By: Joan Janzen
Years ago, Plato said, “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” So, it’s not surprising that people are hesitant to speak up or express their sincere concerns.
Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson was asked by Sky News Australia, why he chooses to speak up, despite great opposition. Peterson responded, “People say I’m brave. I’m not brave; I just know what happens when we allow other people to control our tongues. But it’s troublesome to suffer the sling of arrows when you say what you want to say.”
He’s been subjected to intense attempts at cancelation on the social media front, but he is very careful about not saying anything he believes to be false. “So, it’s been very difficult for someone to try and cancel me by pointing to something I actually said,” he explained. “I discovered if I could tolerate the attack without apologizing, it will inevitably be reversed, so the people who come after me the most harshly, end up being my friends.”
Peterson gave the example of a media outlet that had attacked him, but in the end, it just gave him more visibility, and the accusations were unfounded. “But don’t just shoot your mouth off; be strategic about it,” he advised. “You must decide if you are better served by the truth, or by the lie of silence or deception. A central doctrine in the west is the truth that will set you free. But if you say the truth you’re going to get in trouble, but if you abide by the lie, you’ll get in trouble. You’re in trouble both ways. You get to pick your trouble.”
Climatologist, Dr. Judith Curry, has conducted over four decades of research on weather and climate, and is speaking up about how climate change is interpreted. She was recently interviewed on Biz News TV. “Others and I don’t dispute the basics, but we do object to the idea of a manufactured consensus for political purposes, which has been too narrowly framed. We’ve been critical of the behaviour of the some more politically active scientists who are exaggerating the truth,” she explained.
Curry noted that people haven’t thought this out. “There’s no emergency. Even economically, we’re expected to be four times better off by the 21st century. We’ll all be better off unless we do stupid stuff like destroy our energy infrastructure before we have something better to replace it with. The biggest climate risk is the so-called transition risk,” she said. “I think the Europeans would agree.”
Although she would love to see the emergence of an inexpensive, cleaner, reliable and secure energy, she believes it is decades away. “The period from now until 2050 needs to be a time of technological development and experimentation to see what works, and have some good solutions emerge,” she said.
“But trying to mandate that everyone go to wind and solar is going to be a disaster. We don’t have the supply chain in place for all we need for wind and solar and batteries. ”She reasoned that we are going to need more electricity, not less, and will need a lot of fossil fuels to establish the necessary supply chains.
Curry chose to speak up, but the academic world considered her views unacceptable. Now she works in the private sector, helping companies make decisions about climate change.
“We’ve screwed up our priorities. We can’t sacrifice our thriving to reduce our footprint on the planet. Our number one goal should be human thriving and flourishing; that should be the dominant goal, over the environment,” she said.
Curry noted that disasters impoverish developing countries because they don’t have the resilience to cope. Curry provides better weather forecasting and emergency operational procedures. Her company helps with flood forecasting and develops evacuation plans. She gives Bangladesh as a success story.
Bangladesh developed their own natural gas and fossil fuel resources. Now life expectancy has rose substantially and their economy has improved. “They ignored a lot of advice from the World Bank, and they’re doing really well,” she said. “This is where we could do the world the best, by helping countries develop their own resources they can use in their own country.”
“Anybody who thinks burning dung in a cook stove is clean energy, can think again. It’s shortening their life span. Having to use dung and wood is terrible for their health and climate,” Curry explained.
She described the pre-industrial age weather as “horrible”, which included terribly cold winters and springs, extreme weather and devastating famines. “The weather was much more extreme in the 1930’s, but most people just look at the data beginning in the 1970’s,” she noted. “Even if we went to net zero, you wouldn’t be able to detect changes in the climate.”
“Then you’ve got children raised on alarmism and it’s become a huge psychological problem, because they don’t know how to filter this information. It’s a huge global problem with kids being depressed and thinking they don’t have a future. Common sense has left the room,” she concluded.