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You can not leave everything up to individualsFrom: Steven
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2008-01-09 23:48:40
Remote IP: 69.208.247.83
Message(I've responded to your attachments in the body of the email)
You can not leave *everything* up to individuals.
Government is necessary to
1. Do tasks that are too large for individuals to do
(make roads, bridges, maintain a police force, etc.)
2. Prevent individuals or larger entities
(i.e. corporations) from taking self-serving profit-motivated
actions that interfere or decrease the quality of life
of other individuals.
There is a big, big difference between having a system
where personal liberty is prized, and one where you just
have total anarchy.
In my personal view, I live on the planet, and it is my home.
Others also live on the planet. If others don't treat it
with respect and take environmental actions, then that can
affect me. If an individual takes an action, then there's
a small positive effect; if a corporation/government takes action, then
there's a much larger effect.
If someone wants to worship a different religion than me, wants
to smoke pot in the privacy of their home, wants to have an abortion,
wants to have a gay marriage, whatever, there is no direct effect
on me in any negative way. If the planet becomes inhabitable due to
mass irresponsible living, then that does. Thus, this falls
into the category of #2 listed above.
Responding to your attachments, BP has supported some
environmental movements as of late--in part due to its
previously tarnished image that it is trying to repair.
Of course, as long as it is actually doing some good now,
that's something.
Why don't you look at actual scientific data about the
environment rather than just hearsay from naysayers?
As I mentioned from a previous post, the dramatic rise
in C02 concentration over the last century is a fact
of scientific measurements, as are the rise in global
temperature. As I did mention in a previous post,
it's possible that there is natural warming due to
coming out of an ice age, but the parallel between
the rise in C02 with temperature increase is striking*
(*see below for data),
and is at the very least:
1. Worth investigating further
2. Worth considering ways to limit the environmental pollution
It's better to ere on the side of caution that to be sorry later.
As to investigating further, this is why mathematical climate
modeling is so important. You can actually participate on
your home computer and run climate models to improve
future forecasts. See www.climateprediction.net
Taken from climateprediction.net:
Climate models predict significant changes to the Earth's climate in the coming century. But there is a huge range in what they predict - how should we deal with this uncertainty? If they are over-estimating the speed and scale of climate change, we may end up panicking unnecessarily and investing huge amounts of money trying to avert a problem which doesn't turn out to be as serious as the models suggested. Alternatively, if the models are under-estimating the change, we will end up doing too little, too late in the mistaken belief that the changes will be manageably small and gradual.
To cope with this problem we need to evaluate our confidence in the predictions from climate models. In other words we need to quantify the uncertainty in these predictions. By participating in the experiment, you can help us to do this in a way that would not otherwise be possible.
*Also, in case you want some data on the CO2 concentration
From climateprediction.net:
The climate of the Earth is constantly changing, in response to changes in the incoming solar radiation, the patterns of the continents, the amount of dust in the atmosphere, the chemical composition of the atmosphere and many other factors.
One of the factors which is thought to affect surface temperatures is the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a ‘greenhouse gas’. This means that it does not reflect much incoming solar radiation, but it does strongly absorb outgoing, long wave, thermal radiation, re-emitting it back towards the surface and warming the atmosphere.
Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have been increasing in the past 200 years or so since the Industrial Revolution began. The source is mainly the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) - for transport, industry, electricity or heat. The rest is due to land use change, such as deforestation. Figure 13 shows the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in the past 1000 years (data have come from ice cores, direct measurements in recent years etc., if you're interested in this, read ‘The two-mile time machine’ by Richard B. Alley) and various estimates of how carbon dioxide concentrations will behave in the next 100 years, depending on how we react to legislation on carbon emissions. The concentrations used in the standard and doubled CO2 experiments of climateprediction.net are marked.
http://www.climateprediction.net
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