Our planet is being destroyed, does anybody care?

That actually helps. I've been thinking of narratives lately. I don't know that much about critical theory... but I've thought it's a look at the components of narratives. I've been more looking at the underpinnings of narratives. Like... can I understand a narrative to the point that from just considering one viewpoint (how a person identifed themselves, for instance), I can predict other aspects of a person's outlook. My notion is that no narrative is logically self-contained... there's always a fly in the ointment that will be ignored for the sake of maintaining the narrative.

My own home-base narrative hasn't changed much since I was a kid: life is basically like a dream. In the same way you take the contents of a dream seriously, you take the contents of your life story seriously as it unfolds. You don't sit there in a dream thinking...."this is just a dream." So substance has meaning related to that. So "that which justifies" is coming from the self, no?

So can you guess things about how my thoughts orbit... just based on what I just said about myself? Can you guess what angles would be really hard for somebody like me to swallow?... what somebody with my narrative wouldn't want to look at.... that sort of thing.

Maybe choking is like being static... like reliving the past. The failure looms so large in consciousness that subsequent actions follow that form. One isn't actually reliving the past, though. That's just poetry.

Sometimes conversations about the environment strike me as fixated on the idea of failure. I wonder if sometimes the loudest voices are of those who are sort of conflict habituated so they look for someone on the other side of the issue with whom they can engage on some aspect of the situation that isn't particularly conducive to anything but conflict. So Caroline's real question, which she asked repeatedly, never gets addressed.... 'what intelligent actions should we be taking?'

But maybe that is really the result of problems which have no known solution. Such as the issue you brought up about economic systems that depend on growth.

I tried to adapt to this forum... it really didn't work out too well for me. The only reason I come back at all is that I value your thoughts on things.

Thanks Arj that´s really a big compliment coming from someone with your knowledge...because I can see it behind the elegant simplicity through which you come one or two steps down the ladder to talk with people and take the best they have to offer...that makes you wise of a rare kind...specially on a so competitive driven environment like the one you have in US...(not that I find it wrong since I like competition, but again with meaning...not just for sport.)

on guessing work on your narrative I will keep it very simple and straight forward, from that which my small intelligence could raise up so far on someone with your level of discretion...

My impression on you relates you with a deep sense of fairness and a protective discrete kind of personality, I also think you probably like the idea of travelling and open explore be it through country´s and cultures, in books and their tells, or around the corner in the coffee shop morning environment, you are curious by nature and yet you are reserved and kept to yourself on what counts...people intrigue you with their daily live little oddity´s as also it can be said that you like to pay attention to small detail on those no events that people tend to think as not important or with less symbolic charge and that yet immediately give the away for what they are...nevertheless you avoid people to notice you are actually evaluating them since you preserve your discretion above all and have a non conflictive approach on them, unless of course its the case of teaching them a lesson for underestimating you...on that you can be accurate and unforgiving even relentless...it can be the case that such leads to a light self conflictive situation who lives you at odds with yourself, and yet, end of the day, you find it funny move on and can laugh about it...good !

well that is just poor common guess work, almost vulgar tarot style summary, but that is the hunch I have anyway...hope to not be completely wrong.

See you around Arj !

Its good that climate is back on the Agenda.

Cancun is round the corner. Hope to see it be a success.

Now to put my bit into the cauldron, i would like to point out that there is a difference between the climate-change argument/ no climate-change due-to- man argument and the declining-environmental-standards argument.

I need not be a scientist to know that when i cook or boil milk or water it becomes more palatable for me to eat and drink such stuffs. Food becomes soft and anti-septic when subjected to heat.

I need not be a scientist to know that when i plant a tree or a line of trees it helps me live better than in a open tree-less environment. The value of a tree is no lesss known to a farmer, beggar or a mystic as it may be claimed by a agricultural scientist.

And so on and forth. If suppose someone feels that his/her summers are getting hotter than the previous years, i can only corroborrate the feelings and the consequent hypothesis of a hotter surrounding by collecting some data from the weather bureau. If for a sample, in my area June is hottest, i will take June temperature data available for the last 60 or 110 years, if any, and check the mean temperatures for the month. lets suppose it gives me a a long term mean of 32.4 deg celsius. And then it also for the last ten years, the data shows the mean to be 32.8. Then, this rise in recorded data will certainly help me to establish my intuition/hypothesis that the month is getting hotter.
And so in my enthusiasm, i may extrapolate the same and assert that my summers are getting hotter.

