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
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