Reply To: Translation to Portuguese language

[Rezwan]

Phil’s Dad wrote: We actually want to be responsible for this mess. It makes us feel significant. It also explains why people get so upset if their little bit of control is threatened by alternative explanations.

That’s one way to look at it. Another is to say we’re problem solvers. Tamers. We’ll stop at nothing to shape this world into something comfortable for us.

I think it’s perjorative to call the Global warming crowd “environmentalists”, because an environmentalist might have said, let the C02 go crazy and throw us all into chaos, and let the next order emerge from the chaos.

The global warming crowd should actually be called “Global Air Conditionalists”. Because they are actually trying to have a climate controlled earth, trying to regulate C02 to keep it within a certain range that we happen to be comfortable at right now. (And this seems natural enough. Every creature tries to shape its environment. Fir trees spitting toxins into the dirt to keep other trees off, or, more to the metaphor, Redwood forests regulating temperature.)

Air conditioning the earth is a pretty ambitious activity.

Meanwhile, what do the denialists actually want? I suppose as a counterpoint to your statement above, Denialists DON’T want to feel responsible. They DO want to feel insignificant. And they get upset when…their little bit of helplessness is threatened by alternative explanations?

No, that can’t be it. Well, they don’t want the guilt associated with the responsibility (rather than seeing it as control). And the often state they want to prevent the expenditure of a lot of human resources to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.

I don’t know if you see the irony here.

The global air conditionalists wanted to be responsible for something they thought was at least manageable. At least they have confidence in our air conditioning abilities. But this all hinged on it being a C02 problem, which is easy to solve (once you allegedly arrest and murder all the denialists in the totalitarian regime that you establish).

This cosmic ray thing will be a bit tougher to solve.

Speaking of hooks and lines, do you see the can of worms this opens? Most of humanity was in happy denial of the larger, uncontrollable issues. But by trying to calm global warming c02 fears, this just creates newer, more dramatic and less controllable fears.

Just because they’re more dramatic and less controllable, doesn’t mean air conditionalists won’t try to control them. It will just cost a lot more.

Well, really, time to stockpile the AK47s and MREs. Things could get ugly at some random date that we have no idea about.

Public relations nightmare.