Saturday, March 28, 2009

Is media finally getting over global warming?

The Civil Heretic - Freeman Dyson - Profile - NYTimes.com:
"Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism.

Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”"

1 comments:

Mad Minerva said...

On Gore as "propagandist," I remember when he won the Nobel Prize. One of my colleagues was very excited about it (he is a global-warming enthusiast) and expressed his approval at a school reception that day. Immediately another colleague responded derisively, "So now you can win a Nobel for being a PUBLICIST?" Not for doing anything original but for being an ad man!

It was a bad day for the Nobel Peace Prize, though I've not respected it since it was given to Yassir Arafat.

Anyway, I am all for developing better technologies and all that, but the rise of excessive environmentalism as a secular religion (and a fanatical, fundamentalist one at that with pretensions of moral superiority and desires of coercive behavior over "non-believers") is not good.