LOL, thanks. But yours explains another reason why just counting words is not a good metric. The meaning of your paragraph only becomes clear IN THE LAST PHRASE. Up until then, the reader is wondering, how is any of this connected? Where is this going? What are all the facts? Which are the important ones I need to remember? All of which only becomes apparent in the last phrase. My paragraph is a simple chain, so you don't have to remember too many items as you go along.
Not that I read every article and comment, but I think Slashdot shifted from pro-AGW to anti after the Climategate stuff was released, but also broadly, we had too many people claiming that we had just 4 years to save the planet, and that was a long time ago now.
Disclosure: my own view is that climate change is simply one instance of a class of problems which are global, global in that, they can't be solved by any one government acting alone, so it is these global problems which may necessitate humanity to move to a new set of values which are truly planetary, ie. it is deeply unfair that a kid's chances in life are determined by where they happen to be born, so a kid born in Somalia has a very different life than one born in California, and to really remedy that, we need a united humanity, and so in a sense, global problems like climate change are to be faced not in a technological way, but more essentially in a social and political way, to change people's values, to make people less greedy and more cooperative, and I think that this is why many people are deeply concerned about climate change, because they feel that humanity needs to change its character (changing how we produce energy is just icing on the cake) — however, there is fatal flaw in this, and bear me out, but for succinctness I'm going to say it in an offensive way, namely that, trying to wrap a new morality and ethics inside a science theory, is as bad as creationists trying to refute evolution because they'd rather your little kids grew up believing in their mythic God, in other words, it is a very dumb idea, and apparently, an idea invented by Margaret Thatcher, a very right wing politician who wanted to break the coal miner unions' stranglehold on energy, in around 1985 to 89, and she made a case that coal was very bad, hiding her real reason, her opposition to the miners, and instead gave speeches at the UN about climate change, one of the first politicians to do so, as she wanted to justify going off coal on "scientific" grounds, so she talked about greenhouse gasses and CO2 and man's pollution, and she founded the Hadley Centre and so on... so the moral of the story is, if you really want to transform people's ethics, then talk about the ETHICS themselves, because otherwise, will your ethics become useless if the science ends up changing? or did your ethics actually have their own merit in the first place, regardless of any particular scary problem? that's what the whole environmental movement is going to have to rethink, because as I say, I am in favour of a global united humanity living well in the ecosystems of the world, where every child has a reasonable chance in life, with health and education, but the whole AGW mantra has just blown a huge credibility hole in the project, if one cares to look at it objectively.
Actually I was hoping to be modded Funny, but people posted serious answers. The AC who said that, even if you know the weight, you can still have problems with balance, was interesting, so I learned something anyway:)
Re. "futurists", change does happen but usually in unexpected ways.
Re. "fads", it is a bit like wind farms; lots of enthusiasm and claims of changing the world, but only time will tell whether it works — see "unexpected" above.
You need to take a holistic view, rather than focusing on tiny individual actions. While small things are important, the are often only significant when everyone is doing them, which is why regulation to mandate efficiency is important.
There was a long post/book by a mathematician (excuse I can't remember the ref., but his point was simple) who wrote that, if a lot of people make a small saving, then as a whole, the nation has made a small saving.
For myself, it is only an accident of other life conditions which have meant I can get away with not having a car. But that could easily change. Not everyone can live near where they work, or afford to choose where to live.
I mean, I agree that regulating for efficiency is much better. But in terms of the sorts of scale of use that we're talking about when it comes to nuclear, and how people want electric cars (where's that energy going to come from), I don't see how we'll get there.
Does it explain why energy consumption went down? Less industry perhaps?
I think the main argument about energy is simply, how much is needed? Cutting energy use 10% might not make much difference, to say, whether one can ditch nuclear or coal altogether.
I live in a small house, wear jumpers indoors, don't have a car, rarely fly (once in ten years), always turn the lights off when I leave a room, etc. I doubt I'm making any significant difference to my energy use. Fact is, I use what I need to use. There are no big savings to be made. We forget that we have washing machines and fridges and TVs and computers which previous generations didn't have. We forget that when we turn up to work, we're by law expected to enjoy a comfortable environment, a standard previous generations would have thought extravagant. And whatever you do, don't get sick and need a hospital, just think of the enormous amount of infrastructure you are making use of there. We will always be using a lot of energy. 20% less of a lot is still a lot.
