Paul Di Filippo Quotes
You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that's what's going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you.
Di Filippo, Paul. Interview by Jayme Lynn Blaschke. Voices of Vision: Creators of Science Fiction and Fantasy Speak, edited by Jayme Lynn Blaschke, University of Nebraska Press, 2005, pp. 53-58.
Less than an average of 5 feet above sea level, Maldives is the lowest country in the world. It’s highest point is less than 8 feet high. The small increase in the world sea level resulting from climate change has already affected Maldives, and an increase of only a foot would wipe out a large part of the country.
This was his last House debate and whereas almost all scientists had agreed that climate change was a serious challenge to the nation, an ideologically driven majority of his Republican Party denied that that there was any climate change that was different from the usual vicissitudes of nature, he tried to persuade his anti-scientific, conservative colleagues to face reality.
Here is a case of where an absolutely true quotation is used inappropriately politically. In this case to imply that there is nothing we can do to stop global warming. Just as humans have created some of the climate change in the last centuries, humans can change behavior and stop that portion of the change that we are creating. In addition, there are scientific and technological techniques being developed to alter the climate beyond that which mankind has produced.
Paul Di Filippo is an American science fiction writer. He is a regular reviewer for print magazines Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, and Nova Express, as well as online at Science Fiction Weekly. He is a member of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. Along with Michael Bishop, Di Filippo has published a series of novels under the pseudonym Philip Lawson.
