Monday, April 20, 2015

OR YOU CAN READ THE AUTHOR'S SIGNATURE

How To Tell If The Post About Climate You 

Are Reading Is B.S., In Five Easy Steps




1. Skip articles pretending  to know how fast the unknowable will happen, as in
 "  Whatever changes we are too greedy or myopic to stop from happening in the first place are “irreversible” on that timescale, as the world’s leading scientists and governments explained in November."

2. Skip  polemics that try to steer you away from the scientific literature , as in 
"The Times piece is a double time waster because not only is the piece itself anti-informative but one of its goals is to get you to read an even longer, even more anti-informative essay, “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” which is “A MANIFESTO TO USE HUMANITY’S EXTRAORDINARY POWERS IN SERVICE OF CREATING A GOOD ANTHROPOCENE.” Not!"
3. Skip  dueling tuba articles written by the opposite numbers of  George Will - one is enough.
4. Skip articles, especially longer ones,  by authors who ignore their own past predictive failures and evade stating what time frame  they are talking about for changes said to pose existential threats.
5.  be very afraid of authors even more calculatedly Orwellian than terms like
 “good Anthropocene,” 
soi disant environmental philosophers included.