Name The Decade - Answers & Commentary
May 12th, 2008 by Wiley CodyIf you’ve been reading over the past week, I am confident that you’ve been waiting with baited breath to learn the sources and origins of the Name The Decade trivia quotes from last Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
As the clever among you may have guessed, each and every one of the quotes provided was from an article published in the 1970s - when the climatic disaster was the pending global ice age and the havoc it would wreak on global food production. Each of the quotes comes from one of the following stories:
“The Enigma of Climate.” USA Today Magazine. March 1979.
“There’s a Big Glacier Coming.” Boston Magazine. February 1976.
“A Mini Ice Age Could Begin in Decade.” Boston Globe. November 2, 1975.
“The Threat of a New Ice Age and Some Possible Defenses.” Science Forum. April 1975.
“The Cooling World.” Newsweek. April 28, 1975.
“Another Ice Age?” Time. June 24, 1974.
Wulfgar pointed out that without context, the validity of these quotes was impossible to determine. He’s right, of course, although history seems to have undermined the idea of an ice age around the corner. The point, however, is not to suggest that because science was wrong in the 1970’s it must be wrong today. That would be an unsupported fallacy of reason.
Lamnidae took me to task for including rhetoric that attempts to judge climate change through an anthropocentric view of the relatively short human life-span. She misses the point that I did not write or support any of these quotes, and that similar scare-tactics are being used today by fear-mongers like Al Gore who warn us that human extinction is possible within our own relatively short human life-spans.
The point of this exercise is not to use historic precedent to explore the truth or fiction of catastrophic climate change, but rather to explore the way that the debate itself is carried out. Modern discussions of climate change tend to be rather apocalyptic in nature. In this, they are no different from discussions that happened decades ago about a pending ice age. The reality - both in the 1970s and today - is much less sensationalist.
First, the planet and life in general is a lot more robust than environmentalists like to give it credit for. Whether it be the poisonous emissions of oxygen from primordial plant life, the onset of global ice-ages or the impact on a micro-environment from the violent eruption of a volcano, the planet - and life - has survived. At the same time, man has been predicting the end of the world since he took his first bipedal steps. History, it seems, favors a prudent approach to claims of disaster.
Second, life - including mankind - adapts. Adaptation is one of the necessary elements for defining life according to my 8th Grade biology textbook. Remember that scene in one of the Austin Powers movies when the villain is run down by a steam roller that is inching toward him very, very slowly? He yells, and screams desperately trying to stop the oncoming steam roller when he had plenty of time to just get out of the way. Well, similarly we’ve all seen the predictions of ocean levels increasing as polar ice-caps melt and they always end with water lapping at the second floor of the Empire State Building in New York. The implied threat is that one day we’re all going to drown as a flood of new ocean water inundates our habitats. Realistically, even if we grant that water levels will rise, it’s not going to happen overnight and with technology and time man will move out of the way. History, again, recommends a prudent narrative.
Modern education has centered itself around teaching the ability to think critically - to question authority and to challenge norms. This thinking is empowering, but one wonders why it is not self-applied withing the so-called scientific community. It is amazing to me that someone will in one breath chastise someone for buying into the lies of Big Oil and with the next spout the rhetoric of extreme environmentalism. Where is the critical thinking when someone claims that global climate change will lead to planetary extinction or human cannibalism? Where is the critical thinking when the same rhetorical devices that were used in the 1970s are recycled today to make the opposite argument?
This, to me, is why useful discourse is so difficult on the matter of global warming. Too many “believers” are blinded to the historical context of their fears. The world is always ending the day after tomorrow. Their fanaticism is all-encompassing and they respond to tempered arguments by delving into more extreme rhetoric. And the more extreme they get, the farther from reasonable discourse they move. This has become the hallmark of the Environmental Left, and it’s roots can be traced at least to the coming Ice Age of the 1970s.
