MaxedOutMama
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Ferdinand The Sage...
is located at the Conservative Cat. I have rarely enjoyed a blog post more than this one, discussing strange human superstitions such as that of the concept of a benevolent Mother Nature. Ferdinand is becoming alarmed that the human addiction to this sort of mental nonsense threatens his supply of mozarella cheese, and like any rational feline he protests:
Kender feels we should at least get some entertainment value from the spectacle and helps out by gleefully explicating the cause of the tsunami:
An individual calling himself Jackson4Gore responds to the above post with a simple yet presumably heartfelt:
Yet I can't help but observe that the many pundits trying to link this with climate change and/or the dropping of bombs seem far more emotionally involved with this catastrophe than with the numerically far larger death toll in Darfur over the last few years (estimated at around 300,000). Ferdinand the Conservative Cat would probably find this human oddity quite inexplicable. Now perhaps a tsunami warning system would have cut the number of deaths, and hopefully one will be instituted for the Indian Ocean as a result of this disaster. But we can't change the very nature of our world and its tectonic plates to avert other such events. All we will ever be able to do is mitigate the harm.
In contrast to the Indian Ocean quake, the Darfur catastrophe is almost entirely the result of human actions. Shouldn't we, as a species, concentrate on the things we can control rather than those we can't? I am all in favor of aid, both public and private, to the many nations struck by the tsunami. But let's not lose sight of the fact that most preventable deaths around the world have resulted from human social instability and irrationality, and the world can probably make more of a difference by concentrating its efforts and attention on disease and dysfunctionality.
I get most of my news from NPR, and they have been faithfully covering events in Darfur and the Sudan for years now. Why do such situations get so little media and world attention? Why do issues such as global warming that have so little real effect get so much attention in the press? Why is so much time and money spent on unscientific propaganda and so little time and money spent on education, research, and fixing problems that we know how to fix?
Furthermore, it makes no objective sense to warn of the economic effects of a rise in temperature of one or two degrees, yet ignore the far higher economic costs of disease and poverty. Given that we know (because we have observed it in the recent past) that our climate is highly variable, given that we know that such climate variations will have effects upon the human population whenever they occur, and given that we know we can't control such temperature swings with our current technology and lack of ability to predict such changes or understand the causation of such changes, shouldn't we study the problem of the climate, and proceed to spend the bulk of our money on developing a less poverty-stricken and thus healthier world?
Wouldn't such investments fortify the ability of the third world to survive the possible effect of rising or falling sea-levels? We know our climate has never been static. Scientists tell us that within the last 20,000 years most of those absolutely essential rain-forests in South America were not there - the climate was too dry to support them. We know that within the last 10 thousand years the sea level rose dramatically. We are concentrating upon the very narrow of range of effects that we believe we might be able to control and ignoring the reality that we are not able to control the inherent variability in our climate, which poses the real danger. Our entire civilization has risen in a period of relative climactic stasis, and we know, based on scientific data related to tree rings, ice core testing, ocean sediment testing, pollen testing and the like that this moment of climactic peace is just that in historical time - a moment. Hadn't we better be planning to survive this moment?
The humorous aspect of debates over the possibility of bunker busting bombs causing the Sumatra quake and the tsunamis is that such suspicions are not really irrational for those who follow the news and have no further scientific education. The propositions and logic on which these people's attitudes are based are those that the press and the environmentalists have been promulgating. Admittedly, these attitudes have no scientific basis. "Nature" or the "Environment" never existed in some magical balance until we came along and disrupted it, and minor human actions really don't seem to have affected the climate much at all by historical standards. However, that is not the picture an average person who reads major newspapers and news magazines would develop. So it is truly the larger culture, rather than such individuals, which is imbalanced and irrational.
The idea that nature is delicate has its roots in the book of Genesis, which states that God created Earth according to an intelligent design and threw mankind into it. This belief was confirmed by ecological disasters in places like Australia. It seemed as if nature was too complex for man to understand, and therefore any change could tip the balance and destroy it. This understanding is the entire basis for the Endangered Species Act.As SC&A observes, stupidity reigns about what should be such common scientific concepts, and maybe we should look at the deficits of our social studies programs. It sure sounds to me as if Crystal knew what she was talking about. Given what I'm reading, maybe we'd better get right back to educating students on basics of the scientific method! Mother Nature's reign is quite tyrannical enough, and I don't want to add the burden of stupidity to it.
The idea that we're a giant accident has its roots in the Theory of Evolution and the associated fossil record. Scientists believe that long before man appeared, Earth was subjected to periodic climate changes and natural disasters that changed the mix of species living on the Earth. Each catastrophe killed the species who couldn't adapt, allowing new species to appear. The problem we face now is that we really don't want homo sapiens to be replaced by some new species that might not keep pets or manufacture mozzarella cheese.
