Mal4Prez nails the climate change debate...
POSTED BY: kpo
UPDATED: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 04:17
VIEWED: 12057
PAGE 10 of 11
Good; I'm glad you got away from the toxicity of this place for a time. We took the dogs to the Divide; my back is so bad I can't walk very far (or do much of anything else), but at least they got out. Today I HAVE to get them out sulkying somehow, they need the exercise and the house needs the peace!
As for monied interests, yes, I recognize that. I also know that, via much effort, we are turning the tobacco interests to diversifying, as well as fighting back, and if climate change were accepted by enough people, I think those profitting from our screwing up the planet would hopefully do the same and jump on the alternative-energy bandwagon. If it became accepted, I'd like to believe they'd see the writing on the wall and do so as well.
I don't believe in some of the things you do, and I think petty rivalry could only have a VERY small effect, if there weren't money behind it (not grants, etc., but money to "find" the "facts" negating it).
Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Posted by DT:
What I really don't get is that at the same time you had people on the right going off about the rapture and on the left going off about catastrophic runaway GW that would turn the Earth into Venus... and neither one of them could see that what they were peddling was the exact same thing: completely bogus end of the world panic.
If you don't get it, would you stop doing it? After all, you're the guy who posits that if Obama is elected in 2012, there won't be a 2016 election, and then posts scary pictures to "prove" your point. Just sayin'.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by Niki2:
Good; I'm glad you got away from the toxicity of this place for a time. We took the dogs to the Divide; my back is so bad I can't walk very far (or do much of anything else), but at least they got out. Today I HAVE to get them out sulkying somehow, they need the exercise and the house needs the peace!
Sorry to hear about your back; I know how that goes - mine's fine most of the time (well, there hasn't been a day without pain since 1982, but I'm used to it for the most part), but once in a while it slips, and I'm ruined until I can get it worked out. Relax, feel better, take it easy. See a chiropractor if you can.
I'll be taking the dog out today, IN THE RAIN! It's actually been raining here, pretty much nonstop since yesterday morning. First significan rain we've had in over a year. Haven't seen any rainfall totals, but everything helps. Shit, if nothing else it'll knock some of the dust and ashes off things!
If you see a middle-aged man dancing, badly, in the rain in south Austin, don't be alarmed. :)NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Holy shit! 
RAIN IN TEXAS! Finally! 
Every little bit helps, so I'm sure you won't mind if I celebrate "for" "with" you! We're supposed to get some tomorrow--the first one last week lasted several days, and since then, "Winter" has arrived; colder at night, colder in the morning, and we only get to the 70s. 
Back is scaring me. Time to go back to the neurologist, 'cuz it's not going away; I'm all but living in my back brace, and that's a first. Depression, which hasn't left yet either, isn't helping; yesterday I went to bed at 2pm, got up at 7 to feed the animals, back to bed at 10 and slept until after 6 this morning. And now I'm so sleepy I could go back and do it all over again...at 8:30 am! Sux. But I GOTTA get them out somehow today, so I'll stay awake at least long enough to do that.
Go dance in the rain, man, I'm so happy for you!!! 
Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Strange, I don't see it as disrespectful at all. Rather, I see it as necessary. A person can recognize the limits of their knowledge, but that doesn't mean accepting expertise above all other considerations. Experts can be wrong. I've forgotten more of my education probably than I ever even learned. Whenever I'm asking questions or arguing, I'm thinking back through the very limits of my memory capacity, and I'm a person who has trouble remembering a conversation I had not five minutes ago.
I might use scenarios I've encountered as example arguments, but I have never on this board brought up my job or my credentials like it would win me any kind of points.
This one time, I was arguing on the main board against someone's self-proclaimed Firefly characterization, storytelling, and plot expertise. He was the writer of a popular fanfic series, and he kept USING that as a justification for why he was right.
Or, not that we would, but what if Mal4Prez and I were to start arguing about whose expertise was more applicable, or who had more years of education (her), or who does the harder science and math (also probably her).
I guess I was referring to this in a more broad sort of way. I'm not saying take someone's creditentials on this board, I'm talking about knowledge in general. I see the internet as a double edged sword when it comes to knowledge. You can certainly find out stuff on the Internet, although a good dose of it is probably rubbish. People might think they know more, but I'm not sure that they are more knowledgable. It is different googling a whole load of stuff to reading and studying it year in year out.
You can certainly question experts, they can indeed be wrong, but normally unless it is an area in which you consider yourself highly skilled or knowledgable, you'd probably get a second expert opinion. If I thought my mechanic was leading me astray, I'd see another mechanic. We live in a society where skills and knowledge are highly specialised. It would be nigh on impossible for someone to be highly skilled/knowledgable in IT, medicine, history, mathematics, psychology, construction, engineering, mechanics, plumbing..... Even within those categories there are further specialisations. You wouldn't expect someone to be in charge on engineering a bridge or a high rise if they's looked up a bit of stuff on the net. Nor would you have brain surgery performed by someone who had a read abit about it once or twice.
Expertise is needed for a whole range of things, and yet somehow it is considered elitist to defer to expertise. That is why the climate debate is so frakked. If climate experts are saying there is manmade climate change happening, then why should be believe the journalists and largely non scientifically trained commentators who are screaming dissent? You'd have to prove that there was a world wide conspiracy amongst the scientific community to fake data and for what purpose?
What you don't need to be a scientist to work out is that we are shitting up our backyards. Have you ever been somewhere in the world that is truly pristine and beuatiful and then gone back 15 years later and found it polluted, exploited, rubbished? I have. It happens here all the time. Heartbreaking, unless of course someone campaigns to preserve beauty and wilderness, habitat destruction, saving animals from extinction, overfishing, over exploitation of resources, it will continue to happen. And all the way you have to fight the interests of business, corporations, capitalism, call it what you will, who turns a blind eye to destruction and exploitation because there is a shit load of money still waiting to be made.
And in summary, I give you one of my favourite places in the world that I have just visited (and is protected)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Tasmania, that would be amazing. Of course, to an American, Australia itself seems remote and exotic.
Quote:
Expertise is needed for a whole range of things, and yet somehow it is considered elitist to defer to expertise.
Sure, I'll agree expertise is important, but there's different ways people wear it, and some ways they wear it are more objectionable than others. Rather like how you feel DT who is not an expert wears what he thinks, some experts seem to think it's enough just to BE an expert. No elaboration, no justification, just "I'm an expert."
I have no problem talking to someone who wants to treat me like a human being, and provides backup information/data and their logic for why they've reached their conclusions. I'm even likely to listen. I don't listen if being an expert is all someone has to contribute. What a person has to say is as important as how they got that information.
And if some experts I talk to seem to be incompetent, like the heart doctors I saw who couldn't figure out I had precordial catch syndrome (especially when a previous doctor suggested it as a possibility), then I can't be expected to respect them.
Quote:
What you don't need to be a scientist to work out is that we are shitting up our backyards.
Agree.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Frem's right, this shouldn't be so difficult.
Fracking is crap/luh suh.
DT a chara, I find it tiresome when you always reference the 5th grade education thing, because weren't you homeschooled the rest of the way, got a GED or something similar and then you went to college. So the fifth grade statement isn't accurate and it distracts people, well it distracts me, from your points.
I tend to think that DreamTrove makes sense on this topic and on fracking, though I don't think that its a huge conspiracy to destroy the world. But I do think its a conspiracy to make money no matter what happens. Anyways I understand where he's coming from on this and it makes sense to me as an observer. I have no scientific background except that I like nature and science shows on PBS and the Discovery channel. I like learning about animals and volcanoes and sometimes outer space. I don't know if that's where the average American is with science or if they're all more knowledgable on it than I. I do know though that the only I passed physics in high school was by riding the coattails of my groupmates, I'm pretty good at coattail riding in scholastic situations.
