Even while admitting the obvious hubris of these politicians, it is worth mentioning the possibility that nobody may be qualified to accurately model the effects of climate change. As you point out, extrapolation from a limited dataset is an exceptionally difficult affair, particularly when applied to study of an uncontrolled system such as the Earth’s climate. Given this confound, it becomes an exceptionally difficult situation when what amounts to preliminary scientific data is used in the political sphere. This present example is really just the converse of this problem, where politicians are actively attempting to step into the scientific sphere. Needless to say, neither of these actions bode well for the future of climate change research and policy.

That aside, I am personally pretty skeptical of prognostication in general (even when the prognosticators have very fancy instruments and models). In this case, I think it’s worth taking a fairly moderate perspective: which is that whether or not the current predictions are right, I pretty much like how the Earth is right now, and I don’t like fossil fuels enough to risk screwing everything up. Why mess around with something so good just so we can drive fast cars and planes, and power a bunch of fancy gadgets which are really just good for keeping us entertained 24/7 and making better and better models to predict what the future will look like?

I like to keep in mind that technological progress is not always inherently better than regress. And by this I mean technology cannot be said to be a good in and of itself. The extent to which individuals have enjoyed a good quality of life has waxed and waned throughout human history, and while this tends to be correlated with political, social and technological advance (e.g. promotion of political and social freedoms, increased availability of technology), this does not imply that more technology is necessarily better. There are technologies which are good, those which are lousy and those which are frankly harmful–and the unfortunate problem of us humans is that we often aren’t very good at making this distinction. If there is one potentially promising outcome which may arise from the current state of apocalypticism about climate change, it is that it will force us to make a reckoning about which technologies we really cannot do without. And if we’re lucky, we may just make those truly useful technologies a little bit more efficient.

~neuroautomaton.com

Can you give an example of what you mean? I’m still confused….

I don’t understand this Q, tbh. My point is that any agent that’s oppressive or tyrannical ought to be called to account. Why would I care who wins the title as the most oppresive?

“The ideas of tyranny can be easily extrapolated and employed by both groups, governments and individuals, but it is the motivation behind tyrannical acts that we must be always cautious of. ”

Why would I care about the motivation? Tyranny is wrong – I don’t really care what drives them.

An imaginary number is a number whose square is less than or equal to zero …

Um, Siggyboss, that would make zero an imaginary number. Technically I suppose one could make that argument since 0i = 0, but it’s a very odd thought.