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• Sunday, November 2, 2008 09:43 PM

  @bigguns

  That wasn't your impression of the Beagle Of Doom, is it?

  I can't help but scratch my head over people who deride the faith-based spritual idealism of others- which is inherently ultimately an individual and subjective decision affecting personal consciousness, a realm where people ought to be allowed a wide latitude in their own ideas- while professing their own dire certainties about future prospects for the planet, and covering it with a gloss of "scientific objectivity."

  I'm particularly bemused when the certainties take the form of pessimistic nihilism. Great...you're a rational humanist materialist; concommitantly, humanity is all doomed, a pox on the planet.

  Mind you, I'm fully on board with the technological mission to supercede the petroleum economy, for a wide variety of sound reasons that don't require speculations.

  But human-caused global warming cannot be said to be "scientifically proven." We're still in the midst of the "experiment", after all. Neither can the catastrophic consequences that being forecast be said to be inevitabilities.

  If you view those consequences as a certainty- well, as yet, you're simply entering another belief system.

  Most of the scientists warning about global warming parse their findings as probabilities, based on empirical modeling that's necessarily incomplete.

  Why not entertain some phenomenological agnosticism? What's the rush?

  —cabdriver Read cabdriver's other letters
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