Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Robert. On 8/3/07, Robert A. Rohde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If there are people to worry about in 20800, then it is very likely > that they will be better equipped to deal with any concievable > "damage" than we are today. So yes, I think a harm applied in 20800 > should be weighted less than one applied in 2080.
I do not think that is obvious, and that is yet another topic worthy of note. It appears to me that our capacity to alter our environment in a premeditated and consistent way peaked about two generations ago, the problems not being technical in a coinventional sense. Rather, the technologies for manipulating opinion have advanced dramatically under tyhe influence of broadcasting and information gathering technologies. Accordingly, the relative strength of private interests over public interests has increased dramatically, and sports stadiums get built while bridges fall down. The rest of your points are well taken, but I carefully factored them, as well as the first point, out of my question as originally posed. The discount rate infers that the value of an absolutely certain given outcome be it positive or negative in the distant future is far less than the value of the identical event in the near future. I understand more or less how this emerges from economic logic, and I question it on moral grounds. My question pertains exactly to equally certain events at different times in the future. This is not an altogether frivolous thought experiment. It appears likely that we are in fact buying enormous and unavoidable climate changes thousands of years into the future, when the contemporary heat pulse propagates down to the mid-ocean and cause a carbon release comparable to the direct anthropogenic one. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004GC000854.shtml mt --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
