BPSDBI’ve never simply linked another post before, but Schweitzer speaks Truth bluntly and from the heart:
You Can’t Say “Sorry” When Millions Die from Your Mistake
We are just a few votes shy of descending into another Dark Age in which ignorance and faith triumph completely over reason and fact. We have entered a time in which scientific illiteracy has reached that catastrophic point where science transmutes from a search for objective truth to just another opinion, carrying no more weight than the blathering of a talking head with an opposing view. The collective opinions of thousands of professional meteorologists have been equated to nothing more valid than the uneducated opinion of a radio host. Such false equivalency is a sure sign we are in deep trouble.
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Denying the reality of climate change is tragic on many levels. We are condemning millions to an unfortunate future of coastal flooding, mass migrations, agricultural disruptions, exposure to the northward march of tropical diseases, and inevitable wars over shifting and scarce resources. When these tragic events unfold, an apology from the faithful will be inadequate. Sorry does not suffice in the face of millions of unnecessary deaths and the preventable disruption of hundreds of millions of lives.
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We are at the precipice. Senators Inhofe and Baucus are leading us headlong over the edge as they reach across the aisle to oppose any climate change bill. We are proving ourselves to be arrogant fools. If we fail to act, we deserve everything coming our way. Apologies not accepted as temperatures rise and ignorance reigns.
“The people have the power to redeem the work of fools”
–Patti Smith
“Since 1982, spring in East Asia (defined here as the eastern third of China and the Korean Peninsula) has been warming at a rate of one degree Fahrenheit per decade.” Earth Gauge
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
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Greenfyre's 
Re: “The collective opinions of thousands of professional meteorologists have been equated to nothing more valid than the uneducated opinion of a radio host.”
Why has this happened? Seems to me it is an inevitable consequence of entire civilization being based on competition and self-interest. Are we wrong to distrust the pronouncements of people whose salaries have depended on making rich people and corporations richer, at the expense of all other forms of life? We have been lied to over and over again.
Are we wrong to distrust the words of academics, whose careers depend on publishing lots of papers and getting grant money from corporations or militaristic governments? [1] Is it any wonder people don’t “get” science (or any academic discipline), when its practitioners speak in their own specialized dialects and spend most of their time citing other specialists? Who needs to learn science when you can make an easy dollar exploiting people and the planet, or marketing same, or doing what the education system has trained you to do: follow assembly line orders at work and then get doped up at home?
There is peer review of the science and there is clearly a consensus. Unless those peers visibly include a significant number of “people with my values”, why would an average person trust the consensus? Personally, as someone with a technical and public-minded background, i can see from looking at a bunch of papers and their authors that the conclusions are sound and purely motivated, but how many people are like me? [2]
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