Mirkwood

Google offers a cool Earth Day logo on their website:

… and sets alarm bells ringing in the conservative blogosphere, which duly brings up Al Gore and then brings him down. I am no fan of Mr. Gore, or any political party for that matter, but there is little that is scientifically wrong about An Inconvenient Truth. It is a travesty that any discussion on global warming (charmingly euphemized as global climate change) inevitably begins with a political bias, when it should remain strictly a scientific issue. I participated in a passionate, and occasionally impolite debate about global warming on a public message board recently, and it was interesting to see that the people who do not accept that anthropogenic emissions affect global warming were the same people who opposed stricter gun control after the Virginia Tech massacre.

My (perhaps naive) view is this: A discussion on global warming will have an impact on political decision-making, but it ought not to begin with a political spin designed to impact the decision. Empirical observations, provided that they are honestly obtained and thoroughly validated, express the state of the world as it is, and do not admit subjective points of view. If a glacier recedes by a certain amount every year, then its recession is independent of the political slant of the observer and his funding agency, and there is no point in denying that it is happening. The objective of the global warming debate ought to be about softening man’s ecological footprint on the only planet in the observable universe that is known to support life. Given what could be at stake, it is better to err on the side of caution. Even if everyone does not agree that the current trend of elevated temperatures is more serious than a merely cyclic phenomenon of global warming/cooling, even if everyone does not agree that said trend is due to human activity, a little paranoia wouldn’t go astray.

If politics is to become scientific, and if the event is not to be constantly surprising, it is imperative that our political thinking should penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action. What is the influence of hunger upon slogans? How does their effectiveness fluctuate with the number of calories in your diet? If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote? - Bertrand Russell, Nobel Lecture 1950.

I return to this quote often when faced with choosing one of two alternatives, both of which, for the moment, appear unconvincing. Russell said this while talking about “What Desires are Politically Important”, but even if the quote is taken out of context, it is clear that he attributed great importance to the notion of degree.

Continue reading ‘Appreciating degree in a polarized world’