Plan 9 from Outer Space is widely regarded as the worst movie ever made. Leave it to Wretchard, at the Belmont Club, to incorporate quotes from that movie in a post about... Global Warming (of the doomsday variety). After describing some recommendations, by Popular Science, regarding things mankind can do to the environment, with the specific intent to alter the environment (albeit, for the better), he states,
Today it is still possible to imagine that plans to "save the environment" or "reduce the carbon footprint" can occur in some space other than the one that men as part of nature share. Human acts have always affected nature by affecting mankind itself. "No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Therefore every effort at changing human activity changes the environment. Carbon trading, bans on recreational travel, limits on industrial output, population control policies, the mandatory use of certain kinds of lightbulbs, etc. all change the environment.
Integrated complexity is the notion that there are certain systems which are so complex that changes to various subsets, within the whole, have unintended and unexpected outcomes in other subsets. Think of weather patterns, or the ever changing world of junk-DNA (aka non-coding DNA), for example. The idea that we know enough about the global climate model, to alter it for the better, is both ignorant and dangerous. Indeed, it is this type of integrated complexity which sometimes ends up biting us in the posterior section.
[note: the title of this post is a quote, from the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space, by the character Paula Trent.]
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