Our society is losing the ability to think rationally

It was encouraging to see your editorial (“Media panic on climate, bushfires and a vacation”, 19/12). Most of our society’s organisations and citizens are as bad as the media. Western societies are losing their critical thinking skills. Logic and facts used in arguments are being abandoned.

Lazily, we are adopting emotional and irrational arguments based on myths, fiction, or factoids. We no longer have open and inquiring minds and a desire to politely engage with those who hold different views.

On hearing a different view today, we react in two ways. To preserve our rational arguments, we retreat to an echo chamber with like-minded people. There our irrationality can be reinforced. When we are not in our echo chamber, we attack the messenger not his ideas.

Today, when we hear bushfires and climate change being connected, we can declare we are showing as much sense as those who believed in witchcraft hundreds of years ago.

N. J. Ford, Kambah, ACT

Your editorial on the climate and woke conflagration ended the year on a high. While some panic may be tolerated by long-suffering lovers of evidence on these topics, the media’s conformity to utter madness in its blindness to any debate, warrants no sympathy.

As Chris Kenny, Chris Mitchell and Gerard Henderson have explained so patiently this year, journalists are only tasked to find the facts, truths and evidence in order to report issues as free of bias as possible. While some postmodernist bias is trendy, it is also boring, journalistic trickery, shameful in its zenith this year.

Betty Cockman, Dongara, WA

The report that the crowd-funded Climate Council projects a long-term solution to bushfires beggars belief and defies rationality, though perhaps very woke. Plainly, bushfires have always been a risk in Australia. That risk becomes a catastrophe with the convergence of extreme weather and wilful humanity. The weather cannot be controlled though its consequences may be ameliorated or even, in some instances, averted.

On the other hand, the impact of humans on that catastrophe can be lessened by previous measures such as annual controlled cool burning of accumulated fuel — and discouragement of arsonists. But the human impact can only begin to be assuaged if there is ubiquitous recognition of the plague proportions reached by the human species in its replication. There must be some ready redress.

Ian Dunlop, Hawks Nest, NSW

One wonders if Tim Flannery and his experts have the faintest idea of what an immediate end to the burning of fossil fuels would involve. For a start, the government would have to acquire or close down all fossil fuel-burning enterprises, including those dirty diesel generators that keep the lights on in South Australia.

Skipping over the financial, constitutional and temporal problems involved in that exercise, everywhere except Tasmania would then face regular long-term blackouts, probably on a daily basis, because of the lack of any back-up to wind and solar energy sources. I doubt that even Bill Shorten would subscribe to that model.

Michael D. Kellock, Foster, Vic

The cauldron of discontent that is the climate change debate, alternates between simmer and boiling point depending on what ingredients are tossed in. The combination of drought, water shortages and bushfires mean that the cauldron is boiling most of the time and the media is starting to run out of superlatives to describe the situation.

Crisis and catastrophic have been used to the point that they have almost become meaningless, so apocalyptical occasionally pops up.

Outrage also became popular — how dare the PM allow this to happen? Around the country, groups are calling for immediate or instant action to be taken and are demonstrating volubly. So, I think the time is right to introduce hysteria. The crowd that besieged the Deputy PM Michael McCormack in Merimbula was definitely hysterical. And Greta Thunberg gave a master class in theatrically contrived hysteria at the UN.

Some people in the latest hysterical outburst are not in the mould of the uni student and Extinction Rebellion activists, they were middle aged and senior citizens. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at their antics, but when I examined the word hysteria more closely, I decided to cry.

B. Johnstone, Victoria Point, Qld