Climate change and epistemology

Jem Bendell, who is the founder of the Deep Adaptation (to climate change) movement, started it with a paper. 

It's now downloaded more than 100 000 times. 

But it's now also read bye scientists that not miss to mention that Bendell is a professor of sociology and not an expert of climate change. 

Though Bendell refers to scientists he is accused for doing cherry picking among them. 

Bendell is also very sure of his findings: We are on our way towards a collapse of civilization. We should grieve and then prepare for the collapse. 

Many young people will die, but hopefully humankind will survive in some form. 

A respected journal, Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ), rejected the paper. A publisher explained that the paper wasn't peer reviewed. They wanted Bendell to correct the paper so it reflected the facts. 

Bendell didn't do so but posted it in a blog. 

Bendell means that the journal didn't want to post the paper, because it says that a collapse is inevitable. And that is not what they wanted people to read. 

And it's true that people have been very sad after reading it. 

And there's a risk that people will paralysed by the message. 

In an interview Bendell explains that he wants to be on the other side of denial but also give some physiological  advice and a phorum is started online for people who has accepted his view. 


I don't know what Greta Thunberg thinks of all this. But she  is very disappointed with what politicians do to stop the climate change. She thinks they all are without cloth and that yet not many sees it (maybe except Bendell and Thunberg and some more). 

She and the extinction rebellion movement seems to mean that the situation will be very severe and  ways catastrophic in some areas of the world. And that will influence the whole world.

Even Thich Nhat Hanh has warned for climate change; we has to be aware that catastrophes can happen. It has happened before, as mass extinctions has.

But there are some troubles with "facts".  We are limited by our brain, by our perceptions and by our culture and of course by our feelings and the feelings people around us show. 

Even scientists are limited by these things. 

Some of them mean that mathematics is independent of us, others means that math is created by our brain. 

It may be the th same with music, if some extraterrestrials came to our planet, they would certainly not enjoy the music of, for example, Bach.  

Maybe they don't  even have ears to hear, and for certain another kind of brains, maybe more like the ones that octopuses have: brains in different pars of the body - if they even have bodies... 


We may here have landed in the epistemology. 

But people like Bendell and Thunberg have raised the questions, both in a scientific and  a philosophical way. 

Let's hope many people will be aware of these questions and the risks that may come in the future. 

And maybe wote in that direction in the next election.






  


 


 







 












 








peak to Bendell, he tells me he thinks of "Deep Adaptation" as more of an ethical and philosophical framework, rather than a prophecy about the future of the planet. "The longer we refuse to talk about climate change as already here and screwing with our way of life—because we don't want to think like that because it's too frightening or will somehow demotivate people—the less time we have to reduce harm," he says with deliberation.



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