The real reason why we should fight human-induced climate change
The fight to convince people that we should act to prevent human-induced climate change has been on for many years now. Many rhetoric have been used but Oliver Morton, in What is your dangerous idea?, is afraid that some of the arguments might back-fire because they are missing the real reason. This is a controversial issue.
According to Norton, we should not fight necessarily because ecosystems are going to disappear. His point is that Earth has witnessed harsher changes, the living has endured (so far) far more dramatic blows (none of the least example being the Permian-Triassic extinction, 251 million years ago, when nearly 90% of life was killed), yet life and Earth still exist and are relatively healthy (to our standards).
If we have to fight, it is because people are going to suffer. They will suffer because they will be displaced by the rising sea level, because their way of life will be destroyed, because social disorders will trigger wars and diseases:
"The most important thing about environmental change is that it hurts people; the basis of our response should be human solidarity.Oliver Norton, What is your dangerous idea?, Our planet is not in peril.
The planet will take care of itself."
Any other arguments are near-fallacies and may back-fire. Controversial, indeed.
1 comment:
I entirely agree with Oliver Morton, even though I think that other arguments like that of Gary Snyder are also receivable ones.
But for me the most important one is indeed the suffering of human beings that will go along with the changes in our environment. The loss of biodiversity can also be viewed from that angle: as more and more species disappear, we are loosing both some sources of medicinal substances fabricated by these species and the services they provide to us like pollination of plants that we eat, soil nutrients regeneration for the growth of these same plants, and countless other services that are never taken into account in economic theories.
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