What would Ignaz say about wildfires?

In the mid-1800s, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis tried to convince the Austrian surgeons he was working with to wash their hands before surgery and delivering babies to reduce the horrific number of deaths due to infection.

The Austrian doctors who would show up to surgery with blood on their smocks and dirty hands wouldn’t believe him despite him showing them documented evidence to support his contention that sterile operating rooms dramatically reduced infections.

When he persisted, they hounded him out of the country and he returned to Hungary. He again tried to convince the Hungarian surgeons to wash their hands, but the reaction was the same.

The esteemed doctors could not accept that THEY might be responsible for these deaths.

Semmelweis eventually had a nervous breakdown, was put into an insane asylum and died 14 days later after being beaten by guards.

When science finally proved him correct, philosophers came up with the term “The Semmelweis Reflex”: a human behavioural tendency to stick to preexisting beliefs and to reject fresh ideas that contradict them (despite adequate evidence).

There are stories about the wildfires without a single mention that climatologists have been predicting these very climate catastrophes since the 1980s. What more evidence do we need before we can move beyond the Semmelweis effect and begin mobilizing to fight the climate crisis?

Jim Pine Victoria