What Kind of Problem Is Climate Change?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.
That's an amazingly stupid comment. This is why global warming deniers exist, because people make these types of stupid comments. A hurricane strengthening and stalling on land is not linked to global warming. It's always happened and always will. What was hurricane Andrew then in 1992? What about Katrina 2005? How about in 2004 where 4 hurricanes hit Florida in a 6 week time span? I lived through that one.
Hurricane Lorenzo, right now, is a better example due to where it's at in the Atlantic and its strength. Still not a great example, but better than Dorian. Dorian was technically a normal hurricane. Nothing that special or different. Devastating yes. But devastation is not an indicator of climate change. A higher number of hurricanes and higher than average number in Cat 4 and Cat 5. That's an indicator. And to be honest, this year has been pretty chill when it comes to hurricanes. Only one FL scare. Most years there are 3-5 scares by the end of September. We're only on L when it comes to named storms. Bad years in the past are around S by now. Hurricanes are named in order of the alphabet if you didn't know. In 2004, we went through the whole alphabet, plus some.
I agree global warming is happening. But this year's hurricane season does not show it.
If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian,
hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real,
probably nothing will.
Who's proof-reading these pieces?
Pair it with a striking statistic from a reputable source, at the very least if youre going to make such a naked statement. Who is the piece trying to convince? The already convinced and dyed-in-the-wool card carrying eco-enthusiasts or the unconvinced and the leery crowd?
To help aide in convincing more skeptics I would suggest observations that have held up under scrutiny.
[1] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
Wouldn't that be the best poster child of global warming taking affect for at least 2019 (thus far)?
That doesn't work the other way around when looking at single weather events.
The Alaska heatwave was a decent symptom of the general change in climate, no? At least in better respects than a hurricane.
Saying that is as dumb as saying global warming isn't real because there's still snow in winter.
It would have been smarter to talk about Alaska heat wave from the get-go that lasted, what was it, 7 to 9 days? I don't remember. That's WAY harder to dance around. Everyone can go "It got hot in Alaska? Weird... it got 90+ degrees hot? WTF? For how long? Holy shit!" Instead of a statement that amounted to "There was a hurricane in the Atlantic. Global warming is real."
However, I do know rational people who don't believe in global warming. Mostly, to the degree of being fearful. They do believe that climate patterns do change. They believe the Earth can get hot. They just don't think in 2050 Florida is going to wash out like some predictions said a few years ago.
The reason, there's too many doomsayers that overblow claims or making mountains out of molehills. This article being one. This leads them to still stay on the fence or lean one way or the other. I'm generally a prudent individual. If I see potential problems ahead, I try to nip that problem in the bud. So even if I, hypothetically, didn't think we are on a crash course when it comes to global warming, I still think it would be good to make sure it never comes to that. Reversing the affects takes too long to let it happen. Best to curb CO2 production as soon as possible, just to be safe. But it's not handled like that at all. If I didn't have my own thoughts on the subject, I won't lie, I'd probably be a denier too. Too many global warming advocates have made some crazy claims with dates that never held up. They want to ban all these lifestyle activities that aren't even the low lying fruit. All in the name of "scaring people into action". That line of thought is archaic and dead. People don't function that way anymore. We need to try being rational about how we spread information. That way a majority of people who actually "change the world" and have "influence" agree and spread the word and ideas on making such change.
First we stop making bullshit claims on global warming. Then we can get people to fully wrap their heads around the real research. Which, I know sounds like a lot. But, it worked in Florida elementary schools. I argue Florida public environmental education (at least in the 90s) was a super effective program. It never overblew anything or made sweeping claims over little things. I remember well that they always said "Bad things could happen if we don't do anything", not will. So yea, maybe I'm bias. But I just know articles like these aren't helping. And sadly, people who believe in global warming because of articles like these, are weak in faith. The first to give up and do nothing.
Misinformation requires intent. I'm not convinced there is any intent to deceive here. More likely he's not sufficiently up to speed with a data point not being a trend. Hopefully a scientist or reader will drop him a friendly email.
It's also dishonest to point out that the fossil industry has a clear interest, while ignoring that the renewables industry also has such an interest. A lot of business is being made peddling non-solutions to a problem that might actually be unsolvable.
