Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

[madnak]

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I don't want to go through all the rest again but I can't see why you believe this to be true. It's an extreme form of hedonism that even I can't buy though I'd like to.

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There may be exceptions, and our standards of well-being may be different, but you haven't presented any credible refutation of my argument in this thread. If improvement is cumulative, then a step backward for us is a step backward for future generations, etc. And it seems clear to me that improvement is a cumulative process.

You seem to view history as some inevitable path from which we can never deviate. That doesn't make much sense, unless you believe in divine influence. The future will be what it is because of the aggregate state of the present. To put it more clearly, the state of the world at any point in time is determined by a causal chain of events that goes back billions of years. If this chain is interrupted at any point then the future may be altered irrevocably.

I won't make the claim here that the future is solely a product of the present in a causal sense, but it is substantially so. It's hard to say exactly which variables will have the greatest impact, but we can make some educated guesses. If I step on a bug tomorrow, that probably won't change the course of human history markedly. But if we achieve stable and peaceful societies, that probably will.

And look at our own history - the black death, who knows. But the end of the ice age led to the development of civilization - its effects define each of our lives. The Roman Empire set the cultural underpinnings that we live with to this day. The establishment of religions, the wars through the world, the literature and philosophy, these are the ingredients that make the present what it is. I think it's reasonable to suggest that what we do today will similarly affect the future.

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I disagree. If there's the sort of climate change being envisaged then it will drive massive technological innovation far faster than anything normal.

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What's your basis for that?

If the climate change happens and is a disaster for us, then our communities will dissolve, our resources will be restricted, and all our effort will go into repairs. Any innovation will be based around coping, and real concerted efforts will be impossible until greater stability is achieved. At minimum, it will set us back decades.

[tame_deuces]

Well, if we assume that disasters don't 'matter' to our descendants, then we might as well do our best to avert disaster X and create what we assume is a better world for ourselves, if that leads to disaster Y instead, then obviously that won't matter to the descendants either.

So even if you follow the given logic, you will end up at the conclusion that you should indeed follow what you see as the best course of action.

[chezlaw]

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I don't want to go through all the rest again but I can't see why you believe this to be true. It's an extreme form of hedonism that even I can't buy though I'd like to.


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There may be exceptions, and our standards of well-being may be different, but you haven't presented any credible refutation of my argument in this thread. If improvement is cumulative, then a step backward for us is a step backward for future generations, etc. And it seems clear to me that improvement is a cumulative process.



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The argument is invalid. just because progress is cumulative it doesn't follow that one step back for us means people in the future will be one step back.

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You seem to view history as some inevitable path from which we can never deviate. That doesn't make much sense, unless you believe in divine influence.

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I don't and I don't.

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And look at our own history - the black death, who knows. But the end of the ice age led to the development of civilization - its effects define each of our lives. The Roman Empire set the cultural underpinnings that we live with to this day. The establishment of religions, the wars through the world, the literature and philosophy, these are the ingredients that make the present what it is. I think it's reasonable to suggest that what we do today will similarly affect the future.


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I agree.

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I disagree. If there's the sort of climate change being envisaged then it will drive massive technological innovation far faster than anything normal.


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What's your basis for that?

If the climate change happens and is a disaster for us, then our communities will dissolve, our resources will be restricted, and all our effort will go into repairs. Any innovation will be based around coping, and real concerted efforts will be impossible until greater stability is achieved. At minimum, it will set us back decades.

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Set us back decades in what respect. we're not going to lose technology so you must mean the technology we would have advanced if climate change hadn't happened. That goes back to your invalid cumulative argument. My contention is the stimulous to new technologies will rapidly outweigh a few years lost advances - I can't prove that would be the case so we may just have to disagree.

chez

[madnak]

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The argument is invalid. just because progress is cumulative it doesn't follow that one step back for us means people in the future will be one step back.

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This is true only if the one step back somehow results in multiple subsequent steps forward. That is, if the net effect is positive.

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And look at our own history - the black death, who knows. But the end of the ice age led to the development of civilization - its effects define each of our lives. The Roman Empire set the cultural underpinnings that we live with to this day. The establishment of religions, the wars through the world, the literature and philosophy, these are the ingredients that make the present what it is. I think it's reasonable to suggest that what we do today will similarly affect the future.


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I agree.

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I'd appreciate some clarification: This seems to contradict the position I thought you were defending (that actions taken in the present have minimal impact on the far future).

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Set us back decades in what respect. we're not going to lose technology so you must mean the technology we would have advanced if climate change hadn't happened. That goes back to your invalid cumulative argument. My contention is the stimulous to new technologies will rapidly outweigh a few years lost advances - I can't prove that would be the case so we may just have to disagree.


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Your statement that the stimulus to new technologies would outweigh years of lost advances is a big one, and you still haven't explained where this stimulus would come from, or why a disaster would be necessary to create it.

Maybe we will just have to disagree.

