The Skeptical Environmentalist Quotes

While it is wise to think globally, all organisms are affected locally!

Like all cults, this new one adeptly represses heresy. . . . In defiance of the Western scientific tradition, which maintains that skepticism of inferences drawn from observation is always in order, and that all accepted conclusions are always subject to review and potential overthrow by new data, the climate catastrophists insist that ‘the science is settled’ (science is never ‘settled’) and that therefore no debate, and no new data, can or should be entertained. Those wishing to advance theories or data contrary to the accepted orthodoxy are not merely wrong, but criminal ‘deniers’ who should be silenced, vilified, and if possible, prosecuted.

We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those “risk experts” in the economic domain who fight the previous war)—these are the scientists now trying to impose the solutions on us. But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the conclusions endorsed by anti-environmentalists and pro-market fundamentalists. Quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, since we do not know what we are harming with now. That’s the sound policy under conditions of ignorance and epistemic opacity. To those who say “We have no proof that we are harming nature,” a sound response is “We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either;” the burden of the proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not “try to correct” the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.

TASSC also ran ads in commercial and campus newspapers across the country, and developed potential congressional testimony on “public health priorities.”70 They also created a “Sound Science in Journalism Award,” first granted to New York Times reporter Gina Kolata, “who responsibly detailed … how science has been distorted and manipulated to fuel litigation” on silicone breast implants.71 (Kolata has subsequently been heavily criticized by scientists, environmentalists, and her journalism colleagues for a persistent proindustry, protechnology bias, and an overt skepticism about environmental causes of cancer.)

Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.