Stupidity and Global Warming

There's a meme going around: a picture of some Country & Western-looking German woman playing a guitar, with the claim that she said (in German),

"I don't think that global warming is nearly as dangerous as human stupidity."

There are several things wrong with this statement, whoever said it.

For one thing, the cause of global warming is human stupidity. It makes no sense to say to people who are battling global warming to say, "Don't worry about global warming -- human stupidity is much more dangerous!" when they're battling a direct product of human stupidity. If you say to researchers who are looking for a cure for AIDS, "Don't worry about AIDS -- viruses are much more dangerous!" all you've accomplished is to demonstrate that you don't know nearly as much about AIDS or viruses as the people whose very important work you're interrupting in order to say stupid things to them.

A statement which in itself is very stupid is not necessarily the best course against stupidity. Not every single time. Not in my opinion.

Also, asserting that global warming is less dangerous than human stupidity goes directly against the record of human life, which shows us thriving for many thousands of years despite many thousands of years' worth of very widespread and uninterrupted stupidity. Stupidity has certainly made our lives less pleasant in many ways, but it hasn't killed us yet. On the other hand, if it were not dealt with at all, global warming would kill us all in much less than a thousand years.

Global warming is now being dealt with, on an ever-larger scale, at a rate which just might possibly save our lives. But this is happening, not because people suddenly got smarter, but because energy generation which doesn't generate deadly levels of carbon and other toxic emissions suddenly got much cheaper, and continues to get less and less expensive.

If alternative energy saves us from killing ourselves off -- and it looks as if it just might -- then it will not have been our wisdom which saved us, but our greed. We will have remained just about as stupid as we were, just about as stupid as if, for whatever combination of economic reasons, alternative energy had never become cheaper, and, therefore, it never made the headlines nearly as much, and so it wasn't able to prevent us from killing off our own species with fossil fuels. Once again, our stupidity will not have been enough to kill us.

Yes, I think it's very important -- and almost hopeless -- to struggle against human stupidity. But if, for example, I and another person were stranded somewhere in a vehicle, and a grizzly bear was attacking the vehicle, trying to open it up so that it could eat me and the other human inside, and the bear was making progress, gradually making bigger and bigger cracks in the glass in the windshield and windows -- Ah say Ah say if I were in a situation like that, and the person next to me inside the vehicle said to me,

"I don't think that that grizzly bear is nearly as dangerous as human stupidity."

then that person would be showing a profound lack of a sense for what is urgent and what is not. Yes, it may very well have been human stupidity which got us into that predicament. But solving the problem of human stupidity -- assuming we were somehow able to solve it, there inside that stranded vehicle -- would not save us from that predicament. The problem we would have to solve, in such a situation, is the bear. If we didn't solve that problem, we would never be able to solve another problem.