Skeptical Science New Research for Week #12, 2021
Posted on 31 March 2021 by doug_bostrom
In the world of child psychology it's agreed that smacking youngsters isn't productive even as a slap certainly fixes attention. Our planet is notionally governed by proclaimed adults however and perhaps the psychology is different in this context. Perhaps an unmistakable signal will help to change attitudes. In any case, in their succinct and pointed opinion piece for journal EcoHealth Weinstein & Daszak lay out their skepticism over humankind's collective effort to address the climate mess we've all helped to create, beginning with a title guaranteed to seize our focus and fully redolent of an adult who has lost patience. Failing Efforts to Mitigate Climate Change are a Futile Band-Aid that will not Stop Other Elephants Filling the Room delivers a synopsis of our failure modes and lends the effort a public health perspective:
As all of us working in public health know, particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, fixing disasters after they happen is more costly and less effective than preventing them. Of course it is better to invest in fencing cliffs, rather than buying ambulances to deal with the people who fall off: every public health students knows that! But the social, economic, and political realities are such that there has been little to no investment in adequate fencing, which is why no significant progress has really occurred since the Paris Accord. Climate change is just one symptom of a far deeper malaise that our planet is dealing with—a decline to a future earth that may verge on uninhabitable for many of us. That decline, in our Anthropocene Era, during the ‘Great Acceleration’ has climate change as just one of a series of ecological insults to our planet that need critical work to reduce, wind down, and turn back (Steffen et al. 2015). This is why our current efforts to deal with climate change are no more than a band-aid, treating the symptoms of the Great Acceleration rather than the cause, and doing a poor job of even that. Band-aids on such a chronic underlying malaise are at best futile. At worst, they are a negligent misuse of our resources, and a frittering away of the critical time in which it will be possible to start reversing our decline. Indeed, they border on irrelevant compared to some of the other elephants in the room.
The entirety of Weinstein & Daszak's swift kick is open access, fully shareable to those already in agreement and especially for other more productive venues where wishful thinking in all of its forms is holding us back from repairing our climate problem.
104 articles
https://skepticalscience.com/new_research_2021_13.html
