Mostly, it’s unclear to me what you’re going on about. What is clear is that you feel strongly about something with regards to the CCAK, but beyond some merely potentially barely meaningful insinuation regarding the 98% estimate in the section attached above, it’s unclear whether your let’s generously call it “critique” has any merit.
You say you have several examples, perhaps you would be so magnanimous as to move on to another so-called example of misleading science reporting if you so accept nothing more to complain about with regards to the section so far discussed (ie pg. 20).
I am a real person with a real Buddhist practice, have taken precepts, and belong to a sanga.
I do support a source neutral carbon tax such as the one proposed by Jim Hansen for instance.
I am part of a growing group that believe that the mainstream climate campaigns have adopted strategies that are not effective or are even counter-productive. The Buddhist campaigns I’ve looked at don’t seem to do much better. On that line I recommend to you:
Your initial charge that the bullet point in question is similar to fake news seems unfair.
I think your are right so I’ve withdrawn it. One reason being that the words “fake new” means different things to different people. For more comments on this see Buddhist Climate Action Kit - #22 by Feynman
Yes, the inclusion of the bullet point in a package of information for climate change activists does imply that the authors of the package regard the unusual sea level rise since the late 19th century to be anthropogenic. The scientific case for regarding it as such is obviously not presented in the bullet point itself.
Yes I think we agree on the anthropogenic implication.
I don’t understand why you think the idea of unusual sea level rise is implied. I also wouldn’t say that the implication is “clear” because implications can be weasily things.
Yet, to be clear, the bullet point on it’s own does not hint that the cause is anthropogenic or natural or the act of a mischievous being from another relm.
But more than implying what the authors of the package believe as you put it, on my first read I thought the bullet point wanted to say that somehow just the facts given means that the current rate of sea level rise is anthropogenic and, to follow your lead, the rate is unusual. I don’t think that representing the position of NASA or the IPCC reports with subtle implications is a good way to go.
But going back to my original post I think those comments hold up to examination:
I suggest this statement misleads as much as it helps our understanding.
… Correctly understood this information suggests that a lot of sea level rise is not due to fossil fuels / CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Yet I’d bet that many readers would not come away with that conclusion.
– From my original post
A women travels to a new city. She is greeted by a mob that proclaims that among other things they hate lesbians. They say “we beat up 'dem queers to an inch of their lives. But we leaves them alive and sends them back home so their sangas have to take care of them. Serves them both right!”.
Later some person comes up to the women and demands:
“Answer yes or no, are you a lesbian?”
Now dear listener to this tale. How, in your wisdom and compassion, would you advise this traveler to respond?
Likewise I put it to you. Given the high level of reaction seem on this discussion alone do you think it’s wise and safe for me to publicly come out of the closet as it were?
Sujato, when you write of “attacking volunteers on a Buddhist forum” I hope you include in that thought your own initial response to me. None of us may come away from this with completely clean hands.
There is a real challenge and opportunity to become more skillful in offering critiques especially around such charged topics.
Your comment about “a process by which scientific knowledge advances” strikes me as odd and ironic on several levels but that is a topic for another day. It’s a fascinating (to me at least ) and important field that often parallels dharma wisdom. For instance see:
“even an honest person is a master of self-deception. … our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept ‘reasonable’ outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it.
A Perspective on what to say about ‘the Science’
As to what I’ve called the science reporting. I would strongly recommend something that may seem surprising but I think the notion is well supported by such experts as there are in the field.
The recommendation is: de-emphasize reporting on the physical basis of climate change. If you don’t have the resources to do it well get out of the business. Consider:
There are plenty of other public web sites doing it.
For most citizens and most scientists we have to accept the summaries of others.
There is a key role for citizens - a role that scientists are no better equipped for than non-scientists. That is deciding what to do about it. In some circles this is known as “public policy” or other variations on the word “policy”.
For a significant portion of those policy questions the causes of climate change may be largely irrelevant.
