2012 has everything under control.
This.
Seriously, though as far as "climategate" is concerned, the only thing I really 100% agree with is like Zoomie said. Stop calling everything "-gate" and maybe I'll start paying attention to you. Have you noticed that the things given the "-gate" postfix tend to be the stupidest shit ever.
As far as the climate is concerned, from having studied it for several years I am left with a poorer opinion of the science behind the pro-Earth people. The truth is that huge fluctuations in climate have occurred numerous times in the Earth's history at times when no humans were around to either recycle or drive SUVs. The patterns are such chaos and there are so many variables that it's hard to see the individual effects of any one variable in isolation.
The pro-Earth people's argument is that if we don't know what the effects of our actions will be (i.e. if we don't know for sure that greenhouse effects
won't kill us all) then we should slow our roll until we have studied the shit out of it. The problem is it almost doesn't matter how much we study it considering how many variables there are and how impossible it is to know if we fully understand the system. It's like trying to study the butterfly's wing's effects on a storm. To halt all industry until we have solved the problem is unrealistic and counterproductive.
The anti-Earth people on the other hand tend to be dogmatists that try to deny as much of the science that runs against them as they can. They usually have a pretty anti-science bias which truns me off even more than the pro-Earth people. The other thing is that they share a bizarre and fetishistic alliance with corporate America. Corporations are interesting institutions. They are treated on paper and in the court as persons, and yet if we really look at the simplified world they confine themselves to, we can see that their motivations are far from human. The only way a corporation would be concerned for the environment at large is if it was directly impacted or if the lives of its shareholders were at stake. Even then, compromises could probably be made. So the point is that legal fictions aside, the anti-Earth crowd has aligned itself with the interests of entities that are non-human and that therefore don't care about human concerns.
I also find SUVs to be criminally ugly.Ultimately the thing that used to make me the most excited about saving the Earth was the fact that if we made the world too terrible of a place, the deaths of all the whales and white rhinos and Yangtze River dolphins and bees would just be prelude to the death of all of us by snowball earth or an inferno of black daisies.
As you can see I'm a failed God of Daisyworld.But then as I switched from environmental science to evolution, I discovered that this shit doesn't matter. Yeah maybe humans in this form will not survive. Heck, maybe humans in no form will survive. The point, though, is that life will probably survive. That's the only thing I really care about. Matt Groening said it best. Hell is other people. I say let em burn. That's why Krsna's spot on. Bring on 2012.
PS -
that which toes the party line.
This phrase is a huge problem from many. The gods of spelling thank you.
So How About That Climategate? (Read 11359 times)