Let’s hope he’s right

Conrad Black has his critics and none so vocal as when his columns have focused on Donald Trump.

However critics and supporters might find common ground in Black’s assertions that America is a mess right now, and the president has a duty and the possibility to fix it. Leading up to the election it was clear that for the first time in memory, neither presidential candidate was seen as the right choice, with many in the media and elsewhere seeing Clinton as the lesser of two evils.

However with the election behind, the focus is and should be on what President Trump does.

Black is optimistic that the possibility is there for Trump to truly make a difference for the American people and outward as well, in what may be described as a watershed moment in American history. Many of us may not have liked the election outcome, but we should all hope that Mr. Black has it right. to predict how exactly the cream distributes itself throughout the coffee, molecule by molecule. Weather systems are of course much more complex, and therefore prediction is vastly more difficult. There is a trend in the universe to greater disorder, and the recognition that some changes are irreversible. It is this fact that worries the environmentalists, most particularly how reversibility affects life on Earth, and how human activities contribute to this irreversibility. Life on Earth is the result of fine-tuning and organization, but we are however embedded in an environment of change, and we do need a strategy for handling disorder. We cannot avoid this trend to disorder (also known as entropy). Certainly science can tell us more about the physical world, but our concern should be living-in-theworld, and not assuming that human lifestyle is the main mechanism for change, nor assume that when there is change it should be taxed. Any discussion of climate change should include how greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, affect climate change. Since the Industrial Revolution there has been an increase in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 404.48 ppm measured in December, 2016, at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Not all of the increase is due to human activity but it still has contributed its share of carbon dioxide from burning carbon-based fuels like oil and coal, and from agriculture and deforestation.

The science is strong that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the present rate, the Earth’s temperature will exceed historical values, although we don’t know exactly by how much and by when.

What we must do to slow down increases in greenhouse gases is the most challenging decision the world faces today. Many of us would have assumed that “objectification” of another human being, like sexism or racism, is in and of itself unacceptable. Many of us would have further assumed that no one is entitled to engage in that behaviour based on one’s own assessment that the target of the behaviour suffers no harm, and because one may benefit from behaving in that manner. Sabrina Maddeux tells us that these assumptions are incorrect. She tells us, in fact, that there is nothing wrong with objectification if the consequences are borne by someone else and it yields something useful to her.