>Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 11:44:20 -0400
>From: Jim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: Ocean Level Rising
>
>Has anyone ever watched a campfire? It starts, it grows, it gets hot, and it
>gets cold. How many global warming experts have been watching the Sun?
>
>James T. Conklin
>Longwood, FL
There's a difference between "watching" a campfire and "observing" the Sun.
The first happens in chronological time, while the second happens in actual
time. We can tell all kinds of things about the way the world "used to be",
just by applied attention. We can "know" that the Sun has gotten 30% hotter
than it was when life began on the planet. We can "know" that the planet has
not. And we can use that "knowledge" to tell that GHGs in the upper atmosphere
have likely been trending downward, not upward, to allow these two otherwise
incomensurate facts to coexist.
That's really all we need to "know" to conclude we're headed in the wrong
direction, by pumping up GHGs into the stratosphere. Nothing about the end of
the world, nor about some singularly inevitable catastrophic end state, just
about being headed in the wrong direction. Add time lags to that story (watch
the Titanic for all sorts of great analogies in navigation and obstacle
avoidance under inertia), and we know all we need to know about what we ought
to be doing, at an ecospheric level of organization.
As for the Al Gore dig, well, as we have seen, there's nothing in the books
that tells us that first hand knowledge is necessarily superior to second or
third hand knowledge. Savvy tells savvy.
Cheers,
-
Ashwani
Vasishth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (818) 677-6137
http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/
