I dropped in yesterday for the first time in quite a while and saw my name mentioned so I can't resist responding :-) Moreover, how the sceptics would react when the shit hits the fan was something I had been curious about. The answer I came to was that it would be no different from now!
All men, and probably all women, will not admit that they are wrong. The earliest citation I have found for that fact is in Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." The driving force behind all people is prestige. As Milton wrote "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind)". Therefor they cannot admit that they are wrong because they will "lose face", and so lose prestige. Carnegie says that even if you win an argument, your opponent will still believe that he is right, and would have won if only he was better at arguing or had thought of the killer argument which is ther if only he could think of it. So the situation is that we have already passed the tipping point, but people in general are still saying the same things. Here is Clive James, an Australian by birth, now a British Broadcaster, praising scepticism http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8322513.stm yet the scientists are saying that "three of these boundaries [leading to abrupt global environmental change](climate change, biological diversity and nitrogen input to the biosphere) may already have been transgressed." http://www.stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries Ten years ago I was told by a friend of Wally Broecker that they thought we had twenty years to put thing right. Two years later he told me that some scientists believed that Greenland had already passed the point of no return. In other words the effects of climate change are happening much faster than it was believed before. Within the last ten to fifteen years the live expectancy of the Greenland ice sheet has change from thousands to hundreds of years, and of the Arctic sea ice from 100 years to only 10. But nobody is speaking out, except for Gordon Brown, who having seen Al Gore's Nobel Prize, is obviously hoping he will be rewarded in that way when he too is rejected by the voters in the forthcoming general election. There is a right wing mentality that we all share to some extent, which says that disaster won't happen to me, and any one who warns about it is just chicken. They are not the sort of people who change their minds, so if they do suffer disaster it will not be their fault, just a freak of nature or due to the scientists speaking with forked tongue. See Clive James. > I doubt that I will live to see the disaster, but this interesting > turn in the political dialog should be just around the corner. Right? Wrong, the disaster is only a few years away. You will see it. Abrupt changes happen with little warning by definition. Think of the Boxing Day tsunami. So when the Arctic sea ice vanishes that will be the global air conditioning system broke, and we can't fix that! But then nobody could have predicted that, or at least that is the cry that will go up. Cheers, Alastair. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
