what obligation would we have to protect them? Could we improve the 1/3000 success rate? Should we? At what cost? How much of a difference would there be between "not saving" and actually "killing" them? Would "accidental" killings be permissable? I don't think those are easy questions.
Note than in this case, we are right near the edge of the odds that I consider "reasonable". If the butterfly's chances were 1/100, I would definitely object to killing them, particularly intentionally or with willful disregard, as well as call for their active protection. On the other extreme, if the odds were one tens of millions, there is little we should do beyond avoiding deliberate slaughter.
If embryos have rights, I do not feel it matters at all either how the embryo came about nor where it is currently located. Something's rights are dependant on what it is and what it will become, given the opportunity to do so. For any being that due to circumstance has a low probability of becoming intelligent, but as that entity, in the right circumstances, as a high probability, I would still grant the being rights (as well as feel under a moral obligation to help rescue it).
For example, if I found a wounded man in the middle of the desert, I would find the following logic objectionable:
This man is unconcious. Furthermore, his probability of survival, without my aid, is virtually nil. Therefore, he has no rights and I may kill, rape, or rob him as I please.
Instead, I would see a moral obligation to help this person, if there was any way that I could reasonably expect to do so.
This is analogous to an embryo in a jar. It is what it is. However, under current circumstance, it has a low probability of survival (and note that unlike the man in the desert, is assuredly in this situation of no fault of its own). Yet it is clearly possible for this embryo to be rescued, and given a high chance of survival. Therefore we should do so. Better yet, we should not put embryos in such situations in the first place. Fortunately, IVF procedures are getting much better about producing fewer "excess" embryos. With the right technological and political pressure, this can be driven to zero.
First, I would like to point out that you are also "just a lump of living genetic material". I hope you do not feel diminished by that. I still respect your rights either way.
It is obvious that a first-trimester fetus does not feel or think in any meaningful sense. However, it will, in all likelyhood. Is this sufficient basis for rights? If we limit ourselves to "real world" scenarios, the closest analogies would be people who are sleeping, unconcious, and in comas. Do these people have rights? Apparently there is wide agreement that they do. Yet they are not thinking or intelligent in any meaningful sense, especially the latter two groups. Why do these groups have rights? There is one difference, of course, between these groups and fetuses. The unconcious people not only will be intelligent but also have been intelligent. Does this make a difference? Why?
One ethical system I particularly like is to imagine that we all do have souls, and are sitting around in a committee before we are born and our bodies are selected. What rules would we choose, if we had no idea who we were going to be? Would we choose a system of rules that allowed a 25% chance we would be killed before we ever got out of the womb, even if it did make life better for the lucky 75%? I doubt it. One of the problems we face in the "real world", of course, is that it is that winning 75% that are calling the shots. Is this ethical?
You seem to be caught up on "thinking and feeling". Tonight, when you are asleep, I could flood your room with carbon monoxide. You would never feel a thing. Is this OK? If not, why not? As for animals, they indeed "think and feel"; however, they do not do so at a level which I consider worthy of rights. More critically, they never will.
You should not limit yourself to "real world" situations. Hypotheticals can be quite enlightening. With respect to AI, you had better get used to answering these questions. They are coming quickly enough.
You seem to believe that a person is part of this "society", and therefore has rights. Why? Who decides? Who or what gets included? My "talk of rights" means little to a six year old, too. Are they not part of society? What about a two-year-old? An infant?
I agree with you on one point - the boundry line of intelligence is the ability to conciously respect the rights of others. However, it is clear that we repect of the rights of humans (infants, the deranged, the senile) who cannot accomplish this goal. Why?
Your last line is particularly dangerous. At one time, the rights of slaves were not recognized by all societies. The rights of women are still not respected by many. How does that diminish the argument in favor of granting rights by expanding "society" to include such individuals?
The expansion of the concept of "society" has been a long-running trend. History tends not to look favorably upon those who argued for its limitations. Do you think in 500 years, there will be abortions? Neither do I.
I can hypothesize all sorts of beings without a brain or nervous system that I would consider to have rights. An AI, for example.
See my post below about potential. I use a "reasonable doubt" standard, falling somewhere between.1 and 2%. Sperm, skin cells and mud all have the hypothetical potential to be humans - but are extremely unlikely to ever be so.
