The mentality

One of the problems with debating AGW and catastrophic climate change with alarmists is that factual data are irrelevant. It's their mentality that is the true challenge. Here's one example.

“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line – at about a billion years ago – we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

David Graber, research biologist, U.S. National Park Service

First, the facts (or lack of them): 1 billion years ago, we didn't exist. Not only did we not exist, neither did life on land, nor even hard shelled sea life.

Second, the mentality: humans are not only worth less than other life on earth, we are apparently not part of nature at all. Worse, we are a cancer. A plague. One that would be better to kill off by some virus than to continue to exist on this planet.

This is the biggest problem when dealing with alarmists. Graber is a scientist, yet he not only can't get his facts straight, he chooses to ignore the facts in favour of his anti-humanist personal opinion. With this sort of mentality, it doesn't matter what the facts are, since the (usually emotional) conclusion has already been reached.

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