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AUSTRALIA’S use of coal and carbon emissions policies are guaranteeing the “destruction of much of the life on the planet”, a leading NASA scientist has written in a letter to Barack Obama.
The head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Professor James Hansen, has written an open letter to Barack Obama calling for a moratorium on coal-fired power stations and the use of next-generation nuclear power.
Originally posted by tezzajw
On one hand, sure, by burning fossil fuels, we'll kill life on Earth. But on the other hand, what right does a NASA scientist have to criticise Australia's energy problems, when his own government is doing its best to destroy life on Earth via military domination?
Originally posted by cognoscente
That NASA scientist does not encompass any significant portion of "his own government". Do you really have that big of an issue with authority? I can't imagine your psychological reasoning behind that.
He is advocating what he personally believes will benefit the planet. As an advocate of a personal belief, he might have greater impact on a smaller nation, which we should assume has a much smaller central government bureaucracy.
If he can get pressure on one government and that pressure carries through (he's leveraging the weight of his words as a technical expert in his field) then in his own mind he has succeeded. You must at least attempt to understand how an advocate thinks and feels. I'm fairly certain he doesn't think of himself as some elitist.
Originally posted by cognoscente
This is no blame game. You all want to believe that.
It is common to have some propensity to believe someone only when they themselves (or the organizations they represent) follow the same moral conduct in action as in speech. As intellectual beings, however, we have been gifted the ability to choose not to believe these so called visceral reactions and so with this objective reasoning, we become free from any reliance on choosing our conclusions based solely on intuitive conjecture. With this mind of ours, we can choose not to predicate all our own opinions on notions of an individual's ostensible character. What's even more interesting is how all of you are relating that scientist to some government inner working, as if either institution has something to benefit by providing accusations on such a controversial front as energy consumption, the burning of "dirty" fossil fuels and ultimately its impact on the environment.
So what if it is a blame game? Personally, I think you're all deluded. What evidence leads us to believe this one scientist has been assigned some deceptive task to shift the blame away from the U.S.? That you can't trust "the government"? That type of reasoning is hardly worth the time required to type out the corresponding sentence.
Of course, I could be wrong seeing as how biology will tell us that one's intuition is not a simple lack of reasoning, but a fitness oriented ability which has a firm basis in our evolutionary history. Then again, these essentially primordial psychological structures are undoubtedly losing a vast proportion of their relevance, especially in the setting of our increasingly complex world, a world which must be validated by at least some modicum of empirical analysis to be considered worthy.
We know we're taking this too far when a qualified authority can't even have his opinion tolerated because of our increasing tendency to associate him with his organization, or his organization's vested interests.
You too, I'm sure, can see where all this will only persuade the creation of an ever more unenthusiastic society, one reluctant to trust any source information for fear of how one's support might benefit the informant, or provider of said information. This type of society would naturally select for deceptiveness, which would be the only way to transmit information that might be tolerated. This will lead to a decrease in said information's value in terms of it being able to produce real benefits to society, and instead squander it upon the selected few. We will lose any standard upon which to measure the progress of our quality of information, as people begin to disregard every major publication and every source of information from any academically qualified individual or institution.
In my own "intuitive" pursuit in trusting this individual I am risking the collective well being of this little society right here on ATS. If I provide the wrong information and we all believe it, then we will all lose. So many would choose not to believe me, some would choose to argue with me. A third solution would be to call me naive! I know I might seem naive by writing this, but that is merely a product of your own evolutionary psychology at work. It is your reasoning that a negative opinion might be more responsible, as it probabilistically more accurate. However, I am confident in my opinion, because I hope to have critically analyzed the situation, its agents and its actors, before immediately warning the world (and this board's members) that we can't trust this scientist. In this confidence I can derive my "naive" reasoning and still succeed.
There! I just had a conversation with myself... I'm so cool.
[edit on 6-1-2009 by cognoscente]
Originally posted by watch_the_rocks
Australia releases 326,757 tonnes per year of CO2.
The U.S. releases 6,049,435 tonnes per year.