A dead person has brain structure. So does a cat. So does a late-term fetus. On the other hand, many as-yet-unknown extraterrestrials or AIs may very well not have a "brain structure" but be perfectly intelligent. I hardly see how "brain structure" has any relationship to rights.
Analogously to criminal law, I use a standard which, mathematically, is probably somewhere between 2% and.1%. It does not matter which number you choose within that range, however. Why? Because a sperm has far, far less than a 1/1000 chance. So does an egg or a skin cell. However, a fertilized egg falls well on the other side (about 30% at fertilization, much higher a few days later after implantation). Therefore, where exactly we draw the line is rather irrelevant, as it is clear that before fertilization we are far to one side, and after fertilization we are far to the other.
I would say the same standard applies at the end of life. If Shiavo had a 10% chance of recovering, killing her would have been wrong, don't you agree? But the fact was that her chances of recovering were vanishingly small. That is why pulling the plug was ethical. Now, if a fertilized egg has a 30% chance of surviving, why would we also not grant it rights?
Yes, you can carry the "potential" argument to extemes. One could claim the lint in my belly-button has rights, because there are probably sufficient atoms to spontaneously rearrange into a zygote. But clearly, the probability of this is trivially small. Therefore we can safely discount it.
As a final point, I also believe in granting the benefit of the doubt. This is an important manner with lives literally hanging in the balance. We should error on the side of protecting life.
you are not thinking and feeling, either. In such a case, does that mean I am not taking your freedoms when I put a bullet in your brain?
Potential matters. When you are sleeping or unconcious, you do not have sufficient intellect to earn rights. What gives you rights is the fact that you will wake up and be an intelligent being. When this is not the case (for example, Terry Shiavo), we correctly deem that the hunk of meat that was an intelligent being no longer has rights, and should be cared for as per that person's wishes and contracts.
The "potential matters" principle is the only one that is consistent across a wide-range of situations. Here are some others: Imagine you had a real AI, sufficiently intelligent to deserve rights, living on your cellphone. If the batteries ran out, could you then destroy the phone? Does it make sense to say "I can't destroy the phone when the batteries are charged, but I can when they are empty"? Or how about this. What if humans started their lives as catapillars, then became butterflies, and then, after a second larvae stage became babies. Could we kill the butterflies? What if the situation ran backwards, and it went human-butterly-catapillar, followed by a spore stage that created new humans. Could we then kill the butterflies?
Another problem with your logic is that humans do not become intelligent enough to deserve rights until well after birth, unless you put the bar so low as many animals have rights. So now, you either are stuck with arresting people for manslaughter when they run over a cat and putting Fido on trial for killing a rabbit, or permitting infanticide. Which do you prefer?
They are the roadblock on that one. Yes, it is a reasonable short-term fix, though it is not nearly as cheap as you think, and by the time we get new reactors online it probably won't be the cheapest, either. There is an absurdly-long lead-time before you can construct a new nuclear plant even in the best case.
I don't need to know exactly what technology will develop. I only need to know the trends. Falling wind and solar prices will eventually undercut petro power - probably in about ten to fifteen years. Falling ethanol (see Brazil) and biodiesel prices will do the same for the transportation sector. The pace of adoption for such technologies is growing very quickly and shows no sign of slowing. Why should we spend absurds of money now to implement costly technology now, when in ten to fifteen years we can do the same thing at a profit? There is a huge difference between being an early adopter and buying the $700 DVD player, and being the person who waits a few years and buys it for $20 at Wal-Mart. As much as I am sure you want to solve this problem, paying the big fee to get what we want a few years early simply is not justified by the benefits we would be getting in exchange.
What we need now is a big R&D push to cut the price from $700 to $20. This can be done by 2020. By the way, you should really look at the case history of ethanol in Brazil, which is catching on like wildfire. Decades of government mandates there failed to accomplish this, yet as soon as the market made it beneficial, people started buying the multi-fuel cars like crazy. We cannot solve our CO2 problems with mandates without serious disruptions to the economy. However, we can do it the other way - create the right technology at the right price. People will then solve the problem for free.
agree with? That's exactly what you shouldn't be doing. I have looked at both sets of data carefully. They are both full of uncertainty. The economists, of course, are forced to make uncertain projections based on uncertain scientific data, which is difficult. On the other hand, the conclusions don't vary that widely - doing something about global warming with current technology is at best a wash and probably costs more than it is worth. The obvious solution is to develop the right technology (at the right cost), and then implement it.
