On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 5:22 AM, trent shipley <trent.ship...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I once read a quote that went something like, "No action against > climate change has ever been taken that resulted in material economic > injury to those who took the action." > > This lead me to think that despite the knowledge about climate change > at a physical level, humans make decisions based on the domains (not > the sciences) of psychology, economics, and politics. > > Climate change then, is not a hard science problem, it is an economic > and political problem. The solution can't be had through privation, > no matter how much scientists say extreme conservation may be > necessary, but has to involve a path through shared prosperity. Oh my, do I agree with you! After considering the problems since 1975, I think there is a solution based on new technology. Some of the new technology, the Skylon rocket plane, has hundreds of millions ($) committed to it. I referenced it in a previous posting today on this list. > The second thing it made me think is that while it cannot be said that > one science is more important than another, the discursive domains > indexed by sciences can be ranked as more or less foundational or > derived, or more pejoratively as reductionist or ramified. > > Society > Politics > Economics > Psychology > Biology > Chemistry > Physics That's a good list. I think the first four are emergent from evolutionary psychology. That in turn is based on evolutionary biology, which is emergent from chemistry and physics. > (Everything is, of course, mediated by psychology, but leaving that > aside.) As you go down the scale knowledge becomes more precise and > attainable, but relevance to daily experience lessens. As you go up > the scale, the ramified complexity of the domain makes knowledge > imprecise, but the lived relevance is high. This explains the > frustration of natural scientists who find good science rendered > irrelevant in the face of psychology,economics, politics, and society. That's well stated. And then there are the engineers (like me) who just want to solve the damned problems. It's just an economic/engineering problem to get the cost of renewable energy down. It's not like the sun doesn't put out enough energy. Keith _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
