The thought occurred to me today that I may have only hinted at the fact that I'm an atheist here on this blog, a couple or maybe three times, without actually coming right out and saying it. It's now such an integral part of my life and thinking I often just assume people know somehow and don't need me to mention it. Well, I'm an atheist, so there you go; that clears that up.
It also dawned on me that I haven't personally seen/heard many vocal defenses of the peer-reviewed research behind anthropogenic global warming (AGW) on the part of well-known atheists, aside from Lawrence Krauss, and I haven't bothered to seek them out to double-check, because I have assumed their affinity for science and rational thought makes them take the stance that man-made climate change is real and dangerous. I want to put that to the test by nabbing some quotes, if I can find them. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I will update it with any additional quotes posted in the comments. You have my thanks and appreciation in advance for providing them.
"We started noticing around 2010 and 2011 that academic freedom bills [state-level bills that argue for the teaching of dissenting views of scientific concepts] were starting to bundle evolution with climate change. We also began to notice that there were occasional school board controversies. A teacher would, for example, show a film like The Inconvenient Truth, a parent would complain, and there would be controversy in the school or at the school board about whether there should be equal time given to climate denier information. We said, 'Wow, this is just like the creationism issue.'
So we hitched up our pants and decided okay, we need to tackle this."
- Eugenie Scott
"In the face of these obstacles, we have two choices: Give up and resign ourselves to living on Earth 2.0, with the possibility of vast and disastrous social and political upheavals due to changing temperatures, rising sea levels, and the like; or try and do something about the carbon that is already in the atmosphere. We made the mess, and it is our responsibility to clean it up for future generations."
- Lawrence Krauss
"...and many of them honestly prefer the Republican vision of cosmology, wherein it is still permissible to believe that the big bang occurred less than ten thousand years ago. These same people tend to prefer Republican doubts about biological evolution and climate change. There are names for this type of 'preference,' one of the more polite being 'ignorance.'"
- Sam Harris
"...and scientists recognise that the actual objectivity of scientific studies on global warming is politically impotent unless people believe in that objectivity..."
- Daniel Dennett
"The argument about global warming is not whether there is any warming but whether or not and to what extent human activity is responsible for it. My line on that is that we should act as if it is, for this reason, which I borrowed from Jonathan Schell's book on the nuclear question, The Fate of the Earth: We don't have another planet on which to run the experiment. Just as we don't have a right to run an experiment in nuclear exchange on this planet, we have no right to run an experiment in warming it either."
- Christopher Hitchens
"I mean, really, how careless do you have to be to lose an entire ice cap?"
- Thunderf00t
"I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid. I base this on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the facts about planet Earth...
It's easy enough to believe that drought, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes are signs of a coming catastrophe from global warming, but these are normal variations of any climate that we -- and other forms of life -- have survived. Earth has undergone many serious changes in climate, from the Ice Ages to periods of heavily increased plant growth from their high levels of CO2, yet the biosphere has survived. We're adaptable, stubborn, and persistent -- and we have what other life forms don't have: we can manipulate our environment. Show me an Inuit who can survive in his habitat without warm clothing... Humans will continue to infest Earth because we're smart.
In my amateur opinion, more attention to disease control, better hygienic conditions for food production and clean water supplies, as well as controlling the filth that we breathe from fossil fuel use, are problems that should distract us from fretting about baking in Global Warming."
- James Randi
"In my opinion, if we seriously evaluated the ultimate value of different political issues, then every single political activist should stop everything we’re doing right now and work nonstop on global climate change — if we don’t fix that, then game over, end of civilization, nothing else any of us are doing will matter."
- Greta Christina
"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. Four books eventually brought me to the flipping point...
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism."
- Michael Shermer
"Yes. You could say that the human species is a threat to the human species. I recommend Al Gore's film on global warming. See it and weep. Not just for the human species. Weep for what we could have had in 2000, but for the vote-rigging in Jeb Bush's Florida."
- Richard Dawkins (when asked if global warming is a threat to the human species)
"Travelers like warm weather, not Hell."
- Bill Maher
"Oh, well. All I can say is that, thanks to the denialist ratfuckers, now everyone is going to be far more interested in reading the two papers by Lewandowsky and others. I recommend that you read 'Motivated rejection of science' (pdf) and 'Recursive fury' (pdf) now, or anytime — they’re archived on the web. You might also stash away a copy yourself. You make a denialist cry every time you make a copy, you know."
- PZ Myers
"We might be close to the end of humanity’s history because of environmental damage or because conflict could get out of hand – or more likely both, because each makes the other worse. But if we survive climate change and a rash of nuclear wars, we will find that we are still at an early stage of human development, an immature stage, barely adolescent, only just at the beginning of scientific understanding of the world, still wedded to infantile beliefs and practices that are holding us back and causing or exacerbating the harms that threaten our existence."
- A C Grayling
You may note the glaring absence of Neil deGrasse Tyson, despite his vocal AGW advocacy. Well, this would be why...
Unlike many atheists, I choose not to quibble with NdGT's position here, or accuse him of splitting hairs, and, while I'm always disappointed when otherwise rational scientists apologetically leave the pseudoscience door open a crack for religion, I can accept that he wishes to distance himself a bit from non-believers. For reasons I don't care to get into here (if someone is really dying to know, we can take up the discussion in the comments below), I think he has good reasons to take this stance and avoid declaring himself an atheist. However, that being said, I do take issue with him claiming that he doesn't have the time, interest, or energy to enter the anti-theist debate. Quite the contrary, he seems to have at least a small axe to grind with prominent atheists, and has questioned them in ways that suggest he wishes they were more tolerant of the intolerant. Again, I believe he may have his reasons, which I won't question too greatly, but I just wish he would be...oh...a little more honest about his rather obvious concerns and leanings.
No comments:
Post a Comment