People whining about Google's actions with respect to China fail to realize that the alternatives (even more dreadful Chinese filtering, Google being banned entirely, etcc) are worse alternatives for Chinese freedom.
In short, the scientists say "there is a problem". The economists say "the cure is worse than the disease". So both left and right are wrong on global warming, according to the experts.
There are some things that we should do that will mitigate global warming, but we should not do them because they will mitigate global warming. For example, as you noted, we should use nuclear, which by any rationale is safer than burning coal and spewing all sorts of toxic and radioactive goop into the atmosphere. We should also tax the piss out of gasoline for the same reasons. However, if you feel inclined to add an economically-efficient carbon tax on top of that, you will find that it is a drop in the bucket ($10/ton, perhaps, is justified) relative to the pollution taxes. In short, we should quit subsidizing petro (and car transport). These two things will do wonders for our emissions profile as a side benefit.
apocalypse-preaching enviromentalists. The rise has been somewhere between 10 and 25 cm in the last hundred years, and the predictions are 10 to 90 more in the next century (via IPCC).
Annoying? Yes. A problem that is worth spending hundreds of billions per year to only slightly mitigate? Not even close.
We can spend trillions to barely slow global warming, or we can spend a few billions to provide micro-nutrients to poor people around the world, saving millions of lives.
Which do you choose? Don't be immature and ignore trade-offs, please.
I have just bothered to read real analyses of the costs and benefits, and come to the conclusion that we have better investments of trillions of dollars. This should be obvious, really. Start by reading Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions".
For a tiny fraction of the price of putting a dent in global warming, we can save millions from AIDS or malaria. Which is the better choice?
The big temperature increases sometimes found from these models arise from several implausible assumptions, such as huge population and emission growth that will not happen. Worse yet, the models are inherently full of feedback in their mathematical equations, which causes output to be more unstable than one would like. Small changes to initial assumptions or parameters make big differences in predictions. Garbage in, garbage out. The big temperature rises are predicted when the computers get caught in a positive feedback loop that I find implausible, precisely because with billions of years of history we haven't yet triggered such a loop (and been hotter than we are now). Therefore, I find the low ends of their ranges most plausible, the middle slightly plausible, and the high end pure fantasy. In other words, more than a 2C increase is quite unlikely.
hundred yards over the course of a century, then I would say we were doing humanity a favor by weeding these people out. Of course, such ignorance does not exist.
Note that I am talking about 44 and 94 years out. That is a very long time. Poorer countries are going to leap-frog a large number of technologies and will never pollute to the degree that modern industrial countries did.
By 2050, industrialized nations will be emitting little CO2. By 2100, if necessary, we will be pumping it back into the ground. These projections consistently assume that emissions are going to go up, up, and up. They won't.
The only things that are going to go up up up are petro prices. The only "tipping point" we are approaching is the point where renewables become cheaper than dino power.
Yes, the world is going to warm a couple of degrees, and sea levels will rise a few feet. No, this will not be the apocalypse. Simply put, adaption is cheap, while prevention is hideously expensive at the moment. In twenty years, it will not be.
I, along with most of my friends, am in my early thirties. When I look at my friends from undergrad and grad school (mostly scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers - ie, successful by normal standards), there are only a few have children. I can think of five children out of all of that peer group of fifty people or so, none more than two years old.
On the other hand, when I look back to my dirt-poor rural high school, I can think of several people who already have three or four children, some already in their teens! Almost everyone that I have any knowledge of has children.
At least in my personal experience, reality seems much worse than the published data I have seen. Perhaps this phenomena is getting worse, as the studies I saw had ten year old data.
The same stupidity that causes people to be unable or unwilling to get more education is the same stupidity that causes them to have babies that by no means they should be having. I have never seen any evidence that, independant of IQ, there is a substantial effect of education vs birthrates. There might be a small difference in that people with education delay child-bearing until they finish school, but I have never seen evidence of differental total births. It doesn't matter anyway. The simple facts are that people with low IQ are having more babies sooner, and that IQ is substantially hereditary. This mathematically implies that average IQ will go down over the course of time, unless some other force counteracts this trend.
I have no idea what "better fed" has to do with this. If anything, you are backwards again. People that are so poor that they don't even have food tend to stop having babies. Give them more food, and they are likely to start having more!
of years. They kill tens of thousands of Americans each year. Pesticides are estimated to kill about 20. Which is more dangerous?
