Are Man-Made Tornadoes the Answer to Global Warming?
A Links entry from Monday, August 13, 2007Are Man-Made Tornadoes the Answer to Global Warming?
Steven D. Levitt:
Technology and human ingenuity have solved just about every problem we’ve faced so far; there is no obvious reason why global warming shouldn’t succumb as well.
I have to seriously disagree with Mr. Levitt here. This sounds like that old joke about introducing a group of rabbits into a foreign environment to kill off a certain type of weed, but the rabbit population begins to grow too fast, so wolves are introduced to kill the rabbits, and so on and so forth.
Alex Taylor
Well, he’s making a very obvious logical flaw here.
Levitt’s proposition, that we’ve solved “just about” every problem, does not lead to the conclusion “we’re going to solve this problem”. If we had solved every problem, it would make sense. Since that is absolutely not the case and a ridiculous assertion, and since we only have one shot at surviving this, I’d rather not play the numbers game.
(I do think we’ll solve the problem eventually, I just wouldn’t rely on it. Richard Branson’s prize for carbon sequestering is our best hope right now.)
The Author
Bryan Klausmeyer
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