In a devastating example of critical thinking gone bad, highly educated, deeply caring parents avoid the vaccinations that would protect their children from killer diseases. I love critical thinking and I admire skepticism, but only within a framework that respects the evidence.
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We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down – at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us. (...)
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What climatology is not, is an excuse for planet-wide manipulations; neither is it a scare story, a source of sensational copy for journalists short of lines, or provider of disaster movie scenarios. The protection of Nature and the fight against pollution need no false climatic premisses to underpin them: their necessity is self-evident.
Let those who claim to knowledge of the ‘climate’ make sure that they know what they are talking about, and take time to learn the facts - and this includes some scientists, it must be said. The destiny of climatology is not to be a recreation, a supplier of news items and catastrophes: its destiny, as a science of Nature, is to resolve, objectively, disinterestedly, and responsibly, some of humanity’s fundamental problems.
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The media can’t waste time on stories that won’t pass our attention filter.
Here are a couple of headlines that won’t get past a newspaper editor, because they are unlikely to get past our own filters: “MALARIA CONTINUES TO GRADUALLY DECLINE.” “METEOROLOGISTS CORRECTLY PREDICTED YESTERDAY THAT THERE WOULD BE MILD WEATHER IN LONDON TODAY.” Here are some topics that easily get through our filters: earthquakes, war, refugees, disease, fire, floods, shark attacks, terror attacks. These unusual events are more newsworthy than everyday ones. And the unusual stories we are constantly shown by the media paint pictures in our heads. If we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like.
For the first time in world history, data exists for almost every aspect of global development. And yet, because of our dramatic instincts and the way the media must tap into them to grab our attention, we continue to have an overdramatic worldview. Of all our dramatic instincts, it seems to be the fear instinct that most strongly influences what information gets selected by news producers and presented to us consumers.
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