Monday, September 23, 2013

Climate change

On the one hand, organizations like Green Peace want people to do all they can to prevent climate change. For example:

What you can do about climate change

We can stop catastrophic climate change. We know what causes it, we have the technologies to prevent it, and there's a rapidly growing understanding of just how urgent the need for action is.

All that's missing is the action itself.

The government needs to put in place meaningful policies to urgently reduce emissions - and to act on them immediately. We need your help to persuade them. Together, we can stop climate chaos.

(Source)

Faced with the choice of deadly, dirty, dangerous energy like coal, oil and nuclear power, or safe, clean and renewable power, what would you decide? Renewable energy, smartly used, can and will meet our demands. No oil spills, no climate change, no radiation danger, no nuclear waste – simply energy we can trust. We can achieve a world with 100% renewable energy. Will you make that choice?

(Source)

On the other hand, I presume most climate change proponents subscribe to modern evolutionary theory. If so, they might like to take a gander at the following from geologist Bernard Wood:

Hominin evolution has taken place at a time when there have been major changes in world climate. . . . During the period from 8 to 5 MYA the earth experienced the beginning of a long-term drying and cooling trend. Early hominin evolution took place in Africa at the time of these climatic changes.

(Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction)

Why is climate change necessarily undesirable? Something people should do something about?

A theistic evolutionist could possibly make a case to support organizations like Green Peace in their fight against "climate chaos."

However, given naturalism and modern evolutionary theory, who's to say what's ultimately "bad" or "good" for us or other species? Doesn't "bad" or "good" in part imply there's a purpose for a particular organism or species?

It may be a "bad" thing for individual members of a species. It may be a "bad" thing for an entire species if the species can't adapt. But who's to say individual members of a species or even entire species are worth saving?

It's even conceivable the extinction of other species including our own would actually be a "good" thing since it could pave the way for other species that will be "better" than current species. Let's not be prejudiced toward speciesism including future ones!

At the very least, given naturalism and modern evolutionary theory, why try to intervene as if climate change were something humans should do something about?

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