eco-optimism

[Ian Murray]

> In a Usenet "debate" a few years ago about global warming, I
> thought I'd do as I have often done with other issues: look
> up a few web pages with the science on them and blow my
> right-wing opponents out of the water.  To my surprise I
> discovered that there was no science in the sense of conclusions
> derived from phenomena -- only simulations and hypotheses.
> But science is about conclusions derived from phenomena;
> simulations are about theories, and are of not more than
> entertainment (or pomo lit-crit) interest unless they match
> up to phenomena.  I thought this was remarkable.
=======
Simulating causal dynamics in non-equilibrium systems are gonna be
infuriatingly tricky if you can't 'close' the system--give it an end
point. The atmosphere is, for all intents and purposes, a temporally
open ended system; halting problems in simulating the dynamics of it's
chemical-thermal dynamics is like trying to find the 'end' of pi.
Science is really about learning, finality is a lot harder to reach
than we thought; Newtonianism led us astray on regarding the world's
simplicity with regards to modeling/explaining 'efficient cause'.


> It seems that this sort of thing has also occurred with the
> question of population.  Nobody knows how many humans there
> are in the world, but wildly varying figures have been pulled
> out of hats and presented as fact, often with warnings of
> imminent dire consequences which have failed to appear.  The
> fact is, the population of the world could be declining.  No
> one knows.
>
> Again, in the case of resources, the exhaustion of numerous
> critical raw materials and the subsequent crash of Western
> Civ were widely advertised beginning in the 1960s.  Nothing
> like this has occurred.  Rush Limbaugh was derided for
> going on the radio and saying there was more forest cover
> in 1990 than in 1890, but he was correct and his critics
> were not.
=====

But it's not the amount of forest cover per se that counts, but the
patchiness of it's distibution and the nutrient cycling that goes on,
watershed effects, species sheltering on and on and on the list goes.
It's so beautifully complex.


>
> If I were to discuss labor, money, living standards, political
> relations, crime, the "justice" system, war, the interests of
> non-human animals, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation,
> language, the practices of various religions, diet, poverty,
> police brutality, the death penalty, real estate, homelessness
> and so forth, I could get reliable facts supporting a leftist
> position.  But environmentalism, except for its religious
> elements, has apparently been dominated by people who feel it
> is all right to make stuff up and claim that it's factual.
> I believe this practice is going to create enormous difficulty
> for advancing very reasonable concerns about environment in
> the future, and I wonder why it happened.  The first thing
> that comes to mind is that, unlike other leftish concerns,
> environmentalism is cool with upper- and middle-class people,
> so the bourgeois practice of constantly lying about everything
> may have come into play.
========
That's not fair, Gordon. The whole point of science is to make and
correct errors as quickly as possible. To the extent that folks were
passing off conjectures and models of simulable futures as 'facts'
they definitely weren't speaking as scientists but acting out
anxieties based on the limited models they had at the time. The Paul
Erhlich's of the world may be completely wrong, but it does not follow
they were/are deliberately lying, nor all bourgeois liars.

Ian