Can't we all.. get alone?

Apparently most people are not, once they learn that doing anything about it might increase their energy bill by 20%.

In 200 years, when anyone thinks of the United States, they will think of it as one of those countries that bankrupted themselves and then dried up and blew away.

 

Pass around the pipe... peace pipe that is.

 

RS, have you seen the negative costs described here?

Sustainability & Resource Productivity | Latest thinking | Greenhouse gas abatement cost curves | McKinsey & Company

I would be the first to agree that their methodology is, um, non-transparent. But increased efficiency in many cases does appear to be win-winnish according to many sources.

Lets have solar-grown in Spidey's peacepipe! That 'indoor' stuff looks pretty carbon-expensive (previous PC threads); perhaps at par with (legal) convenience foods.

 

I just happen to have Marvin Gaye's song on that subject stuck in my head, for about the last 12 hours. Not bad. Now maybe someone else will

Ok, close: it's "everybody want to live together".

 

Because at the end of day, all the objective scientific facts must be rolled into a subjective action plan with profound impact, e.g, if we were to do Al Gore's action plan, picking winners and losers.

 

If even that were the case...

 

Nice thought, cyclopathic.

Another nice thought.

But then...we can't even agree that reality exists, let alone what it looks like and where we fit into the picture.

 

Because the "correct answer" isn't obvious.If it was obvious that we would lose Miami,NOLA, NYNY and many other coastal cities-we would act.
We also ape the behavior of our pols and TV commentators.The right is vicious and the left is an arrogant bunch of know it alls preaching down to the little guys while pretending to be "for us.".
And many left wingers have been sooooo pompous for soooo long that when they adopted GW it became poisonous for right wingers.
Gore is a pompous whatever whose family fortune was built on " agriculture" in the pre war south, so why believe him? It is easy to suggest he might be in it for the $$$ (probably not true, but certainly plausible)
It just isn't obvious enough-and we hate/mistrust the other side.
Once the left adopted it- it became poison.
We just act like the folks we see on TV.
Charlie

 

I see your point, OP. Thanks phoebeisis, for demonstrating the OP's point with that hilarious parody.

 

Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor - Lesswrongwiki

 

Actually it seems to me that we get along pretty well in this chat. If you look at the public comments left at news media sites following political (or even politcally charged issues such as human effects on climate) stories, you will really see the fur fly.

We won't solve these issues here, not even probably change too many points of view. But it can't hurt too much to talk about what we find to be probably correct. And importantly, what sources of information led us to those conclusions.

 

I've known many graduate students, US, Chinese and 'other'. First as among them, then from the perspective of post doc or prof. I see support for the central theme of Sherman (just above), which has of course been extolled by many other authors.

It really seems to matter what people learn first. Consistent with later knowledge or not, that first stuff is really sticky. The second issue is once somebody has gone to the trouble of creating an hypothesis, they often tend to look for support rather than for confirmation/refutation (as equally satisfactory outcomes). This is more than just adopting an hypothesis from someone admired. It is your own baby, and it cannot possibly be ugly.

One way to try to cure this is by example. We are very often doing experiments that have not ever been done before. I am always quick to predict outcomes, and to say why I think so. And if things turn out differently, I say, look at that - I was wrong - now we need to find out out what's really going on here.

Not wrong all that often though

But the point I'm trying to make is that science is not a confident walk directly towards an anticipated goal. Neither is it a drunkard's random walk with eyes closed, maybe bumping into the right answer. It is in between, with lots of small steps this way or that. Once in a while, there is a much larger leap which resolves several earlier unresolved questions into a nice self-consistent package. This could be one definition of theories.

A big part of science training is finding the right balance. Between defending your own ideas, and being on the lookout for different ideas that make your baby look downright ugly. If you think it would be easy to train that, you ought to give it a try.

Lawyers, I should think, would not be learning that at all. It would only distract from the primary goal, which is to win. In science the goal is to be right, somehow or other, sooner or later.

 

Well said DAS.

"

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The word ingrained comes to mind.

 

is the goal to be right, or is the goal to discover the correct answer?

 

^ good point bisco.

 

Drive a prius to save money not the world! God has the plan when science thinks its figured it out it will be in to late!

 

But we would lose NOLA anyway, even in the absence of AGW. Its local environmental insults are moving faster than the global issues.