Though the word heresy may now be tainted by your modern 'enlightened' perspective, it was once a perfectly nobel specious accusation.
Maybe the thesis of this book has merit—elites manipulating the fear of the masses for profit—but i might stick it to Haliburton before Greenpeace. I do think its irresponsible to deny climate-change though. In the 19th century, the Michael Chrichton types were telling us that the microscopic germs causing cholera epidemics were a fantasy of fear-mongering scientists—no need to dig up London and put in a sewage system.
At this point in time the science is pretty clear: If we put sewage in the water, people will get sick, if we put CO2 in the air, energy will be trapped.
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Elliot, I couldn't agree more. Though I will likely read the book anyway, just for the action bits. Well, that, and I suspect it'll still bring up some good questions about the role of media and corporations.
As for skepticism about Global Warming, I ran across this site the other day. It's a helpful resource for debunking a lot of the arguments used by global warming skeptics.
On global warming, several years ago I might have skeptical about trusting liberal scientists and their “philosophies” and “sophistries”, but while I was getting my Ph.D. at Harvard something clicked inside me, and I realized how powerful and wonderful it is. Why believe in global warming? I haven’t examined the evidence, though the national geographic has a pretty amazing plot of carbon levels and global temperatures over tens of thousands of years. I believe it because I believe in the process of science to reveal things that are true. I know how scientists work; generally speaking we value impartiality, attention to detail and facts, honestly, independent thought, peer review, openness of data, and freedom to criticize ideas. These are really powerful tools for predicting the future, healing the sick, transporting people large distances, meeting human needs, and saving human lives.
The real question is how bad will global warming become? Will it produce widespread devastations and mass extinctions that many predict? If so, what moral obligations to we have for acting now? If it is a moral issue, why have the prophets been silent on it? For me, science is constantly teaching humanity new things that are challenging so many of our paradigms, creating discrepancies with previously held notions. And global warming is just one of those ways in which science is changing the way we think about the world. Before relatively recently, I was uncomfortable with these “new” ways of thinking, like evolution, but now I feel that we need to work on these things and try to make progress on expanding our understanding, and not using faith as an excuse to stop learning and wondering and asking questions.
As for global warming, I personally tend to believe what seems to be the consensus among scientists that the situation is very serious. As for faith and the prophets, they deal with issues of the spiritual world, but that it’s important to pay attention to those who study the physical world when we are considering physical problems. Sorry to write so much, I tend to think about these things a lot.
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