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posted by n1 on Thursday October 30 2014, @04:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the taking-personal-responsibility-for-humanities-failings dept.

The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future,” that takes the point of view of an historian in 2393 explaining how “the Great Collapse of 2093” occurred. “Without spoiling the story,” Oreskes said in an interview, “I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings” about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called “carbon combustion complex” that have turned the practice of science into political fodder.

Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."

Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 31 2014, @12:30AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 31 2014, @12:30AM (#111740) Journal

    Large numbers of them lost their jobs or were persecuted for being too vocal.

    Does this "large number" happen to be greater than zero? I googled for "lost jobs" associated with "climate researcher", "climate scientist", and "climatologist". Each time, I only found one case, Professor Lennart Bengtsson claims to have been forced out of a position with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (a skeptic-side think tank) by pressure from his fellow scientists. That's the only one.

    Corporations and existing money prevents action.

    i think you forgot to mention the bit about committing economic suicide. Corporations and existing money are the only forces that don't like dysfunctional economies.