Or think about this one. Remember a while back when Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, got poisoned? That same chemical has been found in a number of rivers near chemical plants. Each time, everyone throws a hissy fit. But let's put this in perspective: The dose that Yushchenko endured was something like the equivalent of eating ALL THE TOXINS IN THE SLUDGE in one of those rivers - and it still didn't kill him. Those whiners who are complaining abou parts-per-billion contamination of dioxin in the river sludge are almost assuredly more likely to die driving to the meeting to complain. People always panic because we can "detect" a poison. The problem is that our detectors now are so senstive that we can detect absurdly trivial amounts - even single molecules in some cases. If our bodies were really that susceptable to these trace toxins, we would have been weeded out of the gene pool long, long ago.
"dumb" and "ignorant" the mathematical relationship will still hold. That correlation is quite strong by any stretch. People with low IQ's are having more children at younger ages, and (rightfully) we have removed "selectionary pressures" that would eliminate these children.
Fortunately, genetic engineering will save us from this problem before I gets too big. Actually, what worries me more is the bifurcation we are experiencing. Until 30 years ago or so, there was little relationship between the IQs of a mother and father (basically, most people weren't that mobile and had a limited pool of age-appropriate mates in the neighborhood). This has changed. Smart people are marrying smart people, and dumb people are marrying dumb people. Again, I think that genetic engineering will solve this problem before we wind up with a bimodal IQ distribution, but it is a concern.
I am a chemist, and quite familiar with risks of all sorts of chemicals. I think you are falling for the classic fallacy of "natural = good/safe". This is patently false. Most synthetic flavorings and additives are much purer and safer than the "natural" alternatives, which often are contaminated with things we know to be toxic, along with others that we still haven't tested yet.
There are over 4000 chemicals in an apple, 99% of of which have never been tested for toxicity.
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what obligation would we have to protect them? Could we improve the 1/3000 success rate? Should we? At what cost? How much of a difference would there be between "not saving" and actually "killing" them? Would "accidental" killings be permissable? I don't think those are easy questions.
Note than in this case, we are right near the edge of the odds that I consider "reasonable". If the butterfly's chances were 1/100, I would definitely object to killing them, particularly intentionally or with willful disregard, as well as call for their active protection. On the other extreme, if the odds were one tens of millions, there is little we should do beyond avoiding deliberate slaughter.
If embryos have rights, I do not feel it matters at all either how the embryo came about nor where it is currently located. Something's rights are dependant on what it is and what it will become, given the opportunity to do so. For any being that due to circumstance has a low probability of becoming intelligent, but as that entity, in the right circumstances, as a high probability, I would still grant the being rights (as well as feel under a moral obligation to help rescue it).
For example, if I found a wounded man in the middle of the desert, I would find the following logic objectionable:
This man is unconcious. Furthermore, his probability of survival, without my aid, is virtually nil. Therefore, he has no rights and I may kill, rape, or rob him as I please.
Instead, I would see a moral obligation to help this person, if there was any way that I could reasonably expect to do so.
This is analogous to an embryo in a jar. It is what it is. However, under current circumstance, it has a low probability of survival (and note that unlike the man in the desert, is assuredly in this situation of no fault of its own). Yet it is clearly possible for this embryo to be rescued, and given a high chance of survival. Therefore we should do so. Better yet, we should not put embryos in such situations in the first place. Fortunately, IVF procedures are getting much better about producing fewer "excess" embryos. With the right technological and political pressure, this can be driven to zero.
First, I would like to point out that you are also "just a lump of living genetic material". I hope you do not feel diminished by that. I still respect your rights either way.
It is obvious that a first-trimester fetus does not feel or think in any meaningful sense. However, it will, in all likelyhood. Is this sufficient basis for rights? If we limit ourselves to "real world" scenarios, the closest analogies would be people who are sleeping, unconcious, and in comas. Do these people have rights? Apparently there is wide agreement that they do. Yet they are not thinking or intelligent in any meaningful sense, especially the latter two groups. Why do these groups have rights? There is one difference, of course, between these groups and fetuses. The unconcious people not only will be intelligent but also have been intelligent. Does this make a difference? Why?
