Fat Comforts Are Being Threatened
“In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice.”
I'm just going to leave this here. There is a recent related thread here about "97%". Several years ago when I personally stumbled upon some shocking scientific facts on my own I happened to be reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I was very concerned that what I was seeing firsthand was the opposite of what the news media was reporting. Trust me. This can be troubling to experience. Late one night during that time I was laying on my living room floor by the fire reading Atlas Shrugged when I came across this quote. I had trouble sleeping that night and the quote has stuck with me since. This is where we are now - no doubt. Frankly, it's a dangerous time. It smacks a little of a new dark age and that's what I've been calling it for a couple years now. When you start hearing calls to jail "climate deniers" you know we're in trouble...that science is in trouble.
I'm just going to leave this here. There is a recent related thread here about "97%". Several years ago when I personally stumbled upon some shocking scientific facts on my own I happened to be reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I was very concerned that what I was seeing firsthand was the opposite of what the news media was reporting. Trust me. This can be troubling to experience. Late one night during that time I was laying on my living room floor by the fire reading Atlas Shrugged when I came across this quote. I had trouble sleeping that night and the quote has stuck with me since. This is where we are now - no doubt. Frankly, it's a dangerous time. It smacks a little of a new dark age and that's what I've been calling it for a couple years now. When you start hearing calls to jail "climate deniers" you know we're in trouble...that science is in trouble.
What I suspect we'll be seeing is more research on making renewable energy affordable, and carbon fuel use more efficient and cleaner. There will probably be renewed interest in space based solar power arrays.
Of course, a retreat from the extremist, hysterical envirowacko path we've started down won't make the left wing happy, but their teeth have been extracted, for the time being. Also, there are over 100 Federal judges to be appointed, and thanks to Harry Reid, they only need a Senate majority for approval. Trump can, in effect, pack the court system with judiciary that recognizes they shouldn't be legislating from the bench, which has been the unconstitutional path used by the left for several decades.
For "the environment" I substitute your local microclimate. We know that planting more trees improves the energy considerations of a city. Copying Portland, Oregon, Ann Arbor put in porous street surfacing that traps rain water in the ground rather than running it off into the rivers and beyond. From there the granularity get finer, down to the individual. Your home is better off for the tree. But it is not an instant solution; it depends on long-range planning, which can be in short supply.
Finally, on a tangent, actually, in the "Legal Tender" discussion, the processes of "bench-made law" came up. It is the Anglo-American system that the legislature passes enabling laws, but that the courts fit the law to the case at hand. In countries following the Napoleonic or Continental or Bologna or "Civil Law" way, the legislature spells out the law in deep detail and the courts just fit the case to the law. Many libertarians prefer bench-made law, but it does open the door to that "judicial activism" that other republicans abhor.
It's unfortunate we even have to say this. To me this is a property issue. The preponderance of the evidence is that human activities are doing things costly to other humans. We don't want to stop activities that are a net gain, that create $10 and destroy $8. But we can't have rationalize and bury our heads in the sand saying, "Maybe all the science is all wrong and it's not harming anyone." The thing is that's right. By it's very nature, science may be wrong. There may be wonderful evidence that we can burn all CxHy in the blink of an eye geologically speaking and have it have no costs for humans now or in the future. It could happen. But we can't bank on wishful thinking. We have to work out the best estimate and charge people for the cost of their actions. I don't even agree with climate change "regulation" that has hard limits. We need taxes, some form of cap and trade, at least until the geoengineering is there. The whole thing is economic. There are 7 billion people wanting to pursue an affluent life by serving one another in fair trades. We need to make them whole when we trash their stuff.
Part of the problem is the enormous energy present in the atmospheric and oceanic environments. A class 5 hurricane, like Camille (1969) was the expression of over 250 megatons of TNT equivalent energy, or five times the biggest hydrogen bomb ever exploded. That gave us a distinct message that it would take more brute force than we could muster to accomplish the study's goal.
We next tried the "Butterfly Effect," approaching the problem from creating a reactive environment that would trigger the desired result. We applied a broad variety of chemical precursors, including a broad variety of carbon fuel combustion polluter/stimulator elements, but even using an unrealistic static atmosphere/ocean model, the results were insignificant, even with millions of tons expended. The conclusion we had to reach, to the disappointment of our commanders, was that the Earth's environment was too robust, even on a local scale to be significantly affected by human action.
