Has anyone else noticed that the conservative rhetoric has quietly switched from "global warming doesn't exist so we don't have to do anything" to "global warming isn't caused by people so there is nothing we can do"?
It's hard for me to get all worked up over climate change when no one can tell me whether the observations indicate a trend towards or away from an overall improvement. It's easy to show that things are changing. It's slightly more difficult to show that such changes are resulting from human activity. But no one seems to know whether things are accidentally getting better or accidentally getting worse.
How would anyone know what to "fix" if they can't even identify what is broken? It's like everyone is engaged in an archery contest, and the location of the bulls-eye is revealed only after everyone shoots. You can't correct your aim if you don't know what you're shooting at.
I think I can answer that: the way it always was. Adaptation is always a cost, regardless of the direction. Not only human cost, but also cost for the ecosystems. If the change is fast enough it may cause migrations or extinctions.
In my experience a good Fox News segment can use all three of these, at the same time, and switch back and forth among them, with no cognitive dissonance apparent. I don't think any of them are really being phased out, it's just that if any particular one is defeated in conversation, the arguer switches to one of the other arguments.
EDIT: Indeed, there are several HN comments in this thread to that effect.
- It's not happening.
- It's happening but it's natural.
- It's happening and might be man-made, but it's beneficial.
- It's happening and might be man-made, and it's harmful, but it's not worth the cost to mitigate.
- It's happening and might be man-made, and it's harmful, and free-market solutions will solve it.
And yes, it often freely switches between them depending on the context.
Of those four, only the last two are worth debating, and they're really almost the same thing. Everyone who screams about those first two dimensions are probably profiting more by perpetuating a meaningless conversation than by solving an identifiable problem.
Sounds like a lot of political issues, actually. Some people can make a curiously prosperous living just out of getting other people to shout at each other.
But the first two strongly feed into the last two. If climate change is not anthropogenic, then cutting emissions will not provide any benefit, while potentially causing economic harm. If climate change isn't happening at all then there is no need to do anything, and the entire framework for predicting the outcomes of changes to human activities is completely busted.
I think we should start focusing on real solutions. Many conservatives are right to underline that simply increasing taxes is not the solution. So what's the solution? Innovation in new source of renewable or less polluting energy technologies. Both liberals and conservatives tend to agree here but they diverge in methodology. Liberals want to heavily tax fossil and subsidize renewable energy. Problem with that is that taxing fossil make life and the economy harder in the meantime and subsidizing often goes to cronies which is bad for innovation. Conservatives prefer having better environment for businesses which will boost innovation. Maybe there's some middle ground in there.
...which was still "0.5°F above the 20th century average" for the contiguous 48 US states[1]. From looking at the temperature graph[2], only about ten years between 1900-1980 was hotter than 2014.
The fact that this is perceived as an "unusual cold summer" should give you a pause.
As usual, there's a relevant xkcd for everyrthing: https://xkcd.com/1321/
[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201413 : "In 2014, the contiguous United States (CONUS) average temperature was 52.6°F, 0.5°F above the 20th century average, and tied with 1977 as the 34th warmest year in the 120-year period of record."
[2] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/weather-...
(BTW, seriously, who uses Fahrenheit in scientific discourse?)
This is because warming is only one component of the problems we're facing as a result of pollution. See for example ocean acidification.
> Besides, I don't understand why it's ok for liberals to make fun of conservatives using "extreme snow" during winter as an argument against climate change but that liberals using exceptional heat during summer as an argument for climate change is ok.
The funny thing about snow is it actually can be a result of warming temperatures. At higher latitudes, warmer weather leads to more snow. So that's a starting point that higher temperatures don't necessarily mean less snow. But furthermore, if you have scientifically gathered data that says there's a trend towards warming, it's reasonable to look at heat waves and recognize them as part of a larger problem, since it's supported by data.
However, if you pull out anecdotes that contradict the data, you're trying to muddle the issue and make it look like the data is invalid, even though you have no basis for that conclusion.
> Conservatives prefer having better environment for businesses which will boost innovation. Maybe there's some middle ground in there.
This is a non-opinion. A mix of taxing polluters and subsidizing non-polluting industries is the solution. Having a better environment for businesses boosts profits, not innovation.
Taxing pollution forces businesses to find ways to profit without polluting. That's innovation.
Of course, but more profits encourages people to create more businesses which create more innovation. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.
"Liberals want to heavily tax fossil and subsidize renewable energy. Problem with that is that taxing fossil make life and the economy harder in the meantime and subsidizing often goes to cronies which is bad for innovation"
Something to consider here is that taxing oil production or similar carbon emissions creating isn't really a tax. It's actually just reflecting the real cost of the activity. The problem with these industries is that they have externalities which are not reflected - some of their profits are created by a cost being put onto society. Nobody likes 'taxes', but I think everyone can agree that any activity should reflect it's true cost.
Plus, if you step away from climate change for a moment everyone can see that the demands for energy are only increasing. Some of the new technologies around energy generation will be extremely profitable - whole new sectors. The USA has a strong tradition of supporting innovation and then reaping the rewards in private enterprises. So you might consider the "subsidies" as just priming innovation.
What is the number you put on rising sea levels and altered weather patterns?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fu...
It isn't obvious at all. In fact, there are some indications that the opposite is true. For example, there are some simple economic models in Blatt:Dynamic Economic Systems where rate of profit and rate of growth are inversely proportional. Also, data from Piketty aren't very optimistic in this sense either (it seems that economic states with lots of private capital correspond to low growth and vice versa).
