Pascal's Wager and Climate Change - O'Reilly Radar
The climate change debate rolls on.
Tim O'Reilly makes a case worth reading that action taken to live and work more efficiently with respect to energy sources and uses and the resulting improvement of the environment are worthwhile benefits. Naturally, there are serious and significant countervailing views expressed in the comments to O'Reilly's position about the extent of climate change and whether it's manmade or not. As I have written here previously, I subscribe to Bjorn Lomborg's view of what we should be doing.
The climate IS changing...it always has/does...but whether man's influence is a factor is unsettled (the science is NOT settled because it's built on models that cannot be tested, thus it's not true science as we understand the term) . The important fact that is not mentioned by O'Reilly is there is absolutely NO evidence that climate change CAN BE reversed. And if it is possible, there's no answer to the question of what that state should be.
Mankind's civilized presence on the planet is so short that we are incapable of defining the ''best" climate. We give ourselves far too much credit!
1 comment:
I am reading H.G. Well's "Outline of history" which begins with the origins of space, and then shifts to the origins of life on earth. He covers how the earth has ALWAYS cycled though periods of greater/lesser overall temperatures. The most important lesson is that in EVERY case, life went on, life adapted to the changing environment. So, I think humans are crazy to think that we are going to influence these temperature patterns. Our only option is to be aware and to begin to adapt to the changes as fast as we can. But we're talking about changes that take place over hundreds of years, so it looks like we still have time to adapt.
As far as the science goes, it will be hard to deny that Higher Education in the US has shifted to the far left. Listen to ex-radical leftist David Howowitz on the corrupt influence of the left in the academy today. Is there any reason to believe that his corrupting influence has not seeped into the science departments as well? I will go so far as to say that once science gets it's heads about it again and realizes how far it has strayed from it's core ideals of objectivity, we will see that for the first time science slipped in the 20th century, that it became, especially with the environmentalist, a type of religion, merged with religion, where they take the ideal or ideals first and then look for evidence in the real world. They are supposed to begin with the real work and let the masses draw their own conclusions, or ideals from this. But no, the elites have decided we need to be more like the north American Indians, and live in harmony with the earth. It's not such a bad ideal, but is it true? Is modern society really destroying the earth? And do we really want to give up our modern life and start living again in Tee Pees? It might be fun - for a while.
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