[chezlaw]

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The argument is invalid. just because progress is cumulative it doesn't follow that one step back for us means people in the future will be one step back.


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This is true only if the one step back somehow results in multiple subsequent steps forward. That is, if the net effect is positive.

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Yes I'm saying the net effective is positive for precisely that reason.

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And look at our own history - the black death, who knows. But the end of the ice age led to the development of civilization - its effects define each of our lives. The Roman Empire set the cultural underpinnings that we live with to this day. The establishment of religions, the wars through the world, the literature and philosophy, these are the ingredients that make the present what it is. I think it's reasonable to suggest that what we do today will similarly affect the future.



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I agree.


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I'd appreciate some clarification: This seems to contradict the position I thought you were defending (that actions taken in the present have minimal impact on the far future).

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Talking about expected satisfaction or happiness. We don't suffer because people long in the past suffered. Of course the world was shaped by the Roman empire but it doesn't make any difference to us if it was a miserable time to live through or not. The exception being cumulative matters like technology which is a genuine point of contention.

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Your statement that the stimulus to new technologies would outweigh years of lost advances is a big one, and you still haven't explained where this stimulus would come from, or why a disaster would be necessary to create it.

Maybe we will just have to disagree.

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Its too much like an essay question for me to answer, seems obvious to me but maybe its wrong. Necessity is the mother of invention, technological progress is correlated with demand etc etc. WW1/WW2 is an obvious example of a calamity being a massive stimulas to technological advance but one example doesn't prove much.

chez

[madnak]

I'll grant that misery in the present isn't necessarily bad for the future, but I think misery hurts productivity. The phenomenon you're talking about is a matter of motivation IMO - people don't get more creative during a war, they simply have greater motivation to produce - ie more money is being spent on R&D, etc. Fear and pain are powerful motivators in the personal sense, and so crises are powerful motivators in the collective sense, but I don't think fear is necessary, and if it is then I don't think it will be in the future. There are other ways to motivate people.

I also think that the disaster-oriented advances tend to come in jumps and starts that disbalance the overall level of human technology. Eventually we have to play "catch-up," and do the dreary work of infrastructure and implementation. I don't think there's a lack of insight or money today, more a lack of willingness to do the necessary work, so I don't think our situation is analagous to WW2/etc. Also, if we manage to avert the crisis then the implication is that we've developed technology to circumvent the issue - I could see a crisis motivating us to develop our tech to that level, but since we've already done so in the alternative case, it's hard for me to see any advantage to a disastrous event.

The best answer for the future is, IMO, to deal with climate change now and prevent it from becoming a big problem (though I believe technological measures are the only viable option - social measures won't get us far).

[wacki]

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If you look at the last two reports. C02 levels have increased dramatically (at a greater rate then anyone would have projected) yet the IPCC's own projections for temperature have decreased dramatically.

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Source please.

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The IPCC. In 2001 they projected 2100 temperatures would be 2.4-10.8C higher. In 2006 the projections are now 1.1-6.4C higher.

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I'm familiar with the IPCC reports. I was hoping you would point me to the think tank that makes this 'consensus debunking' argument. I have a hobby of documenting this stuff.

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In the meantime we have had China and India grow to the point China is going to pass the USA as the largest source of CO2 within the next 10 years.

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And this is starting to look like an ideology card. I suspect this is why you are rejecting 99% of the scientific community. If you want to discuss science then good for you. However, political arguments belong in the political forum. What matters in the global warming scenario is not "he's polluting more than I am" child-like/ideology arguments but what the total global emissions are.

[chezlaw]

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The phenomenon you're talking about is a matter of motivation IMO - people don't get more creative during a war, they simply have greater motivation to produce - ie more money is being spent on R&D,

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well I wasn't suggesting some magical change in the brain!

but in principle you must be right about any anticipatable disaster because in principle it could focus the mind and be prevented getting all the benefits without the calamity.

So humanity could have considered what it would be like to have WW1/2 and we could have had nuclear power, the computer, radar, space flight etc etc as quickly without bothering with the actual wars.

Similarly the world could have all the technologies that will spring up from oil scarcity without oil actually being scarce but that's not the way things work in practice. yes there's some anticipation driving research but its mainly as oil becomes scarcer and hence more expensive that people are motivated to demand and supply aternatives.

chez

[madnak]

There are other factors that determine spending - like popular opinion. I think this is a problem we can solve.

[chezlaw]

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There are other factors that determine spending - like popular opinion. I think this is a problem we can solve.

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maybe but popular opinion isn't really interested in funding stuff it has no great need for or is unaware of. As someone once said - 'if you give people what they want, they already have it'.

but I can perform a Sklanskyism with respect to my original argument i.e. even if it was provable that a massive calamity now was an advantage to humanity from the year 3,000 onwards its obviously true that we would still want to avert the calamity now. Hence it cannot be because of these future generations that we want to avert climate change.

chez