David Suzuki "Rediculous, Crazy, Insane"........

[waldo]

ya ya, Simple! You're getting quite the mileage out of your "unintended thread", hey!

I have seen a paper which says that if in fact the fourth plant goes under in an earthquake and those rods are exposed, it’s bye bye Japan and everybody on the west coast of North America should evacuate.

why... that's, as you say Simple, "a terrifying bombshell... ridiculous and insane". If only that pirate with the phone camera hadn't been there... if only bashers hadn't been feasting on this single sentence for years now - it never would have happened, right (If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it...)

[Keepitsimple]

ya ya, Simple! You're getting quite the mileage out of your "unintended thread", hey!

why... that's, as you say Simple, "a terrifying bombshell... ridiculous and insane". If only that pirate with the phone camera hadn't been there... if only bashers hadn't been feasting on this single sentence for years now - it never would have happened, right (If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it...)

You're being awfully naïve Waldo if you think that an advertised event (how else do you get over 700 attendees)with Suzuki as a guest would not be recorded in some manner. As I said - and you continue to ignore - it wasn't only a single sentence - it was a carefully scripted rant - punctuated by that "insane" statement......and for what purpose? Well, that's another story.

Edited January 17, 2016 by Keepitsimple

[waldo]

You're being awfully naïve Waldo if you think that an advertised event (how else do you get over 700 attendees)with Suzuki as a guest would not be recorded in some manner. As I said - and you continue to ignore - it wasn't only a single sentence - it was a carefully scripted rant - punctuated by that "insane" statement......and for what purpose? Well, that's another story.

don't make us/me... and you... continue to watch that pirated amateur video. Give us the 'real stuff'... from all those other recordings you imply exist! And you're making me watch that crappy pirated video - I sure don't see your declared "carefully scripted rant" there. Put up the transcript; sure you can!

of course, all the headlines (particularly basher fed ones) attribute the comment as "Suzuki said". But bashers don't do nuance, right? In that single sentence he states he's read a published paper with that finding. I already asked the other guy if his fake outrage also included that referenced paper... does yours?

I have seen a paper which says that if in fact the fourth plant goes under in an earthquake and those rods are exposed, it’s bye bye Japan and everybody on the west coast of North America should evacuate.

Simple, you have a long MLW history of going after the communicator-types; the Gore's, DiCaprio's, Suzuki's, etc., ... given all the failings you've had in trying to speak to the actual science, there's a common theme here, yes? Gore and Bill Maher had quite the 'luv-in' just a few days back on Real Time - are you working on your next related bashing post?

[biotk]

This was not a formal setting, one driven by media coverage - there was no "playing to the media; playing to the photographers, playing to the professional video camera".

.

Your claims are at least as absurd as those I have heard from the worst creationists and climate change deniers. First of all your claim that this event was not formal, or driven by media coverage etc are nonsense. This event was well covered by the media, even by the Sun Media chain. The symposium was live-streamed. And even if none of that happened to be the case, it is beyond sad to see someone defending a man who blatantly lied to an audience of 720 people.

single sentence where Suzuki states, "I have seen a paper which says that if in fact the fourth plant goes under in an earthquake and those rods are exposed, it’s bye bye Japan and everybody on the west coast of North America should evacuate".

A status report by an anti-nuclear activist group. Not a paper. Not peer-reviewed. Not published in a scientific journal. Repeating a claim that was in a power-point presentation. Not in a paper. Not peer-reviewed. Not published in a scientific journal.

Furthermore, what he says has nothing to with what the status report said. It doesn't mention an earthquake - Suzuki said " if there's another earthquake of a seven or above that, that building will go and then all hell breaks loose. And the probability of a seven or above earthquake in the next three years is over 95 per cent" The status report said nothing about that at all. The probability of an earthquake of 7 or more was actually considered to be 70%, and there had actually by that time already been four earthquakes of 7 or more since the tsunami, with the most inland one being the Fukushima-epicentre earthquake. Hell did not break loose. Nothing happened, which was no surprise to the experts. Suzuki simply lies. That is what he does. And so much for your claim that Suzuki's lies were restricted to a single sentence.

Clearly, you want nothing to do with stepping-up and qualifying your earlier statement where you declare a "Suzuki agenda... one based on anti-science".

