Follow the money...
Dec. 10th, 2009 13:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mapsedgeThe general idea - that our planet's climate is changing - I do not dispute. I merely doubt that humans are a significant player, or that we have the means to alter or affect this change, then, now, or in the future, in any significant way. "Global Warming" as a pseudo-scientific dogma is about money, and lots of it.
I posit that these arguments are never going to be solved except in hindsight. Two or three hundred years down the road, our children's children, dressed in either heavy fur coats or shorts and flip-flops will look back on all this and be able to pick the winning side, but now I don't believe such a determination to be possible. The science, such as it is, is too new, too uncertain, and too filled with profit-potential and emotional knee-jerkiness for that.
It would be easy to draw a line in the sand, but the sand keeps shifting.
Should we reduce carbon emissions? YES. Because doing so will save the world? NO, and it's hubristically naive to think that we can. We should do it because it's healthier for us as a species...and, as it happens, for the species with whom we share this planet.
Should we end the use of fossil fuels? YES. Because doing so will save the planet from destruction? NO...well, yes, okay, if you consider leaving large, gaping holes in our planet's surface and under-surface structures to be destruction, which I do, then YES. Because doing so will leave us less at the mercy of several unstable governments who mean us no good will? YES. Because doing so will reduce carbon emissions and therefore stop global warming? NO. See previous question
Found a white paper online today that makes my argument in much better fashion than I ever could in the amount of time I have in any given day.
A few key excerpts:
Few scientists would dispute the fact that climate is changing on a planetarian scale, and there are good reasons to believe that some of the changing features are not part of a natural variation, but consequences of man-made pollution. What every good scientist will dispute, however, is whether this observed and ongoing change is, as the promoters of the 'global warming' myth dogmatically assert, an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature - and whether the mechanism responsible for it is CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion. Present-day climatology is vulnerable to these kinds of faddist dogmas - pushed forward as part of a political and media-driven agenda - because it lacks a functional, comprehensive, systematic and interconnected understanding of the nonlinear system formed by the atmosphere, the oceans, the land mass and the biosphere, and their interaction with solar radiation.
Pseudoscientific fads do not have, nor do they need, any reason to come about, being set in motion solely by the political and social forces that promote them, and the vested interests they serve. [emphasis mine]
'Global warming' is a clearcut example of the central role acquired by antiproduction in global capitalism. Its promoters, with peer-reviewed mainstream publications at the forefront, have struck gold - a very lucrative business, where nothing needs to be actually produced, not even real science, in order for a 'healthy' profit to be made under the cover of an altruistic advocacy voicing demands in the name of mankind...'
The complete article:
http://www.aetherometry.com/Electronic_Publications/Politics_of_Science/Global_Warming/
I posit that these arguments are never going to be solved except in hindsight. Two or three hundred years down the road, our children's children, dressed in either heavy fur coats or shorts and flip-flops will look back on all this and be able to pick the winning side, but now I don't believe such a determination to be possible. The science, such as it is, is too new, too uncertain, and too filled with profit-potential and emotional knee-jerkiness for that.
It would be easy to draw a line in the sand, but the sand keeps shifting.
Should we reduce carbon emissions? YES. Because doing so will save the world? NO, and it's hubristically naive to think that we can. We should do it because it's healthier for us as a species...and, as it happens, for the species with whom we share this planet.
Should we end the use of fossil fuels? YES. Because doing so will save the planet from destruction? NO...well, yes, okay, if you consider leaving large, gaping holes in our planet's surface and under-surface structures to be destruction, which I do, then YES. Because doing so will leave us less at the mercy of several unstable governments who mean us no good will? YES. Because doing so will reduce carbon emissions and therefore stop global warming? NO. See previous question
Found a white paper online today that makes my argument in much better fashion than I ever could in the amount of time I have in any given day.
A few key excerpts:
Few scientists would dispute the fact that climate is changing on a planetarian scale, and there are good reasons to believe that some of the changing features are not part of a natural variation, but consequences of man-made pollution. What every good scientist will dispute, however, is whether this observed and ongoing change is, as the promoters of the 'global warming' myth dogmatically assert, an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature - and whether the mechanism responsible for it is CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion. Present-day climatology is vulnerable to these kinds of faddist dogmas - pushed forward as part of a political and media-driven agenda - because it lacks a functional, comprehensive, systematic and interconnected understanding of the nonlinear system formed by the atmosphere, the oceans, the land mass and the biosphere, and their interaction with solar radiation.
Pseudoscientific fads do not have, nor do they need, any reason to come about, being set in motion solely by the political and social forces that promote them, and the vested interests they serve. [emphasis mine]
'Global warming' is a clearcut example of the central role acquired by antiproduction in global capitalism. Its promoters, with peer-reviewed mainstream publications at the forefront, have struck gold - a very lucrative business, where nothing needs to be actually produced, not even real science, in order for a 'healthy' profit to be made under the cover of an altruistic advocacy voicing demands in the name of mankind...'
The complete article:
http://www.aetherometry.com/Electronic_Publications/Politics_of_Science/Global_Warming/
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money and politics aside
Date: 2009-12-11 15:05 (UTC)And...
Date: 2009-12-11 15:23 (UTC)Just historically, I give you the Anasazi, the original inhabitants of Easter Island, and other cultures that wiped themselves out by destroying their environment.
There is an excellent show on the Smithsonian Channel right now called "America Before Columbus". It shows with very well done CGI what the Americas were like throughout the past 500 years.
In just 300 years after the landing of Columbus, the European influx of people, livestock, and vegetation transformed 2 continents. That's with axes, plows, horses, pigs, wheat and trees. Throw in diseases to kill millions of Natives, and that's pretty widespread environmental impact for what we would today consider primitive industry.
Fast forward to today, where for centuries since the industrial revolution trillions of tons of pollutants have been thrown into the environment. For the first nearly 200 years of that, with zero attention to pollution control. In the years hence, zero restrictions on pollution from nations like China and India, to name a couple.
The forests of the world (the 'filters' if you will that suck in CO2 and pollutants and send them underground in exchange for oxygen) have been decimated.
The very chemistry of the oceans (another CO2 sucker and recycler for the environment) has changed to a degree that it is no longer absorbing like it did, and many of its benefits are weakening.
With that kind of pollution, and that detriment to the natural scrubbing mechanisms, how can a rational person dismiss out of hand the possibility that it has damaged the environment of the planet?
I really find it difficult to wrap my head around.