There's quite a bit of detailed disussion of Lomborg's book at the
Scientific American site below:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0B96-9517-1CDA-B4A8809EC588EEDFp
ageNumber=1catID=4
Well said Keith, this guys numbers are totally out of
whack. They are so far from correct, that I suspect that
Christoper is a paid propaganda writer. His words sound
very much like someone who is involved in the black ops
profession. It seems like every list that is set up to do
some public good is infected with these folks who just keep
causing friction. I sure wish these know-it-all creeps who
offer nothing but opinion yet demand proof, would get their
own damn list.
kris
--- Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Well, Mr Witmer
It's not often that a person has both Gary North and
Bjorn Lomborg
quoted at him in the same day. If you and them make three
straight
saws, I'll be fully confident in cutting a dead straight
line with my
allegedly bent one.
No, it's not something akin to a religious confrontation,
not by any
means. That would simply be the last resort of someone
who's been
confronted with contrary evidence and been unable to
produce any of
his own, abandoning his points along the way as they
became
untenable, pretending they never existed in the first
place, and
finally being left without a leg to stand on, and hence
this retreat
into an essentially non-rational arena, hoping to find
safety there.
It's just cant. As is the stuff below about science.
Well, Keith and other friends, what we really have here
is something
akin to a religious confrontation, because the
disagreement involves
fundamental differences in worldview and
presuppositions. For example, a
perusal of reviews of Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical
Environmentalist:
Measuring the Real State of the World (
http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521010683/ ) shows
that there is
virtually no middle ground: everyone either loves it or
loathes it. And
that has been the case since the modern environmentalist
movement began
with books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which
similarly
produces extreme reactions from readers. I have profound
disagreements
with the entire set of Malthusian, Darwinian, Marxist
and Freudian
presuppositions that pervade most of modern thought,
especially in the
sciences. Science is hardly value-free and neutral. The
set of
presuppositions that any scientist brings to his work
will surely affect
the outcome of that work. As I see it, modern scientists
include lots of
brilliant men, and most of them are cutting with a bent
saw. It doesn't
matter how sharp a bent saw is, it still can't cut
straight. The vast
majority of scientists study neither the history of
scientific thought
nor the philosophy of science, and thus fail to
recognize that according
due to the presuppositions of their modern worldview,
there is no way
they can explain how science even ought to be possible.
To me these
scientists seem to be living an incongruity without ever
becoming aware
of the fact. Be that as it may, I recognize there is a
huge body of
research purporting to support the conclusion that a
global warming
disaster is in the making. Well, if our bent-saw
researchers continue
cutting long enough, they shall come full circle. They
shall produce new
theories to replace their previous discredited theories,
and the new
theories will be accepted as gospel, just like the
earlier ones were.
Not to worry, there will no doubt be a steady stream of
new
environmental crises to keep everyone fully employed. As
for me, I plan
to continue driving a biodiesel or SVO vehicle happy in
the knowledge
that I am thereby saving money and eliminating
unnecessary local
pollution and waste, but not overly concerned about how
that affects the
climate/weather on the opposite side of the globe. I
will gratefully
avail myself of the excellent biodiesel resources
available on this list
and at websites like Keith's JTF, and shall simply
sidestep what I
perceive to be the ideological cow patties littering the
field. Sorry
for having taken up bandwidth with a discussion that,
albeit important,
is peripheral to this list's main matter of business.
We've had quite a few discussions about what this list's
main matter
of business is, and here's the answer: whatever we like.
Who says so?
I do. And with good reason, which, if you care to, you'll
find very
rationally outlined in the archives, sans religion, sans
politics,
and several times.
What it all comes down to, in this case, is that you
flung about
quite a few unwarranted opinionations that you were
unable to support
when challenged, any more than you'd be able to support
those above.
But at least now you don't even claim that they're
anything but
opinions. I'm afraid you don't demonstrate much knowledge
of the
history of thought or the philosophy of science, nor of
the current
status of either