In an interview found in Farley Mowat's book: "Rescue the Earth: Conversations with the Green Crusaders" Suzuki makes clear that he has walked from science and the scientific method. The book came out in 1990, so the interview was likely conducted in 1989. He claimed his impetus for his change away from science as a way to understand the world occurred around 1980 during the shooting of an episode on logging. I personally don't believe his story about his conversion away from science, because I think it was always there. Ecology, like all fields, started out accepting a lot of assumptions (there is simply no other way to even start) that were later challenged by scientific investigation and evidence. Suzuki like most hippie-types formed a world-view around those views and assumptions. For instance the idea of the balance of nature was something that almost all ecologists accepted as self-evident 40 or 50 years ago, but when ecologists gathered evidence they had to accept that their belief was simply unsupportable (See Kricher below)....that is unless you are David Suzuki, or someone else who can make money writing books telling the general public that their myths are still true. The idea that primal peoples enjoyed perfect environmental and social harmony was also prevalent among scientists at the time, but evidence shows that to not be the case either. When your sacred cows are challenged by evidence you can either accept the evidence or reject science as a way of knowing. When Suzuki's sacred cows were challenged he showed just how anti-science he is.

From Kricher's "The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth" (pages 16 and 17)

"Historically, the notion of a balance fo nature is part observational, part metaphysical, and not scientific in any way. It is an example of an ancient belief system called teleology, the notion that what we call nature has a predetermined destiny associated with its component parts, and that these parts all fit together into an integrated, well-ordered system ."

"In the more modern sense, the continued perception that nature is structured in some sort of balance results from what ecologists call "scale effect." Ecologists, as we shall see, were slow to come to this realization, and thus the balance of nature idea was permitted to move unscathed from its teleological roots to become assimilated into materialistically based science."

After a couple paragraphs explaining how nature on a smaller scale is not in balance, he talks about the last card to fall:

"You can also observe nature on a larger scale and erroneously conclude that there is real balance operating. For many years ecologists have believed that ecosystems such as forests pass through a series of successional "stages" eventually to attain what is called a "climax" condition, where the biodiversity of the forest is in a kind of stable, long-lasting equilibrium. This notion is largely discredited today."

The whole swath of the anti-science, ideological-based positions that people like Suzuki hold are outlined in Martin Lewis's (Both of these books are written by environmentalists, professors, and published by academic presses) book: Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism as he worried in the late 80s/early 90s that one of the segments of the environmental movement - the ideological, anti-science, eco-radicals - were taking over the movement, and that, as their policies and desires were based on myths, fantasies, ideologies, and devoid of scientific reality, they were self-defeating, would completely polarize environmentalism along political lines, and would delay real action exactly at a time when it was most needed. I think that his fears have completely come to pass and now because of their overwhelming position most people assume that the eco-radical version represents what environmentalism is. Because of that shift, environmental action which had previously had victory after victory, now brings failure after failure. The lack of action on climate change over the last 25 years should be placed at the feet of eco-radicals, and not conservative climate change deniers. The latter encouraged conservative politicians to oppose action. The former discouraged liberal and left-wing politicians from taking sensible actions. As I have said before - the proportion of carbon-free sources world wide increased from 6% to 12% between 1973 and 1990. While during the significantly longer period from 1990 to present they have only budged from 12% to 13%. This complete failure was not due to right-wing deniers. Instead it was due to politicians, who wanted to do something about climate change, facing a completely deluded, but extremely loud, set of ideological and counter productive demands from eco-radicals. Several countries, and provinces like Ontario, have been duped by eco-radicals leaving them with needlessly expensive electricity for a generation for the sake of a small amount of mostly useless wind energy.

And of course for Suzuki and the rest of the eco-radicals it is not just with energy, but with everything, from pseudo-science views of food to the repeated scares from environmental NGOs in their constant parade of junk science. I spent most of my life deeply entrenched in the environmental movement. I knew that we were science-based and they were not. It was the reason why I became a scientist. And through becoming a scientist I evolved from someone who believed the things environmental NGOs said, to someone who was skeptical of some of their claims, to someone who now holds the position that claims by environmental NGOs are to be considered lies until I can evaluate the science behind the claim (and in almost all cases the claims are scare-mongering using poor evidence). That makes me sad (and angry) because there are serious environmental issues that need to be addressed.

Nor is this rise of small, rural, local, holistic, vitalist, organic, pastoral fantasy thinking generally of left wing origin (it is not progressive, enlightened or revolutionary, but more often then not conservative and reactionary in origin) as Phillips Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts and Degregori's Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate show. However, there is no more sense in trying to change the mind of people like you then there is in trying to change the minds of creationists or climate change deniers. While there is the odd person here and there who will actually look at the evidence to challenge their own positions, those odd cases will not stop the march of unreason. Eventually the anti-science take over of both the environmental movement and the left in general will fall apart due to their self-defeating political strategies - but it won't be any time soon, and it won't be before they cause enormous harm.

Edited January 18, 2016 by biotk