2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #13

A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Mar 22, 2020 through Sat, Mar 28, 2020

Editor's Choice

The Nature of Crisis

Save Lives Stay Home

Photograph by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Getty 

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An idea beloved of the technorati is that we are actually living not on the earth we seem to inhabit but in a simulation. Elon Musk has said that it’s “most likely” the case, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has set the odds at fifty-fifty. If so, we’ve clearly reached the point where whoever is supervising the action has handed the game over to a bored supervillain who is wildly pressing buttons: Pandemics! Locusts! Firestorms!

The name of this newsletter is The Climate Crisis, but for the moment the emphasis is going to be on the last of those words. We need to understand how crises work, and, since I’ve been thinking about them for many years, I have a few thoughts to offer. This week’s reflection has to do with time, which is a variable we seriously underappreciate. We’re used to political debates that go on forever—when I was a high-school debater, in 1978, our topic for the year was “That the federal government should establish a comprehensive program to regulate the health care system in the United States.” We imagine that, if we don’t solve a political problem now, we’ll get around to it eventually. Meanwhile, we’ll chip away at it—delaying a solution extends suffering along the way, but it doesn’t necessarily make a problem ultimately harder to solve. Certain kinds of problems don’t work that way, however. Physical problems—climate change and the coronavirus being the pertinent examples—are all about time. And what’s striking to me is how similar these two examples are.

The Nature of Crisis by Bill McKibben Annals of a Warming Planet, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 26, 2020


Articles Linked to on Facebook

Sun, Mar 22, 2020

Mon, Mar 23, 2020

Tue, Mar 24, 2020

Wed, Mar 25, 2020

Thu, Mar 26, 2020

Fri, Mar 27, 2020

Sat, Mar 28, 2020

Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 28 March, 2020


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