which is the denialist canard that increasing global concentrations of CO2 will have a net positive impact on plant life
That's true from every observations we've ever made. Show me any point in time with low CO2 and positive plant growth, or high CO2 and negative plant growth (limit yourself to periods of time where plants existed, of course).
The funny part about your defense here (attacking my tabletop experiment by asserting that the tabletop does not necessarily represent the globe), is that the same rationale can be used against tabletop experiments which show CO2 in a bottle absorbing more heat than nitrogen:)
Um. No, it isn't - because nobody is asserting that climate doesn't naturally change. This is simply another strawman.
Sure you are. If you believe that the climate change we've observed over the past 50 years is caused by humans, you're denying that it is a natural change. Now, if you want to be reasonable and say "humans have had an impact for the past 50 years, but are just one factor out of many", maybe we're closer together. Put another way, asserting that observed climate change is at least 50% human induced means you're denying that at least 50% of climate change is natural. If you don't like that percentage, pick a different number and defend it.
But based on the work of Tyndall - which we agree on - we of course expect that adding more CO2 into a system where the amount of CO2 moderates the temperature will lead to an increase in temperature
But we don't agree on the magnitude there, and we cannot blithely assume that natural climate change will stop and all other variables will be held constant so we can isolate the effect of CO2.
You say that the current calculations as to the magnitude of that change is wrong, but you cannot explain why.
Sure I can - they're not falsifiable. Show me any observation that would falsify your calculations, and we're playing the game of science. Put up theoretical calculations on a chalkboard and assume they're true until they're proven false, and you're just being clever by trying to switch out the null hypothesis while nobody is looking.
You're not fighting a competing theory, you're fighting the null hypothesis of natural climate change. While it is clever to try and adjust the null hypothesis to "my climate model", to avoid any strict scrutiny, it doesn't convince.
Put another way, in the absence of a competing model, is there any observation that can falsify the GCM you believe in? If it fails to predict a yearly temperature within 0.1C? 1C? 2C? 10C? Or is the GCM you believe in immune to any observation at all, and fixable at all times by ad hoc special pleadings?
See other reply for the stock debunking of this canard
Sorry, I missed that - you've got a stock reply that refutes the well established scientific phenomenon of increased plant growth with increased CO2? Really?
Tyndall did not make any statement that human CO2 was going to cause a specific amount of warming over a specific time, nor did Tyndall assert that that warming would be catastrophic for humanity or the biosphere.
I'm more than happy to accept Tyndall's findings of spectrums of absorption by gases - asserting that the consequence of that is that we must de-carbonize our energy supply immediately is a whole nother thing entirely.
That being the case, the counterintuitive assertion made by denialists of a specific magnitude (trivial to no effect) will need a very strong, falsifiable hypothesis indeed.
The null hypothesis is that climate changes naturally, as it did for all the years before humanity, or industrialization. No particular falsification is necessary for the null. Further, there is a distinction between asserting that we don't know the specific magnitude, and asserting that the specific magnitude will be trivial or of no effect.
In either case, though, since the difference would only be in magnitude, what would you start off with as your falsifiable hypothesis statement? I'm assuming that if you can construct one for any arbitrary result, you'd use the same formulation for an arbitrary result of significantly less magnitude.
Nobody rational is going to dispute that Tyndall observed an effect that differed between gases. But nobody rational is going to blindly accept that the consequence of that is that the science is settled and the time for action is now. You've got a higher standard to live up to than just an appeal to authority.
I like the climate we have right now, and I have a vested interest in maintaining it.
But the climate we have right now will naturally change no matter what we do. Even if we have a direct and measurable impact, and heck, even if we could focus our impact to whatever intended ends we wanted at a moment's notice, we couldn't come close the the impact necessary to counteract every other natural climate change driver.
Want to convince me we can control the climate? Develop a technology that can dissipate a Cat 4 hurricane in a single day.
Want to make sure you and your descendants survive? Help find the cheapest energy sources available to mankind, and exploit them as efficiently as possible. You can't promise your great-great-grand child that there won't be any hurricanes, or floods, or droughts, or cold snaps or heat waves, but you can give them the resources necessary to survive any of them.
