Friday, June 10, 2016

#162 / Doomer Porn



The Great Change blog calls information about global warming "Doomer Porn." That's a pretty creative description, and there's a lot of it, too. In fact, by clicking The Great Change link, you will get access to an abundance of information, in the form of graphs, "more than 40 visual images of what is transpiring in the real world, outside our cultural filters."

I am not at all confident that this kind of "porn" is going to "get us off."

I am pretty certain that something needs to "get us off," as in "get us off our rear ends and shake us up." As this entry in The Great Change blog tells us, "the greatest impediment to Earth’s ecological recovery is not her ability to heal. Our planet still has that, even at this late date. The greatest impediment is human cultural and cognitive inertia."

Image Credit:
http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2016/05/you-too-can-have-bigger-graph.html

2 comments:

  1. The thing to remember about all of this eye candy is that it is based on interpretation of highly manipulated data. It is not reality, it is an interpretation of reality based on assumptions, models, approximations and projections. Much of the outcome is influenced by political and economic agendas that do not appear in the colorful graphs.

    If one reads the research as primary data, and understands that graphs are interpretation of those primary data, a different picture becomes very clear.

    Just one example, of many:
    "Anthropogenic CO2 warming challenged by 60-year cycle" Earth-Science Reviews 155 (2016) 129–135
    François Gervais
    Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences & Techniques, François Rabelais University, Parc de Grandmont, 37200 Tours, France
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2016.02.005

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael A. Lewis, how are direct measurements of temperature "highly manipulated data"?

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your comment!