It is also perfectly fair to point out the relative likelihood that international political problems around fossil fuels are far more likely to cost the US in blood and treasure than political problems around renewables. We don't go to war for wind and sunshine. Meanwhile, we spent hundreds of billions a year as a nation - not to mention a toll of American military and non-US civilian lives - in order to maintain our semblance of control over flow of oil.
You want to be honest? Sure, let's be honest.
To put it in perspective, the GDP of the US is currently about $19T, so they're saying the Green New Deal would cost 100% of the GDP for five straight years. This seems... exaggerated.
Not if you understand MMT and its proponents. AOC believes that every dollar spent by the government on infrastructure magically turns into five dollars of economic growth, so she's willing to go into deep debt to make it happen.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-e...
[2] I can't find the source for this one right now, but it was in a video interview regarding the green new deal, right around when it was announced.
But what AOC is talking about is not basic research, which has a multiplicative effect because it opens up new technologies, new products, and new industries. A New Deal is work for works sake, and economically substitutive... so the return is actually less than a dollar for every dollar spent.
Clearly, the climate apocalypse is what dominates the media narrative, so if you want to make money tomorrow (not yesterday), you're pushing renewables, not fossils.
That's not at all why global warming alarmists exist. The reason they exist is because the green energy industry managed to make believing in climate change a political issue rather than a scientific one, which is why the alarmism is embraced by one party but not the other. The actual "arguments" don't matter, this one especially since it's impossible to tell if Dorian would've even existed or not had the climate not changed.
Perspective matters.
Anecdotally, most of the climate deniers I know (and am related to) also believe that Jesus is coming back soon, so fuck the environment, right?
No, that's a very caricatured interpretation of Christian theology about stewardship of the environment. But Christians are a convenient scapegoat, right?
No, one has a louder voice than the other because that one is a convenient fig leaf used to put the imprint of the cross on the self-interest of the Mammon-worshipping economic elites.
The other is also politically active as well as involved in direct action, but money is volume in political discourse, and the side serving money has more of it.
(Disclaimer: I'm not Christian and cannot claim any authority on how to interpret the Bible. I would most likely count as agnostic or optimistic nihilist.)
You did admit that you're not a Christian and haven't studied theology or interpretation, which is fair of you. So let me ask a few simple questions which demonstrate the necessity of interpretation and the diversity of views on the topic:
Who are your neighbors? Are they the people in the house next door? Are they the people in the nation across the border? Should you help the people across the border at the expense of the people next door? If so, to what extent? If you decline to let into your country every foreigner who wants in, but offer to help them by other means, are you failing to honor the command to love your neighbor?
Why does "love your neighbor" necessarily mean "admit to your nation every foreigner who wants in, and freely give them everything they want, otherwise you're violating the command"?
It quickly becomes clear that such demands are, at best, based on a very shallow theology, and at worst, deception by those who couldn't care less about any religion.
It's a quite accurate view of the particular views expressed by plenty of climate change deniers; there are more robust sets of Christian beliefs about stewardship of the environment, but they don't tend to coexist with vocal climate denial.
In other words, you're not considering the issue fairly.
Plus you would have to actually show some evidence.
Converting an scientific issue into a political (or better say an emotional) one is only needed if the science does not support your side.
Therefore it makes sense for deniers to move from a scientific discussion (which has largely been lost) to a political/emotional one, where things are more flexible and a good presented bad argument might still enable you to win.
So why should the "green energy industry" move the debate from a science driven (which pretty much supports their argument) to a political one?
Therefore it makes sense for alarmists to move from a scientific discussion (which has largely been lost) to a political/emotional one, where things are more flexible and a good presented bad argument might still enable you to win.
This very submission is an example of the alarmists doing that.
There are none so blind...
Well, you probably didn't, because the mainstream media didn't cover it. You'll have to search for it. Up to you.
> And while some outlets described the co-signers as experts in climate science, most are not. As noted in an analysis below, a significant portion of the co-signers are either engineers or professionals in non-technical fields. Only 10 identified themselves as climate scientists.
So 10! climate scientists argue against climate change? Still looks like there is an overwhelming support for it in science.
[1] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/letter-signed-by-500-...