But the fishy things about data and statistics is, that people use it according to their own wishes/desires and an urgency to claim credits or upgrade credentials or to refute any such claims for the same factors as above.
For we see, with the same observation and records, another person can say or refute the same findings, just to disprove the earlier proposition. This reviewer would than check the records and take the mean temperature for a wider area, say the region or an state, and claim that while it may be true that an area of 10 sq kms around a barometric station shows temperature increase, the average temperatures of the surrounding 1000 sq km shows the temperatures are cooling (lets say it is 32.1 deg celsius) for the month of June in the last ten years.

This is just to explain how scientists can play with data, and therefore the system of peer reviews are very important. We have seen through out history of how induction and deductions methods are faulty.
The jump to conclusions may be erroneous. Bertrand Rusell had said to the effect that all conclusions of Man are mere assertions.

While a 0.1 deg C shift can lead us to claim that our surrounding temperature is cooling, we can also claim that it is getting hotter by 0.4 deg C, at the very same place where i live. For the same place I have two different findings. It depends on the extent of the area for consideration. It also depends on a whole lot of other factors including human error, reference data, instrument and technological uniformity, etc.

The moot point here is that data although objective in its physical sense is subject to interpretation in a prose or report form. Repudiations are part of human discourse. Someone said, and repeated in this forum that Reality may lie between two extremes........... oh yes, it was Buddha who said so - he said to the effect that Truth is in the Middle.

Human judgement can be wrong. And it is great that some of the IPCC reports on climatic conditions are subjected to extremely hard evaluations and criticisms. We should welcome it irrespective of where it comes from, let it and them face the heat only then the judgement and the conclusions that we cook become more palatable.

Hi Jackofalltrades....

There's a good book by David Archer called Global Warming... it's a text book for a beginning course in understanding global warming. He starts out explaining the formula for calculating the global mean temperature.

He explains how the statement is made that we're experiencing warming beyond what would be expected without the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

The IPCC examined somewhere around 20 different computer modeled predictions of what the weather will be like in 2100. Archer explains why they picked that date, and how that ultimately leaves the bulk of the question unaddressed. There are a couple of factors that make definitive predictions impossible. One is that we don't know how much C02 will ultimately be put into the air. The significant issue there being coal. We probably wouldn't burn all the massive coal reserves until about 2300. The petroleum will be gone around 2100. So in the next century, we'll have to make big changes in energy usage whether we like it or not.

The other unresolved issue is clouds. We know that in a warmer world, there will be more clouds, but clouds can be either flat or columnar. It would be nice to know which way the clouds of the future will tend to be because it makes about a 5 degree difference in the prediction. It's impossible now to get a clear answer to that from computer models because of the issue of resolution. Clouds span from the tiny droplets they're made of to the massive white thing that reflects light back to space. Right now we don't have computers that can crunch that much data.

What we understand is that however much CO2... and however the clouds form... what will be experienced is a spike in temperature. In somewhere around a thousand years, 90% of the CO2 will be absorbed into the ocean. The last 10% into the rocks over tens of thousands of years. So it's really: how big a spike and for how long... that we don't know.

Another aspect that fascinating to me is the long term climate. We're about due to go back into a glacial period... or so we've thought for about 20 years. David Archer explains in another book call the Long Thaw (which is available for kindle) all about Malankovitch cycles and variations in how circular the earth's orbit is explain what we now think is likely to happen in the next 50,000 years.

So folks who claim to know with certainty all about global warming... well, somehow they know more than climatologists do. That's weird, huh?

You pretty much nailed it.

1 - I am sure there´s allot more that I did n´t, since my description is overall vague and generalist...but hey, at least I have a good impression...

2 - On account of our exponential growth problem which should be central to a correct analysis on the issue it amazes me how people rather discuss peanuts...

3 - ...and yes conflict and turf control is the drive around here for motivation not the problem at hand itself...pointless to complain either one plays or one gets out of it...

Thanks Arjuna. The information was good. I will try and get his book.

One thing i missed was about environmental degradation. The issue of protecting natural forests is one dear to my heart. I see a lot of good things happenning all over the globe. The climate change skeptics (ones who oppose a changing climate theory) should at least admitt that deforestation increases CO2 levels. Just imagine what would happen if all the standing forests all over the world is obliterated - what kind of a damage it would do to this beautiful Earth?

I also wonder why are the climate change skeptics becoem suddenly so active after the IPCC got the noble prize. Was some interests being affected by that worldwide recognition?........... are we missing something in this great jig-saw puzzle.

How would we go about doing that?

You just write in the words and submit by clicking "Reply".

