The world is not deterministic. That does not make it a Nazi experiment. See also: Godwin’s law.
You might apply your first sentence to your 3rd sentence.
But you’re right. The analogy breaks down. While it holds for AGW being an experiment involving harm to humans (altho it is a “natural experiment”); AND both experiements are evil, at least neither would pass the IRB today; the analogy does break down when one considers that those Nazi “medical” experiments involved perhaps 1000s of people (don’t know the number), while our AGW experiment involves harms to millions, and ultimately perhaps to many billions of people on into the future, perhaps even for up to 100,000 years if we persist with this evil experiment. There’s just no comparison in human history.
Also, admittedly we live not in a deterministic, but a stochastic world, which along with Church teachings still calls on us not to risk human lives. We can follow the logic of Pascal:
FALSE POSITIVE: If AGW is not happening but we think it is and we mitigate it, we will be doing things that save us and businesses a lot of money, without lowering living standards or productivity; and we will be mitigating a number of environmental and other problems that harm lives and property and well-being. The “win-win-win” situation.
TRUE NEGATIVE: If AGW is not happening, and we do not mitigate, we’ll just be in our sorry state of missing so many economic and other-harm mitigating opportunities to save money and save lives. The “lose” situation.
TRUE POSITIVE: If AGW is happening and we mitigate it, there are still a lot of harms in the pipes, but we may avoid extremely harms ones, and we will be mitigating other problems and well, saving money and stregthening the economy (which will help against the AGW assaults to the economy and human lives). It wil be “lose-win-win” situation.
FALSE NEGATIVE: If AGW is happening and we think it is not and we fail to mitigate it we not only allow serious harms to humanity and others of God’s creatures well into the future for perhaps 100,000 years – killing off million, even billions of people – we also contribute other serious environmental harms than harm and kill, and deplete finite resources that should be saved for future generations, and fail to realize the great savings from mitigating AGW. It will be a “lose-lose-lose-BIG LOSE” situation. And maybe the biggest lose of all – ending up in a place a lot hotter than a globally warmed world for all eternity.
If “alternative energy” was actually competitive in any conventional economic sense of the word, it wouldn’t need a five-year plan and huge subsidies. Market forces would make it happen. But it’s not, so it doesn’t. We have been seeing real and significant emission reductions in the U.S., and as you well know, it has nothing to do with “alternative energies” or top down statist control of the economy.
Remember the first steps are energy/resource efficiency/conservation, then getting on alt energy.
But it is quite amazing that most people and businesses are not capping into the great saving from these, tho some are – which just goes to show that market forces don’t work well and we are not rational, maximizing beings (so much for the foundation of economic theory), but something else is going on…maybe some Freudian thing or just fallen human nature. Or, maybe like Cain, we don’t know and we are not our brothers’ keeper. Anyway it’s as much a surprise to me that people are not capping in – for the savings, if not for reducing their harm to life on earth.
We’re going solar in a few weeks. We’re already on 100% wind energy and driving our Volt on that; we’re doing it for the investment.
With the subsidies & promos we’ll be getting a 12.5% return on investment. Better yet it means an average of over $100 saving on our energy bill each month, with our Volt also saving us about $100 a month, which will help in our retirement in a year or so.
Without the subsidies and promos I figure going solar would still be a good deal, giving us a 4% return on investment.
However that’s not the whole story, because if the subsidies and tax-breaks were removed from fossil fuels, our savings and return on investment would be a lot higher, even without solar and wind subsidies.
Let’s at least have a level playing field – take away all subsidies and internalize the externalities (bec “you break it, you buy it”), and may the best energy source win.
Maybe we need a “Green Tea Party”
I’ve yet to see any sort of unilateral U.S. plan evaluated (and certainly not anything Obama has proposed) that even makes anything but rounding error dents in the computer models’ warming. I’m pretty if you completely eliminate U.S. emissions from this point forward, you don’t stave off all that much in the computer models. We’re not the biggest target anymore, and will likely never be again. Better luck convincing China and India.
Per capita we in the US are far greater emitters than the Chinese or Indians. But they, unlike us, are taking AGW seriously and striving to find ways to mitigate, despite the fact they are poor.
Figuring country rather than per capita, Luxemburg would be the model to follow, but per capita they are higher than the US. See list of countries by GHG emissions per capita :
data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC . The US is at 17.3 tons per capita, while China is 5.8 tons per capita, and India is at 1.7 tons per capita; and most European countries are at about half of the US rate.
It would help if the US took its rightful place as a world leader (being one of the richest countries, and also having historically contributed the most to AGW) and inspire & help other nations to follow suit.
