Why would a large number of scientists write about something that does not exist, SAYING it doesn't exist?

The simplest answer to that is that a lot of other people are writing that it does exist.

There have been a number of scientists funded by the energy industry, there is a small number of scientists who have serious doubts about anthropogenic causation of global climate change, though no serious scientist I am aware of who doubts the reality of global climate change. None of these scientist has been able to come up with research that can withstand peer review and seriously challenges the theory of anthropogenic causation.

Why do you so casually dismiss the scientific consensus in this area? Do you do the same when choosing your medical care? other issues of safety for you and your family?

Global climate change, or global warming if you prefer, has considerable scientific evidence to back it up. I'll offer you a challenge: you (or anyone reading this) supply as many post 2000 scientific articles published in any respected peer reviewed journal that point to absence of global climate change or lack of anthropogenic causation

Welcome to logic 101.

Why would a large number of scientists write about something that does not exist, SAYING it doesn't exist?

Some very scientific reason, I'm sure.

And I'm not even going to bother addressing the rest of it.

(Snicker)

Where is your evidence that "most people in the country have identified Al Gore as a total crackpot"?
Last I saw he was polling better than any of the Republicans running at this point. If most think he is a crackpot, yet most would vote for him before the Republican candidates, what does that say about them?

Gore's comments in recent memory deal almost exclusively with climate change.

Chile, no, he was mostly associated recently with "global warming". That is, until the people he was trying to sell, noticed that there was only a conflict over about a half the degrees centigrade. They also noticed that his prepared shins of "the hottest summer on record" kind of fizzled out.

Gore has identified a popular movement to which he can hitch his wagon... a movement with very little in the way a scientific basis behind it.

Most people in the country have identified Al Gore as a total crackpot. Even the mainline Democrats are shying away from him, given their usual proclivity for eating their own, following an electoral loss.

Personally, I hope the man runs. He will make some interesting target practice, until he gets defeated in the primaries... and he will.

Gore has effectively shined a bright light on a serious problem and deserves no small amount of praise for this. Your post implies that you do not think that global climate change is real or at the very least not think anthropogenic causation is real. Is this the case? If so what it your reasoning?

In what way do you see Gore as an obstacle for Dems?

To say that the most visible spokesman for one environmental issue must be the spokesman for all environmental issues and represent every prominent aspect of that movement is frankly ridiculous.

Gore may currently be the most prominent environmentalist but he primarily speaks to only one environmental issue. While global climate change is among the most pressing environmental issues of our time it is not the only environmental issue of our time.

Gore's comments, over time, have certainly not limited themselves to this.

Understand; I hold no allusion to the veracity of his claims. Matter of fact I think the man's a crackpot.

The point I'm making in all of this is the core represents a hurdle for you to get over, and not an ally.

Gore may currently be the most prominent environmentalist but he primarily speaks to only one environmental issue. While global climate change is among the most pressing environmental issues of our time it is not the only environmental issue of our time.

If you look a bit you will find many people speaking out on any number of environmental issues (including many on the topic of genetic engineering). Many of their concerns are serious and well founded and many others are considerably less so.

Most of the equipment and materials required for this work would be quite difficult to control access to. No single piece of equipment need be much larger than a briefcase. The day will come when this is within the grasp of the ordinary person but that day is not likely so soon as he thinks.

Keep in mind that the development of computers did not face active, well funded, and influential opposition from both ends of the political spectrum and any gratification from home genetic experimentation would be weeks or months delayed. The former will eventually be overcome, but the later is likely to be a large problem for the market in the foreseeable future.

While this cannot be dismissed out of hand and will, in some form, likely come to pass eventually there are much more pressing problems to worry about.

ust extracting and identifying specific sequences requires rather expensive equipment and working both very cleanly (generally in a fume hood) and very precisely (uLs of specific reagents) to say nothing of going the several steps further Dyson postulates. Maybe fume hoods, centrifuges, and sets of micropipettes will become common household items in the next fifty years, but I doubt it.

