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Quote by David Wallace-Wells

“Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we've been trained, by a bouyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss categorically as hyperbole. Here, the facts are hysterical, and the dimensions of the drama that will play out between those poles, incomprehensibly large. Large enough to enclose not just present day humanity but all of our possible futures as well.”

Quote by David Wallace-Wells

Book:The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

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David Wallace-Wells

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“By the end of the cold war, the prospect of nuclear winter had clouded every corner of our pop culture and psychology - a pervasive nightmare that the human experiment might be brought to an end by two jousting sets of proud, rivalrist tacticians. Just a few sets of twitchy hands hovering over the planet's self-destruct buttons. The threat of climate change is more dramatic still, and ultimately more democratic, with responsibility shared by each of us even as we shiver in fear of it. And yet we have processed that threat only in parts, typically not concretely or explicitly, displacing certain anxieties and inventing others, choosing to ignore the bleakest features of our possible future and letting our political fatalism and technological faith blur as though we've gone cross-eyed into a remarkably familiar consumer fantasy: that someone else will fix the problem for us - at no cost. Those more panicked are often hardly less complacent, living instead through climate fatalism as though it were climate optimism. Over the last few years, as the planet's own environmental rhythms seem to grow more fatalistic, skeptics have found themselves arguing not that climate change isn't happening, since extreme weather has made that undeniable, but that it's causes are unclear. Suggesting that the changes we are seeing are the result of natural cycles rather than human activities and interventions. It is a very strange argument. If the planet is warming at a terrifying pace and on a horrifying scale it should transparently concern us more, rather than less, that the warming is beyond our control, possibly even our comprehension. That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair, however incomprehensibly large and complicated we find the processes that have brought it into being. That we know we are, ourselves, responsible for all it's punishing effects should be empowering, and not just perversely. Global warming is after all a human invention and the flip-side of our real time guilt is that we remain in command. No matter how out of control the climate system seems; with it's roiling typhones, unprecedented famines and heat waves, refugee crises and climate conflicts; we are all it's authors and still writing. Some, like our oil companies and their political patrons are more prolific authors than others. But the burden of responsibility is too great to be shouldered by a few however comforting it is to think all that is needed is for a few villians to fall. Each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote. Now we all share the responsibility to write the next act.”

ScienceHumanismGlobal Warming
Book:The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
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“Atheism is an emancipating system of thought that frees the mind from myths, fables, and childish fancies. There can be no inquisition, no witchcraft delusion, no religious wars, no persecutions of one sect by another, no impediment to science and progress, no stultification of the mind, as a result of its teachings. The philosophy of atheism teaches man to stand on his own feet, instills confidence in his reasoning powers, and forces him to conquer his environment. It teaches him not to subject himself and debase himself before mythical superhuman powers, for his reason is his power. The march from faith to reason is the march on which dwells the future hope of a really civilized mankind. Atheism teaches man to endeavor constantly to better his own condition and that of all of his fellowmen, to make his children wiser and happier; it supplies the powerful urge to add something new to the knowledge of mankind. And all this, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells. This is no cold and cheerless philosophy; it is an elevating and ennobling ideal which may console him in his afflictions and teach him how to live and how to die. It is a self-reliant philosophy that makes a man intellectually free, and this mental emancipation allows him to face the world without fear of ghosts and gods.”

AtheismHumanismSecularism
Book:The Necessity Of Atheism
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