One ethical system I particularly like is to imagine that we all do have souls, and are sitting around in a committee before we are born and our bodies are selected. What rules would we choose, if we had no idea who we were going to be? Would we choose a system of rules that allowed a 25% chance we would be killed before we ever got out of the womb, even if it did make life better for the lucky 75%? I doubt it. One of the problems we face in the "real world", of course, is that it is that winning 75% that are calling the shots. Is this ethical?
You seem to be caught up on "thinking and feeling". Tonight, when you are asleep, I could flood your room with carbon monoxide. You would never feel a thing. Is this OK? If not, why not? As for animals, they indeed "think and feel"; however, they do not do so at a level which I consider worthy of rights. More critically, they never will.
You should not limit yourself to "real world" situations. Hypotheticals can be quite enlightening. With respect to AI, you had better get used to answering these questions. They are coming quickly enough.
You seem to believe that a person is part of this "society", and therefore has rights. Why? Who decides? Who or what gets included? My "talk of rights" means little to a six year old, too. Are they not part of society? What about a two-year-old? An infant?
I agree with you on one point - the boundry line of intelligence is the ability to conciously respect the rights of others. However, it is clear that we repect of the rights of humans (infants, the deranged, the senile) who cannot accomplish this goal. Why?
Your last line is particularly dangerous. At one time, the rights of slaves were not recognized by all societies. The rights of women are still not respected by many. How does that diminish the argument in favor of granting rights by expanding "society" to include such individuals?
The expansion of the concept of "society" has been a long-running trend. History tends not to look favorably upon those who argued for its limitations. Do you think in 500 years, there will be abortions? Neither do I.
I can hypothesize all sorts of beings without a brain or nervous system that I would consider to have rights. An AI, for example.
.1 and 2%. Sperm, skin cells and mud all have the hypothetical potential to be humans - but are extremely unlikely to ever be so.
See my post below about potential. I use a "reasonable doubt" standard, falling somewhere between
A dead person has brain structure. So does a cat. So does a late-term fetus. On the other hand, many as-yet-unknown extraterrestrials or AIs may very well not have a "brain structure" but be perfectly intelligent. I hardly see how "brain structure" has any relationship to rights.
Analogously to criminal law, I use a standard which, mathematically, is probably somewhere between 2% and .1%. It does not matter which number you choose within that range, however. Why? Because a sperm has far, far less than a 1/1000 chance. So does an egg or a skin cell. However, a fertilized egg falls well on the other side (about 30% at fertilization, much higher a few days later after implantation). Therefore, where exactly we draw the line is rather irrelevant, as it is clear that before fertilization we are far to one side, and after fertilization we are far to the other.
I would say the same standard applies at the end of life. If Shiavo had a 10% chance of recovering, killing her would have been wrong, don't you agree? But the fact was that her chances of recovering were vanishingly small. That is why pulling the plug was ethical. Now, if a fertilized egg has a 30% chance of surviving, why would we also not grant it rights?
Yes, you can carry the "potential" argument to extemes. One could claim the lint in my belly-button has rights, because there are probably sufficient atoms to spontaneously rearrange into a zygote. But clearly, the probability of this is trivially small. Therefore we can safely discount it.
As a final point, I also believe in granting the benefit of the doubt. This is an important manner with lives literally hanging in the balance. We should error on the side of protecting life.
you are not thinking and feeling, either. In such a case, does that mean I am not taking your freedoms when I put a bullet in your brain?
Potential matters. When you are sleeping or unconcious, you do not have sufficient intellect to earn rights. What gives you rights is the fact that you will wake up and be an intelligent being. When this is not the case (for example, Terry Shiavo), we correctly deem that the hunk of meat that was an intelligent being no longer has rights, and should be cared for as per that person's wishes and contracts.
The "potential matters" principle is the only one that is consistent across a wide-range of situations. Here are some others: Imagine you had a real AI, sufficiently intelligent to deserve rights, living on your cellphone. If the batteries ran out, could you then destroy the phone? Does it make sense to say "I can't destroy the phone when the batteries are charged, but I can when they are empty"? Or how about this. What if humans started their lives as catapillars, then became butterflies, and then, after a second larvae stage became babies. Could we kill the butterflies? What if the situation ran backwards, and it went human-butterly-catapillar, followed by a spore stage that created new humans. Could we then kill the butterflies?
Another problem with your logic is that humans do not become intelligent enough to deserve rights until well after birth, unless you put the bar so low as many animals have rights. So now, you either are stuck with arresting people for manslaughter when they run over a cat and putting Fido on trial for killing a rabbit, or permitting infanticide. Which do you prefer?
