Today in our society it is hard to know who exactly to trust. In Muller's Physics for Future Presidents, he talks a lot about Al Gore and his movie An Inconvenient Truth. In this he talks about three different strategies that people use to help to get others to support them. These three key strategies are distortion, exaggeration, and cherry-picking. Its almost like a white lie. You aren't fully lying, but you are leaving out important facts. Although these strategies help to get someone's point across, they actually distort the listeners point of view. As Muller states, he is worried that if people find out that Al Gore actually distorted the truth, they may disregard his findings all together, even though most of his information was factual, just with a twist. One example of what Al Gore did was that he put a graph that shows the correlation between CO2 levels and warming temperatures. It is true that fossil fuels do help to induce global warming but the truth, however, is that this correlation does not necessarily mean cause and effect. By doing this Gore is trying to get his point across more efficiently, but this in turn may be counteractive if people realize what he really is doing.
There is so much propaganda for global warming, fossil fuels, energy, etc. but how do people know what to really listen to? You would think our government would want to tell us the truth in full but sometimes its just not that simple. In the end we really need to research what we chose to believe in. If you believe that human activity is causing global warming, then you better have evidence to back that up. Its not okay to say I believe it because I heard someone say it. In society today we are so used to getting information as quick as possible from search engines like google, and ask.com, that we really don't stop to check if the information we are getting is really reliable. It all goes back to asking who posted this information, when was it posted, and is it something that I can really trust.
Today we need to start to work together to figure out the truth and inform others of our findings in full. Our society has become so wrapped up in putting ourselves first that we forget about everyone else. We really need to start worrying about long term effects rather than short term. Groups all over have been trying to unify populations to come together and make an impact on helping the future of this world. The group 350 actually devoted October 24th as as the international day of climate action, and National Grid is another group trying to bring people together.
There quote:
"If we all reduced our energy consumption by 3% a year for the next 10 years, the impact would be huge.
But everything starts with you."
Its hard to know who to trust now a days but if we really don't have faith in who's giving us the information, we can take the initiative and find it for ourselves. We should be able to have enough faith in each other to believe that when someone tells us something, especially someone in the government, that they are telling the truth. A common quote "two heads is always better than one" really is the truth. If we all start to work together and listen to each other instead of constantly trying to compete to be the best, maybe we can have an impact on the future world. This is what Cuba did when they experienced peak oil and by doing so, managed to survive something that could have ultimately collapsed their society. Although we are different from Cuba in many ways, we should try to use them as an example and take any advice we can get rather than just thinking we can simply do everything ourselves.
-Muller, Physics for Future Presidents-Chapter 19
-Muller, Physics for Future Presidents-Chapter 22
-http://www.350.org/
-https://www.powerofaction.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment