So Much For The Information Society

There's this theory, to which I adhere, that knowledge is power; that the more we know and understand, the better off we will be. But we also resist change, which means that we are very hard to teach. Learning new things implies that the things we know are not sufficient, and not being sufficient makes us feel inadequate, and we resist that as hard as we can.

This morning I saw a piece on CNN where the front person Becky Anderson, was interviewing a meteorologist about the fierce weather in the world that is making the news. Swingeing drought in Iberia, murderous floods from Bavaria to Rumania, the 11th tropical storm for the season (at a stage when the average is 2) sweeping into the Gulf of Mexico.

The forecaster mentioned global warming and Ms Anderson immediately hopped on his case, saying something like, "but there are those who would say that, while extreme, this kind of weather is just within the normal range of events, what do you say to that?"

I had to admire the guy, he patiently tried to explain that, while true, it is the pattern, the concatenation, the piling up of evidence that makes the difference. As long as you focus only on each event you fail to see the big picture yadda yadda.

I'd have been grabbing her by the throat and screaming, "YES! And some people think the earth's flat, and that AIDS doesn't exist and that you can stop kids having sex by telling them not to! And people like that are stupid and dangerous and need to WAKE UP!!!!

It no longer matters whether human activity has contributed to global warming, the warming is a fact. The question is now what the hell are we going to do to survive on a planet where everything we thought we knew about weather is wrong and whether we can turn information into action.

But what we get are people like the woman yesterday from the EU who, when asked what the EU was doing about adapting to these changes, said, "well, we do risk analysis and post event evaluation so that we can better prepare for the disasters and so we know what happened once they pass. After all [now get this] we can't do anything about what individuals do"

I'd have swung for her as well. We are refusing to change our behaviour, how we live our lives, the way and the places we build our houses, manage our farming, nothing. We can regulate practically anything about people's lives from which side of the road to drive to when you can marry to how you build your house, but we we can't do anything about what individuals do. Spare me.

And what's worse, we keep putting things back the way they were when they last got mown down by mother nature.

When people constantly act inappropriately we say that they suffer from some kind of developmental disability, we try to give them mechanisms that let them at least act in ways that will let them fit in to society, as much for their sake as ours. We try to change what individuals do all the time.

But when our entire atmospheric support system begins to change so that practically everything we do is now inappropriate, not to our social relations, but to our survival, we stick rigidly, relentlessly, insanely, to doing the things that were appropriate for another planet.

What we are doing by denying the evidence and refusing to adapt has been tried before on a much smaller scale, it was called Lysenkoism; it failed catastrophically then, and it will fail even more appallingly now.

We have become masters at producing, moving manipulating, modifying and distributing information, but when we encounter inconvenient facts we have not progressed significantly since Lysenko.

Deny the message
Shoot the messenger
Suffer the consequences.

Comments

[Branedy]

Maybe this is the reason that Bush has been pushing the ID stuff into the schools. To make the rest of the population as weak as he is.

As for stupid people, I remember a quote from Larry Niven about 'Two rules for life'

1) Never argue with someone holding a machine-gun.
2) Never stand next to someone who is arguing with someone with a machine-gun.

This principle works in most cases, and I have a corollary;

1) Don't do anything terminally stupid
2) and don't be near anyone who is behaving terminally stupid.

This works in almost all cases, except the one you mention.

When someone is being terminally stupid with the environment,
where do you go?

Another planet!

[A. Reader]

Dear Earl,

I too am a believer in the importance of the environment, and am outraged by the way the earth's resources are being abused by a bunch of wallies seeking only to make an excessive profit, regardless of the destruction they are causing for the wellbeing of all of us.

But, I am afraid you miss the point in your criticism of the CNN interviewer (not an interview I actually saw, I hasten to add, although I do watch Anderson). The point of such interviews on a station like CNN is not to push a particular line, but to lay out a variety of views (usually "for" and "against"). As you acknowledge, the question "some people would say, blah, blah, what do you think of that?" actually provided the meterologist with the chance to explain in detail the whole picture relating to climate change. If Anderson had simply said "isn't it terrible what's happening to the environment today, and aren't you outraged by those in denial?" then the cue she would have been giving to the meterologist would have been to launch into some kind of diatribe, which would certainly not have been so educational for the viewer.

[EM] Sorry A, but I interviewed people on any number of topics every day for 20 years and Ms Anderson doesn't get it. You get someone to talk by asking them open questions about the matter at issue, throwing in vague, unsustantiated challenges that have no provenance or detail is either laziness or carrying water; and my bet is the latter.