Because that argument betrays the most infantile misunderstanding of an issue that is extremely important; climate is not the same as weather, and extreme heat and cold and weather events are what climate models predict.
> Many conservatives are right to underline that simply increasing taxes is not the solution. So what's the solution? Innovation in new source of renewable or less polluting energy technologies.
Are you describing cap-and-trade? That's actually a conservative solution from decades ago; this is the "middle ground" and was roundly rejected as some kind of socialist takeover by today's conservatives.
Anyway it's probably too late for all of that anyway. It's certainly too late for your impotent handwaving about "innovation in new source of renewable". What a joke.
The 'extreme snow' was limited to certain parts of the US - the west coast got very little on the whole. Whereas this high temperature data is a global average. So they're not really the same thing.
> I think we should start focusing on real solutions.
Sounds good to me. Taxes, it must be said, are also a way to spur innovation, because it can focus people's attention on using less of the taxed resource. Here's Greg Mankiw's take on that. He's a Republican economist.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto....
(As for the "conservatives prefer better environment for business.." you ought to look at how well the economy has done under liberal vs conservative leaders all throughout the 20th century to gain some insight into which political leanings are better for the economy, of which business is, of course, a major part.)
Who are "we" that had an unusual cold summer?
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June–August was the highest on record for this period, at 1.28°F (0.71°C) above the 20th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C).
Global warming and climate change are one in the same. "Global warming" became the rallying cry for so many environmentalist quacks citing bunk science - people like Al Gore were universally skewered in the mainstream media - that it was toxic from a PR perspective. So they came up with a new term. "Climate change" has the exact same beliefs, political backers, scientists, corporate interests, and studies behind it as "global warming". It's just a new name.
> I think we should start focusing on real solutions.
The issue is that there is no scientific evidence that solutions are possible. The earth has gone through many dramatic "climate change/global warming" events, and these last occurred long before cars or other man-made pollutants existed. It will go through them again, regardless of how many carbon taxes are levied by liberals or Tesla's are sold. It's just a reality - mankind will eventually cease to exist on this planet regardless of what it does or does not do.
(For some reason, these same people are often pretty worried about the state of the economy. Nations have fallen since the beginning of history, and in the end every business and every nation collapse, so why don't we just let them fail and see if the next one is better?)
There is indeed a logical fallacy playing out in all of this, and that of course is that environmentalists/liberals are attempting to control something that all of the credible scientific evidence says we can't control. Controlling the universe, as it turns out, is much harder than bribing legislators to use the government resources to pursue one's agenda.
Mankind has been altering environments since when they only had stone tools. Your argument is basically, "I don't believe modern humans (with its 7+ billion population and sustained alteration of the majority of land area) have any noticeable effect on the Earth's ecosystem, therefore scientists who say so are wrong."
Stop being so willfully ignorant.
And yes, all scientists (at least sane ones) would agree that, if a several-kilometer-across ball of rock and iron falls from the sky, it will have such a disastrous consequence on the climate (among other things, including "staying alive" for most people) that our modern Global Warming will look like a summer picnic in comparison.
...which is basically non sequitur.
I'm not even sure why you brought up dinosaurs.
Strange then that "climate change" name predates "global warming"
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1321/
Limit human behavior or limit the number of humans.
Both have scary ramifications.
I don't see why people should be so scared by more solar (or even nuclear) plants.
Those are the associations some people have with the line "limiting human behavior". Of course that's a rather one-sided presentation -- I've left out positive things like "ending slavery" -- but the point is to demonstrate where the fear comes from.
In many of the examples you list, there is either an absence of liberal constitutional authority, or corruption of it. The path to the holocaust was paved by the dismantlement of liberal democracy and democratic safeguards. Slavery and subsequent civil rights abuses in the US were made possible by either punching holes in the legal order (3/5 compromise, Jim Crow, etc), ignoring it entirely, or perpetrating the abuses in secret.
To me, then, tyranny and injustice can be forestalled not by tearing down the power of the state and creating chaotic power vacuums, but by vigorously defending transparency, an independent judiciary, an independent press, and all the other legs on which the liberal order stands.
However, the point still remains that "handing over more power to the government" is a thing people have legitimate reason to fear. Particularly in an era where there's so much concern over the judiciary (from Roe v Wade to Citizens United, everyone has something they think SCOTUS screwed up badly) and the independent press (not asking the tough questions pre-Iraq war, seemingly giving Obama a pass on various scandals) and government transparency (Snowden leaks, Guantanamo, Benghazi).
So the things that we need in order to trust the government with more power aren't as strong as many people feel they should be. Simultaneously, the government has a track record of trying to change peoples' behavior in both above-board and behind-the-scenes ways, through everything from tax policy (mortgage interest deduction to encourage home ownership) to astroturfing (infiltration of various dissident groups, including those devoted to non-violence) to draconian drug laws (leading to disproportionate imprisonment of black men) and requiring people to purchase certain forms of health insurance.
It's against this backdrop that "the government wants to limit our behavior" is often evaluated. Even in areas where it actually makes a lot of sense -- like pricing externalities into carbon emissions via taxes -- it's worth asking whether the government is reaching farther than they should in order to accomplish something more than what's been publicly stated.
Nevermind that any European or Chinese or Russian climatology group would deliver the exact same data...
Sad but true
As in, “Raganwald has a potty mouth in person, but he toes the line and respects HN’s guidelines for civil discussion."
http://www.seatalk.info/cgi-bin/nautical-marine-sailing-dict...
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