Historian Matthias Dörries reveals the role of fear in our understanding of climate change
From apocalyptic forecasting to estimates of mass extinctions, climate change is a topic which is filled with fearful predictions for the future. In his latest research, published in WIREs Climate Change, historian Matthias Dörries examines the cultural significance of fear and how it became a central presence in current debates over climate change.
Climatic change, as represented by the media, often prompts headlines predicting disastrous events, frequently adopting fear laden language including analogies with war and warnings of the imminence or irreversibility of pending catastrophes. For Professor Matthias Dörries from the University of Strasbourg, a culture of fear is alive, and doing very well.
Professor Dörries looks at the issue of fear from a historical perspective, asking how our current society has come to conceive of climate change in terms of catastrophe and fear.
“Recently historians have underlined the necessity to revise the grand Enlightenment narrative of science as antidote to fear,” Dörries stresses, “We should now look at how popular and scientific discourses frame fear, and study the constructive and destructive functions of these fear discourses in societies.”
The 1960s and 1970s were characterized by an increasing appropriation of the future by science, leading to a rise of fear discourses by scientists themselves.
“For the very long run, science has indeed some terrifying prospects to offer for the planet Earth, and on a scale of decades, science has identified serious threats, such as anthropogenic climate change,” Dörries remarks.
“The current discourse of fear over climate change reflects the attempts to come to grips with the long-term issue of anthropogenic climate change,” concludes Dörries. “They are appeals for action, they imply claims to power, they stress that the issue is political and cultural, not merely a matter of science and reason alone.”
RichieP says
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dissenters the ‘witches’. After all, it’s not us threatening them with burning
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As far as I am aware warmists are for taking action to avoid burning, naysayers are intent on avoiding action at all costs which strategy may lead to burning.
I think you need to think this out more clearly.
Cassandra King says:
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Someone claimed there was a problem, some people exploited the perceived problem, the MSM jumped in because it sells copy, some people made lots of money inventing fixes to the supposed problem which did not fix the problem because there was no problem to fix in the first place.
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And you were there as an insider in hundreds of IT companies and IT departments of major/minor corporations?
Or did you employ you hyper intelligence to divine this from first principles by inspecting the tangles of your belly button fluff?
LazyTeenager, Cassandra King et al
Interesting article on Y2K postmortem:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142555/Y2K_The_good_the_bad_and_the_crazy?taxonomyId=14&pageNumber=1
Parts of the following quote from the comments section of this article looks eerily familiar:
I lived through the Y2K mess too, and it can be summed up this way:
The Good:
– IT received much deserved attention.
– Outdated systems were replaced or updated.
– IT budgets grew, and spending may have even boosted the economy.
The Bad:
– Y2K was mostly media hype spread by people who didn’t understand IT.
– Hype grew into a marketing tool for IT vendors and providers.
– Lots of meddling from non-IT managers.
– Unnecessary spending on staff and projects for pet projects with Y2K as an excuse.
– IT spending practically stopped in 2000 since all the upgrades and spending were in 1999.
The Ugly:
– After nothing happened on New Years Day, nobody took IT recommendations or warnings seriously anymore.