The only way forward really is new cheaper energy sources. We need much much more energy available. And saving is good but that's always been the case that we find some things we can make more efficient. But generally, efficiencies mean people can use more. It is only when you make things much more expensive that you may stop people using energy, but then you are forcing people to be poor.
Sure, but today, or in a million years? Nature gave us that ingenuity, and like any creature, we use what we have. If the human experiment has run its course and we've reached the limit our survival skills, so be it. But if we can survive, invent space travel, mine the asteroid belt for resources, educate every child to great intelligence, and let Earth return back to a big garden, great. If we can't, we can't.
One of the richest farmland valleys in the world gave great wealth to its country and did so for "eons."
Then a change in the weather caused rainfall to drop by 30% and eventually by something around 80% and the farmland wealth 'evaporated.'
This all occurred a couple thousand years or more before Christ, when the inland valley that was originally a terrific growing area suffered a natural change of world weather which dried it up. That was not caused by man-made activity. It can and will happen again. Man has never had enough power to turn the weather "back" to reclaim the inland growing area of Egypt.
Quoting you in full because you were modded "troll".
And reading Gates' piece, he exactly admits this. Wind and solar can't get us there, and the climate changes ANYWAY. So for Gates, the ACTUAL problem, which he says, is very simple: we all need cheap abundant energy.
And that's where environmentalism splits into the two threads: man is a scourge and we need to deindustrialise and stop growth, v. all human beings, wherever they are born, deserve health and prosperity.
When a natural disaster hits a poor country, it doesn't have the resources to cope, and many people die. When a natural disaster hits a wealthy country, people cope far better. For starters, they probably have better building codes. And then, they have better emergency services and so on. That's the kind of help that the poor of the world need against any and all disasters.
And to get that they need development and resources and to get there cheaply and quickly. Ie. better technology.
Of course some new tech brings new evils, but if you think the world is overpopulated, and over consuming, what you gonna do? Tell people to just stop? That only delays the inevitable. And it is inevitable if you don't invent better tech.
Humanity has always been fighting for survival in the environment. We ill go the way of the dinosaurs if we can't invent better tech. Anything else is just delaying the an inevitable collapse.
You mean the creator of OS/2 went back in time and destroyed planet Redmond, causing a split in the timeline, forking Windows development down a new path of teh ultra shiny and full of lens flare? And somewhere, a very old Jobs is walking around in a black robe, whispering to his younger self?
As a non-programmer, who tries a bit of stuff, that's exactly what I find myself wrestling with. It is the formal operational thinking, or more simply, how to organise things. It is not unlike buildings and architecture; you have all these rooms and they all have certain requirements and functions, yet they also have to co-exist and be connected together, in a building which itself has certain requirements and constraints, and so on. And the details can often affect the wider decisions, for example, a building code says you can't put X next to Y, but to move Y you have to rearrange the plan. And that's where experience really matters, where someone knows that for certain kinds of work, there are certain patterns which will tend to work out ok, ie. you can start with that pattern and find that when you arrive at the details, they more or less fall into place. An analogy I'd suggest is that the programming language is like the building materials—steel can do amazing things which you can't do in iron, but sometimes you are looking for pure thermal mass which you get with coarser stuff like concrete—whilst the architecture, the "pattern language" (a book about towns and cities) is the formal operational thinking, organising everything so it works. That's the key big skill, and whether it is programming or buildings or how to do the weekly shop, the ability to organise, is a life skill, and it is basically the same skill regardless of the subject. As one great developmental psychologist said, "organisms organise."
