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Ecologic
the green hornet
Redemption & Salvation through Recycling |
In many ways, we are a sad species. We have the distinct disadvantage of recognizing
our own mortality but we manage this burden and try to figure things out the best that we
can. Somewhere, someone said something to the effect of ‘sure the cat seems content,
what does a cat know of death’? Well maybe a cat knows everything about death and
being waited on hand and foot by his human subjects is the best way to deal with it.
Beyond the cat, we humans cope differently; we are incessantly striving to attach
meaning to our lives and mostly, the more noble the cause, the better. Some of us find a
meaning to our lives on the heels of a significant life event, such as Al Gore. In Al
Gore’s books ‘Earth in the Balance’ and ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Al recounts the
horrible accident his son was in and how the incident took him on a journey of selfdiscovery
ultimately leading him to his passion for the environment.
Although Al Gore didn’t invent the environmental movement, he certainly gave some
serious legs to it. Al’s energy and zeal for his cause is certainly contagious and if nothing
else, he has been consistent and relentless with his message regarding the perceived
dangers of global warming/climate change. As mentioned in the past, the movement has
taken on religious proportions. To some extent, environmental causes seem to have
supplanted the role of traditional religions to the point where the movement can serve the
purpose of personal salvation and redemption for being human.
Establishing defenses and providing explanations for the climate change cause, as with
the actions of our deities, is not so hard; elaborate mechanisms can be construed that will
validate most anything. Consequently, right, wrong or indifferent, global warming will
be with us forever because it can’t be disproven – we have no control planet in this
experiment. If the theory is elaborate enough, you can explain nearly everything in terms
of global warming.
There once was a guy named Ptolemy who had developed an extremely complicated
system that explained how all of the heavenly bodies revolved around the earth through a
device he made up called an epicycle. When Ptolemy encountered conflicts with his
theory, he just applied more epicycles – and it worked - it was unduly complex and it was
wrong, but the system did its job in explaining how the sun and all the planets orbited the
earth. This geocentric view of the universe was conventional wisdom for nearly 1,500
years and since the dogma of the early church pushed this, it was taken on faith or you
risked being burned at the stake.
Something that I suspect is not widely known is the fact that our current scientific method
suffers from a simple logical fallacy known as ‘affirming the consequent’ or ‘affirming
the antecedent’. Basically, what this represents is the following:
Suppose that – if A is true, then B is true
But if B is true, it doesn’t necessarily follow that A is true;
though this is how our current scientific method is set-up
To apply this reasoning to the scientific method, your hypothesis would be ‘A’ and the
experiment(s) would be ‘B’ – the fallacy is, just because your experiment supports your
hypothesis, it is not absolute that your hypothesis is true because your experiment
actually just infers that your hypothesis is correct, which would set you up for a cause
and effect error. A practical example would be; |
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Observation: a member of another tribe died a horrible death and we had a good
harvest that year.
Hypothesis: if I were to remove the heart from a member of this neighboring
tribe, thereby initiating the horrible death, we will have a good harvest this year.
Experiment: I remove the heart from the poor soul and we have a good harvest
Conclusion: I remove the heart, we have a good harvest and so my hypothesis is
supported |
Thus was born the modern scientific method and the Aztec form of human sacrifice.
Apparently, the subject masses bought off on this because human sacrifices abounded;
never mind that the good harvesting most likely had nothing to do with their horrifying
little rituals – see ‘B’ didn’t make ‘A’ true; it probably had more to do with typical
weather patterns and the abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere spewing from vacationing
Incas and their RVs.
This certainly doesn’t invalidate the modern scientific method and it is assumed that
scientists are aware of this quandary and work really hard to overcome it through the
rigors of repeated experiments approached from different angles. But it does throw up a
cautionary flag when it comes to taking everything ‘scientific’ on faith.
An acquaintance of mine is in medical school and he had mentioned to me once that one
of his instructors admitted at the beginning of course that 30% of what he would be
teaching the class would be wrong, not that the class had to figure out which 70% to
believe – but the point was that he would be teaching the class things that seem true today
but that would be contradicted tomorrow and actually he didn’t know which 30% it was –
so it’s important to be open to new information because new inroads are constantly being
made – it’s actually kind of exciting.
There was a recent incident at the University of East Anglia, which is a repository for
climate data and home to an international Climate Research Unit (CRU). The
organizations’ email server was hacked and some seemingly unsettling emails were
publicized. Most of the emails could be dismissed as benign but others did suggest that
there is an oppressive tone amongst persons in this group regarding openness to new or
alternate viewpoints that stray from the conventional ‘climate change’ wisdom. This is
not a good thing and could undermine the honest straightforward efforts of this scientific
community at large.
So in conclusion, it’s important to be receptive to new discoveries even if the meaning
conflicts with notions that you hold sacrosanct. It becomes increasingly difficult to be
objective if you are blinded by faith alone and you are in constant defense of your world
view. It is tempting to invoke our own epicycles in order to hold conflicting information
at bay and to salvage our own personal version of world order. So let’s not do that and
instead we’d better do the right thing and keep recycling, you know, if you want to hold
onto your heart. |
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