Despite the euphoria surrounding the Paris Climate Accord — Tim3003
My question is: is global warming a challenge too great for humanity to handle? Is the momentum of the growth-based capitalist system too great to slow and turn around? Is the ecocentric view of the world which could galvanise the will to make sacrifices outside our nature? — Tim3003
My question is: is global warming a challenge too great for humanity to handle? — Tim3003
But original question doesn't address that topic: it asks whether stopping climate change is feasible for humans given the current state of our technology. — Jim Grossmann
Dismissing the results in the social sciences because they are not "hard" empirical scientists seems ill-considered to me. — Jim Grossmann
The reason that sciences like psychology and sociology are not "hard" sciences is because they address many more variables than the study of sub-atomic particles and fundamental forces. — Jim Grossmann
As for social sciences not being "empirical," this simply isn't true. Social scientists gather and use data all the time. — Jim Grossmann
And since when are empirical findings definitive? Newton, who was arguably the greatest physicist who ever lived, generated a physics that put humans on the Moon, but his findings did not prove to be definitive. Stephen Jay Gould did not admit to any truly definitive scientific conclusions. He wrote "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" To sum this point up, since we can't discount the possibility that new evidence will call an old theory into question, we can't call empirical findings "definitive." — Jim Grossmann
In short radical de-growth. But radical de-growth is not going to happen because no one wants it, including you and me. — Janus
The economic catastrophe would be shorter and less drastic than global overheating, but it would have to be deliberately engaged. — Bitter Crank
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