Kinda, it sounds like the "fragility" issue. Exports aren't bad—you get more global diversity if you can exchange globally. We can't all grow coconuts even if coconut oil is really good food. The problem is the "efficiency" idea that each place should only do one thing, and then rely on that alone. That's kinda what people are trying to figure out when they say "local". It isn't about local, it is about more diverse systems. Same for any product. When Zambia decided to rely on copper, well what happens when copper prices plunge. It is just the "too big to fail" problem. Globally, we actually have some help in this in that, if one nation's food supply were to fail, it could buy food from elsewhere, so that is diversity and counters the too big to fail problem. It isn't about being local, it is about diverse systems which can adapt to change. Of course, big chem loves to sell to big customers and do big business with monocultures. But that big top down central planned one big scheme thinking is what has to go. That's what people are kinda trying to say when they say "local". What we need, can still be big, just more diverse, less of the "efficiency" thinking, and more of the diverse, integrating thinking, anti-fragility.
I like that idea and to extend it, differentiated education could also be on-going, and we basically split the work week between continuing study and productive work.
The old model—learn by rote and follow a clock and then do the same task in a factory all day for life—is long gone.
Markets shift and adapt, and people need to be able to develop their abilities in whatever direction suits them, whilst working.
Do you think that a country that thinks it's progressive with it's recent legislation permitting woman to attend sports matches should be allowed to have nuclear capacity... in this day and age?
People might not like your question, but it is easy to forget how much violence and war the West has gone through, until well, building peace wasn't so much a case of "because we're civilised", but rather, "because we're tired and thoroughly abused of our desire for war". It's the futility of war. But one only gets that futility when the wars are un-winnable, or the costs of the win too ironic. As discovered... from experience.
Much of the "developing" world, has yet to make this "exquisite" discovery. So, young men really do dream of being heroes, they really do dream of being victorious, and their wives really do love their men for being heroic.
That's quite possibly the more dangerous cultural stage, than whether they get to watch a sports event. Fear the patriotic fever.
When Greece joined, they claimed to have a 3% or below deficit. It turned out to be more than 15%. Goldman Sachs helped them to cook the books. So there's multiple parties to blame. Greece for weaseling themselves into the eurozone, Brussels for turning a blind eye, and Goldman Sachs for committing large scale fraud. In the end, none of the responsible people will be punished. In the end, taxpayers in Europe, both the Greek and the rest of the Europeans are holding the bag. It is by design.
There's little to be done if a nation of people wind up with a bad government (and bad government departments full of people who screw things up).
Hopefully the future will bring in more "team of teams" connected organisations, so that the people can see the crap that's going on and can have a chance to fix it. Democracy, on its own—elect some people—doesn't protect anyone from those people making royal cockups. People still need to be able to see what is going on and hear the alarm bells when they happen, not 20 years later when the stuff the governments were doing finally has consequences big enough for all to see.
As it is, "the people" only get to find out about the small leak when the ship sinks.
So I think there must be some lessons for the people, in books like General McChrystal's Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.
There's often confusion between science (testable observations) and science (reasoning, thinking, rationality).
They overlap in a very specific way: reason is the capacity to think about thinking. Ie. I have a thought, "the Gods like me" and then rather that just start behaving like the Gods like me, I actually then have another thought, "wait, how do I know the Gods like me, what am I basing that thought on?"
Most people gain the ability to think about thinking in their early teens. Until then, we just parrot what we're told.
Now, this enquiry, "how do I know if this is really true?" is the basis of science. Science is technically called a "3rd person perspective", ie. it is objective. It comes from like, 13th century or something, where who armies were about to charge each other on the battle field, both of them yelling "GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!!!" and a clever guy standing on a hill watching, said to himself, "well, they can't both be right". He was literally the 3rd person there, as the first two could not stand objectively and see the scene. He realised, they can't both be right, so at least one side is deluding themselves, is mistaken, yet they appear completely convinced. So how do I know if I ma right? I can't just rely on feeling certain of my view. It has to be..... TESTED!
That's science and reason. The ability to know that we can fool ourselves, so we need a way to TEST.
Ironically, climate change is one of those things where they say, oh we can't wait until it is really testable, we have to act, which you know, is a problem. It is such a problem that people resort to calling others immoral denialists, for pointing to it. And ironic that the Pope weighs in on it, too.
