tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post8568855820113341215..comments2024-03-19T07:48:54.021-06:00Comments on Gus Van Horn: Indifference to Facts Is Good Policy?Gus Van Hornhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-18160930284672345332017-04-28T05:16:37.428-06:002017-04-28T05:16:37.428-06:00Dinwar,
You remind me further of a couple of inte...Dinwar,<br /><br />You remind me further of a couple of <a href="https://ari.aynrand.org/blog/2017/04/27/the-march-for-science-and-earth-day" rel="nofollow">interesting</a> <a href="https://ari.aynrand.org/blog/2017/04/26/icymi-this-earth-day-shrug-off-environmentalist-fear-and-guilt-by-amanda-maxham" rel="nofollow">links</a> I encountered this morning at <i>Voices for Reason</i>. <br /><br />I think that all the errors Williams and you indicate are both motivated by a desire to clothe altruism in scientific garb and are aided by poor philosophical fundamentals on the part of the environmentalists.<br /><br />GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-78397924578459581922017-04-27T06:57:47.320-06:002017-04-27T06:57:47.320-06:00There's a dirty secret that Environmentalists ...There's a dirty secret that Environmentalists don't want people to know: The whole thing is based on a flawed premise. <br /><br />Environmentalism holds that the pre-human is the standard for "good". This is codified in NEPA and other environmental regulations: Any ecological conditions are fine, as long as humanity isn't involved. The assumption is that ecosystems that have not been influenced by humans are stable. <br /><br />However, this simply isn't true. There are multiple lines of evidence demonstrating this. To list a few: <br /><br />Predator dental wear, which indicates the ratio of predators to prey, demonstrate conclusively that every ecosystem we have ever studied--ALL of them, bar none--is lacking in predators compared to stable ecosystems (meaning ecosystems that have underwent minimal change over a few million years). We have never, since biology became a science, seen, much less studied, a stable ecosystem. <br /><br />The megafauna are essentially gone. There are a few stragglers, and more in Africa/southern Asia, but by and large giant mammals are a thing of the past. This has real ecological consequences. You can't remove a huge portion of the ecosystem and not have it respond! Yet because the megafuana died out about 11,700 years before biology became a science, Environmentalist calculations ignore this fact. <br /><br />On a related note: A lot of plants still exist that had powerful defensive mechanisms against megafauna herbivores (such as yuccas), or which relied upon such herbivores for their life cycle (avocados, among others). The fact that these plants exist indicates that the ecosystem isn't stable. Without a powerful forcing mechanism evolution will almost inevitably eliminate such metabolically and reproductively risky traits. <br /><br />None of this is controversial; this is all standard stuff in biology. It's not in the Biology 101 textbooks, but it's certainly openly discussed among scientists. Yet Environmentalists ignore all of this, and insist on returning the Earth back to a stage that is necessarily and inherently unstable. The whole thing is insane and ignores copious amounts of evidence. Dinwarhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06138006602385020048noreply@blogger.com