Comments on The Faith Heuristic: Best Paragraph I Read Today

I think that is more of a human nature thing than ...

2009-12-08T13:20:59.367-05:00

I think that is more of a human nature thing than a religious thing. We all find ways to divide ourselves into in-groups and out-groups and demonize the others. Its part of the reason why I can't stand the vulgar level of political discourse.

You should take a look at http://richarddawkins.ne...

2009-12-08T06:56:56.884-05:00

You should take a look at http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,4724,Climate-Change-editorial,Richard-Dawkins-----and-an-editorial-in-the-Guardian,page4#comments
where the lovely atheists are being ridiculously fundamentalist about AGW.

I am trying to point out that by claiming a moral imperative to solve AGW and forcing everyone to go along with it they are doing EXACTLY what they complain that the religious do. Apparently pointing out their hypocracy is too much for some of them and they have decided ad hominen attacks are the way to go.

PS. My tag is keddaw on that site.

Fair enough!

2009-12-07T09:57:06.172-05:00

Fair enough!

I am no fan of enforced reduction of emissions. T...

2009-12-07T05:24:36.091-05:00

I am no fan of enforced reduction of emissions. Thought I'd get that out the way.

Cutting emission levels is not impossible, undesirable, or unlikely. Technology has always increased efficiency and completely new technologies reduce or remove the requirement of some previous technology.

A couple of examples: Sulphur has been removed from almost all industrial processes (mainly coal burning power stations) sot hat we have much less sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere and so much less acid rain than we had in the 1980's.
Horse manure threatened to swamp major cities in the late 19th Century until the internal combustion engine came along and removed the need for horses almost completely.

We now have a seemingly intractable problem of an addiction to fossil fuel based energy, but all it would take is some bright spark (no pun intended) to come along with a cheap, mass produced solar panel or some other form of renewable energy and we'd be able to continue our insatiable use of power but with no carbon offsets (or other legislated nonsense) required.

This requires some faith in human imagination and inventiveness, but need is the mother of invention and we need this one, if only to keep the governments at bay.