But if you read many of those paragraphs in the Pope's thing, you'll see that he is only using it to promote Christian values, like self sacrifice, helping the poor, etc. And he's very against postmodern values, where people try to think about alternatives. It would be nice if he said, please build some nuclear power stations, or improve the efficiency of cars, but no, he's all like, stop being selfish you sinners! Stop being materialistic! Stop being greedy!
And frankly, I'm of the opinion that climate change has been tuned in to a polarised, good guys v bad guys, "science" v "denialists", that it is no wonder that the Pope can come in and say, see I told you, you must respect the ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY OF GOD!
It is just a symptom of ecology having been dumbed down to such an extent that it has become religious an polarised.
The actual calculations and reasoning you have to make just to figure out the carbon footprint of an espresso are complex, full of assumptions, and difficult. Ecology is NOT a simple subject. The climate is NOT a simple subject. Should you build a coal station, to raise living standards faster, improve healthcare, and thus reduce child birth rates, or should you be "sustainable" and limit energy availability, so development takes longer, and people maybe continue with high birth rates for longer? That's just an example.
But no, denialists! And now with the Pope's blessing, evil selfish god-denying denialists!
But back to your point, someone would have to sit down with Hitler, and rationally explain to him Human Rights, and that he has no basis for thinking that his race was superior to other races, or if he does cite evidence, you critically examine it, and even then, ask, so what's the moral reasoning for him thinking that his place is to dominate others rather than help others? Most of this stuff can be reasoned out and doesn't require Gods.
And we actually know form developmental psychology that humans go through several stages of ethical and reasoning ability, so we know that what appears to be completely self evident to Hitler, is not reasonable to other people who have a higher and more reasonable capacity. It goes back to that ability to think about thinking, which is the start of being able to take the perspective of other people, and that's the basi
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, thanks. But yours explains another reason why just counting words is not a good metric. The meaning of your paragraph only becomes clear IN THE LAST PHRASE. Up until then, the reader is wondering, how is any of this connected? Where is this going? What are all the facts? Which are the important ones I need to remember? All of which only becomes apparent in the last phrase.
My paragraph is a simple chain, so you don't have to remember too many items as you go along.
And 49 phrases, which is why it's just about readable.
Not that I read every article and comment, but I think Slashdot shifted from pro-AGW to anti after the Climategate stuff was released, but also broadly, we had too many people claiming that we had just 4 years to save the planet, and that was a long time ago now.
Disclosure: my own view is that climate change is simply one instance of a class of problems which are global, global in that, they can't be solved by any one government acting alone, so it is these global problems which may necessitate humanity to move to a new set of values which are truly planetary, ie. it is deeply unfair that a kid's chances in life are determined by where they happen to be born, so a kid born in Somalia has a very different life than one born in California, and to really remedy that, we need a united humanity, and so in a sense, global problems like climate change are to be faced not in a technological way, but more essentially in a social and political way, to change people's values, to make people less greedy and more cooperative, and I think that this is why many people are deeply concerned about climate change, because they feel that humanity needs to change its character (changing how we produce energy is just icing on the cake) — however, there is fatal flaw in this, and bear me out, but for succinctness I'm going to say it in an offensive way, namely that, trying to wrap a new morality and ethics inside a science theory, is as bad as creationists trying to refute evolution because they'd rather your little kids grew up believing in their mythic God, in other words, it is a very dumb idea, and apparently, an idea invented by Margaret Thatcher, a very right wing politician who wanted to break the coal miner unions' stranglehold on energy, in around 1985 to 89, and she made a case that coal was very bad, hiding her real reason, her opposition to the miners, and instead gave speeches at the UN about climate change, one of the first politicians to do so, as she wanted to justify going off coal on "scientific" grounds, so she talked about greenhouse gasses and CO2 and man's pollution, and she founded the Hadley Centre and so on... so the moral of the story is, if you really want to transform people's ethics, then talk about the ETHICS themselves, because otherwise, will your ethics become useless if the science ends up changing? or did your ethics actually have their own merit in the first place, regardless of any particular scary problem? that's what the whole environmental movement is going to have to rethink, because as I say, I am in favour of a global united humanity living well in the ecosystems of the world, where every child has a reasonable chance in life, with health and education, but the whole AGW mantra has just blown a huge credibility hole in the project, if one cares to look at it objectively.
