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I'm Not "Impressed"

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By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

It looks like I foresaw a split in the environmentalist camp. Last week, while writing about Al Gore's "Inconvenient Interview" I noted:

Maybe the fact that even the United Nations, which one would think would lead the hysterical global warming charge, has a view different from Gore's has him a bit shaken. If Gore is truly right, why wouldn't he spread his message unabashedly to all listeners. It looks like he has something to hide -- knowledge. And that behavior by itself doesn't prove Gore is wrong, but it sure is motive for doubt about his claims.

At The Reference Frame, physicist Lubos Motl:

Just like in the case of the Catholic Church and Protestants, the environmentalist church of consensus is going to split. Everyone in the church agrees that there is a 100% consensus among all experts but unfortunately the two equally strong groups of experts disagree what the consensus says.

and...

The IPCC report is going to say that Antarctica won't see any significant difference even if CO2 levels continue to grow. In fact, Antarctica has seen some cooling and increased precipitation is raising the total amount of ice mass on this continent, as the IPCC report also mentions. The frequent readers of this blog also know that Greenland has cooled down in the last 70 years, too. Its ice mass seems to be increasing there as well.

Lubos notes that some are protesting the IPCC's view because it gives the wrong "impression":

The goal of a scientific report is apparently to "give the right impression".

Without "impression", there would be no environmentalist movement. "Impression" is an important philosophical term and extremely applicable to the global warming hysteria.

"Impressions" have their root in Democritus' materialist, atomist epistemology. Democritus did not support an objective reality which you and I perceive with our senses and then seek to understand through concept formation and logic. Instead, Democritus thought that we can not really know reality through thought. We have only "impressions":

...t follows that thought, which knows the true real, can be explained only from an impression which this truly real makes upon the fiery atoms, -- explained therefore itself only through the efflux of such images. As a psychological process, therefore, thought is the same as perception...

Odd and fantastic as this sounds, the indications are yet all in favour of the supposition that Democritus drew this conclusion from the presuppositions of his materialistic psychology. This psychology knew no independent, internal mechanisms of ideas or conscious states, but only an arising of ideas through the motions of atoms.

Hence it regarded ideas that were evidently deceptive as also "impressions" and sought for these the exciting images. [Windelband, p.114 - 115].

The environmentalist movement clearly supports this epistemology and bombards you and me with atomistic images in order to make an "impression". Instead of making a scientific case based upon hierarchy and context, we are indundated with pictures of floating icebergs and dripping water in order to make an impression.

Two thousand years later, David Hume carried on the idea of impressions:

Only in characterising Hume's doctrine, it must not be forgotten that this absolutely certain matter-of-fact quality, which belongs to impressions, is solely that of their presence as mental states. In this meaning and restriction intuitive knowledge embraces not only the facts of inner experience, but also those of outer experience, but at the price of recognising that the latter are properly only species of the former, -- a knowledge, that is, of mental states. [Windelband, p. 472]

Translation: "Sure you can attain certainty, but not certainty based upon reality, but a certainty based upon what you make up in your head."

Thus, scientific knowledge based upon reality and built hierarchically and in context is not important. You can just be certain of what you have made up in your head. And what is in that head? Just impressions of contextless melting glaciers.

The result is the explanation for the success of the global warming religion -- materialist and skeptic view that we can't really know reality ("I just can't or don't want to know") coupled with an intrinsicist "I just know based upon whatever I feel." This is why both liberals and conservatives support environmentalism -- and why science is dismissed. The growth in religious belief over the past two decades is both a reflection of the increased intrinsicism in the culture and an aid to those who wish to believe in environmentalism.

I, however, am not "impressed" with either.

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/blog/archives/002244.html

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