re: Feb 14 2009 Science News - editor’s comment
Editor Tom Siegfried’s comment emphasizes that the main subject of science is understanding a world of change, but one might not know that from asking scientists. Scientists have built their whole culture around finding fixed rules for things. We call it “determinism” and the whole community is so […]
To GreenLeap 2/10/09, edited response to Glenn Albrecht saying “I am genuinely surprised that the global financial system has failed before ecological systems.” in his blog post: http://ethicsclimate.blogspot.com/2009/02/ethics-of-nation-building.html
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Glen,
Yes indeed. If surprising, yes, but it’s also quite fortunate that the global financial system failed BEFORE the ecological systems… That gives us a little time to […]
posted to Climate Concern Group 1/28/09, about the urgency.
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You have to laugh about the long range predictions for the environment, though. That ocean levels would continue to rise for 1000+ years even if CO2 increases are halted immediately, with the curve having a different slope depending on how soon, has been in all the literature, […]
Stan,
Phil –
-snip-
S: Overall, my point is that nature’s workings are mysterious, and we (think we) understand (just a small portion of) them by way of our discourses.
[ph] Yes, and the portion we can codify in language and write in terms that are culturally meaningful to us and relevant to scientific methods is the useful knowledge […]
I think ‘magical thinking’ is apt for what brought down our financial system, but it’s a view from hindsight, not foresight, and altogether too imprecise. I wrote my first comprehensive paper on growth induced collapse 30 years to the day before the Fed called this one to a halt.
The problem now as seen from foresight […]
Alex,
Actually, it would seem to increase energy use to save energy. The reason is what you might call the “bottleneck principle”. If you remove bottlenecks it increases the flow. The high value we put on some efficiencies is that they are bottlenecks that unleash the use of other resources when made less of a constraint. […]
Posted to COTE Forum 1/27/07
Jodi,
Well, not compounding your returns has the same sort of Catch 22 that doing great sustainable design and having the profits go to pumping up the world’s appetites does. You need to build a broader reason fordoing the right thing. For sustainable design we definitely do still need to learn how […]
9/6/06
Eric & all, A few days ago I asked: Can anyone offer other examples of growth systems that get into trouble from being unable to control their own limits? People don’t seem to understand how the best of intentions lead human systems to overshoot, so looking at natural ones might help us understand the problem. […]