Actually I was hoping to be modded Funny, but people posted serious answers. The AC who said that, even if you know the weight, you can still have problems with balance, was interesting, so I learned something anyway :)
Just saying.
Re. "futurists", change does happen but usually in unexpected ways.
Re. "fads", it is a bit like wind farms; lots of enthusiasm and claims of changing the world, but only time will tell whether it works — see "unexpected" above.
You need to take a holistic view, rather than focusing on tiny individual actions. While small things are important, the are often only significant when everyone is doing them, which is why regulation to mandate efficiency is important.
There was a long post/book by a mathematician (excuse I can't remember the ref., but his point was simple) who wrote that, if a lot of people make a small saving, then as a whole, the nation has made a small saving.
For myself, it is only an accident of other life conditions which have meant I can get away with not having a car. But that could easily change. Not everyone can live near where they work, or afford to choose where to live.
I mean, I agree that regulating for efficiency is much better. But in terms of the sorts of scale of use that we're talking about when it comes to nuclear, and how people want electric cars (where's that energy going to come from), I don't see how we'll get there.
Does it explain why energy consumption went down? Less industry perhaps?
I think the main argument about energy is simply, how much is needed? Cutting energy use 10% might not make much difference, to say, whether one can ditch nuclear or coal altogether.
I live in a small house, wear jumpers indoors, don't have a car, rarely fly (once in ten years), always turn the lights off when I leave a room, etc. I doubt I'm making any significant difference to my energy use. Fact is, I use what I need to use. There are no big savings to be made. We forget that we have washing machines and fridges and TVs and computers which previous generations didn't have. We forget that when we turn up to work, we're by law expected to enjoy a comfortable environment, a standard previous generations would have thought extravagant. And whatever you do, don't get sick and need a hospital, just think of the enormous amount of infrastructure you are making use of there. We will always be using a lot of energy. 20% less of a lot is still a lot.
The only way forward really is new cheaper energy sources. We need much much more energy available. And saving is good but that's always been the case that we find some things we can make more efficient. But generally, efficiencies mean people can use more. It is only when you make things much more expensive that you may stop people using energy, but then you are forcing people to be poor.
Sure, but today, or in a million years? Nature gave us that ingenuity, and like any creature, we use what we have. If the human experiment has run its course and we've reached the limit our survival skills, so be it. But if we can survive, invent space travel, mine the asteroid belt for resources, educate every child to great intelligence, and let Earth return back to a big garden, great. If we can't, we can't.
One of the richest farmland valleys in the world gave great wealth to its country and did so for "eons."
Then a change in the weather caused rainfall to drop by 30% and eventually by something around 80% and the farmland wealth 'evaporated.'
This all occurred a couple thousand years or more before Christ, when the inland valley that was originally a terrific growing area suffered a natural change of world weather which dried it up. That was not caused by man-made activity. It can and will happen again. Man has never had enough power to turn the weather "back" to reclaim the inland growing area of Egypt.
Quoting you in full because you were modded "troll".
And reading Gates' piece, he exactly admits this. Wind and solar can't get us there, and the climate changes ANYWAY. So for Gates, the ACTUAL problem, which he says, is very simple: we all need cheap abundant energy.
And that's where environmentalism splits into the two threads: man is a scourge and we need to deindustrialise and stop growth, v. all human beings, wherever they are born, deserve health and prosperity.
When a natural disaster hits a poor country, it doesn't have the resources to cope, and many people die. When a natural disaster hits a wealthy country, people cope far better. For starters, they probably have better building codes. And then, they have better emergency services and so on. That's the kind of help that the poor of the world need against any and all disasters.
And to get that they need development and resources and to get there cheaply and quickly. Ie. better technology.
Of course some new tech brings new evils, but if you think the world is overpopulated, and over consuming, what you gonna do? Tell people to just stop? That only delays the inevitable. And it is inevitable if you don't invent better tech.
Humanity has always been fighting for survival in the environment. We ill go the way of the dinosaurs if we can't invent better tech. Anything else is just delaying the an inevitable collapse.