"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
"I know more than you because I have an official looking signed paper in some field."
Maybe PhD programs ain't what they used to be, but people with official looking signed papers tend to know a lot more than the casual bystander to a topic (as long as those papers come from a legitimate institution).
And FWIW it's extremely difficult to have a 'scientific' discussion on this board. First of all, IMO 95% of any topic is learning the language - whether it is specialized terms for specialized information, or mathematical formulas, or both. If you don't speak the same language, it's hard to discuss the topic. The alternative is for the person with the knowledge to literally try and teach all the necessary background - but that isn't going to happen here.
Another problem is that using academic papers as references is something I'm not sure is allowed. I may personally purchase the e-version of a paper, but am I allowed to post it? So what gets referenced are extremely shallow google references, which I think no one should find legitimately convincing. In this instance, the only thing they're good for is to indicate you're not just completely fabricating a line of bullshit.
Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?
Yeah, me neither....
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I think DT gets annoyed with people who seem to be saying that emissions are the ENTIRE problem, while he sees deforestation as the major problem. But what neither of the groups who are accepting of climate change seem to be willing to concede, is that it's ALL PART OF THE PROBLEM.
I swear, it's going to drive me to violence one day, this constant attitude of "There's only ONE solution: MINE!" There ISN'T just one solution. There's lots and lots and lots of solutions, each of them tiny.
People seem to look at the overall problem and either (a) despair and give up, figuring it's too much for them, or (b) focus in on that one thing that they can change in their own lives, and proselytize that this will be the whole solution, and the ONLY workable solution. I've got news for ya, people: Big problems don't have single solutions.
Instead of looking at the problem as a single source and a single solution, let's start looking at the Big Picture a bit more. A problem like climate change isn't a straight-arrow problem, where you can draw an arrow on a straight line from problem to solution. It's more like a grid. Picture a grid, 10 squares by 10:
Each of those squares holds a tiny piece of the puzzle, one piece of the solution to the problem. Each of them, in essence, holds one percent of the answer.
Of course, really big problems exist in more than two dimensions, and are more complex than a simple grid. Picture a matrix, 10 x 10 x 10 - the grid above, but 10 squares deep as well. Now each cell represents 0.1% of the answer.
You can't do a thousand things to solve climate change all by yourself. But we can each do several things every day, and be a tiny part of a larger solution.
Do we have to ban cars outright? No. Do we have to ban logging overnight? Of course not. We have to start cutting back; we have to start weaning ourselves off these things. And as we do more of them, we find there is actually less to do. That grid that started off at 10x10 becomes, in the second level, 9x9, then 8x8, and so on, until we work our way down to the final piece. In three dimensions, it would look like a four-sided arrowhead pointing to the answer, a "targeted matrix" if you will.
Of course, this matrix is purely imaginary, a thought exercise to help get your head around the idea of what solution systems would look like, and it would really exist in four dimensions, not three, since time is always a factor.
But we can do this. Things that seemed odd to me all those years ago when I started doing them are now completely normal, and forces of habit. That makes it easier to keep doing more and more things that will reduce my carbon footprint, because I can keep doing what I've been doing, out of habit, and I can concentrate my energy on adding new things to my old habits. And so can you.
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I usually go and look for the abstract, which is free, and if well written has sometimes been in the past good enough to work for whatever point I'm arguing.
Quote:
but people with official looking signed papers tend to know a lot more than the casual bystander to a topic
Not necessarily. This is where you get into some of the problems in the academic system. Sometimes you get someone who sounds like they know what they're doing, but then they really don't. Often times peer review exposes them as fraudulent, but there still seems to be idiots that think those papers give their voice more weight than any brains they might have.
That's why it's important, even when listening to some experts, to have your incompetence and nonsense detectors out until you know for certain the person in question actually does know what they're talking about.
I was pretty happy when Mal4Prez said angle of sunlight is probably the big contributor to air temperature, since we agree. But yeah, you could get a second opinion and so on if you felt it was warranted.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME