Nov 25, 2021
Thinking Citizen Blog — Greta Thunberg vs Bjorn Lomborg: the Quest for Perspective
Thinking Citizen Blog — Wednesday is Climate Change, the Environment, and Sustainability Day
Today’s Topic: Greta Thunberg vs Bjorn Lomborg: the Quest for Perspective
What do Halloween and Thanksgiving have to to with climate change? A lot. Should we be freaking out over the worst disaster to befall humanity since the beginning of time? (Thunberg) Or should we be chilling out and counting our blessings (Lomborg)? Is the climate panic just a special case of the toxic negativism that pervades the press and social media? Yes. As the ancient saying goes, if it bleeds, it leads. For an antidote, check out Part Three of today’s post which includes a short personal statement by physician, demographer, statistician and self-proclaimed “possibilist” Hans Rosling.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate,
GRETA THUNBERG (2003 — ), the Elizabeth Hubbard of 2021?
1. For those of you who might not remember, Elizabeth Hubbard was the teenage instigator of the Salem Witch Trials that resulted in 20 executions in the 1690s. (Salem bills itself as the “Halloween Capital of the World.”)
2. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”
3. “I want you to act as if your house is on fire. Because it is.”
NB: “I want you to feel the fear every day.”
BJORN LOMBORG (1965 — ) author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and False Alarm (2021) — too Panglossian?
1. Lomborg is gay and vegetarian and believes that climate change is real but also believes that climate change hysteria is a disaster for truth, the poor, and mental health of us all.
2. He recently highlighted the fact that deaths from climate disasters are down over 96% since the 1920s but that this overwhelmingly good news is absolutely absent from the headlines of the major press and from the brains of most young climate activists or the general public. (see fourth link below)
3. “Activists constantly talk about the existential threat climate change poses and the deaths natural disasters inflict — but they never quite manage to total up these deaths. One reason is that it’s easier to bend the data about disaster frequency than to bend death statistics. Death tolls tell a very clear story: People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before.”
NB: “A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. Over the next decades deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.”
A THIRD VOICE FROM SCANDINAVIA — HANS ROSLING (1948–2017)
1. Author of “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World and Things are Better than You Think” (2017). The best youtube video, by far, in my opinion is his “200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes.”
2. Perspective is everything.
3. “People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
Elizabeth Hubbard (Salem witch trials)
Opinion | We’re Safer From Climate Disasters Than Ever Before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling#Reception_of_Rosling's_views
Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes — The Joy of Stats — BBC Four
Click here for the last three years of posts arranged by theme:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to climate change or the environment. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to climate change that the rest of us may have missed. Your favorite chart or table perhaps…
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart.
