I had a debate coach once point out that in the real world, outside the realm of cross-examinations and time limited speeches, it was terrifically easy to recognize winners and losers in debates. The first to call the other a name lost the argument, the second to do it lost the audience for both of them. It’s a clever bit of summary, though not without its holes. If one is willing to fight dirty, name calling can be a particularly effective weapon in argument, but not if it’s just whipped around like an over pressurized fire hose. Insults are a scalpel, not a baseball bat.
“Moron?” Really? That’s the best vilification you can each summon to your verbal offensives? Argument is an exercise of intellect, and a sharp and targeted insult can eviscerate a soft spot, lay open the guts of your opponent’s logic. “Moron?” At least “your momma” would have required some minimal level of cleverness to connect the dots of how your opponent’s mother’s negative attributes metaphorically connected with the debated points of global warming. If you must resort to insults, which is occasionally necessary and deliriously satisfying as I can attest to from this little rant, at least try to be intelligent about it. Dumb blind name calling is a sign of either laziness, an irredeemable intellectual midget, or a rank amateur.
As for the argument at hand about climate change, it seems that we need to split the debate into two parts: the problem and the solution. It’s disingenuous to claim both that there is no problem and that even if there was, the system that created the problem will provide a solution without any change to that system. You don’t get to have it both ways.
The vast majority of reputable scientists believe that climate change is a real problem, regardless of whether one particular data point or another tracks on the opposite side of the curve. The reason is extraordinarily simple: what we do affects our environment.
If you take a petri dish, add some sugar, and only one type of bacteria, that bacteria will eventually all die of a polluted environment, drowning in their own waste products. Any stable eco-system requires at least two components, each of which consumes the other’s waste, thus ensuring a functionally indefinite closed loop. The concept should be familiar to anyone who’s heard the cliche: don’t sh*t where you eat. While there are components of the natural world that can easily expand and adapt to take care of certain human waste products (our ever increasing exhaled carbon dioxide, for example), others are more problematic because the natural world does not include a component that can deal with them, at least on the scale at which we’ve arrived in the last two centuries. The goal is simple and very obvious: morph our civilization such that waste products are eliminated or at the very least captured and stored. If at every dusk we leave our environment as it was at dawn, then we drastically improve the long term viability of this little petri dish of a planet as our species’ home.
Do I think that carbon emissions, to take one salient example, will cause catastrophic global effects in the next fifty years? Two hundred? I don’t know, that’s what the scientists are there for. Certain quarters of society are claiming that the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, forgetting that those same scientists are the ones who invented the wonders of industrial civilization whose impact is being dismissed. Who is more qualified to say that a house’s foundation is inadequate, the guy who designed and built the house, or the guy who lives in it? Ignorance and a vested interest in maintaining that ignorance are a catastrophic combination.
Markets are a tool. A great tool to be sure, a tool that has produced unprecedented wealth in the modern world. But like any tool, they are only as good as what they are pointed at. Blindly insisting that the market is a beneficent deity that will magically fix any problem is the height of naivete. The market didn’t magically eliminate 18 hour work days, child labor, and the gamut of other horrors of early industrialization. Regulation did. The cap and trade systems being bandied about are a brilliant hybrid approach, using the superior tool of a market for a carefully targeted purpose.
Morons? I think as a species a more accurate invective would be “children.” There is nothing more childish then ignoring your own mess even as you wallow in it.
