No mention of climate change in the article.
He still doesn't "believe" in it. "Nobody can know if it's happening" and "earth went through countless high and low temperature passes over the years. It's nothing special"
It was a great example of today's reality we live in. It's truly an age of misinformation.
Here's a clue:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i...
This year is looking like it will set the record for lowest yet. My guess is that it will be ice-free in September within 5 years because it's an exponential decay. Note "ice-free" is agreed to mean less than 1mil square kilometers.
Agreed by who? You're trying to convince the deniers; giving them a massive out like that isn't tactically sound.
"Oh their prediction was wrong so they changed the terms - climate change is a conspiracy and they're lying to our faces, can't you see?!?!"
I was going to say "It's an endless fight", but it isn't true. The fight will end when we all die. The horrors that are coming are unspeakable. During the famines in Russia during the civil-war starving mothers ate their children. Famine is our future. In the USA, we are already locking up climate refugees, many children, in cages.
Things are already starting to get bad and we aren't at 1.5C, or 2C, or the 3-4C we are projected to hit by end of the century.
Funnily enough, I think this would actually be justified if climate change was going to cause imminent famine as you're suggesting. Given the choice between having the population of the US undergo a mild famine while to the south there's a famine beyond living memory (thanks to preventing climate-motivated migration) or having a famine beyond living memory here (thanks to the extra few hundred million mouths to feed), I know which one I would want the US government to choose. Helping refugees is a good thing, but the US government has an obligation to US citizens first and foremost. That's why we call it the United States government, and not the Mexican government, or Guatemalan government, or Honduran...
If you let too many people get into the lifeboat, you all drown.
I don't think that this is currently the case, though. Famine, when it comes, will affect the rest of the world far more than it will the US, Canada, and Russia. Food will become more expensive, but that will be due to exports rather than having more people than the land can feed - unlike almost every other country on the planet. Also barring further improvements in agriculture, of course.
USA has had the biggest impact on climate in the last 100 years and is responsible for the bulk of climate emissions. In other words, the rest of the world will starve because of us and somehow we can justify building walls to protect ourselves. If there is a thing as "evil" it most certainly is that.
I think that when it comes to total impact on the ability of the rest of the world to feed itself, the US is probably pretty far in the black. Yes the contribution to climate change is negative, but the Green Revolution [0] is almost certainly very, very positive. Improved agricultural tech, including GMO crops, have fed a lot of people around the world.
Lifestyle choices won't affect climate change as long as we keep fueling the machine that's chewing through the resources. "It's the economy, stupid" - the modern economy doesn't just depend on consuming many resources as possible, its tenets are fundamentally based around it. Every call for more jobs is a call for more waste. Every push to lower interest rates is a judgment of valuing the present over the future. We've figured out how to make more stuff than we can actually ever use - now we need to figure out how to dial it back instead of throwing the excess away.
It's also important to you because it can help you decide where to work, where to live, and what to do.
I'd argue that the overriding moderator is culture, with global warming being much more inconvenient for the car-based consumption treadmill.
> There is a reason the rest of the world (in places with worse problems than in USA)
It's not about real problems that people directly struggle with, but rather political "problems" that mass media turns into a divisive frenzy.
Edit: This is what I was trying to remember:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-risks-as-...
It’s probably quite a good lesson for everyone, a lot of our beliefs aren’t reached through some process from first principles, they are accepted from what appears to be normal. Our understanding of the world is really not much better than the sources for news and analysis we and those around us expose ourselves to.
Suppose Iceland were to win the World Cup. Would people be saying that Iceland had spent a bunch of effort training players, or would they be saying that it's natural for different teams to win, and that it had to happen eventually?
One major issue is that probability and statistics are very far down the pecking order of what is considered part of a good education. A huge number of people think "it varies randomly" means the same as "there's no way to know any more".
People would be saying both and they would all be right. It takes both luck and training to win.
EDIT: Replaced "argument" by "fallacy"
I keep saying that ocean acidification needs to be the forefront of the argument more. The data is so much clearer and dramatic that it's so much harder to deny the harm being done by greenhouse gases. "It's hot today" is a terrible way to start a discussion with someone who doesn't believe in global warming, just like "it snowed today" is a terrible counter-argument from them.
I don't know about these polar vortexes in particular, but climate change predicts wider swings in both directions, as there is more energy in the system. In other words, the vortex would not have gone as far south if it had had less energy.
If I may share a simpler analog, it's like when I see people on social media mocking flat-earthers and saying, "how do you think cell phones work if satellites aren't real?" Okay - you agree the earth is near-spherical. That's great. But your lack of actual understanding just gave the flat-earthers a chance to point out that cell phones don't actually use orbiting satellites, make you look like you don't know what you're talking about, and win the argument. Now somebody who also doesn't understand is questioning the scientific consensus even more strongly.
> Energy arrives from the sun in the form of visible light and ultraviolet radiation. The Earth then emits some of this energy as infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere 'capture' some of this heat, then re-emit it in all directions - including back to the Earth's surface.
https://skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enha...
It's devastating to think about, very negative, and it almost always means that people need to quit doing things they've come to love.
It's like trying to get someone who's addicted off their drugs and telling them that even if they are successful with quitting, it won't protect them unless all others stop doing drugs simultaneously.
And I'm putting enough solar on my roof to run the house and charge my in-the-near-future EV, so, yeah...
Try selling people a problem without a solution. Good luck!
And even the hypothetical solutions nobody wants to commit to are being disputed in the style you can witness above.
- we know that that effort would result in an uptick in carbon production (need to produce all this new stuff: factories, ship it everywhere, etc.)
- we also know that as energy gets cheaper, people use more of it
- there aren't enough rare earths to replace all transportation with EVs, and even if there were it's like 20% of emissions; this ignores rare earths needed for outside storage batteries/grid tech/...
the only solution - happens to be economic - is massive shedding of consumption by basically the entire population of the earth, and if you think your standard of living won't decrease many-fold you aren't being realistic.
This man had in the past lobbied to forbid the NWS from releasing weather data directly to the public, and gotten Rick Santorum (his home state senator) to propose a bill to that effect.
https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-10-hotte...