communication. community. cognition.
I have diagnosed part of my problem.
The QuickRSS plugin I had active on my site was not playing nicely with the built-in RSS fetch in the WordPress 2.8 administration panel.
I deactivated the plugin, and that problem is solved.
However, I still have no access to the visual editor.
I just upgraded to the new version of WordPress, and for now, I recommend you wait.
Something funky is going on in the background, so for the time being I bring you Retro-Occam. Plain vanilla theme, plain vanilla plugins.
{{myquote|Hearts worn on sleeves can’t hide dark secrets.}}
{{myquote|Perpetual pessimism is multiplying by zero; Perpetual optimism is dividing by zero.}}
Some people want to classify me as a “climate-change denier.” Instead, call me what I am, a skeptic of the highest order.
I originally majored in geology because I wanted a broad science background to become a science reporter. My school wouldn’t have any of it, and instead wanted me to narrow down into a little box. I don’t like boxes so much, so I switched majors and went for a journalism major with a political theory minor.
I also don’t like people using bullying tactics in an attempt to make others go along. The scientists I looked up to never bowed to consensus, nor did they attempt to silence others with the billy club of popularity. Believe me, the moment you speak out against such things, people will come out of the woodwork to pick apart everything they can about you personally, because ad hominem is a great way to shut up dissenters without considering the merit of the argument.
[Ad hominem works both ways, by the way – as there are those who try to connect all environmentalists with a hidden agenda of socialism.]
Folks, no matter what they tell you, the science is not settled, and the case is not proven. Science is never, ever settled. And the academically-honest scientists will tell you that they aren’t making a scientific case for radical environmental change, they are asking for you to make an economic one based on Pascal’s Wager.
Pascal’s Wager is a simple one: given the costs for believing in God (the entry fee, so to speak) and the risk/reward for the existence of Heaven/Hell – it makes sense to believe in God. The eternal reward is so great if you’re right, and if you’re not, you didn’t lose very much.
What we’re being offered on the environmental front is a variation on Pascal’s Wager. Worst-case scenarios are being trotted out, and we’re told that we simply “can’t wait” for the science to prove conclusively that we are beyond the point of global extinction. What’s the harm in living a little cleaner and greener, anyway?
Turns out, there can be quite a lot. Cleaner and greener is a great way to go if all things are equal, but they almost never are. Every choice has a consequence, there’s a trade-off and an opportunity cost: what else could we have done with that money? (Conversely, the opportunity cost of doing nothing at all about the environment is the same as Pascal’s Wager; going to Hell.)
Before you bet on the Angels, though, there are some things I’d like you to consider about the data regarding Climate Change.
Are we talking about within a lifetime, or within a nation’s written history? Are we talking about centuries on the average, or millenia? Are we talking geologic time?
Oh my God, glaciers are retreating! (We are coming out of an ice age, you know…)
Oh my God, we could lose the polar ice caps! (Some estimates show that within the last 6-million years, we’ve had polar ice around 20% of that time. So polar ice is the exception, not the rule.)
Oh my God, the coastal cities will drown! (Ever see a map of Pangaea? Coastlines aren’t permanent.)
Oh my God, Earth is getting warmer!
That last one is even subject to some debate. Forty years ago, science was convinced we were heading into irreversible Global Cooling (caused by pollution.) And all of those computer models and projections failed to predict that the Earth would peak in 1998 and has been cooling since.
Of course models can be trusted, to the extent they are programmed correctly. You can make a virtual model of a card game, and use it to predict which strategies work and when to double down. You can make very good assumptions over time about how to maximize your profits at the blackjack table. But what if you were playing blackjack and these starting showing up?
The +4 card forces you to draw an additional four cards, and would almost assuredly force you to go over 21. That’s not fair, though! That’s not a part of the game!
If the card starts showing up in real blackjack games but isn’t accounted for in your model, then who is at fault?
Models are only as good as their inputs. I have no doubt that the scientists working on climate change projections have every good and noble interest at heart, but their models have missed some pretty big influences over the last few years, such as El Ninos, sunspots, and variations of solar radiation. The models have been tweaked and poked, but will only be as useful as they are based in reality.
Fundamentally, it is a given that carbon dioxide levels are the engine for the warming as a greenhouse gas. This ignores other, more potent and influential greenhouse gases – and the pressures they exert.
The genesis for this post came from reading this article in Wired, about the possibility that Earth might be inhabitable for an additional billion years than previously thought.
King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.
The theory here is that atmospheric pressure has always varied on Earth. A theory. Completely unsupported at this point, but the Caltech team is doing the math to see what the consequences might be. And why is he doing that math?
“I am glad that Li and colleagues have raised the issue of how overall variation in atmospheric pressure may have affected past and may affect future climate,” ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University said in an e-mail. “This could be relevant for understanding climate change on the billion-year time scale.”
Despite this potentially important role, atmospheric pressure in the distant past has gone uninvestigated.
“We have a lack of data about the past history of the atmospheric pressure,” said Li.
What is that again? A lack of data? No one has even measured it before, and it’s only now being theorized that it has varied much (or will in the future). Which brings us back to all those climate change models:
And they want us to bet trillions of dollars that could instead be put to use for education, health, disease prevention, innovation, quality of life improvements, preventing hunger, relocation, or any of a laundry list of social goods that we might have instead?
They haven’t even accounted for the pressure. So for now, I refuse to bow to theirs.
I read an interesting post by Terry Heaton, about how broadcasters are complaining that they couldn’t see the disruptions they are now experiencing.
My question is, have they checked their water?
It’s applicable to broadcasters and to automakers, industries that ignored decades of trends and advances that changed their markets under them. Instead of measuring the change to understand it, they measured the change as a means to make excuses. Instead of adapting and innovating, those companies are now scrambling and possibly ceasing to be.
Have you checked your water? Are you measuring the right things? Are you prepared to act on those measurements, even if it means straying from your comfort zone?