Yes, but it could also be worse, so, it is better to try to keep everything as-is, since we already know that is good enough for us. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't".
I'm not sure if I can buy that one. Before cyanobacteria were able to put enough oxygen into the atmosphere in order to support animal life, that philosophy would've left the world a barren unevolved place. Can we even pretend that we know any of these devils sufficiently?
There is also the part that most likely because of human actions the species go extinct faster than new ones are emerging.
I know there's been a lot of talk about the rate of extinction increasing on the planet due to humanity, but nobody has actually observed it - it's all just theoretical calculations.
If you understood it, you would know that Abraham knew when he was asked to take his son to the alter that his son would live on. He had been told that his son would lead to a large family of descendants to bare Abrahams bloodline for example, can't do that dead.
I understand it completely, you just don't seem to agree with my assessment of it. Look, it's pretty basic - no matter how powerful the space alien, no matter if the space alien helped me conceive my child, no matter if the space alien promises me that my child will live on and bear descendants, when that space alien says "take this knife and slit your child's throat on this slab of rock", I say "no." This is basic morality, inherent in any human being. To suppress that basic morality takes indoctrination by some human sacrifice religion invented by some sociopath, or something broken in the brain.
Sacrificing your own child was no exactly uncommon for people in that area in that period. It was perfectly acceptable to do so.
And by that observation, I righteously condemn those people in that area as immoral. Their acceptance of such an abhorrent practice is a stain on their souls.
At some point, we had to be told not to do it in some way, the story relates that way to us after the fact.
So left to our own devices, humans have no clue that killing one's own child is immoral? What are we, rabbits that just don't know any better and eat our first few litters alive?
I might accept that there are some small fraction of humans that simply have no internal moral compass, and would just as soon kill their own child as comb their hair, but to believe that we needed religion to get rid of human sacrifice (which, started, funnily enough, because of other religion), well, that's just silly.
So I'm guessing you're what, 16.. 17 years old and too stupid to realize your elders are far more experienced in the world than you are, and that there ARE people more intelligent and more enlightened than you.
Bad guess, but that's okay. It's hard to tell someone's age by their prose, and I understand you need to resort to ad hominem in order to defend your point of view.
Put another way, if you found out right now that I'm actually your elder, would you entertain the possibility that I'm more intelligent and enlightened than you?:)
It is a fact that occasionally human sacrifice is a very moral action under the right circumstances.
No, that's an unsupportable assertion. There is no moral version of human sacrifice, much less a moral version of killing your own child with your own hand at the command of some powerful benefactor.
And if said alien was doing so because your kid was carrying a virus that was pretty much set to destroy all human life on the planet... but you're too ignorant to know that... would you still not listen?
Stick to the analogy - said alien was doing so because he wanted to test my absolute loyalty.
If you're not going to stick to the analogy, then it begs the question, why doesn't this all powerful alien just cure the virus that my kid carries, and save humanity without resorting to homicide?
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
Down that path lies madness. While a clever turn of phrase for Roddenberry, you can use that to justify anything at all. There are certain moral absolutes, and killing your own child because you were ordered to by a powerful benefactor is absolutely evil.
I can think of at least 10 different reasons right this instant why it might be best to kill your own child, and most of them revolve around practical matters.
Name one.
The problem you have with understanding 'the voice in your head' is a lack of faith.
I'm not sure if lack of faith is a bad thing, if having it means you can be convinced to kill your own child.
1) if you truly believe petroleum has only biogenic origin, then by releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere, we're simply restoring the natural state of the earth - that CO2 came from those nasty plants and animals that fixed it in solid form, robbing the atmosphere of its rightful share of the gas:)
2) If you think a 7-billion strong industrialized civilization is significant, go google for how much CO2 is respirated by insects on this planet compared to CO2 generated by humanity.
I guess if we could go back and edit it so that part of the lesson that was taught was "Seriously, dude, I know you're loyal to me, but next time, when some all powerful being asks you to kill your son, say 'No'", I'd be willing to hold up Abraham as a role model, but IMHO, he learned the wrong lesson that time. I'm a little more impressed by his negotiation with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, but for me it doesn't quite make up for his willingness to sacrifice his son.
