Live Earth 7/7/07 gentlemen start your tivo

Hey, Eugenics is not a fact; it is a policy based on a fact about which all agree: selective breeding changes(and can thus "improve" characteristics of populations. But it's immoral in a big way as done on humans.

The scientific community is overwhelmingly in agreement about global warming as a great threat to the stability of our habitat. That doesn't mean they have solutions. But one good shot at a solution is to stop doing what apparently causes the phenomenon that seems so dangerous. I mean, duh.

To say Al Gore is on about this because he's bored, and to act like that discredits what he says, is a stupendously cynical ad hominem. Al Gore didn't make up the evidence, nor did the huge group of internationally prominent scientists who agreed unanimously that global warming is a fact and a scary one about which we should do something.

Besides, if the question is whose motives in characterizing the evidence and assessing the risk are more suspect, the answer is completely clear: big industry, oil, and the politicians they keep in office (and in their pockets), as well as the rich whose rich lives these make possible. Not Al Gore and a bunch of lab guys.

Oh also, the fact that it is hard to predict the weather 7 days in advance is NO INDICATION you can't predict long term trends. Lots of systems, maybe most, are just like that. The problem with the weather is that we happen to care a lot about a temporal range of it within which it is seems pretty stochastic.

It's ime to work on real solutions instead of just denying the problem. One preliminary step is getting out from under the influence of people in power (real or nominal political) who deny the problem.

Danlib1,

You are confused, making a simple category mistake. The relevant distinction is not between theory and fact, but between truth evaluable a proposition and a policy. Eugenics is a policy, like integration and space exploration. Global warming is a proposition: that the Earth is warming at a potentially dangerous rate due to human caused factors like dramatically increased carbon emissions. That claim may be true or false. Eugeneics is neither true nor false; it is either going on or not.

There is no theory/fact dichotomy. It may be your theories that there are three beers in your fridge and Oswald acted alone. Either may be true, either may be false. If they are true, they are facts, despite being theories. Einstein's special relativity theory is a theory, which may be true, and state facts. The theory of evolution is also a theory, and damn near every working biological scientist holds it. "Creationism" is also a theory, which almost no biologists respected outside of religious communitiies accepts. They are both theories. At most one states a fact. But it is no criticism of a claim to call it a theory, since even the best, most confirmed, useful, universally accepted theories are still theories --which may or may not be facts.

Global warming is either a fact or not, but it is a very widely held theory by independent and unbiased -- i.e., not in oil companies pockets-- scientists. But it is certainly a theory. Eugenics is noit a theory or a fact, and it is not anymore much practiced by humans on humans.

Zilla-- I am no expert on whether Glogal warming is actually occuring and alarming and all that. Indeed, I've been skeptical for a long time. But the evidence based on deep core ice samples from Antarctica Gore presents in the first half hour of his documentary is pretty compelling, going back way longer than the whole series of relative local coolings and warmings that have occurred since Homo Sapiens first appeared. If his evidence is at all good, whether or not we are causing these changes, we have never been around for anything like them. It has been consistent through all of this time that those making profits never accepted claims that they were doing so at the cost of the general good.

The resonance"deniers" makes with holocaust discourse is not unintentional; the cases are not identical, but that doesn't mean the resonances shouldn't be pointed up. Al Goreis no socialist(at least not in any sense in which a vast majority of Americans are not). And "socialist" is no epithetor anything like a univocal "cause". It represents a wide range of policy options recognizing the fact that private ownership of the means of productiion is not in all cases conducive to the public weal or justice. Free market uber alles is an unsubtle "doctrine", dead everywhere, and understandably, its advocates are defensive.

I wrote a careful reply to this site in response to Danlib1 this AM, but, for whatever reason, it didn't make it to posting. Whatever. Suffice it to say, theories can be facts, Global warming=doubting is not the same as holocaust-denying, and only time will tell if those who doubt globa, warming are actually doing as much of a dusservice as those who doubted reports of atrocities coming out of Nazi held land in 1943.