I’d been thinking about some stuff about direct realism earlier today (it didn’t get anywhere far in case you’re wondering) and then by fairly independent browsing I ended up at Fodor’s rather amusing review of Putnam’s The Threefold Cord, which includes some rather withering invective against said direct realist theories.

Somehow all that web browsing was connected to finding stuff about global warming. I recall that around 12 months ago I tried to do a comprehensive search to find out what the latest scientific opinion was. I seem to recall that there was some convergence on the position that the data was all lining up with the best-case scenario of the original pessimists. This scenario is still pretty bad – it’s a pessimist scenario not an optimist scenario after all – and plenty bad enough to justify efforts like Kyoto, but not catastrophe within a decade as the really bad scenarios predict.