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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (70204)	6/2/2008 10:21:03 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541965

Are you blaming the Atlanta water problem on GW? It seems that way given that you interjected GW into the discussion of Atlanta water. That's just the kind of response that triggers the h-word. The reason CC is such a slippery theory to prove is that no one prediction can either prove or disprove it. Actually, that is true for a lot of scientific theories (probably most of them), but most of them don't imply that we collectively must change the way we do things, so most people don't care about it, and the battles just get fought within the scientfic community itself. CC and its implications are battles that have been fought in the scientific community for decades now, at least since the 70s. No one can "blame" any one event on CC. And, in fact, climate itself is the result of such a complex nexus of "causes" that assigning blame to any one thing is impossible (especially since "climate" isn't a "thing" or a single "event" but (a) it refers to historical trends and averages and (b) the trends and averages aren't located in a single geographical area, they are global in nature. It is a classic setup for an enormous "tragedy of the commons" (if you're not familiar with this concept, google it--it's an important one). That is a long way of saying that the Atlanta water woes can't be ascribed directly to CC. Nor, for that matter, can almost any of the water woes around the world. But if someone did construct a web of causation, then CC, population increase, and short-sighted management of water resources and infrastructure by individuals, municipalities and states would be at or very near the center of the web. Water and water rights have always been an issue. Always. Not like they are today. And they will get far, far more intense over the coming decades. And not just in the US. Over most of the populated world.