You Ought to Have a Look is a regular feature from the Center for the Study of Science. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.
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This time around You Ought to Have a Look at a brilliant analysis of the profound illogic of “climate catastrophizing” appearing, in all places, in Foreign Affairs, arguably the most important international contributor to precisely just that.
Written by the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass (“he’s just like you and me, only smarter”), who often finds himself YOTHALed in these writings, it’s a logical tour-de-force that skewers the exaggerated bathos of the apocalyptics with simple economic logic and hard numbers. Along the way, the usual purveyors of gloom-and-doom, like Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich and The Club of Rome, as well as some more modern-day would-be autocrats like Harvard’s Daniel Schrag, fall victim. The intellectual carnage wrought by Cass is truly breathtaking. And it’s all in Foreign Affairs.
Cass starts off with a bang:
Climate change may or may not bear responsibility for the flood on last night’s news, but without question it has created a flood of despair. Climate researchers and activists, according to a 2015 Esquire feature, “When the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job,” suffer from depression and PTSD-like symptoms. In a poll on his Twitter feed, meteorologist and writer Eric Holthaus found that nearly half of 416 respondents felt “emotionally overwhelmed, at least occasionally, because of news about climate change.”
For just such feelings, a Salt Lake City support group provides “a safe space for confronting” what it calls “climate grief.”
Panicked thoughts often turn to the next generation. “Does Climate Change Make It Immoral to Have Kids?” pondered columnist Dave Bry in The Guardian in 2016. “[I] think about my son,” he wrote, “growing up in a gray, dying world—walking towards Kansas on potholed highways.” Over the summer, National Public Radio tackled the same topic in “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?” an interview with Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, who offers “a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them.” And Holthaus himself once responded to a worrying scientific report by announcing that he would never fly again and might also get a vasectomy.
Cass then notes that this fear is stoked at the highest levels, with gaudy statements by President Obama (as long as there’s no chance of an audience question, he notes), Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Bill di Blasio (the last made at the Vatican, which has also been fanning the flames).
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