They are the roadblock on that one. Yes, it is a reasonable short-term fix, though it is not nearly as cheap as you think, and by the time we get new reactors online it probably won't be the cheapest, either. There is an absurdly-long lead-time before you can construct a new nuclear plant even in the best case.
I don't need to know exactly what technology will develop. I only need to know the trends. Falling wind and solar prices will eventually undercut petro power - probably in about ten to fifteen years. Falling ethanol (see Brazil) and biodiesel prices will do the same for the transportation sector. The pace of adoption for such technologies is growing very quickly and shows no sign of slowing. Why should we spend absurds of money now to implement costly technology now, when in ten to fifteen years we can do the same thing at a profit? There is a huge difference between being an early adopter and buying the $700 DVD player, and being the person who waits a few years and buys it for $20 at Wal-Mart. As much as I am sure you want to solve this problem, paying the big fee to get what we want a few years early simply is not justified by the benefits we would be getting in exchange.
What we need now is a big R&D push to cut the price from $700 to $20. This can be done by 2020. By the way, you should really look at the case history of ethanol in Brazil, which is catching on like wildfire. Decades of government mandates there failed to accomplish this, yet as soon as the market made it beneficial, people started buying the multi-fuel cars like crazy. We cannot solve our CO2 problems with mandates without serious disruptions to the economy. However, we can do it the other way - create the right technology at the right price. People will then solve the problem for free.
agree with? That's exactly what you shouldn't be doing. I have looked at both sets of data carefully. They are both full of uncertainty. The economists, of course, are forced to make uncertain projections based on uncertain scientific data, which is difficult. On the other hand, the conclusions don't vary that widely - doing something about global warming with current technology is at best a wash and probably costs more than it is worth. The obvious solution is to develop the right technology (at the right cost), and then implement it.
to leave as many leaks as Google will? Neither do I? Nor will their search be as effective. Chinese citizens win both ways.
People whining about Google's actions with respect to China fail to realize that the alternatives (even more dreadful Chinese filtering, Google being banned entirely, etcc) are worse alternatives for Chinese freedom.
In short, the scientists say "there is a problem". The economists say "the cure is worse than the disease". So both left and right are wrong on global warming, according to the experts.
There are some things that we should do that will mitigate global warming, but we should not do them because they will mitigate global warming. For example, as you noted, we should use nuclear, which by any rationale is safer than burning coal and spewing all sorts of toxic and radioactive goop into the atmosphere. We should also tax the piss out of gasoline for the same reasons. However, if you feel inclined to add an economically-efficient carbon tax on top of that, you will find that it is a drop in the bucket ($10/ton, perhaps, is justified) relative to the pollution taxes. In short, we should quit subsidizing petro (and car transport). These two things will do wonders for our emissions profile as a side benefit.
apocalypse-preaching enviromentalists. The rise has been somewhere between 10 and 25 cm in the last hundred years, and the predictions are 10 to 90 more in the next century (via IPCC).
Annoying? Yes. A problem that is worth spending hundreds of billions per year to only slightly mitigate? Not even close.
We can spend trillions to barely slow global warming, or we can spend a few billions to provide micro-nutrients to poor people around the world, saving millions of lives.
Which do you choose? Don't be immature and ignore trade-offs, please.
I have just bothered to read real analyses of the costs and benefits, and come to the conclusion that we have better investments of trillions of dollars. This should be obvious, really. Start by reading Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions".
For a tiny fraction of the price of putting a dent in global warming, we can save millions from AIDS or malaria. Which is the better choice?
It is in a constant state of flux and you can never go back to where you were. Organisms will live, die, and move. It will still be nature.
The sea level rise could be less, could be more. So far, it is sure failing to live up to expectations.
whines about.
The big temperature increases sometimes found from these models arise from several implausible assumptions, such as huge population and emission growth that will not happen. Worse yet, the models are inherently full of feedback in their mathematical equations, which causes output to be more unstable than one would like. Small changes to initial assumptions or parameters make big differences in predictions. Garbage in, garbage out. The big temperature rises are predicted when the computers get caught in a positive feedback loop that I find implausible, precisely because with billions of years of history we haven't yet triggered such a loop (and been hotter than we are now). Therefore, I find the low ends of their ranges most plausible, the middle slightly plausible, and the high end pure fantasy. In other words, more than a 2C increase is quite unlikely.
lot more worried about arsenic in my drinking water than the sea rising a few feet over the course of the next century.