The one thing we found that did have a noticeable affect on local microclimate was water vapor. As an example, Phoenix, Arizona has been turned from a dry desert climate to a humid, muggy one, thanks to the mad profusion of constantly watered golf courses in the metropolitan area. Aside from that, nothing much else worked. Solar effects on Earth's geomagnetic field are enormous, and the source of nearly all climate change. Humans have an effect, but it's like mouse fart in a hurricane.
What caused the current mass extinction event? It coincides with the appearance of behaviorally modern humans. This is when humankind quickly spread around the globe and the other similar species of genus Homo disappeared. Maybe some other cause (I fancy the Monolith) caused one of the many species of Homo to take over the earth and caused the current mass extinction. But I think humans caused the mass extinction. When we harnessed the power of chemical bonds and population exploded, changes to the earth accelerate. There's obviously some limit where human activities would affect one another. Even some pre-agricultural peoples knew about concepts of over-hunting an area. To me it's absurd to say human activities could not influence the earth in away that affects other people.
There are inevitably changing climate conditions due to solar influence, regardless of what humans do. Clean air and water are logical, desirable goals, as is improved efficiency in generating and distributing power, but attempting to create mass hysteria over a perceived need to institute radical changes that result in much harm and little benefit isn't a productive path to follow.
Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
Lead author of many IPCC reports
”Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
Sir John Houghton,
First chairman of the IPCC
”It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
Paul Watson,
Co-founder of Greenpeace
I think we could talk about how we should be growing our food inside; greenhouses and hydroponically, without mentioning warming Or cooling or why. Maybe they'd listen.
Seems, believe it or not, that many business are sprouting up in Jersey, nyc and...wait, wait for it...chicago!, that are growing food indoors.
Likely requiring an inexpensive abandoned factory. Growing an organic specialty type of food like tomatoes (high yield) or potatoes, strawberries.
If the blithering idiots would get their heads out of their butts, they could look back in history to find what area's of earth were conducive to growing crops during the last Grand Solar Minimum. We very well might start looking to the desert areas which some now are beginning to green up and use them for the land intensive crops.
Funny thing, it wouldn't take a miracle nor a big government program...just the truth and verbal encouragement.
you can not stop with this quote, for the entirety of Atlas demonstrates that fact. We are in trouble now and can it be saved in my opinion no.
We had a discussion about fossil fuels at work. (One of my colleagues used to own a petroleum drilling supply company. We are all military now.) The point he made is that fossil fuels are easy to transport: can of gasoline; bucket of coal; you can't do that with wind.
On your wider point, though, I am not so pessimistic. In fact, I gave up on the end of the world after Y2K. I expected it ever since I read Anthem and then Atlas Shrugged in 1966. I even had a window sticker for my car: "Barbarians. Mystics. Bread and Circuses. / Save your candles - The Dark Ages are Coming." We passed 1984 and even Halley's Comet. (My grandmother told me that they went to church because they expected the end of the world in 1910. It was perhaps her first mental shift on religion; our family never practiced.) Even in those so-called "Dark Ages" (which only affected a corner of Europe), soap was invented, antimony was isolated as a metal, astronomy advanced beyond the Roman model, slavery was forgotten, and trade continued.
On that last point in particular, a king in England, Offa of Mercia c. 750-800, struck coins in imitation of Islamic dinars because of trade. Some of the largest hoards of silver Islamic dirhens are found in the Baltic and Viking lands, again, because of trade.
What was "dark" about the "Dark Ages" was the lack of local histories by competent writers. What was lost from Rome was the diary, the daily self-reports of people of influence. But it came back, eventually. It is compelling to read about "pioneers" (i.e. peons; paisons; countrymen; farmers) leaving their manor farms to go out and chop down groves to open new lands and found new villages, c. 900 AD. At that same time frame is a perhaps curious report of a "religious community" of men and women in central Germany who founded an astronomical observatory.
You would not want to give up your life now for life then, but it was an advance over Rome. We are too easily dazzled by the marble that hides holes in the common social structure. Like its buildings, the Roman Empire was largely a facade.
