On certainty

Some questions to the reader:
Can science prove human causation of global climate change? If so why are we still arguing about it? If not, is there any scenario in which we can accept some degree of scientific uncertainty? Has the bulk of scientific opinion been wrong before? If so, does this make science unreliable? Is it somehow foolish or ethically wrong to accept benefits from science without question, but shun science’s warnings?

Blog-o-mat: Continuing continuing service

To the reader,
I'm pleased and impressed by the responses I've read to previous questions. I'm glad to see such heart-felt and articulate comments. Since I'm still up to my eyeballs in journal articles and CRS reports, I'll throw out a few more questions on ethics and environment:

Do we have any responsibility for the well-being of future generations of humans? Is such a responsibility dependent upon whether or not we have children of our own? Do we have any responsibility for the well-being of non-human species? Does the aesthetic quality of nature have any tangible value? Does the spiritual or metaphysical quality of nature have such value? Who or what should get to determine what those values are?

Clouded

It's been overcast the last couple of nights, a fact that has me thinking about the night sky, rather than looking at it. The people have been on my mind more than the numbers, the tall-tale factoids, and the Weird Terrain.
I recall those who set about modeling the sky: Newton with his audacious claim and his big letter G; Einstein with his hip trick for the orbit of Mercury; Kepler and all of those ellipses, spheres, and cubes. I remember my freshman year heroes: Oort, Kuiper, Carolyn Shoemaker, and Hyakutake (that lucky cat).
This lineage of thinkers finally drifts past Copernicus and pauses at Galileo. I see in the life and legacy of Galileo Galilei a parallel with present debates about the origins of the world we know. Galileo was branded a heretic for his assertion that the Earth orbits the Sun, a fact that the Church disputed based solely upon their interpretation of religious writings.
People should believe as they will- many traditions of belief hold insight. (For my own part, I find Christianity, Western science, and Taoism to be particularly apt.) Moreover, we should engage in a meaningful dialogue over differences in our paradigms and should avoid mindless dogma. Belief should remain sincere.
I see an unfortunate trend among my friends and family who choose a literal interpretation of the creation story in the Abrahamic faiths. There is a pattern of extrapolating pararational dissent over the sciences that speak of evolution to those sciences that discuss climate change. Indeed there are relationships between these trains of thought, though there are similar linkages to the sciences that find fossil fuels and the sciences that develop new drugs and biologics. Leading a selective theological assault only against those scientific conclusions that are socially or politically unpalatable lacks sincerity in practice.
Perhaps more theologically important, I fear this debate undermines the core values of some of the world’s most populous and influential religions. Just as a literal interpretation of biblical cosmology against Galileo’s (and Copernicus’) conclusions continues to detract from the relevance of Christian thought, so too does the debate over origins, and more urgently, the antagonism toward climate science. This hostility erodes an opportunity to improve peoples' lives.
More than three centuries after the Church condemned Galileo for suggesting that the Earth did indeed orbit the Sun, and more than two decades after humans walked on the surface of the Moon and saw this with their own eyes, Pope John Paul II, speaking for the Roman Catholic Church, observed:
"In the last century and at the beginning of our own, advances in the historical sciences made it possible to acquire a new understanding of the Bible and of the biblical world. The rationalist context in which these data were most often presented seemed to make them dangerous to the Christian faith. Certain people, in their concern to defend the faith, thought it necessary to reject firmly-based historical conclusions. That was a hasty and unhappy decision...It is a duty for theologians to keep themselves regularly informed of scientific advances in order to examine if such be necessary, whether or not there are reasons for taking them into account in their reflection or for introducing changes in their teaching.
"The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture..."
(A full transcript of the English translation of the Pope’s remarks is available here.)
Religion and the sciences are not inherently mutually antagonistic. Moreover, these two wisdom traditions complement one another: The scientific method does not explicitly contain an ethical framework. It asks questions like "can we do this?" but often fails to ask, "should we do this?" Contrarily, religion generally lacks systematic natural inquiry and technique. It handily foments discussion over the ethics of creating a vaccine, but offers little or no insight on how one might accomplish this.
The turf war solves no problems and succeeds only in creating hostility and dividing people. It also ignores what each of these systems of belief actually want: understanding and a better world.

Where the heart is

When friends and family visit for the first time, the words "cute", "cozy", and "darling" are bandied about. They ultimately recall that the townhouse my wife and I sold in November had one more half-bathroom and a little more floor space. This creates a logical paradox and begs the question, "So why did you move?"
It's a blow against living to consume. I've watched friends and coworkers move further and further away from where they spend most of their time, because "Out there, you can afford more house." I find this equation faulty, as its only parameters are dollars and square feet. Moreover, this calculus is predicated on the conclusion that a bigger house is always a better house.
I first began to dissect the equation long before moving, using that management-student logic that so often gets lodged in my head. In developing cost estimates, time=money. Though, absent from the $/sq foot equation for choosing where to live were the hours spent in rush hour traffic. For my friends who didn't mind an hour and a half each way stuck in a slow-moving car, I stepped through some simplified arithmetic: 3 hrs/day * 5 days/week * 50 weeks/year * 1 day/24 hours = 31.25 days/year. Commuters who enjoy half that daily ride- not at all a bad commute in the DC area- spend two full weeks in their cars every year. I understand that gas is fairly expensive, too. Mrs. and I resigned ourselves to our fairly average DC-area commutes, but resolved that we couldn't move further away.
This back-of-the-envelope finance led me to think about opportunity costs: what do we pass-up with all of this A-to-B? This begged the question of efficiency: If the commuting is wasting certain resources (i.e., my life), is it possible that it is inherently wasteful? Are there other aspects of my life that are wasteful? Some of these questions emerged before the move, some after.
The dominoes fell down in lovely little rows and started to yield answers: If I live close enough to the train to walk to it each day, I won't need to waste time, money, and fuel driving to it, nor driving to the gym to run in place. If I live near the town center, I can walk there, too- there is poetic logic in walking to and from the places where I dine. If I replace my vintage windows with high-efficiency windows and insulate my hot-water pipes and ducts, I won’t have to spend so much to heat and cool my house and heat my water. If I replace some of my lawn with a vegetable garden, I won't have to mow it, and I'll save money on produce in the summer. If I use a rotary mower, I'll never have to buy gas or change oil. If I install a rain-barrel on my downspout, I won't spend as much money to water my garden, and I'll be a better neighbor by reducing my impact on storm water. It became clear that I needed to stop working against myself and my surroundings.
My little house also started to give me answers to questions I hadn't known to ask. For instance, the wisdom of building a little Cape Cod and planting a couple of maple trees in front of it has become apparent. The maples, like the house are more than half a century old now, and regulate both water and insolation. I haven't paid to heat or cool my home since April.
The collective lesson for me has been (and continues to be) learning to understand what I really want, and how to get it without wasting resources on things I don't. Finding a little house that has space to suit my current and anticipated needs without extraneous space for extraneous things has made a huge difference.

Thanks to Charise for getting me thinking about this again.

Loaf

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
-Henry David Thoreau