Norman Mailer

I agree entirely. The key term here is “convinced”. Rather than “tried to convince”. Trying is of no significance if it does not lead towards success (even if it isn’t you that succeeds).

We need to recognize that the people who try to “open the public’s eyes” are not helping but hurting the cause, because they make it look like the solution occurs through individual people choosing to recycle and calk their windows. Trying isn’t enough, you have to be right.

I would guess they will be split into two groups: those who convinced politicians and the general public of the need to act and those who made important contributions to the process of doing so.

I have no interest in arguing with the science. I think it is exactly as likely as all those predictions will pan out and be oh so horrible as it is likely that a rediculous number of people will die today who I could have saved by donating money to organizations that play lousy commercials on television.

The point is, because the problem is political, what we don’t need any more of is scientific understanding, we need political understanding. The most intelligent thing to date I’ve heard anyone say about politics is that it is “the art of the possible”. That means whining about other people not taking up their duties is the farthest thing from politics. The point is not what ought someone else do, or even what ought you do, but what can you do.

I’ve had a really hard time thinking about this “can” question since I read this blog post. The best foil I can think of is imagine a time in the future when this problem has been solved, who would we of the future look back to as the ones who made this future possible? And not just what we’d be indoctrinated with, what the historians that got it right would say, who would those people be. Presumably they would be in lots of different fields, but I think there is good reason to think there would be some specific characteristic which will be apparent in retrospect which seems esoteric now.

Al Gore has a lot of credibility, not because he’s ‘the’ expert on climate change (there are very smart people who know more than him) but because he still has a lot of political clout.

I think you need an engineering education where you can evaluate the alternatives. For example, are fuel cells a reasonable way to go or not? For that, you need a pretty general engineering and scientific education, which is not traditionally what happens. That’s not how I was trained. I was trained as a computer engineer. So I understand how to build computers, how to make software. I’ve learned on my own a lot of other things. If you look at the people who have high impact, they have pretty general knowledge. They don’t have a really narrowly focused education.

Fortune has a very interesting interview with Google co-founder Larry Page. He hits on a lot of topics that are frequently discussed here, and some that aren’t often discussed, but that I have spent a lot of time thinking about (e.g., geothermal). Here is a link to the interview:

Larry Page on how to change the world

Nobody claims the understanding is complete, but the huge mass of evidence demonstrates that we need to have global emissions peak within 10-15 years if we are going to have atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses stabilize around 450ppm.

If you let it go higher than that, you not only suffer more certain effects - like additional water problems and loss of species - you also run an appreciably higher risk of catastrophic effects.

The need to act definitely supersedes the need to understand better, at this juncture in time. We know enough to justify enormously more action than we have yet undertaken.

I’ve just about had enough of this kind of talk. Why don’t you go save some starving african children already. The logic of that places the immanent need to act above the need to understand, the hubris that the understanding is already complete, is the purest form of fascism.