Kender feels we should at least get some entertainment value from the spectacle and helps out by gleefully explicating the cause of the tsunami:
It was a test by the extreme right-wing, war mongering, capitalistic christian-created industrial war machine, led by Bush, Cheney and an un-named co-conspiritor possibly running a major American corporation, using a secret, yet banned, space-based weapon of mass destruction, that was secretly funded by food-for-oil profits funneled into daddy Bushs' bank account, that causes earthquakes to make sure it works before they recall all our troops and use it in the middle east and france for good measure.This is a pretty accurate summary of some of the theories I've been reading on Democratic Underground. There is currently quite a war between science, ordered thinking, and wild-eyed conspiracy theorists raging over there. I don't think either the right or the left can lay claim to be the rightful custodian of science and rationality, and I'm glad many posters on DU are fighting against the rising tide of nonsense such as this, which begins with the somewhat mangled question:
Anyone else agree that Global Warming could be attributed to the disasters?Not surprisingly, many do (reverse subject and noun above), and one DU poster responds with a grand mulilateral vision worthy of being fully quoted. I have tested it on several human subjects, and Bro #1ended up hanging on to the table as he laughed his guts out, while my unsuspecting mother came to near disaster in the kitchen as she was felled by hysterics. (This warning forms the basis for my legal disclaimer of all liability for any damages resulting from your continued reading of this post):
Kyoto is not enough - Thank you for your stand, but Bush seems to be intent on denying reality no matter the cost.
The truth is the change is happening faster than our ability to monitor. We have just the barest understanding of the intricate factors that make our habitable environment possible. Even for when it was introduced Kyoto had been watered down and destroyed by the participation of politicians adding job and economic factors into the equation - and for our current situation even its original stipulations are too little too late.(Note the "earth in fragile balance" conception that Ferdinand was explaining above. As the poster seems to understand, Kyoto was going to do almost nothing to change the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and it was going to accomplish almost nothing at a huge cost. The conclusion the poster did not draw was that thus the Kyoto treaty made no sense. Trying to do even more would, at this stage, doom a large part of the human population to death by famine, and so is not an attractive proposition for the great bulk of humanity. It is difficult to explain to some hard-headed people why we should starve a quarter of the world's population in order to fend off casualties from global warming.)
Besides your many examples, we have had tornadoes of fire race across central California. Just this year unexpected windstorms of hurricane force closed Tokyo and Paris. Christmas travelers were trapped in frozen highways all across America.(Yup. I myself take every winter and every snowstorm as a dire warning of global warming. Also windstorms and hurricanes, such as the one considered the worst ever to hit the US - the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. Also brush fires. Summers, now, are clear indications of the ice age, so I spend each year in a wild swing between the terror of opposite disasters. Life on the cutting edge of environmental thought is nothing if not alarming.)
This whole process has in it an event horizon. We don't know where or when it is, and we don't know what's on the other side. We could already have crossed an critical boundary. If not, it will take radical global cooperation to merely slow the deterioration.(Yeeeees? I await your proposal as to how to accomplish this radical global cooperation... Define event horizon, wouldja? Just to make mama happy.)
Who has the power to force such cooperation? Only the office of the President of the United States has enough military and economic power to build a cooperative multinational solution. I do not believe our current president has the interest, will or talent to do what is necessary.Tada!!!!! Why didn't I think of that? We'll just invade the world and make them all stop being bad!!!! That's how to solve these knotty problems! This is clearly deLespinasse-type problem-solving, and I do feel so good about the fact that we have "enough military and economic power" to enforce such a "cooperative multinational solution". Hey, this type of globalism sounds a lot like passages from Mein Kampf, and surprisingly like Bush's plan to fight terrorism! Who'da thunk you could have so much tyrannical fun forcing the world to save itself?
An individual calling himself Jackson4Gore responds to the above post with a simple yet presumably heartfelt:
Yep, you are exactly right!A later poster, apparently struggling to communicate, tries facts:
One of the most powerful earthquakes was the 1811-12 New Madrid quake, long before global warming and even before the area was very heavily populated. Since then, that area has become quite polluted and heavily populated but so far at least, no recurrence. Please explain.Clearly this last poster has been infected with the materialistic Western capitalist anti-environment doctrine of the scientific method, which in part maintains:
The final step of the scientific method is to rigorously test your prediction. Remember, you cannot "prove" your hypothesis. You can only fail to disprove it. While this is an example of how the scientific method is used in everyday research and hypothesis testing, it is also the basis of creating theories and laws.Another person, relying upon drama rather than reason, simply posted a picture of a person in a tinfoil hat. But sometimes pictures aren't worth a thousand words - and it seems scientific method is not even a blip on this DU person's event horizon who replied with:
The scientific method requires a hypothesis to be eliminated if experiments repeatedly contradict predictions. No matter how great a hypothesis sounds, it is only as good as it's ability to consistently predict experimental results. It should also be noted that a theory or hypothesis is not meaningful if it is not quantitative and testable. If a theory does not allow for predictions and experimental research to confirm these predictions, than it is not a scientific theory.