For many policy questions climate change is only one aspect of the overall challenge. (Malaria wouldn’t go away even if the climate cooled. In California water would be still be an issue if climate wasn’t changing. The state has had several mega-droughts in the last 1,200 years, the worst lasting over 120 years.)
There is a close relationship to how people respond to the issue and the type of options they think they have. (Hint: giving people more options opens them up to accepting more bad news)
US public opinion on climate change has been relatively stable (with ups and downs) over three different presidencies, 5 IPCC reports, many extreme weather events, and a a lot of campaigning and advocacy. At this point continued efforts to debate the politics via science simply serve to reinforce the current public opinion.
I don’t necessarily mean that he did this intentionally… but if you go back to the various references about what trolling his, I’ll argue back that it could be unfortunately seen as such…
May be I wasn’t clear enough.
So, no personal offense was meant.
And I’m sorry if it diluted my other (main) point: it seems to be an awful lot of talk for what should be regarded as a tiny bullet point in a large document filled with good intentions.
DKervick,
Thanks for the intervention with sukha over trolling. It seems to work much better if a 3rd party does that. IMO terms like that should not be used without a specific definition.
There are a couple things I commend the Action Kit for:
It does partly acknowledge “land use change” as a driver of warming. (But only one aspect of it’s impact). It thus partly avoids the error of characterizing human-induced climate change as due to a single cause.
It mostly avoids the “worse catastrophe ever to face human kind” trope. (The trope reminds me why the Buddha declined to address certain metaphysical questions. The IPCC WG2 report specifically addresses why the report does not use such adjectives.)
It’s tone is more equanimous than some other guides.
I would add that there are more scientific errors in the document including one that forms the basis for a question that is used to evaluate climate change knowledge in scientific research. http://www.culturalcognition.net.
After some reflection I think it best if the readers of the document looked for them as an exercise. It’s an old teaching technique: have people read something, ask them if they find any errors in it, then point out several that they missed.
Inconvenient Truths
The kit recommends seeing one of several documentaries. I’ll comment on Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. I would recommend viewing that film along with reading the U.K. judge’s final ruling from Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills. The judgement ruled on the guidance notes that had to accompany the film when it was shown in English state schools.
The existence of the case and the ruling on what must be included in the guidance notes to teachers are quite salutary for understanding the social context of climate change.
Poverty
Climate change policy invites us to fall into ethnocentric traps.
I think it’s morally questionable to talk about the impact on the poor without at least mentioning that a) compassion for the poor implies doing more than working on climate change b) a powerful way to reduce the vulnerability of the poor is to raise them out of it. Over a broad spectrum poverty can be argued to be one of the most serious threats to the world’s poorest people.
Moral Error
I think it’s most often is a moral error to restrict and tie our moral obligation to a single, specific course of action or policy. Avoid unnecessary dualities.
For instance: “In international negotiations, Australia should set emissions reduction targets of at least 40 per cent by 2020 below the levels of 1990, and advocate for a binding agreement to keep global warming at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. … we have a moral obligation to do so.”
There is difference between a good idea and saying that it’s the only good idea. Among other things it puts one in the silly position of having to say that a 40 % reduction over 1991 levels means we haven’t met our moral obligation.
If find it fairly disgraceful that a bunch of anonymous people behind computers would criticize and disparage the strenuous and difficult work the unpaid volunteers went through to compile this work.
If you do indeed care so much about these things, complaining about them here is going to do absolutely nothing except irritate the good participants of this forum.
Perhaps instead you could volunteer your time and knowledge to helping Buddhist organizations compose better climate action kits, or go outside and actually work with your local (faith-based) climate action group to start working on effective solutions to this problem.
I’m sure the composers of this kit were aware there were going to be errors, and I’m sure there’s even more than you have apparently ‘found’. But the point of this kit was just to be a conversation starter, a beginning point for individuals and groups to take meaningful climate action. Obviously, you’ve missed it.
P.S. Climate ‘action’ is actually doing stuff, not just whinging about the issues with it on forums.
It is a fair dinkum lot of work. I look at the weeks and years of unpaid work I’ve put into educating myself so I could volunteer my experience, expertise, knowledge and insight towards helping to compose a better action kit.
