Breaking news: A look behind the curtain of the Heartland Institute’s climate change spin | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
The Heartland Institute — a self-described “think tank” that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle “Heartland Insider” has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute’s strategies, funds, and much more.
[UPDATE: Heartland has confirmed that some of the documents are real, but claims the strategy document, which I quote below about teaching strategy, is faked. This claim has not yet been confirmed or refuted. DeSmogBlog has more info.] [...]
Personally I believe that the climate is changing and that humans are having some effect on that change, but that our effect is like a small-to-medium drop in a fairly large ocean; we make some ripples, but the climate has been, is, and will continue to be changing throughout the lifetime of the planet, Earth's inhabitants in any geological era having some effect but changing mostly as the result of all the forces constantly at work in the core and the atmosphere and the solar system and the galaxy and the universe. Our impact will be negligible in terms of the earth's grand scheme, but we may contribute to making things very difficult for ourselves with the micro effects of our behaviors, whether we contribute to heating/cooling cycles or whether we use up most of the available resources that we need and make the rest unusable through pollution and wasting, the effects with which we're involved will have far more impact on us than on the planet. Earth can 'live' without anything we're capable of taking and most of what we take will find it's way back to her mass eventually until we start moving far into space. Even when we've taken everything we can and made the place uninhabitable for ourselves or just run out of resources, or even when our course as humans simply runs out in evolutionary terms even if we have nothing to do with our own eventual demise, the earth will go on. We'll have extincted ourselves long before we can change Earth in ways that would throw it off course or shatter it entirely unless we tread carefully on the paths to those abilities (and if we get to a point where we can do those things, the act of doing them to the earth would kill us all anyway, unless we've evolved greatly or created some really amazing technologies). The planet doesn't care if the Midwest falls in on itself thanks to fracking or the coasts fall off thanks to natural mass wasting and our houses happen to be built on them, it's all just par for the course for Earth, what it's body is meant to do, and we're essentially like the bacteria we gladly wash away in the shower. Earth is not angry with us. Volcanoes and tsunamis are not emotional responses to our choices, not punishments for evil-doing. 'She' couldn't care less. By the same token, 'she' won't protect us from ourselves or from her own vagaries, either; can't, really. That's not 'her' job. She's only a mother in terms of being the place in which we gestated and from which we were born. She has no expectations, no hopes or dreams, no desires for or of us.
Whether we believe in human-made climate change or not, we have to deal with the world as it is. We have to address natural 'disasters' as they happen, whether they're the result of climate change (natural or artificial) or just random events that appear to be occurring with greater regularity. I'd say, "... *are* occurring with greater regularity," but relative to when? Maybe greater than in the couple hundred years we've been intensively recording scientific data, maybe greater than in the 8,000 years that human civilizations been recording events, maybe greater than in the 10,000 years since the end of the last glacial period, or in the two-and-a-half-million years since the beginning of the current ice age; I know that in my lifetime the climate seems to have changed, from my very limited perspective, and it makes sense to me that like any other body, our planet's body would experience cycles and changes throughout the course of it's life. Denying that or trying to prevent it is futile, and any changes we introduce into the earth's dynamic system are going to have both intended and unintended effects. We can only do the best we know how in any given moment, try to minimize adverse effects to ourselves from both natural and 'unnatural' (which means what, exactly? Humans are part of nature, up to and including our seemingly 'unnatural' inclinations) forces, and continue as we always have to work in the interests of our own survival and prosperity (hopefully realizing at some point along the way that 'prosperity' is not necessarily measured by sheer numbers of individuals in a specie nor by a species' ability to exploit resources out of existence and/or cover the greatest area possible with waste). If we focus on those things, the arguments for and against 'climate change' can be shelved until such time as we have enough data to actually think we can make some sort of definitive assessment as to what kind of change we're talking about. Change is inevitable, in the climate, in our lives, and in the universe, and it's always happening, every moment. The unequivocal dismissal of the idea that the climate is changing seems naive. Of course it's changing, and every time we think we get a handle on how and why those things will also change. It's an academic argument, worthy of discussion and examination, but not particularly useful except where it drives basic understanding of fundamentals, the development of new technologies, and new uses for existing ones, both those designed to steer the climate in directions that are good for us (hopefully in the long-term, although we seem to choose short-sightedness much of the time) and those designed to address the fallout of changes which have always been inevitable but which perhaps before were devastating to local populations, setting their development back each time they had to rebuild (if their enclave survived at all). This Institute, however, doesn't seem interested in academic argument so much as propagandizing, and that is always problematic.
Comments
Post a Comment