1. Invent a pseudoscientific field.
2. Make normative, political claims from said field.
3. When people outside the field express dissent, invent a non-profit to "verify the credibility of influential claims," and only allow people in said field to join said non-profit and verify the credibility of said claims: https://sciencefeedback.co/for-scientists/
> To Apply: You need to have a PhD in a relevant discipline, have at least one published article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal within the last four years in the field they are commenting on.
To criticize climate science, you must first become a climate scientist, which requires assenting to the belief in the validity of climate science, because anyone who dissents from that belief would not be awarded a PhD in the field nor have peer-reviewed articles published in it.
So only people who agree with them are allowed to criticize them. Hm, sounds a lot like HN. And so scientific! I'm convinced, thanks for the link.
There are a lot of people who don't fit that category, and if they are to be persuaded at all, it won't be by the means that are used to convince the scientifically literate. For the illiterate, they might well be tipped by one summer's weather or one hurricane's damage. That's bad science, but the voting booth doesn't care whether your reasons are sound or not. The New York Times is reporting on policy as well as science: what people are going to choose to do.
In that sense the statement is accurate. Those capable of being convinced by science are convinced; those who are moved by incorrect evidence have just received a big wad of it. The only ones who haven't reached the correct conclusion are driven by ideology, and won't be convinced by any evidence.
We can bemoan the fact that so much of policy is decided on bad grounds, but that seems to be a fact of life. Most people don't understand science, and manufactured doubt can be used to sway them from the conclusions reached by science. If you care about getting things done in a democracy, you have to take them into account.
That doesn't justify using the science badly, but that's not what's happening here. They're just reporting on the mechanisms by which people have reached their conclusions.
One time, I saw a graph of temperature over time. That's it. Nobody has ever tried to show me any other theory or evidence. Has anyone ever tried publicizing the science? I take issue with the "science has failed so now we have to be irrational" story because I am not convinced that the science has ever been tried.
I don't think this is an accurate characterization of things. Most people I know believe in climate change, but very few of them could cite any facts or graphs or science that convinced them really. They believe it because people on tv who they trust told them it was true.
I'm not saying this is bad, we should trust experts on topics without expecting every single member of the population to get bogged down in the gritty details. I myself do believe in climate change and vote for democrats. That said, it annoys me when people act like everyone who believes in climate change is a genius who knows science and isn't blinded by ideology while the deniers are cavemen or religious zealots too dumb to get it. Like it or not, it has become a political issue and people on both sides are largely just following their own side, not looking deeply into the findings and methods of scientific studies to decide for themselves if they agree with the researchers.
[1] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/pix/user_images... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Barry_(2019)#/media/...
I will say our hurricane floor count is higher on average by 2-3. I have a hard time believing there were zero hurricanes some years. Meteorology and aeronautics really was useless before the 60s (compared to today). So, numbers before then are hard to take seriously and are probably understated.
Our 5 year average of storms is trending down (slightly) since 08 as well. 10 year average peaked in 05 and has dropped since 2012.
My grand point, hurricanes right now don't make good evidence for global warming. There are far better evidence points and general scientific knowledge about greenhouse gases. Using hurricane statistics is only going to lead to ammo for deniers as they don't pay attention to better evidence. Will hurricanes potentially intensify in both volume and strength? It's definitely possible if ocean temperatures rise on average. That's how hurricanes are "fueled". But right now, we don't have good evidence of that being a truth.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/how-w...
In effect, voting is simply a measure of whether random HN users were pleased or displeased by your comment.
And you're not allowed to mention it, either. If your perfectly reasonable and polite comment gets downvoted to invisibility by random, angry users who won't tolerate diversity of opinion, then suck it up, comrade, and learn to please the hivemind--no complaining!
Of course, certain very-high-karma users can get away with saying things that would be flagged and downvoted to death if said by anyone else.
And that's what HN wants voting to be. Welcome to HN. Enjoy your stay, if you can.
Oh, this is why they exist? Or is this just a convenient excuse?
Either way 'some people don't make sense when describing X' is not a good reason to reject X.
Again, I'm not saying global warming is a lie. I know it's real. Not a belief or held in faith. Just knowing. But part of the discourse as to why people don't believe it, I see from articles like the NYT article. It's just a realistic stance on the issue. Articles like these give zero benefit. Even those who believe in global warming are arguing against this article in HN. It definitely won't bring the deniers into the light.