In a lot of ways, the God of the Hebrews was a really different character than the God of the Christians, carrying echos of anthropomorphic emotions and mannerisms from old pagan Norse or Greek gods even as it tried to break new ground by establishing monotheism. Now perhaps a generous interpretation is that this difference in character was simply due to a difference in the understanding of people at any given time, but I find it interesting to think of what we might do if we were constructing monotheism for the first time today - how different would that first Bible be if it was a work of modern, rather than ancient man? Joseph Smith gives us some possible counterfactual, but his reliance on biblical sources probably puts more restraints on his work than it would be if the entire planet had simply been polytheistic all the way up to say, 1900.
Anyway, thank you for the very interesting comments, they've been very thought provoking:)
The kind of loyalty you could only give someone if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were all-powerful, all-seeing, and totally there for you (and all mankind) 100%.
It seems to me that having the power to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're actually talking to an all-powerful, all-seeing, and totally there for you 100% God is a god-like power in itself. So when you talk about how you may have doubted, what you're actually showing there is a lack of hubris - a lack of hubris apparently not shared by Abraham. This makes Abraham a very odd hero - how humble can you be before God when you are so proud that you believe you have an infallible judgement to recognize the One True God?
One other interesting thing about the whole story, is how Isaac never seems to hold all of this against Abraham, or against God.
Of course, as you've mentioned elsewhere, the bible doesn't expand on a lot of things - perhaps Issac *was* angry at his father for the rest of his life, but just never showed it.
In any case, Issac had a pretty dysfunctional family by modern standards - the whole Jacob/Esau thing was the icing on the cake for that one though:)
Maybe the evil alien never should have created beings that were even capable of suffering? Or struggling? But what would life be without that - I think it would eliminate growth, change... reward... I'm not sure I can conceive of that kind of life and still be a person.
Another very insightful observation, to be sure. Put another way, it's possible for God to be all-powerful, and it is possible for God to be all-good, but it is not possible for him to be both in a world which requires suffering, struggling, growth, change and reward:)
That sort of makes the idea of Heaven, and an eternal bliss, scary when you think about it - sure, it might be fun, but you lose your personhood once you're at one with God. It's more comforting to me to think that after my life is over, it's simply over, and that I won't have to suffer through an eternity of no growth, change or reward:)
We tend to think of death (if we think of it), as something to put off for as long as possible...
A sad testament to the insecurities of man, and arguably the idea of an afterlife as proposed by various religions is also an example of this phenomenon.
Extinction of a lot of species, while natural, would, in the long term, be bad for us.
That's an assertion. There's no particular predictive power we have that would allow us to discern whether or not the prevention of an extinction or the allowance of an extinction would be good or bad for us. Our well intentioned actions may actually be preventing the emergence of some incredibly benign and important species - we simply cannot accurately predict the effect of our interventions.
I agree, we cannot simply say "natural" is "good", which is something I think that environmentalist hippies hold as a mistaken trope. Yes, the western tit-mouse is natural. Is it good enough for us to stop development of homes and businesses?
We have an impact on our environment around us, just like every other organism. I can understand reasonable efforts to make that impact as efficient as possible, but the idea that without the albino tiger, or the gray wolf, or the grizzly bear, or the western tit-mouse, or the spotted owl, that somehow we're going to have a bad long term future is pure speculation. The ultimate rationale for the preservation of endangered species is the irrational fear that species are a limited resource, and that we'll somehow run out of them - nothing could be further from the truth, given the phenomenon of natural evolution and the emergence of new species.
Semantics aside of whether or not it's a "simple twiddle" or some more reasoned "tuning", the problem here is that there is no possibility of falsification, and no guarantee that one "tuning" is more appropriate or justified than another.
Unless you state ahead of time what observations will falsify a given model calculation, you're not really doing science, even if you are doing something interesting.
By this reasoning, there is no post hoc explanation that makes God a good person for killing his Son by the demand of Himself.
