This is totally not political, and don’t you dare say it is
Scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action
Almost 400 scientists have endorsed a civil disobedience campaign aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change, warning that failure could inflict “incalculable human suffering.â€
In a joint declaration, climate scientists, physicists, biologists, engineers and others from at least 20 countries broke with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest from Amsterdam to Melbourne.
Wearing white laboratory coats to symbolize their research credentials, a group of about 20 of the signatories gathered on Saturday to read out the text outside London’s century-old Science Museum in the city’s upmarket Kensington district.
“We believe that the continued governmental inaction over the climate and ecological crisis now justifies peaceful and non-violent protest and direct action, even if this goes beyond the bounds of the current law,†said Emily Grossman, a science broadcaster with a PhD in molecular biology. She read the declaration on behalf of the group.
“We therefore support those who are rising up peacefully against governments around the world that are failing to act proportionately to the scale of the crisis,†she said.
The declaration was coordinated by a group of scientists who support Extinction Rebellion, a civil disobedience campaign that formed in Britain a year ago and has since sparked offshoots in dozens of countries.
It is interesting that their idea of a solution is Government Doing Something. Because this is all science, not politics
While many scientists have shunned overt political debate, fearing that being perceived as activists might undermine their claims to objectivity, the 395 academics who had signed the declaration by 1100 GMT on Sunday chose to defy convention.
“The urgency of the crisis is now so great that many scientists feel, as humans, that we now have a moral duty to take radical action,†Grossman told Reuters.
No one is stopping these 400 people, and all the Extinction Rebellion nutters, from giving up their own use of fossil fuels, hair dryers, air conditioning and heating, showers longer than 2 minutes, more than 2 sheets of toilet paper, living in homes over 300 square feet, eating food they didn’t grow, eating meat, ice makers, etc and so on. Giving a goodly chunk of their money to the government. Practicing what they preach.
“We can’t allow the role of scientists to be to just write papers and publish them in obscure journals and hope somehow that somebody out there will pay attention,†Julia Steinberger, an ecological economist at the University of Leeds and a lead IPCC author, told Reuters.
Oh, so people who have a stake in perpetuating the climate scam, along with increasing the size and power of government.
Say, did any media folks ask these scientists (many are not) about the nutters gluing themselves to things, including airplanes? How about duping fake blood all over the place? Dancing like they’re on drugs? How about interfering with average people just trying to go about their lives?
