--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "PaliGap" <compost...@...> wrote: > > A philosophy professor from New Zealand recalls the > Y2K apocalypticism at the dawn of the last decade: > > http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01dutton.html > > "'The Y2K Nightmare' caught the sensationalist tone, > claiming that 'folly, greed and denial' had 'muffled > two decades of warnings from technology experts.'"
In 1999 I was working for a technology PR company that monitored Y2K stories for a 'well known software giant' and it seemed to me that the stories of impending doom came primarily from newspapers desperate to sell copy and from computer companies trying to make a buck riding on the wave of hysteria. > > "Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real > problems poverty, terrorism, broken financial > systems needing intelligent attention. But they get the attention from the people they need attention from. Unfortunately for the author overpoulation, soil erosion and peak oil are real problems that you can easily get apocalyptic about because they are real and no-one is taking them seriously. Yet. But they will and I've no doubt there will be people saying that we don't need to double the amount of farmland we need by 2050 even though it's stark staringly obvious. This isn't doom and gloom but a sober assessment. Wait a few years, the papers won't stop going on about it once it's become obvious we are just going to have to live with climate change. The way this works is scientists give out the worst case scenario to spur governments into action. Suppose no=one had listened about the ozone layer. Not a problem? Think again. Even > something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has > seemed at moments to be less about testing our health > care system and its emergency readiness than about the > fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own > fluids. Imagine if the government had done nothing and swine flu had turned out like the black death did and exter- minated half of europe? Things do change in the wink of an eye, many a civilisation has collapsed overnight. The real stupidity is thinking ours is immune. We wallow in the idea that one day everything > might change in, as St. Paul put it, the "twinkling of > an eye" that a calamity might prove to be the longed- > for transformation. But turning practical problems > into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from > actual solutions. Only way to wake people up I'm afraid. I can't wait to see what the climate deniers think of having to have a rationed water and food footprint to go with reduced carbon by the middle of this century! If you think it isn't going to happen you aren't facing up to the facts, *that's* denial. > This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, > storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular > climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe > less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, > and that familiar sense that modernity and its > wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical > day of judgment. So the seas won't rise when the ice melts? The world's weather patterns aren't already changing? Biblical day of judgement? Where do you get this nonsense from dude? BTW the BBC have finished the second series of my fave TV show "Survivors." Broadcast starts on 12 Jan. Catch up here: http://survivorsbbctv.wordpress.com/ The best post apocalypse show ever made. As bleak as the day is long. I like my doom and gloom.