Good point. God killing Jesus (torturing him no less) shows a distinct amorality of God. It would be like a Southern plantation owner whipping his own Son to death, and then promising all his slaves that he'll never whip them again - hardly a praiseworthy or admirable act.
If you read the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price, then you should also know there is a Joseph Smith Translation to the Bible.
A few more rewrites, and maybe we might have a reasonable version of the bible:) I vote for God telling Abraham he was a fool to be willing to kill his own son, and Abraham apologizing profusely for his blind loyalty. I'd also vote for Jesus not getting angry at money changers, and instead of killing him on a cross, I'd have him go out on a pilgrimage to other lands never to be seen again. I'd probably also have the book of Job be about Satan torturing Job's poor soul while God was out on vacation or something, and then God comes back, has a big fight with Satan, and restores Job, and then God profusely apologies about not paying close enough attention to the mortal world.
Religious doctrines based on ancient hebrew mythology encourage the defense of those doctrines through the defense of the mythology. Defense of mythology is in conflict with modern science.
If the evil space alien was able to prove to you that your child was going to suffer horribly if you didn't let the alien take him, but would have a wonderful and fulfilling life if you did let the alien take him, then what is the moral choice?
Well, assuming the evil alien is all powerful, and could do anything at all, the moral choice would be to demand that the evil alien use his powers to stop the future suffering without resorting to a blade across the throat. We saw Abraham negotiate with God over Sodom and Gomorrah - if it had been my son called to the altar, I would've pulled out the negotiating card immediately.
If someone today hears a voice telling him to murder his son, he can know that it isn't God
Or the corollary, he can't know that it *is* God - which is an even more basic problem with the story. How does Abraham know he's talking to God, rather than some other nearly-all powerful deity that's just messing with him while the real God is out on vacation in some other multiverse?
I can only imagine how relieved Abraham was to find out that the God he worshiped was indeed a merciful and kind God, and did not require that kind of thing at all...
That's an interesting point, and you know what, I might have enjoyed the story more if Abraham had not only been relieved, but if he had been embarrassed about his willingness to murder his child. If God had taught him the lesson "Child Murder Is Bad", and at the same time taught him the lesson "You Shouldn't Be Blindly Loyal To Anyone, Even Me", it could resonate with me. Instead, it reads like "Child Murder Is Not Necessary To Appease Me" and "You Are Noble For Your Blind And Absolute Loyalty To Me".
We don't know either devil - this is the wild world of Future-Earth we're talking about:)
Put another way, we know climate changes. Even if you believe humans have an impact, even if we completely disappeared, climate will still change - so whether or not we're facing "natural" climate change or a combination of "natural + human" climate change, we'll never be able to stop climate change.
Our only choice is to adapt, and the best strategy is to put our efforts into the cheapest energy possible, so that the maximum amount of people have enough energy to make whatever adaptations are required.
Take only one aspect: sea level rise. A good majority of the world's population lives on a coastline where 20ft increase of sea level would dramatically change the world's population.
Put some numbers on that - how long would it take to get 20ft increase of sea level at current rates? 100 years? 1000 years? 10000 years? Be honest with yourself.
Second it's one thing that climate change has happened in the past; it's another that we are the cause
In either case, climate changes. We can't stop natural climate change. The only alternative we have is to adapt and survive, and we do that best with cheap energy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true from every observations we've ever made. Show me any point in time with low CO2 and positive plant growth, or high CO2 and negative plant growth (limit yourself to periods of time where plants existed, of course).
The funny part about your defense here (attacking my tabletop experiment by asserting that the tabletop does not necessarily represent the globe), is that the same rationale can be used against tabletop experiments which show CO2 in a bottle absorbing more heat than nitrogen :)
Sure you are. If you believe that the climate change we've observed over the past 50 years is caused by humans, you're denying that it is a natural change. Now, if you want to be reasonable and say "humans have had an impact for the past 50 years, but are just one factor out of many", maybe we're closer together. Put another way, asserting that observed climate change is at least 50% human induced means you're denying that at least 50% of climate change is natural. If you don't like that percentage, pick a different number and defend it.
