A Saturday Short
Diversity of Thought - I am but a Simpleton
On April 17, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey, German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. In 1953, he wrote a note that said in part, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything”. This quote has been adopted as a clear prediction of climate change, even though the invention of global warming was born some 35 years later.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, was the 32nd President of the United States. His quote, “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people”. This quote was 43 years before June 1988, when James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies gave testimony to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, claiming global warming was real and it deceptively evolved into what it is today.
Both of these quotes come from an article titled “54 Inspirational and Shocking Quotes on Climate Change”. On another website, the story “30 of the Most Impactful Climate Change Quotes” provides climate change quotes from celebrities, religious leaders, business leaders, politicians, broadcasters, activists, and scientists. The excerpts are all from the usual suspects, but I concentrate on their list of 5 scientists:
David Suzuki is a pretentious Canadian Zoologist
Jane Goodall is an English Zoologist and Chimpanzee expert
Bill Nye dubbed erroneously as “The Science Guy” is a Mechanical Engineer
Stephen Hawking, Physicist
Richard Denniss, Economist
While the only actual scientist there was Stephen Hawking, his work and research was related to multiple universes, not climate change.
I often argue that liberals, progressives, and leftists, who claim open-mindedness and tolerance, have very little of those declared traits. A study by the British Journal of Social Psychology on ideological diversity proves that it is so. While the previous link connects to the actual paper, it is a tedious, scholarly journey. A relatively good synopsis of the research can be read in a Reddit article entitled, “There is more diversity of thought on the political right than on the political left.”
The study can be summarized in the graph below, with liberal diversity in ideological thought in blue, and the conservative counterpart to the right in red. The liberal thought process illustrates why they are so irrationally embedded with their political view of climate change and anyone outside that concept would be considered a political simpleton.
