kohlrak: Well, that's what happens when you conflate things. I remember talking to a guy (who said his family are politicians, but as a communist he refuses to use their influence to prop up his own arguments, which i could respect) from Ljubljana, Slovenia, and we were talking about global warming. He, having more information than I, said that CO2 in particular has a lower green house gas rating than H2O: that is to say that it cools the planet, which is precisely what the deniers are saying. I asked him why he supported something he knew (or, at least, believed) to be false. His answer was "well, you see, I believe that the correlation to human proximity and violence is the result of higher concentrations of CO2, since I feel more at peace in nature." Let's just say that a similar issue where he supported something publicly that he previously told me he totally didn't believe is precisely why me and him stopped talking. Either way, it illustrates a point: alot of issues today are conflated. Take evolution: to believe in evolution is the rejection of religion, no? Why is it that intelligent design and evolution are a dichotomy? Global warming is real, but we're conflating reality with politics. I'm sure we could come up with a larger list with things like homophobia and transphobia, young earth theory and evolution, old-earth and intelligent design, low testosterone and erectile dysfunction (just to give a totally random example), etc.
If we could deconflate this, i think you would find alot more agreement with the people, especially since this line of thinking is less likely to include the negative impacts of all the global warming politics. We'd much faster find some kind of solution instead of all this stonewalling and fingerpointing.
I agree with you 100%. I think it's unscientific to simply say that this is the way it is and we will ignore all other possibilities. Both sides of the argument are guilty of stonewalling rational discussion on the issue. Which what I was kind of pointing out in a sarcastic way in my original post to the other fellow. More discussion is always better than less discussion. The best answer to big questions rarely resides in the extremes and is most often the balanced and measured approach. The main problem that I have with climate change deniers isn't that they have another opinion but that they use that opinion like a cudgel to try and prevent any meaningful work to be done to correct the problem. And you are correct in your assessment that many who believe in climate change use that belief in a similar way to push peripheral agendas, which is unfortunate. And I only excuse it because at the very least they are trying to do something, which I view as better than sticking your head in the sand.
As a side note, since you brought it up, I am also religious and also don't understand the argument that evolution and creationism are two binary opposites. Surely if God created life and wanted it to thrive he could build in mechanisms to ensure that it would and evolution could be just such a mechanism. If he created the rules by which the universe operates, than why assume he stopped at gravity and magnetism?
Careful, the allies you found earlier in the post may soon stab you in the back.
But, yes, that's the issue overall. This is why the censorship games (via mods) on gog, youtube, etc are a problem. You don't get rid of bad ideas by making them illegal to discuss: you merely push them underground. This censorship stuff only makes those of us in disagreement with the status quo look better: clearly the inability to counter-argue is a sign that their arguments are falling apart.
But, i tell you, the conflation and false-dichotomies are on purpose, from what i've seen. "Christians are anti-science," because we might not agree with mainstream views, even if we have partial agreement. It's all or nothing; it's us vs them. Would you believe that the majority of climate change denier information i've seen actually supports that climate change is happening? Strawman arguments are the identitarian's friend.
Another fun conflation: even those that deny climate change in all forms are usually conservationists of national parks, the oceans, etc. My father, staunch conservative, believes all global warming theories are a crock of shit, but he donates money to the preservation of national parks and cleanup efforts. Why might that be? Why is it that when the left holds a rally, there's a mess, but the tea party rallies leave the land clean of trash? Conservatives, ideologically speaking, are far more interested in nature conservation than the progressives are, on fundemental levels:
sanctity is a conservative exclusive foundation (no, that page doesn't say it, but it brings up the topic: the left sees itself as entirely rational, and sanctity has little to no basis in rationality). I don't necessarily agree with the moral foundations theory in entirety, but it's close enough to truth to be useful. The same thing can be said about rape and other things conservatives are accused of. Gotta be weary of these games (of conflation).
kohlrak: We don't use consequences to determine truth, at least we never did before.
dtgreene: Actually, we do. It is a consequence of physical laws that things fall; hence, being aware of the consequence of such physical laws, we can attempt to determine what the laws are. Once we have an idea, we can then do further testing to confirm that the physical laws are what they think they are. If enough experiments contradict the law, we then find a way to modify the law and our understanding of the universe.
Therefore, we do indeed use consequences to determing truth in the sciences.
(I note that mathematics is different, but that's another story. and "truth" ends up being ill-defined in that context.)
I stand corrected: we don't use assumption or presumed consequences to determine truth. Otherwise, it's totally true that i'm going to win the lottery this week, because i would donate all that money to charity. This is how mysticism works.
firstpastthepost: Of course, weather effects in games aren't attached to any topics that are controversial. It's just a minor gameplay feature. So I assume you're right.
Except when the weather effects are affected by in-game climate change. (See what I did there?)
And that's how politics manages to creep into everything: "Oh, but your realistic rain physics don't match climate change models, therefore not realistic." or "Dude, why does how much my character eat have to do with the rain?"
