When scientist must shout

The overwhelming consensus among climate scientists is that human-caused climate change is happening. Yet a fringe minority of our populace clings to an irrational rejection of well-estabilished science. This virulent strain of anti-science infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading  newpapers  and what we see in TV , leading to the appearance of a debate where none should exist.

In fact, there is broad agreement among climate scientists not only that climate change is real, (a survey and a review of the scientific literature published say about 97 percent agree) but that we must respond to the dangers of a warming planet. If one is looking for real differences among mainstream scientists, they can be found on two fronts: the precise implications of those higher temperatures, and which technologies and policies offer the best solution to reducing, on a global scale, the emission of greenhouse gases.

For example, should we go full-bore on nuclear power? Invest in and deploy renewable Energy – wind, solar and geothermal – on a huge scale? Price carbon emissions through cap-and-trade legislation or by imposing a carbon tax? Until the public fully understands the danger of our present trajectory, those debate are likely to continue to founder.

This is where scientists come in. In my view, it is no longer acceptable for scientists to remain on the sidelines. I had no choice but to enter the fray. I was hounded by elected officials, threatened with violence and more, after a single study I co-wrote a decade and a half ago found that the Northern Hemisphere’s average warmth had no precedent in at least the past 1,000 years. Back in 2003, when asked in a Senate hearing to comment on a metter of policy, I risponded that “I am not a specialist in public policy” And it would not “be useful for me to testify on that.” It is not an uncommon view among scientists that we potentially compromise our objectivity if we choose to wade into policy matters or the societal implications of our work. But there is nothing inappropriate about drawing on our scientific knowledge to speak out about the very real implications of our research.

If scientists choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a vacuum that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of short-term self-in-terest. In fact, it would be an abrogation of our responsibility to society if we remained quiet in the face of such a grave threat.

How will history judge us if we watch the threat unfold before our eyes, but fail to comunicate the urgency of acting to avert potential disaster? How would I explain to the future children of my 8-year-old daughter that their grandfather saw the threat, but didn’t speak up in time?

Michael E. Mann from International NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/if-you-see-something-say-something.html?_r=0
If you want to know more about Distinguish Professor Michael E. Mann and about the subject please go to the link below

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/michael-mann-climate-change-deniers-must-stop-distorting-150312836.html?.tsrc=Yahoo

You can also found an italian translation by Angelo Ruggeri in the blog: http//albixpoeti.blog.tiscali.it

Dante's Ulysses

 –  Inferno Canto XXVI-

“When I left Circe who more than a year

   retained me over there close to Gaeta

long before Aeneas came  there

 giving the place that name,

   not fondness for my son, nor pity

on my old father, nor Penelope`s claim

to the joys of conjugal love,

   could overcome  in my mind the lust

 to get  experienced of  the whole world

and  all  human faults and virtues,

   and  I turned into the large and open sea

with just one  ship and only those few comrades

who  did not desert me. 

   I saw  both shores as far as Morocco

 and as far as Spain and I saw Sardinia

and the other islands  washed by that sea.

  I and my  comrades were old  and worn

when we sailed  into the narrow pass

where Hercules rose his columns

  warning all men not to go further,

already I had left Ceuta on the left,

Seville now sank behind me on the right.

  “Comrades,” I said, “who through a hundred thousand

perils have reached the West, in the short time

we have still left of our lives

   let us   not deny  ourselves  to experience

 the uninhabited world  following the course

of the sun where it set.

   Consider your origin! You were not born

to live your lives like brutes,

but to  follow the path of virtue and knowledge!”

   With this brief exhortation I made my men

so eager for the voyage I could hardly

have held them back if I changed my mind,

   and turning our stern toward morning,

we bore southwest out of the  known world ,

making wings of our oars for our fool`s flight.

   The night  showed already   all the constellations

 of the other hemisphere and our pole

 had so declined that it did not rise out of its ocean bed.

    Five times  the  moon’s face

 had brightened  and as many time  waned

since we had started our voyage

   when   a mountain appeared to us 

so far that it  looked dark,  a peak so tall

I doubted any man had seen the like.

   We cheered  and  soon we cried

because  a whirl broke hard

upon our ship from the new land:

   three times it turned over and over the ship

 in the wave ,  at fourth the poop rose

 and the bow went down, as Somebody wished

      till the sea closed over us.”

English Translation by Angelo Ruggeri

Ulysses in the time

Ulysses is may be the best known myth of Ancient Greece. His personality has fascinated all the great writers all over the times  in the western culture from Dante to Joyce.

