Another piece I liked in the June 2006 Scientific American magazine was Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Column. His sub-title, “How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip“, tells the story.
He was skeptical regarding Global Warming but the accumulation of evidence finally won him over.
People who are willing to follow the truth where ever it leads – even if it means overturning their previous views – are to be commended. And those who think integrity means erecting ever larger defenses of their positions are, in my opinion, dead-wood on the tree of humanity.
Here’s a quote from Gandhi that I particularly like:
My COMMITMENT is to TRUTH as I see it each day, not to CONSISTENCY.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Here’s the opening of Shermer’s piece and a link to the main body of his article:
In 2001 Cambridge University Press published Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I thought was a perfect debate topic for the Skeptics Society public lecture series at the California Institute of Technology. The problem was that all the top environmental organizations refused to participate. “There is no debate,” one spokesperson told me. “We don’t want to dignify that book,” another said. One leading environmentalist warned me that my reputation would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it. So of course I did.
My experience is symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement. Activists who vandalize Hummer dealerships and destroy logging equipment are criminal ecoterrorists. Environmental groups who cry doom and gloom to keep donations flowing only hurt their credibility. As an undergraduate in the 1970s, I learned (and believed) that by the 1990s overpopulation would lead to worldwide starvation and the exhaustion of key minerals, metals and oil, predictions that failed utterly. Politics polluted the science and made me an environmental skeptic.
Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians–the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon–issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for “national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions” in carbon emissions.
Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, Calif., where former vice president Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the recent documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance.
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Thx to Kim W. for the Gandhi quote.