Fundamentally, the ability to understand the world involved critical thinking. The types of things we see from global warming deniers tends to be a kind of faux critical thought. Find some nugget of information that supports your cause, cling to it, and definitely do not attempt to gain some sort of comprehensive understanding of the subject.
This is understandable in one sense - the world is extremely complicated, and one cannot form a deep understanding of all the things they need to interact with.
The problem is people compensate for this by bullshitting themselves into believing they have some sort of understanding of said complex topic without putting in any of the work required to actually understand it.
I don't know what the real name for it, but talking about 'the media' has become sort of like a code smell to me. "The media" doesn't exist as a unified thing, and that's almost certainly a good thing. Instead of being a useful phrase, it becomes a wild card for assigning responsibility for whatever the source thinks is wrong with the world.
Dorian was technically a normal hurricane.
with the following
[The Labor Day Hurricane] was tied with Hurricane Dorian for the strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricane by maximum sustained winds, with winds of 185 mph (295 km/h) at landfall
Or if not, at lease please stop calling people "stupid" for bringing up Dorian as an indication that perhaps we should be concerned about increasing frequency of severe tropical storms?
Wrong question. We're not creating public goods, we're preventing the creation of a public bad, aka externalities. How to prevent creation of externalities is well-known: Pigouvian taxes, which are similar to but not quite the same as sin taxes.
The prisoner's dilemma also exists here, but there is a solution which also won the Nobel Memorial Prize: William Nordhaus' climate clubs.
What is the alternative?
Cold hard facts don't seem to move the majority of people as they are hard to relate to.
I do, because trying to manipulate people's emotions is the lowest form of argumentation. Not to mention the fact that she (or rather, her handlers) only care to target western countries. I'd be more willing to trust her (handler's) sincerity if she ALSO AT THE SAME TIME called out the country that has a giant brown cloud, visible from space, hanging over it.
> What is the alternative?
Make a better argument for why _this time_ it's truly different. Start off by admitting that scientists aren't always correct ("the science is settled" is one of the dumbest phrases ever uttered) and admit that scientists HAVE gotten things wrong about the climate in the past (e.g., the ice age predictions of the 70s). Then proceed with arguments that detail why previous dire predictions were incorrect and why it's different this time.
Finally, be logically consistent in your arguments:
* People in western countries are told to "have fewer children" in order to save the earth. Well guess what, we're already below replacement levels. We've done our part. Lecture folks in the developing world to do so, they're the ones contributing to overpopulation.
* At the same time, much is said about per-capita CO2 emissions in western countries. Why do we hear complete silence from climate alarmists about migration from third-world to first-world countries? I would think they'd be staunchly opposed to it, seeing as how every person imported into western countries will instantly have their carbon footprint boosted sky high. Wouldn't it be better for the earth to not have these migration patterns occur?
You claim this, but the rest of your post is primarily about emotions. You want people to admit they were wrong, as if that makes any difference to the science.
> Start off by admitting that scientists aren't always correct
I can't imagine you could find a single scientist who wouldn't admit this, but ironically the example you give, "the ice age predictions of the 70s", is a common myth propagated by global heating deniers. See [0].
> ("the science is settled" is one of the dumbest phrases ever uttered)
The science is settled. Why do you think it's dumb?
[0] https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.ht...
"Unfortunately, the small number of predictions of an ice age appeared to be much more interesting than those of global warming, so it was those sensational 'Ice Age' stories in the press that so many people tend to remember."
There may have been more reporting of ice age predictions, but that wasn't what the scientists were saying.
It's because of claims and citations like yours that people don't believe alarmists. It's dishonest (or ignorant) to cite a fraudulent paper as the source for a claim that the science is settled. Real science is falsifiable and can withstand dissent.
There's a lot of evidence for overwhelming consensus on the science of global heating.
Starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists%27_views...
Papers rejecting AGW are in an extreme minority.
Don't take my word for it. You're on the Internet. Look up the evidence about Cook's paper. Their fraud was exposed years ago, yet people continue citing him, his paper, and his Web site. (You probably won't find much about it on Wikipedia, of course.)
And the lies are nothing new. For example, Stephen Schneider advocated scientists and media deceiving the public in APS News Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5. It's been going on for decades.
> Papers rejecting AGW are in an extreme minority.
