The first few points strike me as fatalistic. You say "It seems smarter to me to put our money into emergency preparedness." But your argument seems to be: "It isn't certain that the catastrophe is going to happen, so let's not plan for it." In most situations, that sounds irresponsible. In most cases if someone told you that a catastrophe might happen, you'd prepare for the catastrophe, right? What is different about this situation? Are you certain the catastrophe won't happen? Why is it "smarter" to assume the catastrophe won't happen? It isn't as if you have any evidence that says it won't happen -- that's not possible. At most, you have the claim that the evidence doesn't prove that it will happen. But my point was we live in a world where there are no certainties. If there is any reason at all to think a catastrophe will happen, we should take that into consideration.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Paul Rumelhart <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:godshatter@yahoo.com">godshatter@yahoo.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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It depends. The cure might just be worse than the disease. Say we
as a country manage to curb our emissions over the next 50 years or
so, but hurt our economy in the process. Well, China and India will
still be belching out CO2 at an alarming rate and the CO2 we've
already put into the atmosphere will mostly still be there. We'll
end up in the same place more or less as if we didn't curb our
emissions, and we'll have a much weaker economy to deal with the
threats as they happen. It seems smarter to me to put our money
into emergency preparedness, really boost that to the next level.
Even if the worst parts of global warming don't happen, we'll still
be prepared for the disasters that will happen anyway.<br>
<br>
Paul<br>
<br>
On 04/06/2011 07:00 AM, Joe Campbell wrote:
<blockquote type="cite">There is a possibility of a catastrophe, right? Don't
you think it would be wise to take that into consideration? I
guess the point of my last post was you don't need to prove that
human beings are the ONLY cause of rises in CO2; and you don't
need to prove that rises in CO2 WILL lead to a catastrophe. It
would be relevant if we had SOME impact and if there was SOME
chance of catastrophe, or if we could substantially lessen the
chance and make the world a better place for our children. I just
don't see why we have to be certain that there is going to be a
catastrophe in order to take action. Very few things in life are
certain. We live by rules of probabilities and those of us who act
responsibly act to ensure there is no catastrophe even if the odds
are low.<br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Paul
Rumelhart <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:godshatter@yahoo.com" target="_blank">godshatter@yahoo.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);padding-left:1ex">
On 04/04/2011 09:15 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);padding-left:1ex">
That 3 & 4 are plants seems debatable. Less replace them
with:<br>
<br>
3'. Mankind has some influence and impact<br>
<br>
4'. We'd be better off with less pollution and fewer CO2
emissions<br>
<br>
Does this make me a skeptic? Fine.<br>
<br>
The issue is what can/do we do?<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I would agree with 3, and most of 4 (I'm ambivalent towards
CO2, until I'm convinced, but fully behind lowering
pollution).<br>
<br>
What can we do is the essence of the problem, and is why I
think global warming has such a foothold. It's easy to blame
the fatcat oil executives smoking their cigars and
orchestrating the demise of civilization for their own twisted
amusement. Or to blame the idiot in the Hummer that
aggressively sped past you.<br>
<br>
If it's just Mother Nature, then what can we do? The only
thing we can really do is keep our heads down, try not to
anger the gods, and prepare ourselves as much as possible for
disaster to strike. And that's the key reason this topic
strikes such a chord with me. If the emphasis were on
preparing for food shortages, evacuations, flooding, etc, I'd
be OK with it. It never hurts to prepare. But that's not
where the emphasis is. It's on carbon credit swap schemes and
other exotic financial systems. Some of them brought to you
by the same people that gave us Enron.<br>
<br>
Based on just that bit of knowledge, I'm skeptical that anyone
other than some grassroots folks that are admirably trying to
save the world from doom (like Ted) is really serious about
this. Where are the warehouses full of grain to hedge against
climate changes that might cause short-term famine? Where are
they building seawalls or dikes in case the water comes up
higher than it ever did before? Where are the nuclear
engineers starting to break ground to build new nuclear
reactors?<br>
<br>
I think our focus is on the wrong thing, and that if it
changed to preparedness instead of emissions reduction, we'd
all be better off. And you'd probably get more people on the
bandwagon to boot.<br>
<font color="#888888">
<br>
Paul<br>
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