Ok, I promise not to abuse my limited knowledge of strine on you anymore.
From your comments I judge that you put a lot of weight on your ability to make accurate attributions of other peoples intentions. My response was also a post " filled with good intentions" as you say. So what happened?
I chose that one bullet point because the logic of my point was mostly self contained within the bullet point itself. I structured my original comment and then explained my reasoning so that you didn’t have to know much about climate science to understand my thinking. Yet I’m thinking that it’s self-evident from the responses that people went off in a lot of directions.
I propose to you that the concern that I was a shill, troll or whatever complicated things, invoked defensive reasoning and diminished understanding. (I admit that you might find some irony if you read my initial response to the bullet point in light of my last sentence!)
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional bias is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others’ behaviors .
I put it to you that attribution bias may cause more problems on blogs than do trolls. Making attributions about others, whether about their motives, their competence, etc is sort of like have a troll in our own heads!
Further I put it that if you think all the talk was just about that one bullet point then you might learn alot if you re-read the thread with different eyes. A lot of salient ground was covered that relates to the entire document and how it might be used. You can lead a horse to water …
Regarding intentions. For me, and I believe also so in early Buddhism, both intentions and consequences matter.
The monk laughed and then replied brightly “oh yes, the little politician in my head … I recently renamed him Donald you know! That guy sometimes wants to be president of me. Yes, it’s true! I am grateful when diligence and mindfulness of the three poisons helps me to vote another way.” – anon.
I think you have a sincere concern about the issue of how climate change activists can most effectively communicate with the public, and do so without using claims that later prove to be overstated, thus discrediting the activists.
But as a newcomer to this forum, you should probably have thought more about how to apply those concerns about communication to your own case, and avoided “fake news” and “sounds like Trump” broadsides directed at well-meaning people who might not have stated a factual point with as much context as they could have.
I agree, especially since most buddhist in the west are part of the 13% progressive minority and this forum in particular leans strongly in that direction. It even had a black banned put on top of the forum when Trump won the presidency. Imagine if you went to a christian forum where most people are part of the 11% fundamentalist section of republicans. You would speak in a certain way, aware of how you will be perceived in such an environment no matter how moderate the opinion.
At first, the natural feeling when encountering such situations is revolt. A feeling that “it’s not ok to be called a troll just because of questioning progresive orthodoxism”. But if you would be on a christian forum, you would also be called a troll for contradicting the orthodoxism over there. Be pragmatic and aware that such topics are highly politically charged.
There was a good post recently about how people react when issues are politically charged: The Backfire Effect
Even when speaking softly, there might still be strong reactions.
The monk laughed and then replied brightly “oh yes, the little politician in my head … I recently renamed him Donald you know! That guy sometimes wants to be president of me. Yes, it’s true! I am grateful when diligence and mindfulness of the three poisons helps me to vote another way.” – anon.
I concede the point about skillful communication again.
Buddhism has both a consequentialist and a intentionalist (e.g. Virtue) ethical view. That is the dharma teaches a two fold (or more) attention to our actions.
To attend to our intentions.
To attend to the consequences of our actions, that is, the perspective of karma.
In the purely consequential analysis it doesn’t matter what your merit, virtues or intentions were or are.
I took the mostly consequential view of things rather than the more skillful, dialectically balanced one. That is, just as you suggest, I wasn’t considering the intentions and viewpoints of themselves of the listeners. Your comments have caused me to reflect more deeply than I would have on my own.
I was scanning news items this morning, as I do after opening D&D and then the NYTimes, with coffee.
I saw this: Bill Gates has lots of money, a foundation, and an interest in climate change issues. This was one essay that seems to pinpoint causes of climate damage, and possible mitigation. I don’t necessarily endorse Bill and Melinda Gates, but I always endorse good ideas, no matter where they come from…
) and important field that often parallels dharma wisdom. For instance see:
Ok, I promise not to abuse my limited knowledge of strine on you anymore.