Comments on: Does global warming trump all hot-button ethical issues?

By: desik

desik — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:12:40 +0000

Wow! How much passion there is to attack Dr Nicholson for merely raising awkward issues ! No attempt from the critics commenting here to process the fact that we could instantly double life expectancy for people in developing countries to our standards by just ensuring they got basic medicines and fed properly .

No, their valuing of human life is pretty selfish and selective and revolves around the personal ignoring the pain, suffering and death routinely brought about by inequality on a massive scale as this is just an impersonal fact of life to them , a given, that we must all, presumably , accept as unremarkable and take for granted because, well, we really dont want to discuss human problems as resource management issues do we ? even as the global population races towards a projected 9 billion by 2050 and our own innate grasp of the most basic of math must surely tell us that we are overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet.

By: BP

BP — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:08:06 +0000

“Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.” -Russell Baker

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:57:02 +0000

@ Stewart,
You said, “China has been slowly turning itself around with its one child per family plan, even though it takes decades to stabilize population growth. The rest of the developing world must follow its example to avoid disaster.”

Are you serious? China’s Communist party in in governmental control. We do not want to follow their example. It is NOT the government’s job to determine family size.
Parents (who support their own family) should be left the control to plan their family.
Parents who support their families through welfare and my tax dollars, maybe they should be limited to one child.

By: A La Carte (10/15) Evangelical Perspective| Today In Theology

A La Carte (10/15) Evangelical Perspective| Today In Theology — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:10:21 +0000

[...] with the myth that “In the days of Christopher Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat.” The Environmental Trump Card Alarming headlines continue to arise from environmentalists. At a recent bioethical conference one [...]

By: william devito

william devito — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:58:51 +0000

I cannot believe that this seriously made the top of the list at the bioethics convention. Think about how unproven anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is (don’t believe me, check out the global temp drop for 2008). CO2 is an essential chemical for all of life. We need it. How many deaths are directly related to CO2 emmitted by humans? Compare that to the number of deaths that are directly attributed to lack of modern medical care. People who believe that global warming is the worst thing to happen to the earth need to think just once about being wrong. What if they are wrong and all of these extreme policies would negatively affect people for nothing. The mentality among AGW activists is that there should be no cost benefit analysis of fighting AGW instead it is whatever extreme cost automatically weighs ou the smallest of benefits. This is the wrong approach to almost every other issue but for AGW environmentalists do not see it that way and that to me is what scares me. The myopic fervor of environmentalists should be controlled more than our output of greenhouse gases

By: i.blain

i.blain — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:28:11 +0000

This author is sick, twisted and evil. People like him are a far greater threat to the world than global warming.

By: Mike U

Mike U — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:39:18 +0000

Ludicrous. The science of climate change isn’t even remotely certain enough to justify such draconian measures, and having such dreck coming from a “medical ethicist” is appalling. The world’s temperature has actually remained flat for a decade now (with a large cooling in the past year), and many scientists predict that will continue for another 7-20 years based on the combination of a weak solar cycle and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation moving into its “cooling” phase. The GCM models that make these predictions have well-known problems - they don’t model clouds well, some assume constant relative humidity (even though measurements show relative humidity falling somewhat over the past 50 years), and they assume positive feedback from increased high-level cloud formation (despite satellite data which shows negative feedback from the mix of high/low cloud formation as the tropics warm). Most don’t include the PDO, either.

Bottom line: treating simulations of a system as complex as global climate as if they were gospel truth and using that information to justify 10s of trillions of $$ in expenditures and radical policy changes like “closing all western hospitals” is something that belongs in The Onion. Not at a serious conference on medical ethics.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:10:48 +0000

This is madness. There is no runaway greenhouse effect; it is a scare-scam from Al Gore. We have serious elected officials and “ethicists” (whatever that is) driving public policy in a way to reduce quality of life, and risk our economic security, over a fairy tale.

Move aside and let the grownups run the world.

By: Demesure

Demesure — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:56:51 +0000

What a joke, Nicholson is his name, like the Nicholson in the madhouse of the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Well, it would be funny if it weren’t that tragic.

I’m floored to know some ill people are in the hands of that mad charlatan, some uninformed people are informed by that crazy “ethicist” and that the world is so enthralled by this AGW bigotry to condone such stupidity. The “debate is over” : that guy must be stripped from his position and forbidden any real exercice on real patients.

We had the Oath of Hippocrates, now we have Nicholson’s Cuckoo Oath of the hypocrites.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:59:00 +0000

I suggest we keep the hospitals open just long enough to have Dr. Nicholson’s head removed from his butt.