There are people who could watch a hurricane like Sandy blow out of the Atlantic every other day and blame it on anything but human activity. They are like those who, having been diagnosed with diabetes, eat donuts for breakfast. There's not much to do about them.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the denial of human impact on environmental issues, implying that some people ignore clear evidence and consequences of their actions.
Michael Specter uses the metaphor of a hurricane to illustrate how some individuals refuse to acknowledge the effects of human activity on climate change. He compares these individuals to those diagnosed with diabetes who still indulge in unhealthy eating habits, emphasizing the futility of trying to change their perspective. Specter points out that despite overwhelming evidence, some people remain in denial, making it difficult to address critical issues like climate change effectively.
In practice
During an environmental awareness seminar, this quote can underscore the need for responsibility in climate action.
If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.
The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost.
Humanity has nearly suffocated the globe with carbon dioxide, yet nuclear power plants that produce no such emissions are so mired in objections and obstruction that, despite renewed interest on every continent, it is unlikely another will be built in the United States.
Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that.
Why do people refuse to vaccinate their children against measles or whooping cough? In many cases, because they have never seen measles and have no idea what it might do.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
From a certain temperature on, the molecules 'condense' without attractive forces; that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there some truth in it.
I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.
Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work.
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