Frission said:
We're going into the realm of politics here, but I suppose that the catastrophic scenarios were needed to actually get action. I am not familiar with the subject of activism. I know that it's difficult to get credence in a subject which is rife with misinformation because of special interests, especially on such a difficult subject.
The way all this is handled in the political realm is a whole other issue that I don't particularly care to get into, and it's not important to my point - I'm keeping things on the level of individual or mass sentiments with regard to the potential consequences (i.e. reactions of individuals instilling fear or morally guilting others into some kind of ideologically construed action, or perhaps being fearful or feeling the weight of guilt themselves). I know this has immediate consequences for politics, but the moral/ethical issue is my main concern.
I would much prefer that we talked about the danger of ecosystem collapse such as the disappearance of coral reefs, or the danger of perturbation in agriculture, or even the political instability from possible droughts due to less wind going to and from the equator and poles (since winds are to simplify are a way to make up the temperature difference between the two areas). Yet gigantic tsunamis and hurricanes seem to have captured the attention. I would again shift the blame on those who are responsible for creating this image of climate change, since professors and lectures on this subject have focused on changes due to climate change that are straight out of an apocalypse movie.
You know, a large part of the reason I responded to this thread was because the OP chose the term 'global warming' rather than 'climate change'; the former has exactly the connotations of fear that are really at issue when one asks the thread title question. If this thread were going instead to focus on an academic discussion of the interrelations of various natural systems and qualified speculation about their effects, there'd be no room for my ethical criticism.
I don't understand the last sentence of science predicting that we would destroy ourselves. I never saw that attitude. In fact there's actually alot of optimism involved in the process of discovery, from my experience. I would yet again blame popular depictions of science or science philosophers (not to insult them, since it is an important role).
Media can make many claims on science, precisely because there's an ignorance of the scientific process.
We have made a distinction earlier that there's a difference between science and science philosophy right? I think that's where there is a disagreement. While some scientists may espouse a view of existence, death and the universe that may be disagreeable, it does not strictly relate to the process of science aka the scientific method and such.
Herein lies what appears to be one of the greater misunderstandings that most people taking issue with me in this thread have with my view - I must have been unclear. I do not think that the actual process of science creates this problematic metaphysical picture of existence; it only arises when a) The epistemic gap between scientific theory, no matter how well evidenced, and 'fact' or 'truth' is not properly respected, particularly when the latter implies broad metaphysical conclusions from experimentation that never had anything to do with metaphysics (that is, any scientific experimentation). and/or b) People understand Science as not only an authority on Truth but THE authority. Science is not the problem, *Scientism* (a philosophical position) is.
Of course, I did say that the scientific method itself implicitly contains certain metaphysical assumptions - this is not to say that every scientist has consciously chosen these for himself, or that a responsible scientist (backed by responsible reporting of results) would not be able to reasonably qualify his findings when pressed by bracketing these assumptions. That is to say, he can do science and still maintain a critical distance 'at the end of the day', recognizing that he is working with theoretical models only, and that those models rely on foundational philosophical assumptions (without which he wouldn't even be able to begin his practice). So we agree - there is nothing in doing science or dealing with experimental results or theories (even 'laws'), that strictly compels anyone into some worldview or other. The problem arises when people, all too commonly, fail to maintain the correct critical/epistemological distance, and hence *do* build their worldview out of poorly drawn conclusions from said results.
The scientific theorem is a system which does insists that nothing is proven right, only that it has not been proven wrong. In the context of climate change, it hasn't been proven wrong and as the bearers of the burden of proof, we have furnished proof, which only continues to accumulate. From the numerous attempts to discredit climate change, there hasn't yet been a piece of evidence that has disproven climate change.
And my concern is just what sort and what weight this burden of proof is. If a theory remains without sufficient contrary evidence, does it somehow harden into fact? Let alone metaphysical fact? Certainly not. It remains on the theoretical level, regardless of how heavily it might influence future practical moves, and so the burden of proof in a way remains within the scientific community, a burden held against itself, its scope extending only that far. I think we are in agreement and I might seem like a pedant for saying all this, but a lot rides on this and I think it bears stressing.
Now, whether the views that some people have gotten due to an enthusiasm for science (or a misinformed idea of science) is unfortunate, it's not strictly directly correlated. Do you blame Nietzsche for having adolescents say that everything is pointless? No, because if the belief in scientific naturalism/materialism may be due to individuals incorporating elements of science into their worldview, it doesn't mean that science is intricately tied to this view.
Again, I don't necessarily mean to fault the scientific enterprise for the philosophical issues that crop up around it. However, I think this is actually a pretty widespread problem in the modern world, even if you only ever hear a few noisy ideologues worshipping science publicly, because most of the damage is done invisibly and implicitly. There are historical reasons for these problems that surround science - those who were really responsible for the advent of modern science laid its metaphysical foundation and did so with all the zeal and naivete that might be expected of someone stumbling upon an entirely new way of looking at existence...modern man is still heavily under the influence of ways of thinking traceable to the Enlightenment and in some ways further back than that...