You mean the creator of OS/2 went back in time and destroyed planet Redmond, causing a split in the timeline, forking Windows development down a new path of teh ultra shiny and full of lens flare? And somewhere, a very old Jobs is walking around in a black robe, whispering to his younger self?
As a non-programmer, who tries a bit of stuff, that's exactly what I find myself wrestling with. It is the formal operational thinking, or more simply, how to organise things. It is not unlike buildings and architecture; you have all these rooms and they all have certain requirements and functions, yet they also have to co-exist and be connected together, in a building which itself has certain requirements and constraints, and so on. And the details can often affect the wider decisions, for example, a building code says you can't put X next to Y, but to move Y you have to rearrange the plan. And that's where experience really matters, where someone knows that for certain kinds of work, there are certain patterns which will tend to work out ok, ie. you can start with that pattern and find that when you arrive at the details, they more or less fall into place. An analogy I'd suggest is that the programming language is like the building materials—steel can do amazing things which you can't do in iron, but sometimes you are looking for pure thermal mass which you get with coarser stuff like concrete—whilst the architecture, the "pattern language" (a book about towns and cities) is the formal operational thinking, organising everything so it works. That's the key big skill, and whether it is programming or buildings or how to do the weekly shop, the ability to organise, is a life skill, and it is basically the same skill regardless of the subject. As one great developmental psychologist said, "organisms organise."
Chaos theory and nonlinear systems should be mandatory in high school, together with statistics. Seriously.
Agree. And you can see how AGW was specifically framed to step around them. For example:
"weather involves chaos but climate is the long term average within boundaries... "
"uncertainty can't be an excuse to do nothing..."
Kinda, it sounds like the "fragility" issue. Exports aren't bad—you get more global diversity if you can exchange globally. We can't all grow coconuts even if coconut oil is really good food. The problem is the "efficiency" idea that each place should only do one thing, and then rely on that alone. That's kinda what people are trying to figure out when they say "local". It isn't about local, it is about more diverse systems. Same for any product. When Zambia decided to rely on copper, well what happens when copper prices plunge. It is just the "too big to fail" problem. Globally, we actually have some help in this in that, if one nation's food supply were to fail, it could buy food from elsewhere, so that is diversity and counters the too big to fail problem. It isn't about being local, it is about diverse systems which can adapt to change. Of course, big chem loves to sell to big customers and do big business with monocultures. But that big top down central planned one big scheme thinking is what has to go. That's what people are kinda trying to say when they say "local". What we need, can still be big, just more diverse, less of the "efficiency" thinking, and more of the diverse, integrating thinking, anti-fragility.
I like that idea and to extend it, differentiated education could also be on-going, and we basically split the work week between continuing study and productive work.
The old model—learn by rote and follow a clock and then do the same task in a factory all day for life—is long gone.
Markets shift and adapt, and people need to be able to develop their abilities in whatever direction suits them, whilst working.
Tler!
('Allo 'Allo ref)
Do you think that a country that thinks it's progressive with it's recent legislation permitting woman to attend sports matches should be allowed to have nuclear capacity... in this day and age?
People might not like your question, but it is easy to forget how much violence and war the West has gone through, until well, building peace wasn't so much a case of "because we're civilised", but rather, "because we're tired and thoroughly abused of our desire for war". It's the futility of war. But one only gets that futility when the wars are un-winnable, or the costs of the win too ironic. As discovered... from experience.
Much of the "developing" world, has yet to make this "exquisite" discovery. So, young men really do dream of being heroes, they really do dream of being victorious, and their wives really do love their men for being heroic.
That's quite possibly the more dangerous cultural stage, than whether they get to watch a sports event. Fear the patriotic fever.
If you think a left turn causes carnage, just imagine what driving on the wrong side of the read altogether does.
Question, why did France and Germany want Greece in? (I don't know the answer).
When Greece joined, they claimed to have a 3% or below deficit. It turned out to be more than 15%. Goldman Sachs helped them to cook the books. So there's multiple parties to blame. Greece for weaseling themselves into the eurozone, Brussels for turning a blind eye, and Goldman Sachs for committing large scale fraud. In the end, none of the responsible people will be punished. In the end, taxpayers in Europe, both the Greek and the rest of the Europeans are holding the bag. It is by design.
