Threaded at the Mutualist

Wow - why not design a post for a doctor lenny comment. i consider the inconvenient truth to be more damaging to the environmentalist position than if they hadn't exaggerated to the point of disbelief. But the whole argument show a definite lack of understanding of the underlying atmospheric chemistry process. I put up the climate quiz the other day - so i am in tune here. Let me try to put sergio's question in perspective.

i am a property owner and seen by some as a wacked out constitutionalist and property rights advocate. I am seen by others as a whacked out environmentalist because i prefer being outside away from traffic. But what i do as a scientist is model natural process, forcusing on decay and decomposition. nature provides a huge organic scaffolding that places substrates - things to get worked on - into positions where they can be worked on.

The more i discover about nature's guilds and processes, the more i see organized queueing based on mathematical relationships. I feel that these relationships can be applied to everything, including human and animal behavior, austrian economics and ayn rand.i serve on a watershed council that operates by consensus - the Partnership for Umpqua Rivers. A pseudo-government busy-body organization to prop rights activists. As a scientist, i laugh at some of the 'facts' brought into science debate.

But when i first got to the table in 1997, the facts had no data to support them - now the PUR has a complete monitoring for hire program based on accurately calibrated information and graphically displayed through GPS. All that knowledge and we still have the same arguments on cutting old growth timber or inserting a cross country gas line.

I would never dream of taking the science that i hear at a council meeting as science fact without talking to the principals for reference data. Often, what they show me has been scientifically discredited in the literature - er - improved upon to be approved. I fear some very intellegent people made up a lot of what we call science fact in the last century. Science today is applied engineering and research is a nasty word when the people think research is development. How many bulbs did edison build?

Perserverence and reason to address every counter-argument internally first is the crux of the scientific method. Today - science is used to support POVs, not to discover anything relevant. On the other hand, i'd stand behind any and all data published by the PUR and provided in documentation - because we have a scientist looking and a quality control program acceptible to the PTB in our fields of expertise. But i do check - and i am not enamored with ISO14XXX or 9XXX or any beaurocracy of judgement.

Depends on the venue, the depth and the breadth as to what i can believe. But it has to be consistent, or i have to change my thought to make it so. Paradigm shifts have a way of surprising people and the key liquid in this world is water, not oil. We know what happens when shaken : water does not mix with oil. Cross-posted.