Foretelling or fortune telling has always been popular. We want to know what's coming down the pike. We also like to worry about the future. A sense of fear or dread persuades us that we are not just alive, but that we are responsible, concerned, sober, and serious about life. Those who worry about the future are the grave and weighty citizens, the leaders.
The media, consequently, love apocalyptic stories. Fear sells. It grabs attention.
But it would be a worthy public service for media to run "So how did it turn out" stories on a regular basis. A healthy society needs a decent dose of scepticism when it comes to harbingers of doom. The NZ Herald has done us a service when over the holiday break it ran a "So how did it turn out" story on bananas. Yes, you read that right. Bananas.
Apparently, back in the day, a decade ago we are assailed with the prognostication that bananas were at risk of becoming extinct. Children used to sob in their beds at night with that terrible combination of sadness, regret, and fear. "Save our bananas" pressure groups sprung up everywhere. Greenpeace scaled tall buildings festooned with bananas to call attention to the threat. Eco-terrorists threw banana skins on busy sidewalks causing havoc in rush hour.
So how did it turn out? Nada. Bananas are more plenteous today than ten years ago. The only upshot is the rise in orthopaedic surgery to repair limbs damaged by falling heavily on busy sidewalks as a result of the harbingers of deprivation. No prosecutions of eco-terrorists were ever successful, however. Everyone had a sympathy for them--they were trying to save us all; they deserved some slack.
In 10 years, it was said 10 years ago, we might have no bananas. "Bananas could split for good," the BBC declared in 2003, citing a Belgian scientist who urged swift action to create new types of bananas. By now, the ubiquitous Cavendish variety was supposed to have been at least in apocalyptic decline.Here is the considered response to such futuristic fear-mongering:
Maree Conway, a strategic foresight practitioner in Australia, said such predictions should be banned. "I always think of predictions as living in our comfort zone. We like certainty - that's a human trait - so we predict and think we'll know what's coming," Ms Conway said. "We can't know. There's no data about the future. Predictions are based on data, and it's data from the past."This lust to know the future which, in turn, panders to our self-glorification and sense of worth and power, this titillation with fortune telling has become endemic to many pseudo-scientists. They have replaced the gypsy fortune tellers of old. Global warming is the current version. But that will fade, to be replaced by other fearful apocalyptic tales to make our children shake in their beds.
A prediction is to assume today's trends will continue into the future. "And that makes us very happy." They were wrong 99 per cent of the time anyway, she said. It was futile to focus on a single trend - like Panama [banana] disease - when there were so many trends intersecting and emerging. All you could do was to keep an eye out for change, she said.
It is doom, doom everywhere. Evil portents are upon us, we are told. Tell that to Alaskans who are bitter about the immediate future--due to the extreme cold they have had to suffer through. They are asking, "How's that global warming working out for ya?". Not so good. We want more carbon dioxide out there. Much, much more.
The Greens are always wanting to ban things. Why don't they ban dire predictions of eco-disaster? Oh, but we would lose the thrill of the Crusader, they would say. The self-importance, the self-righteousness, the spirit of being the "noble warrior"--it would all be gone. Life would no longer be worth living if we could not be scared about the future, and we were forbidden to share our fear with others, winding them up to a state of perpetual bed-wetting.Forget global warming, Alaska is headed for an ice age
Alaska is going rogue on climate change.
Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again: While global temperatures surge hotter and the ice-cap crumbles, the nation's icebox is getting even icier.
That may not be news to Alaskans coping with another round of 50-below during the coldest winter in two decades, or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth. Then again, it might. The 49th state has long been labeled one of the fastest-warming spots on the planet. But that's so 20th Century. In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Widespread warming
That's a "large value for a decade," the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in "The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska." The cooling is widespread -- holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other, the paper notes. It's most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade, the report says.
The new nippiness began with a vengeance in 2005, after more than a century that saw temperatures generally veer warmer in Alaska, the report says. With lots of ice to lose, the state had heated up about twice as fast as the rest of the planet, in line with rising global greenhouse gas emissions, note the Alaska Climate Center researchers, Gerd Wendler, L. Chen and Blake Moore. After a "sudden temperature increase" in Alaska starting in 1977, the warmest decade on record occurred in the 1980s, followed by another jump in the 1990s, they note. The third warmest decade was the 1920s, by the way.
Where would be the joi d'vivre in all of that? The world would be a duller place, right? Maybe. But it would also be a more sober, sane, and rational place. Less childish. Less superstitious. More grown up.
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