4 ms·

My first thought upon seeing the title to the post: Q: What's the difference between Global Warming and Clojure? A: Clojure is real.

by tjic 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago
By implication you're saying global warming is not real, and that's not true, global warming is real. The questions center around how much of it is due to our influence and if we are capable of doing something about it.
- jpwagner 17y ago
  "global warming" is a phrase that has taken on a larger meaning than just increasing-average-temperature. his joke is obviously referring to the movement (he did capitalize.)
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    That's too subtle for me to catch, sorry. A capital more or less does not give a sentence a different meaning. Please keep in mind that not everybody reading this is of English native extraction and such subtleties are easily overlooked.
- fleitz 17y ago
  There is also the question of whether the net effect of the warming is a negative economic impact, and if so if "fixing" it is a greater cost to the economy than not fixing it.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    That's very true. It may very well have a net positive economical effect. But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true. Economic advantages are not all there is to look after, long term effects are important, and the absolute effect on economies is also important. In other words if our economy goes up because of doing something and some poor country loses all they've got then you could argue the net effect is positive because they didn't have much to begin with. But that's definitely not how the world should work. So we need to look past purely economic motives and at humanity (and to some extent the biosphere) as a whole. Beancounters are bad stewards of ecologies.
    - jacoblyles 17y ago
      >"But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true." I doubt that any serious environmental economist thinks this way. Economists do include non-monetary factors in cost/benefit analsyes, and the cost of environmental degradation which does NOT show up on profit/loss statements is one of the oldest topics in the field. Dismissing the entire discipline of environmental economics as the work of "bean counters" is a really bad rhetorical start for any serious discussion of ecological policy, though unfortunately it happens often among the masses on internet message boards. I am really disappointed to see that these caricatures abound.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        There are many examples of very precious resources being squandered because of profit motives, our stewardship of the planet could be much better, I doubt it could be much worse. In less than 300 years, basically since the time that we started to industrialize we have remade face of the planet. Point me to all those efforts at sustained management that ought to be a counterexample to those examples of wanton destruction of habitats and ecosystems for profit. Everywhere that money is brought in to the equation sooner or later the ecology will have to suffer. Running an ecology as a business is simply not an option. I know it has been tried many times and I know that there are plenty of people that probably have the best interest of their environment at heart, but from what I've seen to date the best thing we have done is to simply not mess with a large enough area and hope that it will recover. Any attempt at large scale intervention, even from a positive viewpoint has sooner or later become a game of seeing how to use that resource within the letter of the law for maximum profit. Rainforests, the Canadian forest management, wildlife preserves, the artic and the oceans. The list really is endless. Calling the people in charge bean counters is doing them a service, it means they're not actively involved in destruction on a planetwide scale that they are aware of. I even leave open room for 'best intentions', but that doesn't mean their effects are positve. Not by a long shot. Right now those places that are doing best in terms of species diversity and other parameters indicating relatively healthy ecosystems are those that we haven't gotten around to yet and those that we have utterly abandoned. Environmental economics is a complete contradiction, you can not manage a tract of rainforest or a volume of ocean in a way that is at the same time good for the environment and ecologically sound. We have basically taken out an environmental mortgage and have spent that mortgage on stuff that harms the environment, it will be a long long time before we are in a position to pay it back. I realize this is not a happy picture, but sometimes it is better to open your eyes to what's really going on than to put on your rosy sunglasses and to hope that it will all go away. There are lots of very uncomfortable conclusions that we may one day have to draw, there is a small chance that we will be in a position to guide those decisions if we start acting long enough in advance.
  - skorgu 17y ago
    Hopefully one would also weigh moral costs in some way. As FiveThirtyEight[1] demonstrates trivial changes to global economies can mask tremendous changes to human populations. [1] http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost-half-planet-for.html http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost...

My first thought upon seeing the title to the post: Q: What's the difference between Global Warming and Clojure? A: Clojure is real.

by tjic 17y ago

My first thought upon seeing the title to the post: Q: What's the difference between Global Warming and Clojure? A: Clojure is real.

jacquesm 17y ago

By implication you're saying global warming is not real, and that's not true, global warming is real. The questions center around how much of it is due to our influence and if we are capable of doing something about it.

jpwagner 17y ago
"global warming" is a phrase that has taken on a larger meaning than just increasing-average-temperature. his joke is obviously referring to the movement (he did capitalize.)
- jacquesm 17y ago
  That's too subtle for me to catch, sorry. A capital more or less does not give a sentence a different meaning. Please keep in mind that not everybody reading this is of English native extraction and such subtleties are easily overlooked.
fleitz 17y ago
There is also the question of whether the net effect of the warming is a negative economic impact, and if so if "fixing" it is a greater cost to the economy than not fixing it.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  That's very true. It may very well have a net positive economical effect. But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true. Economic advantages are not all there is to look after, long term effects are important, and the absolute effect on economies is also important. In other words if our economy goes up because of doing something and some poor country loses all they've got then you could argue the net effect is positive because they didn't have much to begin with. But that's definitely not how the world should work. So we need to look past purely economic motives and at humanity (and to some extent the biosphere) as a whole. Beancounters are bad stewards of ecologies.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    >"But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true." I doubt that any serious environmental economist thinks this way. Economists do include non-monetary factors in cost/benefit analsyes, and the cost of environmental degradation which does NOT show up on profit/loss statements is one of the oldest topics in the field. Dismissing the entire discipline of environmental economics as the work of "bean counters" is a really bad rhetorical start for any serious discussion of ecological policy, though unfortunately it happens often among the masses on internet message boards. I am really disappointed to see that these caricatures abound.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      There are many examples of very precious resources being squandered because of profit motives, our stewardship of the planet could be much better, I doubt it could be much worse. In less than 300 years, basically since the time that we started to industrialize we have remade face of the planet. Point me to all those efforts at sustained management that ought to be a counterexample to those examples of wanton destruction of habitats and ecosystems for profit. Everywhere that money is brought in to the equation sooner or later the ecology will have to suffer. Running an ecology as a business is simply not an option. I know it has been tried many times and I know that there are plenty of people that probably have the best interest of their environment at heart, but from what I've seen to date the best thing we have done is to simply not mess with a large enough area and hope that it will recover. Any attempt at large scale intervention, even from a positive viewpoint has sooner or later become a game of seeing how to use that resource within the letter of the law for maximum profit. Rainforests, the Canadian forest management, wildlife preserves, the artic and the oceans. The list really is endless. Calling the people in charge bean counters is doing them a service, it means they're not actively involved in destruction on a planetwide scale that they are aware of. I even leave open room for 'best intentions', but that doesn't mean their effects are positve. Not by a long shot. Right now those places that are doing best in terms of species diversity and other parameters indicating relatively healthy ecosystems are those that we haven't gotten around to yet and those that we have utterly abandoned. Environmental economics is a complete contradiction, you can not manage a tract of rainforest or a volume of ocean in a way that is at the same time good for the environment and ecologically sound. We have basically taken out an environmental mortgage and have spent that mortgage on stuff that harms the environment, it will be a long long time before we are in a position to pay it back. I realize this is not a happy picture, but sometimes it is better to open your eyes to what's really going on than to put on your rosy sunglasses and to hope that it will all go away. There are lots of very uncomfortable conclusions that we may one day have to draw, there is a small chance that we will be in a position to guide those decisions if we start acting long enough in advance.
- skorgu 17y ago
  Hopefully one would also weigh moral costs in some way. As FiveThirtyEight[1] demonstrates trivial changes to global economies can mask tremendous changes to human populations. [1] http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost-half-planet-for.html http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost...