From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 21:21:16 MDT
By all means, there are good reasons to pursue research, which will
eventually persuade us (especially the good Bayesians) to start developing a
definite opinion about the reality, extent, causes, economic implications
and actions to be taken in relation to global warming. But for now, I side
with you in having no opinion. The reason for bringing up the subject again
here is to prod those who already have an opinion to shed their premature
conviction. And I mean it - really I have no opinion, I neither deny nor
believe in dangerous anthropogenic climate warming and the need for action,
because there are insufficient data on the future of our climate.
Indeed, there is an interesting phenomenon in cognitive science, the
Bruner-Potter interference. If a human visual system is exposed to a very
blurry, incomprehensible version of a photograph, this person will have
difficulty deciphering a less blurry version of the same image, which is
already understandable to a person who never saw the very blurry version. It
is explained by the consumption of perceptual resources by futile hypotheses
formed during exposure to insufficient data. Your higher visual areas (the
semantic parsers) are so consumed with a flurry of conflicting hypotheses
from the too-blurry image that they can't analyze the scene even if
sufficient data becomes available. The truth is lost in the internal babble
of your temporoparietal cortex. So it pays to hold off on guessing until you
know better, especially in cases where upwards of a trillion dollars is the
down-payment on your decision.
Also, I plainly hate environmentalists, and I am happy to see them suffer a
hit.
Rafal
----- Original Message -----
From: "Damien Broderick" <damienb@unimelb.edu.au>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 10:04 AM
Subject: Re: Let it burn!
> At 01:35 AM 6/7/03 -0400, Rafal wrote:
>
> >### Owners of the Prius, shame on you. Instead of helping the planet,
> >burning gasoline to make the world a green oasis, you mutter your 1970's
> >mantras of "conservation", " limits to growth" and general doom.
>
> Here's a recent view to the contrary; I have no opinion:
>
> By FRED PEARCE
> New Scientist
>
> Smoke is clouding our view of global warming, protecting the planet from
> perhaps three-quarters of the greenhouse effect. That might sound like
good
> news, but experts say that as the cover diminishes in coming decades, we
> are in for a dramatic escalation of warming that could be two or even
three
> times as great as official best guesses.
>
> This was the dramatic conclusion reached last week at a workshop in
Dahlem,
> Berlin, where top atmospheric scientists got together, including Nobel
> laureate Paul Crutzen and Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, former
chairman
> of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
>
> IPCC scientists have suspected for a decade that aerosols of smoke and
> other particles from burning rainforest, crop waste and fossil fuels are
> blocking sunlight and counteracting the warming effect of carbon dioxide
> emissions. Until now, they reckoned that aerosols reduced greenhouse
> warming by perhaps a quarter, cutting increases by 0.2 °C. So the 0.6 °C
of
> warming over the past century would have been 0.8 °C without aerosols.
>
> But the Berlin workshop concluded that the real figure is even higher -
> aerosols may have reduced global warming by as much as three-quarters,
> cutting increases by 1.8 °C. If so, the good news is that aerosols have
> prevented the world getting almost two degrees warmer than it is now. But
> the bad news is that the climate system is much more sensitive to
> greenhouse gases than previously guessed. [etc]
>
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