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Recent research suggests that being green may make you mean. This is a specific example of ‘moral compartmentalisation’. Ian Leslie thinks that this also occurs in the workplace: people who put their family first feel they don’t need to be nice at work. It’s an appealing theory.
Congressman Donald Schwerbitz, who represented South Dakota back in the 1960s and 70s… recognized that carbon emissions are caused primarily by breathing, and he proposed to cut those emissions in half by requiring every American to wear a device that plugs up one nostril. Congressman Schwerbitz… an irrepressible prankster… managed to get himself invited onto a talk radio program to explain how the nostril plugs would work. (The host was in on the joke.) Because talk radio audiences are dominated by libertarians and reactionaries, the response was not positive. Callers clamored for civil disobedience; one threatened that if he ever saw anyone wearing one of these devices, he’d “punch him in his other nose”. Others worried that our clean air might drift over to Cuba, where the communists could use it. A few, though, were enthusiastic. One woman wanted to know if the devices could be adapted to fit animals. Warthogs, she observed, have very big nostrils.
Although the Steven Landsburg piece from which I have stolen this extract isn’t supposed to be a comment on talk radio, I think this sums up the concerns of most talk radio callers well – at least from what I have heard when travelling in a taxi, or getting my hair cut.
I was handed a free copy of the WSJ Europe this morning. It contained the following snippet in the opinion section, spurred by a Japanese paper questioning the use (or rejection of) the scientific method in developing climate change models:
[T]oday’s climate science is so complex that only time – and a lot more observation – will tell whether what scientists think they know is really correct…. Until then, the alarmist findings by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are “an unprovable hypothesis”.
Here’s the full piece. Aside from it being nice to see The Register referenced in the mainstream media, the piece is worth bearing in mind the next time you hear scientists say “the science is clear that x” or politicans claim that “the consensus among scientists is that x“. Science is a process, not a consensus, and the significant of the problems that climate change can cause should not lead us to cut corners in that process.
