Speaking of bad analogies, the latest meme -- which comes from scientific "research" -- is that global warming is like slavery!

No seriously. According to Professor of Sustainable Enterprise Andy Hoffman, we must "change the way we structure our organizations and the way we think as individuals" so that what is a "scientific fact" becomes a "social fact" until we all collectively come to see the same moral problem with the burning of fossil fuels the same way we see the moral problem with slavery! This "value shift" will "require people to come to terms with a new cultural reality" -- all that in the name of "science"!

Despite scientific evidence of climate change, it will take a significant cultural shift in attitudes to address the situation, a U-M researcher says.

The shift would be much like what has happened with recent cigarette smoking bans and even similar to the abolition of slavery in the 19th century.

"The present reality is that we tend to overlook the social dimensions of environmental issues and focus strictly on their technological and economic aspects," says Andy Hoffman, the Holcim (U.S.) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and School of Natural Resources and Environment. "To properly address climate change, we must change the way we structure our organizations and the way we think as individuals.

"It requires a shift in our values to reflect what scientists have been telling us for years. The certainty of climate change must shift from that of being a 'scientific fact' to that of being a 'social fact.'"

In an article published in the current issue of the journal Organizational Dynamics, Hoffman compares the current cultural attitudes toward climate change to historical societal views on smoking and slavery.

"Just as few people saw a moral problem with slavery in the 18th century, few people in the 21st century see a moral problem with the burning of fossil fuels," Hoffman says. "Will people in 100 years look at us with the same incomprehension we feel toward 18th-century defenders of slavery? If we are to address the problem adequately, the answer to that question must be yes."

But Hoffman says this value shift will require people to come to terms with a new cultural reality: first, that we have grown to such numbers and our technologies have grown to such a capacity that we can, and do, alter the Earth's ecological systems on a planetary scale; and second, that we share a collective responsibility and require global cooperation to solve it.

I must be getting old. I didn't even know that "Sustainable Enterprise" was an academic discipline.

Sounds like a very powerful field, and I certainly hope that its gatekeepers believe in, you know, stuff like academic freedom and free scientific inquiry. Scientific skepticism should not be summarily dismissed as "immoral" by other scientists.

I think the professor's analogy is not only inane, but it trivializes the horrors of slavery. People might start asking whether such intolerant and nutty ideas are sustainable.