I would suggest to you that the machines we are conducting this conversation on, and the means by which our thoughts are transmitted to each other, as in computers, and the Internet, would have not been predicted by most people 50 years ago anyway.

Indeed the leaders of industry never figured on the average Joe or Jane owning a computer, Let alone be able to connect it to other computers all over the world.

After all they were very expensive, not exactly the easiest things in the world to run, or even understand the basics of.

I could go one, but right now I'm sure you see my point. which is, namely, who knows what we're going to see in 50 years?

I offer a suggestion:

Given the number of things that some smarter people than you or I have listed amongst the things that would never happen, because it was too expensive, too hard etc., that we now use every day, I suggest that the question before us, is not whether not we can accomplish Dyson's ideas.
After all, history has proven human kind to be quite capable, given time, of doing what had been considered impossible.... both good and bad.

Rather, the question for us should be whether or not we both individually and collectively figure that the vision offered by Dyson is worth the trouble to bring it to fruition.

Inherent in that choice, it seems to me, is the question of whether or not it is too dangerous to our future to make the attempt.

Gore? Who cares what some American pol says? I'm I supposed to care because I'm left of center and he's a Dem? Nope, sorry, I don't. He isn't from my party (the SNP) and even if he was, I'm no blind follower. More a tiler than a joiner.

And yet "these same people" is hardly a phrase connoting a single Gore, is it?

Yes, in fact, it is. Whether or not either of us like it, (And for the record, I don't, either) he has become the face of the environmental movement. It's within that context that my comment was directed.

More a tiler than a joiner.

Boy, I'm glad you got the spelling correct on that one. (Quiet chuckle)
With my compliments
/E

Gore? Who cares what some American pol says? I'm I supposed to care because I'm left of center and he's a Dem? Nope, sorry, I don't. He isn't from my party (the SNP) and even if he was, I'm no blind follower. More a tiler than a joiner.

And yet "these same people" is hardly a phrase connoting a single Gore, is it? So when I google "environmentalists biotechnology" and come up with this from Free Republic (on the search's first page!)saying "environmentalists argue that agricultural biotechnology poses too many risks to human health and the environment, and that its use should be sharply curtailed or even banned altogether" I figure either you're not looking all that hard or you want to have it both ways.

Regards, C

A point similar to my first thought: I disagree that "[t]he epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended" when humans emerged as the dominant species. Humans are a product of Darwinian evolution - IOW, we are products of nature. Accordingly, whatever effects we produce are also products of nature.

History has seen such a shift before: The advent of tetrapods and dinosaurs, respectively, each had far-reaching effects on pre-existing species. That these effects were not consciously directed is ir-relevant.

Well no, they aren't silent about this at all, if Bithead would bother to go look for what they are saying before he pronounces.

Oh, but I have. Perhaps you can show me where Al Gore makes his pronouncements on the topic?

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

That humanity's actions have somehow usurped evolution from within rather than just being part and parcel of the entire evolutionary range of possible pressures is simply an absurd misunderstanding of the theory, one far too often advanced by social engineers with utopian dreams.

Bithead above writes:

And yet these same people are silent on the issue of how such as what Dyson proposes will affect these delicate balances, and in the end our life on this planet. And the law of unintended consequences would seem to apply here, particularly true given the large possibility matrix we're dealing with.

Well no, they aren't silent about this at all, if Bithead would bother to go look for what they are saying before he pronounces.

It's simple. Create an evolutionary pressure and evolution will rspond. That pressure can be up, down, sideways, expansionist or a pressur for extinction but there will always be a response and it isn't always a predictable one. A gamut of new hybrids, if they are able to provogate their genetic codes in whole (breeding true) or in part (further hybrids), will be an enormous pressure in all kinds of unintended ways.

If they cannot breed, they're just dead ends genetically. Still, their competetion for resources and space will itself be a pressure.

So Bithead gets it right, even from ignorance - unintended consequences. But then again, unintended consequences are what evolution is all about.

Regards, C