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. 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 (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. _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com