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To: Moominoid who wrote (22180)	9/22/2007 4:01:27 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218179

Moom, you have a faulty premise in here <This fact means we should be all the more cautious in fooling around with the system when we only have a vague idea of its sensitivity to greenhouse gases. > You are quite right that goofing around with systems that work means taking great care. For example, human DNA has been under development for a billion years, with petatrillions of living things being sacrificed to get to where we are now. Casually goofing around with dietary inputs, toxic inputs, and genetic engineering needs a LOT of care and will certainly involve blunders. Such as recommending margarine, with hydrogenated oils, in place of butter. Or saying eggs are a bad thing. Your false premise is that there is "the system" which is operating nicely, keeping things hunky dory. You are committing anthropomorphism of the worst kind = ascribing good intentions to "the system" as though it is doing a good job of maintaining living conditions for people. Unlike human DNA, which is specifically designed to do a good job for people, the physical system of the climate and its interaction with living things is NOT in any way at all "working". The theory that you are accepting is the Gaia idea that Gaia is making things hunky dory for life on Earth. My Gaia theory more accurately matches reality = Gaia is a depressive suicidal maniac on a one way trip from a hot ball of stardust to a lifeless frozen and crystallized wasteland. Gaia has been stripping life out of the ecosphere for eons, burying it in limestone, shale, coal etc. When enough has been stripped out, the already-thin atmosphere will be too depleted to maintain living conditions and it'll be game over. Producing CO2 might hold the next glaciation at bay while we figure out what really needs to be done. Your assumption that humans should do nothing is founded on a false premise. I pretty much invented the precautionary principle in the early 1980s [maybe it was around - it's such an obvious idea but I hadn't heard of it and it wasn't normal to assert it in my world]. But that was in regard to things which were likely to be unduly hazardous. Unfortunately, the principle is now abused so that cancer patients who will be dead in months are not allowed to put themselves at risk with untested pharmaceuticals. Rituxan in particular was NOT permitted in unapproved applications where it is now a first line treatment. It was obvious to me that it should have been a first line treatment back in 1997 because the potential harm was trivial but the potential benefit was large - as it turned out to be. "Safety" is often used as a mindless byword, ignoring the cost in lives of the cost of safety. $1000 spent on "safety" is $1000 not spent on things which would improve safety even more. Similarly, we hear all about the COSTS of climate change aka global warming aka greenhouse effect. But we don't have enthusiastic announcements of the benefits. For example, "Woe is us, the polar bears are having a hard time of it, the ice is melting" [although their numbers are way up]. We don't hear "Halalujah, the Northwest Passage is open so we don't have to waste a fortune going through the Panama Canal". Your assumption that "the system" is looking after us is false. Mqurice