But we don't agree on the magnitude there, and we cannot blithely assume that natural climate change will stop and all other variables will be held constant so we can isolate the effect of CO2.
Sure I can - they're not falsifiable. Show me any observation that would falsify your calculations, and we're playing the game of science. Put up theoretical calculations on a chalkboard and assume they're true until they're proven false, and you're just being clever by trying to switch out the null hypothesis while nobody is looking.
You're not fighting a competing theory, you're fighting the null hypothesis of natural climate change. While it is clever to try and adjust the null hypothesis to "my climate model", to avoid any strict scrutiny, it doesn't convince.
Put another way, in the absence of a competing model, is there any observation that can falsify the GCM you believe in? If it fails to predict a yearly temperature within 0.1C? 1C? 2C? 10C? Or is the GCM you believe in immune to any observation at all, and fixable at all times by ad hoc special pleadings?
Sorry, I missed that - you've got a stock reply that refutes the well established scientific phenomenon of increased plant growth with increased CO2? Really?
How does that debunking match against science? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/29/plants-gobbling-up-co2-45-more-than-thought/
Tyndall did not make any statement that human CO2 was going to cause a specific amount of warming over a specific time, nor did Tyndall assert that that warming would be catastrophic for humanity or the biosphere.
I'm more than happy to accept Tyndall's findings of spectrums of absorption by gases - asserting that the consequence of that is that we must de-carbonize our energy supply immediately is a whole nother thing entirely.
The null hypothesis is that climate changes naturally, as it did for all the years before humanity, or industrialization. No particular falsification is necessary for the null. Further, there is a distinction between asserting that we don't know the specific magnitude, and asserting that the specific magnitude will be trivial or of no effect.
In either case, though, since the difference would only be in magnitude, what would you start off with as your falsifiable hypothesis statement? I'm assuming that if you can construct one for any arbitrary result, you'd use the same formulation for an arbitrary result of significantly less magnitude.
Nobody rational is going to dispute that Tyndall observed an effect that differed between gases. But nobody rational is going to blindly accept that the consequence of that is that the science is settled and the time for action is now. You've got a higher standard to live up to than just an appeal to authority.
But the climate we have right now will naturally change no matter what we do. Even if we have a direct and measurable impact, and heck, even if we could focus our impact to whatever intended ends we wanted at a moment's notice, we couldn't come close the the impact necessary to counteract every other natural climate change driver.
Want to convince me we can control the climate? Develop a technology that can dissipate a Cat 4 hurricane in a single day.
Want to make sure you and your descendants survive? Help find the cheapest energy sources available to mankind, and exploit them as efficiently as possible. You can't promise your great-great-grand child that there won't be any hurricanes, or floods, or droughts, or cold snaps or heat waves, but you can give them the resources necessary to survive any of them.
Actually, I've had one for two years now, and I expect another to get to that age in about 7 years :)
I'm not sure if I can buy that one. Before cyanobacteria were able to put enough oxygen into the atmosphere in order to support animal life, that philosophy would've left the world a barren unevolved place. Can we even pretend that we know any of these devils sufficiently?
I know there's been a lot of talk about the rate of extinction increasing on the planet due to humanity, but nobody has actually observed it - it's all just theoretical calculations.
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/05/18/18greenwire-scientists-clash-on-claims-over-extinction-ove-96307.html?pagewanted=all
As they say, "where are the bodies?"
So are you now claiming that instead of dead dinosaurs and plants, natural petroleum products are the remains of cyanobacteria?
How old do you think this biogenic petroleum actually is?
I understand it completely, you just don't seem to agree with my assessment of it. Look, it's pretty basic - no matter how powerful the space alien, no matter if the space alien helped me conceive my child, no matter if the space alien promises me that my child will live on and bear descendants, when that space alien says "take this knife and slit your child's throat on this slab of rock", I say "no." This is basic morality, inherent in any human being. To suppress that basic morality takes indoctrination by some human sacrifice religion invented by some sociopath, or something broken in the brain.
And by that observation, I righteously condemn those people in that area as immoral. Their acceptance of such an abhorrent practice is a stain on their souls.
