This blogger is a big believer in listening to voices from outside the mainstream, even if–especially if–they challenge beliefs which may have outlived their usefulness.
Here are some of the latest examples of contrarianism, with a link and sample from each:
On one of numerous blogs at a movie site called Movie City News, editor David Poland throws cold water on the rapturously-reviewed An Inconvenient Truth, declaring "no matter how much generosity critics and activists show this movie, it is still a boring slideshow by a boring speaker and no matter how many cool graphics are included, it’s still a boring movie."
And he’s sympathetic to the message! He says it needs more Michael Moore-style "umph." But in the next breath, he admits that with a little luck, this slideshow could become the biggest documentary of the year, and gross $6-7 mil. Sounds okay to me. Better than demagoguery. (But I don’t work in marketing; maybe in marketing, demagoguery is good.)
The NYTimes last week ran a long, thoughtful piece on an international collaboration, spearheaded by the World Wildlife Fund, called Yukon-to-Yellowstone, or Y2Y. The Wildlands Project sees it as the beginning of a "Spine of the Continent" conservation effort that will support wildlife from Canada to Mexico. The news is mostly good, with some brilliant ideas to reduce the slaughter of wildlife on the highways, but late in the story, one of the proponents and scientists involved, Dr. Mike Gibeau, takes a sheet of paper from his wallet. He’s carried it for thirty years. It’s a quote from Aldo Leopold. It doesn’t exactly fit the one of the story, but resonates nonetheless:
"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well — and does not want to be told otherwise."
That last line certainly remains all too true today, doesn’t it?
And, in news that for some reason hasn’t been much discussed in this country as of yet, the BBC reports on two different research efforts, one from Europe and one from UCBerkeley, that agree that the IPCC estimates of climate change over our current century may be too cautious. Much of this work goes to the question of "sensitivity": If we anthros double the atmospheric level of CO2 to the range of 500 ppm (which is already assured) then we know that global temperatures will rise.
But how much? The IPCC leaned towards the lower end of the range, 1.5C, but the new research suggests it could be 2C or higher.
Mark Nylas superbly thumbnails the research, and concludes:
Here is evidence, published independently by two teams of researchers, which suggests that the headline figures published so far by the IPCC are not ‘alarmist’, as some claim, but very, very conservative. There are no crumbs of comfort, nothing to suggest that we’ll be lucky with our continued climatic experiment. Drastic action is now needed, whatever the consequences on lifestyles, jobs and economic growth. Our survival as a species is now more clearly at stake than ever.
On the other hand (warning: double contrarianism ahead!) researcher James Annan, who has spent a great deal of time on the "sensitivity" question, is less alarmed. It’s weedy stuff that can’t be summarized in a sentence: You’ll have to look at the post to see why. But in the end, he concludes:
The BBC journalist talks up this [new] research as a "challenge" to "the consensus view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)" but I think it would be more realistic to describe it as a slight nudge.
UPDATE: One more double-contrarianism: in Salon, in his technology column, Andrew Leonard looks at a piece lefty writer Greg Palast wrote on Peak Oil, scoffing at doomsayers’ predictions, and pointed out that Palast seemed almost to take pleasure in getting it wrong. Leonard writes:
Palast suggests that we dismiss [peak oil prophet]Hubbert and peak oil because Hubbert was a petroleum geologist who worked for Shell. Oil companies, Palast tells us, want us to believe in peak oil, because it gives them an excuse to keep raising prices. Tell that to Exxon, who just this February calmly assured the world that there’s plenty of oil to satisfy demand.
[Palast’s] argument doesn’t stand the most basic sniff test. The oil industry does not want the world to think peak oil is right around the corner, and watch government and consumers rush to embrace alternative energy technologies. For a glimpse at how the industry reacted to Hubbert at the time, try Hubbert’s own recollections. Executive summary: They thought he was crazy.
Kit Stolz 