Dewey Benson:
There's crucial info in that story. How about you tell me what specific issue you have with what aspect of my on the spot “presentation”?
This interaction wasn't meant as a stand-alone argument – even the child in question knew that. All I wanted to do was point out that at his young age, this child had already set a course for himself without questioning the arguments offered to him by people who should be protecting him from the arbitrary.
BTW: As I've posted elsewhere, no one has yet to replicate a fluid whose thermodynamics are affected by as tiny a component as CO2 is in the atmosphere – irrespective of that tiny component's thermal proerties.
It's a shame that all you do is hit and run – you make it easy to assume that this is all your capable of.
As I wrote in the post you quote but obviously won't spend time on, the burden of proof is on the Greens. I also wrote down what I'd consider a time-worthy argument – in form if not in substance.
Given how much money and mind-hours have been spent on this issue, to say nothing of how many careers and teaching institutions have been adversely affected buy this BS, you'd think there be at least the beginnings of an argument that meets my commonly accepted standards.
Why would it be that all these people can site is consensus?
(As one observant mind put it recently: scientific consensus is what you get when you don't have scientific fact.)
Even if the data you site shows a warming trend in that part of the world, what would that prove Re, 1) the planet warming up, 2) that this warming is bad, 3) that there's anything man can do about it, 4) that man's effrots at improving his life are responsible for it, 5) that people alive today should squander their standard of living in the name of what they owe to those of five, ten, fifteen generations from now?
Who contradicted this?
I will say that the Greens' arguments are so off the wall that one need not have a mastery of scientific method to, with some confidence, dismiss their claims until the Greens, on the affirmative on their non-issue, come up with a better argument -- or at least and argument
If this were true, how would you know it's true, as the statement is self-refuting? Or are you, like so many on the Plato/Augustine/Kant axis declaring yourself to have some sort of special, supernatural ability, or access to a being with such powers?
Man has freewill. One of the options his freewill imposes on him is to think or not think. The existence of that option, however, does not make error his natural state.
Again, if this were true, how would you know it's true?
Again, if this were an actual attribute of the human experience, how would you be able to ID this and declare it objectively true?
As a crucial aside, I point out that emotions are directly linked to thinking. The field of psychology, showing signs of recuperating form its nihilist orgies of the 20th Century, is starting to return to this incredibly obvious view.
Emotions are the way Man experiences every thought, standard, and method of integrating these “things,” that he has consciously accepted as true at one point. The reason emotions need to be checked is because we can, unwillingly, integrate erroneous ideas into our subconscious.
But how does a being that isn't rational and/or always rationalizing, come up with and use a methodology that corrects these inherent traits?
The fact is that all the Scientific Method can do is provide reliable data in a certain context.
What that data means, how it's to be integrated with other data, contexts and arguments, etc., is the realm of Logic. Hate to tell you, but Logic, qua Logic, has been out of fashion for the better part of a century's worth of western history.
It is absent in the current culture, in academia, in the theoretical sciences, and, more and more, in the applied sciences. (Note the glee with which “1+1=2” has been challenged on this board by an practicing chemist in order to leave room for a [conveniently] customized definition of “faith.”.)
Finally, this current anti-Reason mindset the West has embraced, brought to us by a philosopher who was eager to make room for religion (Kant), is not a human characteristic. It is simply one of the options his freewill affords him.
This perspective, that man is inherently flawed, has been with us for some time. Original Sin is one example; Eastern traditions another; Freud declaring Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest man ever, to be depraved because of this greatness, is The example of how this mindset defines the 20th Century.
If Man were depraved, the Ancient World, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the USA, the rise in everyone's standard of living for the better part of a century, indeed, all things that are the glory of mankind, could never come about. Further, you couldn't hold your viewpoint, as declaring Man incapable of Reason refutes all statements, including the statement that man can know nothing.
I say, enough with this barbaric tradition and the Sky Is Falling mindset it triggers. Let the Greens, the decedents of a long
line of Man and Life hatters, prove their point by the simple, millennia old standards of what constitutes proof.
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