09-27-2019, 11:47 AM
AGW is not religion. Religion and science operate in different ways, even if someone like the cleric-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) tries to reconcile them (God did it -- but He did it through physical and mathematical laws).
Science can be a good tool for deciding what is moral. It is scientific knowledge that lead is a hazard to mental development and good behavior, so science can get the lead out of paint.
It is not the science behind AGW that creates the judgment on behalf of AGW. People have moral values that say that economic, political, and military chaos resulting from changes in climatic conditions can draw certain conclusions about AGW and the desirability of reducing its bad effects. Or -- science cannot show that driving Jews into a gas chamber to be exposed to the fumes of hydrogen cyanide is wrong. Science can tell us what fumes of hydrogen cyanide do to people, and it is up to us to determine that exposing innocent people to the fumes of hydrogen is wrong because... well, murder is objectionable in the extreme.
The models overwhelmingly go one way. The risk of climate change inundating lowlands and shifting places out of cultivation is simply too high for my taste. I do not want any martial apocalypse, especially one in which hundreds of millions stand to be killed. If we choose to cause millions of Bangladeshis to die because we are unwilling to reduce our use of fossil fuels, then we are little better than those Nazis who drove innocent people into shooting pits and gas chambers.
Science can be a good tool for deciding what is moral. It is scientific knowledge that lead is a hazard to mental development and good behavior, so science can get the lead out of paint.
It is not the science behind AGW that creates the judgment on behalf of AGW. People have moral values that say that economic, political, and military chaos resulting from changes in climatic conditions can draw certain conclusions about AGW and the desirability of reducing its bad effects. Or -- science cannot show that driving Jews into a gas chamber to be exposed to the fumes of hydrogen cyanide is wrong. Science can tell us what fumes of hydrogen cyanide do to people, and it is up to us to determine that exposing innocent people to the fumes of hydrogen is wrong because... well, murder is objectionable in the extreme.
The models overwhelmingly go one way. The risk of climate change inundating lowlands and shifting places out of cultivation is simply too high for my taste. I do not want any martial apocalypse, especially one in which hundreds of millions stand to be killed. If we choose to cause millions of Bangladeshis to die because we are unwilling to reduce our use of fossil fuels, then we are little better than those Nazis who drove innocent people into shooting pits and gas chambers.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
