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iProve: Climate Change And Post-Truth Politics

By Bill Henderson

03 October, 2011
Countercurrents.org

" Google Earth Outreach, offers free tools to harness the Google Earth and Google Maps services and high-quality satellite data. For several years, non-profit groups in the United States, Europe, Brazil and Africa have taken Google up on the offer and now Canadian organizations are eager to get on board too ." Winnipeg Free Press

I think such enlightened co-operation and utilization of these powerful emerging tools is great. I have long used Google Maps, zooming down to see the infection pattern in BC forests , for example.

But explaining isn't proving - esp within society-wide denial.  Pictures are worth a thousand words. Strong visual tools will get more people engaged. But these programs and even Al Gore and a million celebrities with all the networked Net access time can only explain. We need an iProve if someone like Steve Jobs would make it globally accessible and user friendly.

' Scientists don't think like us ' and we live in a post-truth politics where senators and governors, premiers and prime ministers can dissemble         the most ridiculous nonsense about climate change to effectively rule out even the very minimum of possible mitigation. As Dave Roberts points out at Grist: there are no referees and you can say anything.

Except even the most rabid teapartying Republican couldn't say that the Seattle Mariners are the best team in baseball - they'd be laughed off the planet. There are box scores and standings in every paper. Not even if they had the money to repeat 'The Mariners are No1' over and over on every MSM outlet.

There still is evidence-based truth. We need a different 'common platform' for communicating our climate change predicament and it is a competition forum with 'box scores' and 'standings' that are undeniable.  Proving - more practically disproving - not just explaining. This is possible.

Google are you interested? Before you go Steve, could you make my competition forum app globally available and user friendly?

Action on climate change (as well as 'peak oil', sustainable economies, and local issues - for my own local example, whether salmon farms are disease breeders infecting wild salmon ) requires an app where evidence-based decision making helps us govern ourselves to do the right thing.

Using the Net, the AAAS or NAS, the Royal Society or CSIRO (acting as facilitator, as referee) could provide a competition forum with open and transparent peer review that could win over skeptics, crush deniers and remove the present sillyness which anchors society wide denial.

We need to build a much more robust consensus on climate change cause and effect, suite of dangers, and effective mitigation. The competition will hopefully produce a definitive current best science page that anybody globally could access and pages of orderly evidence systematically disproving each (very shallow in the climate change example) denier false argument.

I've tried to model how this innovation could turbocharge democracy; how it would work and implementation in op-eds gathered at

Climate Change: Get Smarter: Turbocharging Democracy Online
and
Building Climate Change Consensus: Mann Vs McIntyre , For Example

Innovate so that we can live in a reasonable, responsible, evidence based society and not the present money dictated consensus trance. That's our choice science and tech communities. And we need this new consensus building technology up and running as soon as possible. Our kids future depends upon us. Google are you interested? Before you go Steve, could you make my competition forum app globally available and user friendly?

Bill (at) pacificfringe.net

 



 


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