Indeed, the transportability of liquid fuels, combined with a solid energy density is their major advantage. Even on another planet, if you want the most energy for mass, or energy for portability, liquid fuels are what you'll be producing. Even if you have a nuclear reactor or a large solar array, using it to produce liquid fuel for an internal combustion engine is much more effective than batteries.
Consider "The Martian" as an example. While I highly recommend the book over the movie (you lose so much context), a more reasonable rover rollout would have not used battery->wheels. The mass of the batteries is much larger than the mass of a martian atmo -> liquid fuel reactor and a lightweight ICE. Even if you used the liquid fuel to power a generator you'd have come out ahead. For terrestrial counterparts look to modern diesel locomotives, in which the diesel motors drive generators to power electrical motors; or the Chevy Volt which has a small motor to generate electricity to drive the wheels.
Despite what loonies want us all to believe, liquid fuel won out because it was more effective.
It seems to me that the climate-alarmists aren't trying to keep comforts of their own, but rather to take ours away.
Throughout history people call for jailing people they disagree with. In modern times it's a few weirdos. There are parts of the world were blasphemy is a serious criminal offense. But in most of the world, it's a joke. "It's _blasphemy _to mix a good single malt with water." The average person today understands the basic concept of science, of creating theories and models based on experimentation.
Consider your example of people who deny the human role in climate change. It's bad they reject the science, but it's amazingly good that they often criticize the science by likening it to a religion. That means, at least in principle, they're saying they accept science. They usually are not making an argument based on counting the number of begats in the Bible or something.
Similarly people who deny the science showing vaccines and GMOs are safe or that ESP and homeopathy are not real at least claim to be looking at the evidence and not forming their opinion and then seeking whatever evidence to support what they wish were true.
The biggest thing is the average person knows value comes from applied science. This is huge b/c value used to come from land. For much of history there wasn't even a concept honest ownership of the means of production. It flowed from divine right. Now the average person understands he could use technology to create value that wasn't there before.
These are actually great times for science, IMHO.
"The average person today understands the basic concept of science, of creating theories and models based on experimentation." Definitely nope. You honestly think the average person understands this?
Also, it does not matter what so-called "average" person believes. They do not make history. And the Flynn Effect says that the "average" IQ is increasing. It just means that more geniuses are being born. There was a time when a genius might be born once in three generations within a tribe of 300. Now the 25% smartest people in China are more people than there are in the USA. Thus, we enjoy an advanced civilization.
Sure, there are people who live for WWE wrestling and do not know the name of Richard Feynman. But those people do not matter. The fact is that we are living in a Renaissance of extraordinary talent.
Much much more by far than other times in human history. It's not even comparable. It's a revolution of increased understanding.
=> "... according to Michigan State University's Jon Miller, Americans are slightly ahead of their European and Japanese colleagues in general scientific knowledge, though everyone has room for improvement.
“A slightly higher proportion of American adults qualify as scientifically literate than European or Japanese adults, but the truth is that no major industrial nation in the world today has a sufficient number of scientifically literate adults,” he said. “We should take no pride in a finding that 70 percent of Americans cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times.”
Approximately 28 percent of American adults currently qualify as scientifically literate, an increase from around 10 percent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to Miller's research. (Science Daily here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases... ) " (from my blog "Education in America: at least two cheers.")
For this question you have to look not at the numbers of religious people but how many of them take the religion literally. I suspect that has been trending downward for a thousand years.
"Approximately 28 percent of American adults currently qualify as scientifically literate"
I wonder how that compares to 100 years ago. Scientific literacy has obviously increased since the Dark Ages, but I suspect it has increased more recently I don't have any data though to back it up.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetec...
You cannot do that with Zeus or the Faiery Queen.
Three of my criminology professors ran a statistical study of The CSI Effect. (Google for "barak shelton kim csi effect".) Prosecutors complained that juries demanded sometimes ridiculous kinds of "physical evidence" because of TV shows like CSI. What the professors found was a general "tech effect" in society. Interestingly, jurors with more education did not demand such evidence, but accepted the prosecutors' claims.
There's lot of negativism and even hopelessness here among people who foresee and even want "the end of the world." But I see things getting generally better for everyone over time. We may yet have transient catastrophes, but the path to the stars is easy to see.
Do criminologists know why this is?