Justify this:
Your plan: Spend trillions to prevent some Bangladeshis from being forced to move due to rising sea levels
My plan: Invest a few billion to provide clean water to all Bangladeshis, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
It should be a no-brainer which we choose. And don't be childish and ignore trade-offs, please.
hundred yards over the course of a century, then I would say we were doing humanity a favor by weeding these people out. Of course, such ignorance does not exist.
Note that I am talking about 44 and 94 years out. That is a very long time. Poorer countries are going to leap-frog a large number of technologies and will never pollute to the degree that modern industrial countries did.
By 2050, industrialized nations will be emitting little CO2. By 2100, if necessary, we will be pumping it back into the ground. These projections consistently assume that emissions are going to go up, up, and up. They won't.
The only things that are going to go up up up are petro prices. The only "tipping point" we are approaching is the point where renewables become cheaper than dino power.
Yes, the world is going to warm a couple of degrees, and sea levels will rise a few feet. No, this will not be the apocalypse. Simply put, adaption is cheap, while prevention is hideously expensive at the moment. In twenty years, it will not be.
I, along with most of my friends, am in my early thirties. When I look at my friends from undergrad and grad school (mostly scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers - ie, successful by normal standards), there are only a few have children. I can think of five children out of all of that peer group of fifty people or so, none more than two years old.
On the other hand, when I look back to my dirt-poor rural high school, I can think of several people who already have three or four children, some already in their teens! Almost everyone that I have any knowledge of has children.
At least in my personal experience, reality seems much worse than the published data I have seen. Perhaps this phenomena is getting worse, as the studies I saw had ten year old data.
The same stupidity that causes people to be unable or unwilling to get more education is the same stupidity that causes them to have babies that by no means they should be having. I have never seen any evidence that, independant of IQ, there is a substantial effect of education vs birthrates. There might be a small difference in that people with education delay child-bearing until they finish school, but I have never seen evidence of differental total births. It doesn't matter anyway. The simple facts are that people with low IQ are having more babies sooner, and that IQ is substantially hereditary. This mathematically implies that average IQ will go down over the course of time, unless some other force counteracts this trend.
I have no idea what "better fed" has to do with this. If anything, you are backwards again. People that are so poor that they don't even have food tend to stop having babies. Give them more food, and they are likely to start having more!
of years. They kill tens of thousands of Americans each year. Pesticides are estimated to kill about 20. Which is more dangerous?
Or think about this one. Remember a while back when Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, got poisoned? That same chemical has been found in a number of rivers near chemical plants. Each time, everyone throws a hissy fit. But let's put this in perspective: The dose that Yushchenko endured was something like the equivalent of eating ALL THE TOXINS IN THE SLUDGE in one of those rivers - and it still didn't kill him. Those whiners who are complaining abou parts-per-billion contamination of dioxin in the river sludge are almost assuredly more likely to die driving to the meeting to complain. People always panic because we can "detect" a poison. The problem is that our detectors now are so senstive that we can detect absurdly trivial amounts - even single molecules in some cases. If our bodies were really that susceptable to these trace toxins, we would have been weeded out of the gene pool long, long ago.
"dumb" and "ignorant" the mathematical relationship will still hold. That correlation is quite strong by any stretch. People with low IQ's are having more children at younger ages, and (rightfully) we have removed "selectionary pressures" that would eliminate these children.
Fortunately, genetic engineering will save us from this problem before I gets too big. Actually, what worries me more is the bifurcation we are experiencing. Until 30 years ago or so, there was little relationship between the IQs of a mother and father (basically, most people weren't that mobile and had a limited pool of age-appropriate mates in the neighborhood). This has changed. Smart people are marrying smart people, and dumb people are marrying dumb people. Again, I think that genetic engineering will solve this problem before we wind up with a bimodal IQ distribution, but it is a concern.
I am a chemist, and quite familiar with risks of all sorts of chemicals. I think you are falling for the classic fallacy of "natural = good/safe". This is patently false. Most synthetic flavorings and additives are much purer and safer than the "natural" alternatives, which often are contaminated with things we know to be toxic, along with others that we still haven't tested yet.
There are over 4000 chemicals in an apple, 99% of of which have never been tested for toxicity.