So left to our own devices, humans have no clue that killing one's own child is immoral? What are we, rabbits that just don't know any better and eat our first few litters alive?
I might accept that there are some small fraction of humans that simply have no internal moral compass, and would just as soon kill their own child as comb their hair, but to believe that we needed religion to get rid of human sacrifice (which, started, funnily enough, because of other religion), well, that's just silly.
Bad guess, but that's okay. It's hard to tell someone's age by their prose, and I understand you need to resort to ad hominem in order to defend your point of view.
Put another way, if you found out right now that I'm actually your elder, would you entertain the possibility that I'm more intelligent and enlightened than you? :)
No, that's an unsupportable assertion. There is no moral version of human sacrifice, much less a moral version of killing your own child with your own hand at the command of some powerful benefactor.
BTW, do you have any children?
Stick to the analogy - said alien was doing so because he wanted to test my absolute loyalty.
If you're not going to stick to the analogy, then it begs the question, why doesn't this all powerful alien just cure the virus that my kid carries, and save humanity without resorting to homicide?
Down that path lies madness. While a clever turn of phrase for Roddenberry, you can use that to justify anything at all. There are certain moral absolutes, and killing your own child because you were ordered to by a powerful benefactor is absolutely evil.
Name one.
I'm not sure if lack of faith is a bad thing, if having it means you can be convinced to kill your own child.
Two thoughts:
1) if you truly believe petroleum has only biogenic origin, then by releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere, we're simply restoring the natural state of the earth - that CO2 came from those nasty plants and animals that fixed it in solid form, robbing the atmosphere of its rightful share of the gas :)
2) If you think a 7-billion strong industrialized civilization is significant, go google for how much CO2 is respirated by insects on this planet compared to CO2 generated by humanity.
Perspective is a wonderful thing :)
I guess if we could go back and edit it so that part of the lesson that was taught was "Seriously, dude, I know you're loyal to me, but next time, when some all powerful being asks you to kill your son, say 'No'", I'd be willing to hold up Abraham as a role model, but IMHO, he learned the wrong lesson that time. I'm a little more impressed by his negotiation with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, but for me it doesn't quite make up for his willingness to sacrifice his son.
In a lot of ways, the God of the Hebrews was a really different character than the God of the Christians, carrying echos of anthropomorphic emotions and mannerisms from old pagan Norse or Greek gods even as it tried to break new ground by establishing monotheism. Now perhaps a generous interpretation is that this difference in character was simply due to a difference in the understanding of people at any given time, but I find it interesting to think of what we might do if we were constructing monotheism for the first time today - how different would that first Bible be if it was a work of modern, rather than ancient man? Joseph Smith gives us some possible counterfactual, but his reliance on biblical sources probably puts more restraints on his work than it would be if the entire planet had simply been polytheistic all the way up to say, 1900.
Anyway, thank you for the very interesting comments, they've been very thought provoking :)
It seems to me that having the power to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're actually talking to an all-powerful, all-seeing, and totally there for you 100% God is a god-like power in itself. So when you talk about how you may have doubted, what you're actually showing there is a lack of hubris - a lack of hubris apparently not shared by Abraham. This makes Abraham a very odd hero - how humble can you be before God when you are so proud that you believe you have an infallible judgement to recognize the One True God?
Of course, as you've mentioned elsewhere, the bible doesn't expand on a lot of things - perhaps Issac *was* angry at his father for the rest of his life, but just never showed it.
In any case, Issac had a pretty dysfunctional family by modern standards - the whole Jacob/Esau thing was the icing on the cake for that one though :)
Another very insightful observation, to be sure. Put another way, it's possible for God to be all-powerful, and it is possible for God to be all-good, but it is not possible for him to be both in a world which requires suffering, struggling, growth, change and reward :)
That sort of makes the idea of Heaven, and an eternal bliss, scary when you think about it - sure, it might be fun, but you lose your personhood once you're at one with God. It's more comforting to me to think that after my life is over, it's simply over, and that I won't have to suffer through an eternity of no growth, change or reward :)
A sad testament to the insecurities of man, and arguably the idea of an afterlife as proposed by various religions is also an example of this phenomenon.