His original characters are depicted in the Homer's epic poems Iliad and Odyssey.

In the first, though the central role is played by monolithic epic warriors like Achilles, Agamemnon and Menelaus, emerges his cunning and his courage, jointly with his prudence and wisdom.

 In the second, where he plays an absolutely main role, hits mostly his curiosity, his bravery and craving of knowledge but also his  misfortunes and disgraces (po’lymetis and po’lytlas are the two Greek  words that connote and mark his character soon in the incipit of Homer's late masterpiece).

Ulysses, with his anxiety of knowledge, sometimes even against the Greek’s gods will, reminds in someway to the biblical account of Adam and Eve, who tasted against the God’s prohibition the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

We cannot be sure that Homer (or better the more ancient traditions that the classic fonts assign conventionally to his collection) was influenced by the direct vision of the biblical reports; but we can neither exclude it utterly, so mysterious and intricate are the contaminations between different cultures, all over the human history.

But in the Ulysses of Dante we can notice that jointing with the Greek-roman tradition, the new Jewish-Christian vision prevails on the eldest basic  characters: in the XXVI Canto of Dante’s Comedy, the immortal Greek hero doesn’t follow the knowledge at any rate, but his intentions are moved for thirst of “virtues and knowledge”. That’s what we read in the Ulysses prolusion to his mates “You were not born for living like brutes/ but for following virtues and knowledge”.

As matter of fact Dante puts his Ulysses with the cheating advisers (jointly with Diomedes) and not with the Angels rebelled against God (though we must observe that they are nevertheless very close each other, in the bottom of the horrible hell).

In other words we can say that modern western culture accepts the Dante’s vision of the Inferno’s Ulysses.

The rebellion against God is therefore reserved to Adam and Eve and to the Angels who fought against God for supremacy; Ulysses is the positive hero whose anxiety of knowledge is to be framed in the quest of God; or at least that’s the positive idea that western culture accepts unanimously now days.

This perspective of Ulysses‘ myth is also accepted by the graduated poet, the English Alfred Tennyson.

Totally opposite is instead the vision given by Irish writer James Joyce in his controversial novel Ulysses.

Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904 (conventionally the day Joyce's married  his  wife, Nora Barnacle).

The  novel establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem (Leopold Bloom corresponds  to Ulysses, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus).

Ulysses  is divided into eighteen episodes. Since publication, the book has been a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday.

It's useful to describe now the equivalence between the epic's characters and the main  subjects in the modern  Joyce's Ulysses. As everyone knows the three main characters in the Irish novel are Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus (a sort of autobiographic profile, already featuring in a previous author's novel as The portrait of an artist as a young man). The story establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the Homeric's poem:  Leopold Bloom corresponds to Odysseus, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus.

It could  have  been very  hard to find a real coincidence in the two stories (the Homeric and the Joycean) if Joyce himself had not given a precise, peculiar imprint in that direction. As matter of fact James Joyce divided his novel into 18 different episodes, each one reminding the Homeric's Ulysses events. But while the Homeric hero lives those events through a ten years journey all over the mediterranean basin, Bloom, Molly and Stephen are shown to the reader featuring all over a single day in Dublin.

We cannot correctly understand the Joyce's work, if we don't sight it in the right  frame of the  cultural background of the Joycean's times.

The Irish writer lives and creates in the same period of Picasso decomposing  reality into the cubism painting technique. In the same time that Dadaism cries out its anti-war politics through a rejection against the war and the bourgeois way of thinking and behaving both in its  political and colonialist approaches.

May be right title for the Joyce's opus could be "The hidden side of the Homeric  hero Ulysses" also considering the probable freudian influence on the literature and arts in the same Joyce's epoch.

In fact the Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, make me think that Freud’s  concepts of the conscious, primary process and dreams can help illuminate Joyce's characters.

As matter of fact, in the first two decades of the XX century, ‘the stream of consciousness’ writing  technique finds several followers, such as Marcel Proust in France and Italo Svevo in Italy (besides Joyce himself).

The great, innovative  discovery of these  three novelists, has been to  turn fiction from the external to internal reality.

Of course you might like or not Joyce’s novel (its reading being so difficult and hard, though joyful and agreeable in certain pages, where humor and nonsense prevail on the apparent leisure of the full contest),  and so,  still prefer the myth as Homer has engraved it in his unforgettable masterpiece, but Joyce’s Ulysses is already like a shadow who will follow forever the Greek myth of Odysseus.