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Originally Posted by The Batlord
Al Gore's political stance on global warming has been turned into almost a national joke because he's been portrayed as a crank to the extent that the populace as a whole has bought into the idea to an extent. The American political narrative is almost completely indifferent to global warming due to the republicans' success at molding the narrative on any range of issues. Liberalism in general is kind of a dirty word in American politics, even if half the population is actually liberal.
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Well, If Al Gore is viewed as a crank by most people, that's a bit sad. But circumstances and people's opinions can change. If the effects of global warming continue to accumilate as predicted, if those effects impact on people's lives, then today's crank may be vindicated tomorrow. It's happened before, though off-hand the only historically uplifting example that comes to mind is Copernicus with all his heliocentric nonsense.
In the same way that they say that every US bombing raid in the Middle East spawns another hundred terrorists, it may not be long before every hurricane victim is demanding action on rising sea levels, etc.
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For the Nth time, people are ****ing stupid. They simply are not capable of understanding events on a scale beyond the few square miles they will likely be born, live, and die in. We are poo-flinging apes who were never designed by evolution to deal with any of this **** and yet we are recklessly trying to do so with no sense of self-awareness. Human+ is the only reasonable solution to any of this as far as I can tell. We just simply need to be made more intelligent.
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I'm sure there are plenty of stupid people in the world, but also there are many intelligent people. Your claim that "they are simply not capable of understanding events beyond the few square miles..." is something I would contest, especially in the age of the internet.
You also mention that we "were never designed to deal with any of this ****." The fact is that we are an evolutionary freak. We have a much bigger brain than any other animal, of a sophistication completely unjustified by the circumstances of our origin. I agree that we started out as apes, and we could've got by with a brain the size of a chimp. But we got a much bigger brain than necessary, and we've proved ourselves capable of doing a lot more than just flinging poo. As a species, our position throughout (pre-)history has always been at the cutting edge; no other species has confronted the kind of stuff we have. And no-one can be sure how we will react to the problem of GW, but to say in advance that we will fail reminds me a little of the attitude of some unintrepid people when first confronted with the possibility of the railway; "Human beings aren't designed to travel at that speed." Turned out that those nay-sayers got it wrong, and, nothing personal of course, but I rather hope you've got it wrong too.