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I'm saying there is nothing that would in fact have been done better by premature worry about global warming. If your argument is that any sequence of actions w
by rwallace 12y ago
I'm saying there is nothing that would in fact have been done better by premature worry about global warming. If your argument is that any sequence of actions will be less than optimal - compared to, say, the actions that could have been carried out by a hypothetical omniscient entity of infinite wisdom and benevolence - then that is certainly true but irrelevant. But the previous argument was that convincing actual humans in the nineteenth century to start worrying about global warming would have been net beneficial, and I'm pointing out it would have been disastrous.
And that, mind you, is still with the anachronistic application of 21st-century knowledge to the matter. If people in the 19th century had actually tried to figure out what they should be worrying about if they were going to worry two centuries prematurely, they would likely have come up with something completely different.