A common error encountered by people who claim to use the scientific method is a lack of testing. A hypothesis brought about by common observations or common sense does not have scientific validity. As stated above, even though a good debater may be quite convincing as he conveys the merits of his theory, logical arguments are not an acceptable replacement for experimental testing.
All of the abuses the planet is taking is taking its toll.Geeze. I hardly know what to say. I like my whiskey neat, my coffee without sugar, my facts factual, and my science to be based on scientific method. I'm beginning to feel a bit like a T. Rex myself - doomed to extinction. But hey, one has to go with what one knows. Like everyone, I have been deeply distressed by the tsunamis and the loss of life they have caused.
You don't have to be a scientist to realize we are killing our own planet. Everything is a factor, global warming, pollution, bunker blasters, nuke testing, all of it. If you stub your toe, do you feel the pain? Everything matters & it affects the planet and its people & wildlife. When the Gulf stream and weather patterns are changing, it takes its toll in all the ways we are witnessing.
Yet I can't help but observe that the many pundits trying to link this with climate change and/or the dropping of bombs seem far more emotionally involved with this catastrophe than with the numerically far larger death toll in Darfur over the last few years (estimated at around 300,000). Ferdinand the Conservative Cat would probably find this human oddity quite inexplicable. Now perhaps a tsunami warning system would have cut the number of deaths, and hopefully one will be instituted for the Indian Ocean as a result of this disaster. But we can't change the very nature of our world and its tectonic plates to avert other such events. All we will ever be able to do is mitigate the harm.
In contrast to the Indian Ocean quake, the Darfur catastrophe is almost entirely the result of human actions. Shouldn't we, as a species, concentrate on the things we can control rather than those we can't? I am all in favor of aid, both public and private, to the many nations struck by the tsunami. But let's not lose sight of the fact that most preventable deaths around the world have resulted from human social instability and irrationality, and the world can probably make more of a difference by concentrating its efforts and attention on disease and dysfunctionality.
I get most of my news from NPR, and they have been faithfully covering events in Darfur and the Sudan for years now. Why do such situations get so little media and world attention? Why do issues such as global warming that have so little real effect get so much attention in the press? Why is so much time and money spent on unscientific propaganda and so little time and money spent on education, research, and fixing problems that we know how to fix?
Furthermore, it makes no objective sense to warn of the economic effects of a rise in temperature of one or two degrees, yet ignore the far higher economic costs of disease and poverty. Given that we know (because we have observed it in the recent past) that our climate is highly variable, given that we know that such climate variations will have effects upon the human population whenever they occur, and given that we know we can't control such temperature swings with our current technology and lack of ability to predict such changes or understand the causation of such changes, shouldn't we study the problem of the climate, and proceed to spend the bulk of our money on developing a less poverty-stricken and thus healthier world?
Wouldn't such investments fortify the ability of the third world to survive the possible effect of rising or falling sea-levels? We know our climate has never been static. Scientists tell us that within the last 20,000 years most of those absolutely essential rain-forests in South America were not there - the climate was too dry to support them. We know that within the last 10 thousand years the sea level rose dramatically. We are concentrating upon the very narrow of range of effects that we believe we might be able to control and ignoring the reality that we are not able to control the inherent variability in our climate, which poses the real danger. Our entire civilization has risen in a period of relative climactic stasis, and we know, based on scientific data related to tree rings, ice core testing, ocean sediment testing, pollen testing and the like that this moment of climactic peace is just that in historical time - a moment. Hadn't we better be planning to survive this moment?
The humorous aspect of debates over the possibility of bunker busting bombs causing the Sumatra quake and the tsunamis is that such suspicions are not really irrational for those who follow the news and have no further scientific education. The propositions and logic on which these people's attitudes are based are those that the press and the environmentalists have been promulgating. Admittedly, these attitudes have no scientific basis. "Nature" or the "Environment" never existed in some magical balance until we came along and disrupted it, and minor human actions really don't seem to have affected the climate much at all by historical standards. However, that is not the picture an average person who reads major newspapers and news magazines would develop. So it is truly the larger culture, rather than such individuals, which is imbalanced and irrational.
Comments:
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Thanks for the compliment. I have started reading DU much more since last night, when some fool went there and invited people to come "take on a midget racist republican". They have some right idjits there. BTW, so far, no takers from DU and my blog sits quiet and steady.
About the bombs causing earthquakes....that sounds like a James Bond film....just can't remember the name.
About the bombs causing earthquakes....that sounds like a James Bond film....just can't remember the name.
Best damned post of the season, period, bar none.
A must read.
Going to refrence this.
SC&A
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A must read.
Going to refrence this.
SC&A
# posted by 
: 10:47 PM
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