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  • From: Marty Kraft <martyk@allspecies.org>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Fw: Re: The Climate Science
  • Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 10:37:49 -0600

It's not about being rational. It's about addiction to economic advantage, comfort, ideology and other mental constructions that we cling to. With drugs and alcohol you have to wait till the person  bottoms out before they change. Unfortunately we're stuck until a significant number of people hit bottom. I hope it's in time. If not consciousness will have to evolve a better model, one that can survive.

Marty Kraft
On Dec 8, 2009, at 9:56 AM, Pego Rice wrote:

It is a bit of an oversimplification, still quite hard to argue with. Theory A)  Quite strong evidence, strong enough that even very conservative scientists are extremely alarmed that this planet may be headed to massive calamity.  A calamity of such magnitude that there is a significant possibility that our species will not be able to survive.
 
Theory B)  It's not our fault so we don't have to do anything.  We are just most likely to survive anything like Kurt Russell escaping New York.  We will find our inner Arnold Schwarzenegger and just sail on.  We will have time. This version I have generally tracked to corporate-funded think tanks (All of whom announce that they don't take corporate money and are TOTALLY UNBIASED.  Further investigation, for me, has always tracked to these tanks being funded by a "independent fund" established by a group of energy corps).  The only group I found was really legit and had something that looked good on paper (A famous and well educated author picked it up and made great noise for years about it being proof that Theory A was false)  When this research group submitted their paper to show that warming was caused by solar cycles, tho, for peer review it was found that a critical passage of calculations had been based on a faulty decimal placement.  Still, it is the pre-peer review version that gets bandied about so often.
 
Every time I've really studied the deniers I have found bias, however it is still that one line of reasoning that stumps me for why people are not far far more serious about the situation and that is that while risking myself, even myself and a few other adults may sometimes find itself a reasonable choice, risking 70%, 90% even all of the human species.  How can that ever be a rational course?
 

Yours, Pego

<<The main problem I have with such debates is that this side (often referred to as "denier") never addresses the "down side".  Sure, it's great if there is no negative effect on civilization (and I hope they're right), but what if there IS?  I think that's the interest of most on this list.  We try to prepare ourselves to survive (climate change, water shortages, bank failures, food insecurity - you fill in the blank).  Heck, I even buy insurance for mundane events like car crashes and house fires.  Surely I'm going to try to moderate the possible effects of The End of Civilization.

There's an article in this week's Time magazine by Bjorn Lomberg (The Skeptical Environmentalist), that attempts to characterize the problem in dollars, and concludes the Copenhagen conference is doomed to failure.  Again, not much help in deciding what to do.

On Dec 6, 2009, at 2:38 PM, Pete Vukovich wrote:

> Today a friend sent me this. Personally I find the issue confusing, I know good objective physicists who have firm beliefs that most of the 'global warming' we've measured isn't due to C02 (they claim the infrared scattering coefficients for C02 in the 15 micron? bands don't give much credence to global warming theories - many believe sun activity is a more likely cause). >>

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