Is This "The Age of Stupid"?
On Monday, Sept 21 a new British film, The Age of Stupid, will have its global premiere. In the US, the hip, youth-oriented, drama-documentary-animation movie on "climate change, oil, war, politics, consumerisim and human stupidity" will launch from a solar-powered cinema tent in New York live to over 400 movie theaters across the country, timed for the day before the UN's climate meeting on Sept 22nd, when 80 heads of state -- and therefore the world's media -- will gather in New York.
Following the screening, there will be a 40-minute live event featuring Kofi Annan, actress Gillian Anderson, the film's director Franny Armstrong and star, Oscar-nominated British actor Pete Postlethwaite. Audiences will also hear from scientists working in the Himalayas and the Indonesian rain forest via live satellite link. A group of children will speak from the very room in Copenhagen in which all our futures will be decided at the UN climate summit in December, and Radiohead's Thom Yorke will wrap up the evening with a short acoustic performance.
Why all the hullabaloo? Many believe this could be the next, far hipper "An Inconvenient Truth." Pete Postlethwaite ("In the Name of the Father," "Brassed Off") stars as a man born in the 2000s, now living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking back at "archive" footage from 2007 and asking why we didn't stop climate change when we still had a chance?
Why were we so "stupid"?
The 92 minute film was filmed on location in America, the UK, India, Nigeria, Iraq, Jordan and the Alps. In addition to Postlethwaite, it "stars" a 92-year old French mountain guide, an entrepreneur starting a low-cost airline in India, a Shell oil man who rescued 100 people after Hurricane Katrina, an African woman living in Shell's most profitable oil region in Nigeria and two Iraqi refugee kids trying to find their brother.
On August 12, 2009 the New York Times commented on the unique way this film is being distributed:
Is this the kind of media it will take to help people around the world wake up to our precarious situation? And if it is, will we take the next steps towards intelligent action?
For more information: www.ageofstupid.net
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Last week you pointed out that there were many climate change deniers.
Age of Stupid, QED
See Linda Buzzell's Profile
"It's that kind of hysterical exaggeration that most damages your cause."
This seems to me to be the core of the problem: the idea that what is happening to the planet's weather systems is someone else's "cause" and not a problem for all of us. The effects being tracked and charted by science don't distinguish between those who understand the science and those who don't. Climate changes -- like Katrina -- affect everyone, regardless of political view.
I heard an interesting radio program on CBC yesterday (Canadian Broadcast Corporation) about how people in different countries around the world are dealing with global climate change in different ways. It explored why the US (and Canada to a lesser extent) have politicized the issue into a Left-Right thing rather than a science thing. This is apparently not the case in other countries. Margaret Thatcher, for example, long ago founded an organization to help Britain cope with climate change. But in the US, according to the CBC program, it's the fear of possible government "interference" which is behind the refusal by the right to even consider the facts as they're now emerging.
It's always wise to remember that nature has its own rules far different from the various rules that humans have developed in different countries and societies all over the world. And "nature bats last."
We haven't been living by nature's rules for quite a while, and are now reaping the consequences.
"We haven't been living by nature's rules for quite a while, and are now reaping the consequences."
Nature's rule book has a habit of changing over time. It used to be considered natural for blacks to be slaves, homosexuality to be un-natural and of course a woman's place was in the home. We overcame those "natural" obstacles to progress and I think that is all we need to do now.
Seeing only negative consequences to AGW is seeing the glass half empty. We need to be wiser than that. Adapting to nature's new world will include exploiting the advantages of global warming and not just bemoaning the disadvantages.
lff
Our great-grandchildren will look back on these disputes the same way that we look back on arguments about the germ theory of disease, or whether turning on the super-collider would cause a black hole that would eat the earth.
We can only hope that they look back from the comfort of a clean and relatively stable environment and with the understanding of a patient parent for a slightly slow child and not from the ruins of our earth.
or, they may look back on this with the same chuckle as the end-of-the-world pronouncements of Ehrlich, and all the other sensationalized nonsense that comes out of our system of entertainment-science.
Elitism is a big part of the problem, from conservatives obviously, but also from Liberals who dumb down the arguments. Take the time to understand that Climate is distinct patterns in a Chaotic system, not simple averages of the weather. Then people will understand why Warming can lead to an ice ages, or something else.
The other problem is the complete dominance of Conservatives Big Money in government, Media, think tanks, all designed to stupidify people.
The the GOP Conservatives robber Barons use fear and tribalism to keep the Kucinihs' and Dean's out of power.
And it obviously still works. 50 % of people believe there is a death panel and all the other obvious lies.
Wake up fools, You are killing us all.
How ironic, this posting:
in explaining the drop in water and electricity usage in California:
"The reduction may have been aided by weeks of unusually mild weather before the onset of more typical heat this week. " http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9AAOU380&show_article=1
Much like the unseasonably cool July and August here on the Great Plains.
I forgot to include
Distraction,
During the ice ages, we have hundreds of thousands of years of ice nearly to the equator, punctuated by 10 thousand year warm cycles. THAT"S a Climate. The average temperature over 1 year, ten years even 100 years is weather. Of course the weather changing can be an indication of the climate changing to a new state.
See Linda Buzzell's Profile
Talking about idiocy... I just received this link to an L A Times story from a friend:
TRIAL SOUGHT ON SCIENCE OF WARMING
The US Chamber of Commerce wants EPA to hold a Scopes like trial on the causes behind global warming.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-climate-trial25-2009aug25,0,901567.story
And by a "Scopes-like trial," do you mean a trumped-up FAKE court hearing?
Really, Linda. Nothing succeeds like calling anyone questioning your faith "stupid".
It is only when one has no facts left that they resort to name-calling. Remember elementary school?
Just as sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes an idiot is just an idiot.
Wonderful quote by John Stuart Mill fits here:
"The worst offence... which can be committed by a polemic is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feels much interested in seeing justice done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degreee without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. "
Good advice - environmentalists should also take it.
lff
Wouldn't that scare the pants off of the Church of Global Warming adherents? Best that you just ridicule the idea, and refuse the notion of any debate. That's what Al Gore does.
The science is past the point where such trials deserve anything other than ridicule.
Debating the mechanisms, debating the timing are all valid science. The rest is all BS.
Al Gore's book "An Inconvenient Truth" will be exhibit A. On page 178 Gore lies by claiming Antarctic land ice is thinning everywhere. The scientific measured and documented truth is Antarctic land ice is THICKENING over a large region.
Gore's book will be seen as mere propaganda contrary to science. There is no scientific consensus that man made global arming exists, much less the global catastrophie that Gore claims.
Exhibit B will come from Goldman Sachs documents that prove they are pushing Cap N Trade because they will make billions off it.
Exhibit C will come from TBoone Pickins documents that prove he stands to make billions from Cap N Trade and he has a track record of propagandizing the public starting with financing swift boat attack campaign against the Democrats during the 2004 election.
TV is why.
Yes we do live in the age of "Stupid"
But maybe a better or older term is "Age of Anti-Intellectualism"
Some of us deny that being pregnant, if inconvenient, is not being "with child".
Others deny the historical fact that men landed on the moon.
While others call the movement for a public option in healthcare as evil.
Still others believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that science is evil as well even when
they use it daily in their lives.
Others cling to science as a religion, while some who have no religion, arrogantly diss everyone who
believes anything else.
And some even dispute the oldest rite of humanity, marriage and seek to change it because it is not politically convenient.
Yes, in fact, in some respects, folks from 240 some odd years ago, were smarter than we are today.
Ladies and gentlemen: Exhibit A.
Your usual incisive, fact-driven commentary, CO
Ladies and gentleman Exhibit B CO Perez
"I'm always right and never wrong"
The title makes it sound like "Idiocracy". Then again, if you look at some people in this country, "Idiocracy" looks like a documentary!
I love fantasy movies about the future.
According to Back to the Future Part II, we should have hoverboards in the next 6 years. If you'd like to pre-order one, you can mail me a check for $1,000.
I think history is pretty clear that we have a lot more to fear from mass movements of people fighting for their version of the truth than from any natural disasters.
lff
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