That's an assertion. There's no particular predictive power we have that would allow us to discern whether or not the prevention of an extinction or the allowance of an extinction would be good or bad for us. Our well intentioned actions may actually be preventing the emergence of some incredibly benign and important species - we simply cannot accurately predict the effect of our interventions.
I agree, we cannot simply say "natural" is "good", which is something I think that environmentalist hippies hold as a mistaken trope. Yes, the western tit-mouse is natural. Is it good enough for us to stop development of homes and businesses?
We have an impact on our environment around us, just like every other organism. I can understand reasonable efforts to make that impact as efficient as possible, but the idea that without the albino tiger, or the gray wolf, or the grizzly bear, or the western tit-mouse, or the spotted owl, that somehow we're going to have a bad long term future is pure speculation. The ultimate rationale for the preservation of endangered species is the irrational fear that species are a limited resource, and that we'll somehow run out of them - nothing could be further from the truth, given the phenomenon of natural evolution and the emergence of new species.
Semantics aside of whether or not it's a "simple twiddle" or some more reasoned "tuning", the problem here is that there is no possibility of falsification, and no guarantee that one "tuning" is more appropriate or justified than another.
Unless you state ahead of time what observations will falsify a given model calculation, you're not really doing science, even if you are doing something interesting.
Good point. God killing Jesus (torturing him no less) shows a distinct amorality of God. It would be like a Southern plantation owner whipping his own Son to death, and then promising all his slaves that he'll never whip them again - hardly a praiseworthy or admirable act.
A few more rewrites, and maybe we might have a reasonable version of the bible :) I vote for God telling Abraham he was a fool to be willing to kill his own son, and Abraham apologizing profusely for his blind loyalty. I'd also vote for Jesus not getting angry at money changers, and instead of killing him on a cross, I'd have him go out on a pilgrimage to other lands never to be seen again. I'd probably also have the book of Job be about Satan torturing Job's poor soul while God was out on vacation or something, and then God comes back, has a big fight with Satan, and restores Job, and then God profusely apologies about not paying close enough attention to the mortal world.
Religious doctrines based on ancient hebrew mythology encourage the defense of those doctrines through the defense of the mythology. Defense of mythology is in conflict with modern science.
Show me where Lot is in any way condemned for his actions. And being tricked by his daughters into having sex with them doesn't count.
Well, assuming the evil alien is all powerful, and could do anything at all, the moral choice would be to demand that the evil alien use his powers to stop the future suffering without resorting to a blade across the throat. We saw Abraham negotiate with God over Sodom and Gomorrah - if it had been my son called to the altar, I would've pulled out the negotiating card immediately.
Or the corollary, he can't know that it *is* God - which is an even more basic problem with the story. How does Abraham know he's talking to God, rather than some other nearly-all powerful deity that's just messing with him while the real God is out on vacation in some other multiverse?
That's an interesting point, and you know what, I might have enjoyed the story more if Abraham had not only been relieved, but if he had been embarrassed about his willingness to murder his child. If God had taught him the lesson "Child Murder Is Bad", and at the same time taught him the lesson "You Shouldn't Be Blindly Loyal To Anyone, Even Me", it could resonate with me. Instead, it reads like "Child Murder Is Not Necessary To Appease Me" and "You Are Noble For Your Blind And Absolute Loyalty To Me".
We don't know either devil - this is the wild world of Future-Earth we're talking about :)
Put another way, we know climate changes. Even if you believe humans have an impact, even if we completely disappeared, climate will still change - so whether or not we're facing "natural" climate change or a combination of "natural + human" climate change, we'll never be able to stop climate change.
Our only choice is to adapt, and the best strategy is to put our efforts into the cheapest energy possible, so that the maximum amount of people have enough energy to make whatever adaptations are required.
Put some numbers on that - how long would it take to get 20ft increase of sea level at current rates? 100 years? 1000 years? 10000 years? Be honest with yourself.
In either case, climate changes. We can't stop natural climate change. The only alternative we have is to adapt and survive, and we do that best with cheap energy.