To be honest I wanted my friends to see it in the philosophy forum but since you ask, our environment is part of us and now that it could be in danger it needs man to be thinking for the greater good.
We need to be responsible.


If we are not careful it could be pretty frightening to eh?

People do according to how they feel, and justify according to how they think...

Thanks for your informative post. Yes they reckon the polar bear will retract to the brown bear, I didn't know that's where they originated from thanks. And farmerman I had to give george hell coz he royally deserved it.

Misinformative, you mean.

Farmerman is suggesting that because polar bear hybrids are on the increase polar bear numbers are therefore increasing.

The logic is along these lines:

1) You have a polar bear and a grizzly bear within a particular region.

2) They mate and give birth to a hybrid.

3) You therefore have two polar bears within a region.

This is fallacious because the hybrid is no more polar bear than grizzly bear (or brown bear or whatever). It also ignores the fact that most polar bear populations that are capable of being monitored are shown to have declined in recent years, hybrids or no.

The polar bear will not "retract" into another species of bear because the common ancestor to modern bears is not a modern bear. Many of the modern species of bear are close enough cousins that they can mate to produce crossbreeds, but these hybrids do not add to the numbers of the population by dint of the fact that they are hybrids. The hybrids are not the same as the parent species, nor the common ancestor, they are something new.

There's nothing wrong with that per se, the hybrids may well be the way of the future - but it isn't an indicator of the health of the polar bear species - quite the opposite.

Farmerman may be arguing that they still constitute a genetic legacy, and that therefore the alteration of purebred polar bear stock into populations made up of increasing numbers of hybrids mitigates a sense of loss people might feel over the decline in polar bear numbers.

That is as may be - though if he meant that he didn't express it very well. He also ignores both scientific and aesthetic considerations that lead people to conclude that biodiversity is 'A Good Thing' and an indicator of the general 'health' of an ecosystem.

Even if he was pointing out their continued legacy it still would have no bearing on whether or not the decline in polar bear numbers heralds a valid concern for changes to the Arctic environment which are linked to a warming trend. The increase in hybrids is due to the animal being driven from it's niche after all.

Yeah...it is true that the issue of what is to be the main cause of global warming, either Sun spots activity and Solar flares or mankind and CO2 emissions, does not justify all the remaining Eco-problems that we are starting to face...such manipulation of the facts unavoidably makes me suspicious on the true motives behind it...
Polar bear superficial analysis its also indicative of a dismissive attitude that does not convey the impartial neutral Scientific approach that they are trying to sell...its amazing then that junk Science by which we are to be criticized is their medium to counter...ironic is n´t it ?

Regards>FILIPE DE ALBUQUERQUE

Well, Arjuna, i suspect that it is still true that people, by and large, neither agree with you that the planet is being destroyed, nor do most of them care.

Didnt say anything of the sort. Please try to follow what I said.

Thats what I said, completely and accurately quoted. There is no hint of anything that you seem to wish to confer. I am merely thinking out loud

1will extinction actually be another name for "genetic impoverishment"(by the way genetics is what it is, theres no plot against the genetic complement of life. Extintion, "bottlenecks" evolution, theyre all outcomes.

2Polar bears are a maritime bear. They may evolve or they may mingle their genes with their rootstock once more

3Polar bears seem to be ranging further inland as if to defy the saying that'
"Those species so well adapted to an environment are also held prisoner by it"

The main problem i see in this silly, silly thread is the assumption that the planet is being destroyed. First and foremost, climate change is not a destructive process, it's a natural process. Which leads me to the second point, which is that the alleged destruction is actually a way of saying that human beings may not like how the planet will turn out, due to climate change, due to pollution of the atmosphere and the oceans, and due to the increasing strain on agriculture thanks to competing demands for the uses of crops. But just because the enviroment might become less than all humans could wish it to be is not evidence that the planet is being destroyed.

And, once again, i suspect most people don't care--that most people (out of the six billion+ on the planet) aren't even aware of such a claim.

Looks to me that you actually are inferring - pretty plainly - that polar bear numbers are not decreasing ("its population is actually greater now than it has been in the past") based on some pretty dodgy logic.

Well it's a metaphore isn't it? We covered that already. The "destruction of the planet" is an admittedly unwise exaggeration of a more sensible sentiment along the lines of "we are rendering it less habitable for ourselves".

Mutually exclusive?

No.

A meteor that impacted on the earth and obliterated it would be natural. It would also be destructive. Presumably if you were some south sea islander watching his village get swallowed up by lava from the local volcano you would not be so louche as to sit back and say "oh well, it's just nature". That would be a less utilitarian approach than noticig that something was being destroyed.