There's little to be done if a nation of people wind up with a bad government (and bad government departments full of people who screw things up).
Hopefully the future will bring in more "team of teams" connected organisations, so that the people can see the crap that's going on and can have a chance to fix it.
Democracy, on its own—elect some people—doesn't protect anyone from those people making royal cockups. People still need to be able to see what is going on and hear the alarm bells when they happen, not 20 years later when the stuff the governments were doing finally has consequences big enough for all to see.
As it is, "the people" only get to find out about the small leak when the ship sinks.
So I think there must be some lessons for the people, in books like General McChrystal's Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.
Germany was an old land too, but if crazies get power, they can run it in a bad direction. Same goes for anywhere.
Thats quite a feat, subtracting 2005 from 2015 and getting 8. Hope you don't do IT for a living.
It's an off-by-one error.
There's often confusion between science (testable observations) and science (reasoning, thinking, rationality).
They overlap in a very specific way: reason is the capacity to think about thinking. Ie. I have a thought, "the Gods like me" and then rather that just start behaving like the Gods like me, I actually then have another thought, "wait, how do I know the Gods like me, what am I basing that thought on?"
Most people gain the ability to think about thinking in their early teens. Until then, we just parrot what we're told.
Now, this enquiry, "how do I know if this is really true?" is the basis of science. Science is technically called a "3rd person perspective", ie. it is objective. It comes from like, 13th century or something, where who armies were about to charge each other on the battle field, both of them yelling "GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!!!" and a clever guy standing on a hill watching, said to himself, "well, they can't both be right". He was literally the 3rd person there, as the first two could not stand objectively and see the scene. He realised, they can't both be right, so at least one side is deluding themselves, is mistaken, yet they appear completely convinced. So how do I know if I ma right? I can't just rely on feeling certain of my view. It has to be..... TESTED!
That's science and reason. The ability to know that we can fool ourselves, so we need a way to TEST.
Ironically, climate change is one of those things where they say, oh we can't wait until it is really testable, we have to act, which you know, is a problem. It is such a problem that people resort to calling others immoral denialists, for pointing to it. And ironic that the Pope weighs in on it, too.
But if you read many of those paragraphs in the Pope's thing, you'll see that he is only using it to promote Christian values, like self sacrifice, helping the poor, etc. And he's very against postmodern values, where people try to think about alternatives. It would be nice if he said, please build some nuclear power stations, or improve the efficiency of cars, but no, he's all like, stop being selfish you sinners! Stop being materialistic! Stop being greedy!
And frankly, I'm of the opinion that climate change has been tuned in to a polarised, good guys v bad guys, "science" v "denialists", that it is no wonder that the Pope can come in and say, see I told you, you must respect the ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY OF GOD!
It is just a symptom of ecology having been dumbed down to such an extent that it has become religious an polarised.
The actual calculations and reasoning you have to make just to figure out the carbon footprint of an espresso are complex, full of assumptions, and difficult. Ecology is NOT a simple subject. The climate is NOT a simple subject. Should you build a coal station, to raise living standards faster, improve healthcare, and thus reduce child birth rates, or should you be "sustainable" and limit energy availability, so development takes longer, and people maybe continue with high birth rates for longer? That's just an example.
But no, denialists! And now with the Pope's blessing, evil selfish god-denying denialists!
But back to your point, someone would have to sit down with Hitler, and rationally explain to him Human Rights, and that he has no basis for thinking that his race was superior to other races, or if he does cite evidence, you critically examine it, and even then, ask, so what's the moral reasoning for him thinking that his place is to dominate others rather than help others? Most of this stuff can be reasoned out and doesn't require Gods.
And we actually know form developmental psychology that humans go through several stages of ethical and reasoning ability, so we know that what appears to be completely self evident to Hitler, is not reasonable to other people who have a higher and more reasonable capacity. It goes back to that ability to think about thinking, which is the start of being able to take the perspective of other people, and that's the basi
May as well, because those fraud prevention calls can become quite frequent.
Then admit it is a guesstimate and nothing more.