Battleangel

The president of the British Royal Society offers these words of caution in his final anniversary address.

BBC - “There are serious problems that derive from the realities of the external world: climate change, loss of biological diversity, new and re-emerging diseases, and more.

“Many of these threats are not yet immediate, yet their non-linear character is such that we need to be acting today.

“And we have no evolutionary experience of acting on behalf of a distant future; we even lack basic understanding of important aspects of our own institutions and societies.

“Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason.”

[...] fundamentalism applies not only to organised religions but to lobby groups on both sides of the climate change debate.

The climate change “denial lobby” and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) opposed to nuclear power are not exempt from a denial or misrepresentation of scientific facts, he told reporters in London.