The Decider

Spring           New Moon (seed moon)

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Kate is a good decider(unlike the other Decider).  She makes a decision a second if necessary.  Somewhere along the line she and Teddy Roosevelt must have drunk the same water.  I’m a muller and wonderer.  It’s nice to have two different decision making styles at home because it allows a long view and a necessary, lets do it now attitude to reinforce each other.

Two iconoclasts have crossed my way of late.  Freeman Dyson is one.  He’s a really smart guy, a physicist and an employee of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.  He’s written all sorts of stuff; I’ve read his essays, but none of his books.  He thinks global warming is real, but that the radical consequences predicted are not.  One telling aspect of his critique involves the notion of climate models.  He claims that assumptions used to build those systems are not accurate.  If the assumptions are no good, the model can not be.  I don’t know the science, but he’s a guy whose thought matters.

I’ve not changed my mind.  At least not yet.  But he has made me wary.

The second is a Patrick Moore, a founder of Green Peace and now, ironically, a supporter of nuclear power.  In an article published in 2006 he makes the argument about base-load generation that I mentioned a couple of days ago.  He seems to think nuclear is the only generative source with enough oomph to replace coal in the interim between now and an eventual switch to renewables.  I found his arguments less compelling.  He seems to think reprocessing is a reasonable solution to the waste problem, but a Scientific American I read this week points out many problems with reprocessing, not the least of which is that it produces plutonium, material useful in a bomb.

It’s good to have received wisdom challenged by reputable people, it sharpens the debate and makes everyone think more clearly.