TikToker under name “nuancehoe”. In our conversation we delve into Prophets, Evolution, the argument against there being free will, and if time we hope to delve into dogma as debated by Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson
Resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u45SP7Xv_oU
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Good show! We have to be so aware of dogma! It’s everywhere. I appreciated the thoughts on free will. Carahs’ and Bills’ positions which mirror that of Sam Harris’ have validity but are at best hypotheses at this point, just as are those positions of those who claim the existence of free will. By the way, did Jordan Petersen offer a rebuttal? If he did, why didn’t we hear it on the program? To withhold it would seem to indicate a bias.
Kudos also for their hat tips to environmental issues. Regrettably, one of the great dogmas alive and kicking today is climate alarmism, which is linked to radical environmentalism, which has its roots in legitimate environmentalism, but represents the classic bastardization of a benevolent and noble concern or cause.
Climate alarmism is a classic dogma. Those who’ve embraced it similar to TBM’s pay no attention to any empirical data that eases or challenges the hysterical narrative. Like most issues of our time, the proper care of the earth and its population is extremely complicated. Data indicate that many of the clamored for and demanded curative tactics will likely be far worse than the disease.
I get a kick out of people who luckily break free of Mormonism only to fall prey to countless other dogmas or forms of fundamentalist religiosity such as post modernism, radical climate alarmism, etc. which employ the exact same tactics as Mormonism to shepherd their flocks.
Maybe it’s just good ol human nature. After all we, none of us have any say in what we think or do, anyway right? Hopefully, once a dupe, not always a dupe.
Sorry Bob I have to fundamentally disagree. What you call “Climate Alarmism” is really just want scientists have been trying to tell us for decades, based on research that goes back centuries. Our modern understanding of global warming and anthropogenic climate change came to dominate climate science the same way evolution came to dominate biology; by earning its place in the scientific literature through successfully explaining things we can observe, and proving itself in the face of entrenched skepticism.
There are plenty of websites, books, videos, etc. that can give you a better run-down of the history of global warming than I can. Suffice it to say that once we incorporated the basic physics of the Greenhouse Effect into our understanding of the climate system and examined trends in measurement over time, we’ve been forced to conclude that human activities are causing a major disruption that has big implications for everything we do that takes place in “a climate,” which is basically everything.
Much of the inhabited world was in a deep freeze around 25,000 years ago, which then gradually thawed out. For the last 10,000 years or so the planet’s climate, on average, had been in a relatively stable and comfortable state. This allowed us to do things like develop agriculture and settled societies, invent writing, civilization, and all that stuff we take for granted as the bedrock that enables modern living.
As a quick rundown, the “Greenhouse Effect” is why the Earth is nice and comfortable, whereas the Moon alternates between a blazing hellscape and a deep freeze in light and dark, respectively. Without the Greenhouse Effect, Earth’s oceans would be solid blocks of ice right down to the bottom because we’re far enough away from the Sun that we “shouldn’t” have liquid water, except that our atmosphere traps and redistributes heat around the planet. Without that atmosphere, it might as well be the surface of the Moon.
One of the more powerful Greenhouse Effect gases is CO2. There used to be a whole lot more of this in the atmosphere and the planet used to be hotter than it is today. But plants, rocks, and other things draw CO2 out of the atmosphere and then get buried underground. This takes some CO2 out of the air over long periods of time. It became trapped in geological lockboxes as things like carbonate minerals (rocks) or fossil fuels (hydrocarbons).
A couple of centuries ago, we realized we could get a lot of energy out of fossil fuels and started digging them up and burning them to power the eventual Industrial Revolution. In the process, we released a lot of CO2 that had been formerly locked up underground and pumped it back out into the atmosphere, where it contributes to the Greenhouse Effect. It makes sense, right? More Greenhouse Gases means a stronger Greenhouse Effect.
Now, because humans are pumping steroids into the planet’s Greenhouse Effect by churning out billions of tons of fossil Greenhouse Gases, that climate stability of the last ~10k years is disappearing. It’s being rapidly displaced by a new climate regime, driven by basic physics. The process is highly disruptive and the endpoint uncertain; how dramatic the changes are depend on what actions we take today. But, based on our best understanding of the physics of the climate, the change could be as great in magnitude as the difference between the deepest freeze of the “ice age” or Last Glacial Maximum (when the future site of Chicago was buried underneath a mile-thick crust of ice) and what the climate was like when RFM was born. The difference in global temperatures between sub-glacial Chicago and the Chicago that build the IBM Building is only one of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius.
And instead of taking place over many thousands of years, this could play out over less than a century. That’s obviously not going to be a fun ride for the Earth’s ecosystems, including the natural ones we rely on (ocean fisheries, for example) as well as artificial ones we’ve created (industrial-scale agriculture that keeps food affordable and plentiful year-round).
You don’t have to take my word for it, but you would do well to heed the word of the world’s experts rather than dismiss it as some sort of political fad. The folks at NASA make a pretty compelling case. They keep a website where you can see the data they collect on how warm the planet’s getting.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
You can even get the raw data and example code from them if you don’t trust their analysis, or find copies of the scientific papers they publish that describe how they do their work. Rather than keeping things secret and hidden, like the Mormon Church’s leadership, they operate in the open and anyone can scrutinize their work, looking for mistakes. If you’re handy with data analysis and coding, joint the ranks of those who have taken a crack at second-guessing them with your own methods!