CREATIVE CLIMATE DENIAL AND HISTORY

Denying climate change gets creative

John M. Crisp, February 19, 2015 (AZ Daily Sun)

“Climate-change denial persists in various modes, none of which is particularly convincing…They're successful if they raise enough doubt about the scientific consensus…There's the "I-am-not-a-scientist" mode, which depends on a resigned know-nothingness to suggest that climate is too complex for an ordinary person…The opposite of this mode of denial is the notion that humankind has always managed to come up with the ingenuity to solve the dilemmas that face us…Then there's… a false humility thoroughly at odds with the history of civilization. For the most part, the narrative of human progress has involved the careless exploitation and depletion of local resources…but now the growth of both human population and of our technological capacity has pushed us up hard against the globe's natural limits…

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“…[T]he great modern parable of humankind's capacity to affect the environment…[was] the Dust Bowl…In the 19th Century, the Great Plains, a vast swath of our country's mid-section from Canada to Texas, was covered with grass…[Then] thousands of farmers moved to the Great Plains and plowed up the sod that had held the soil in place for millennia…Dry land farming flourished in [the 1920s]…But a devastating drought began in the early 30s and the hard winds blew…One hundred million acres were stripped of topsoil…[and the land and people were] destroyed by blowing dust…[This is] the future in our own past…Our biggest threat isn't our climate; it's our denial.” click here for more

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