All the science that's been proven correct was once an extreme minority view. An argument based on the number of people who believe something is not a scientific argument.
And why would you make an unscientific argument about a scientific issue?
I won't. I want peer-reviewed science, like the vastly significant body of research that has been produced showing AGW.
> You're on the Internet. Look up the evidence about Cook's paper.
No. You're the one insisting that the global scientific orthodoxy is wrong. You present the evidence.
> Stephen Schneider advocated scientists and media deceiving the public in APS News Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5.
No, he didn't. Try looking up the original. But even if he did, it wouldn't matter. The science is overwhelming. It makes no difference what one individual said 23 years ago.
Are you also unaware of the peer-review crisis?
> No. You're the one insisting that the global scientific orthodoxy is wrong. You present the evidence.
Since you appeared to be unaware, I informed you that a particular, widely cited paper was discovered, years ago, to have been fraudulent, and that the information about it is freely available on the Internet. Five seconds on Google (or perhaps DuckDuckGo) would present you with the information.
You have refused to avail yourself of said information.
It is not my responsibility to educate you about science. If you care about scientific integrity, you can look up the information without any interference from me. If you prefer to remain ignorant and fixed in your beliefs, that is your decision.
> No, he didn't. Try looking up the original. But even if he did, it wouldn't matter. The science is overwhelming. It makes no difference what one individual said 23 years ago.
You accused me of "bullshit," but here you are simply lying. I have cited the original, and I have the original, and since you are willfully ignorant, I will quote it here:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
--Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5
Now you can look it up and see for yourself, and then you can retract your ignorant lie and false accusation.
You obviously don't care about the truth. Climate change is your religion, and your faith is unwavering.
There's definitely issues in science with things like repeatability in individual studies, but that doesn't apply to something like AGW. It's supported by thousands (millions?) of papers, models, meta-studies, science bodies, and so on, all agreeing.
See for example NASA's overview: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
> Now you can look it up and see for yourself, and then you can retract your ignorant lie and false accusation.
Gosh, you're furious. But at least you have got the correct quote, and it just isn't the smoking gun you think it is. It's just one remark, made in public, about the need to be media-savvy. He was not suggesting misleading the public.
That's nonsense. Not only have you not supported your assertion, but: 1) there's no reason to think that AGW is immune to these problems; and, worse, 2) AGW research is not reproducible, because it's not falsifiable, so it specifically does apply to AGW; and 3) even if you think models are meaningful, falsifiable predictions, the models have proven to be inaccurate. The claim fails in every way, from general to specific.
> It's supported by thousands (millions?) of papers, models, meta-studies, science bodies, and so on, all agreeing.
I have to wonder here if you actually believe what you're saying. "All agreeing"? That's a nonsensical, blanket statement. That's not science.
Five seconds on a search engine would prove to you that there are many scientists who do not agree with AGW hypotheses and alarmism. The parallels between your mindset and those of religious true believers who can't tolerate dissenting views are striking. Nope, don't look at any information that might contradict your scriptures, that might reveal their weaknesses, that might undermine the foundations of your faith.
> See for example NASA's overview: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
See for example this former NASA employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997978
I worked on NASA's "Mission to Planet Earth" program for a few years. Cherry-picking of models that produce results that meet the current agenda is not uncommon. Just as researchers have a (deserved IMHO) reputation for publishing data that concurs with their topics...
> Gosh, you're furious.
Let's recap:
1. You accuse me of "bullshit." 2. I make a truthful claim. 3. You accuse me of lying. 4. I prove my claim and say you should retract your accusation. 5. You say, "Gosh, you're furious!"
Where did you learn to act so shamefully? You accuse someone of bullshitting and lying, then when they prove they're not, your response is, "lol u mad." You can't even handle the truth, and your trolling is predictable.
> He was not suggesting misleading the public.
Of course he was. But he's practiced at couching, characterization, deflection, and projection, just like you are.
Have you looked up John Cook's fraudulence yet? Can you admit that knowledge to your psyche, or does it need to be protected from dissent?
We made a major effort to reduce particulates, which largely succeeded.
I'd love to hear from someone more economically minded about why I'm wrong.
https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-divid...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuel_tax_in_OECD_countrie...
When people threaten your future with vague notions of impending, and irrevocable doom, there is only one answer:
Live for today.
Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes?
(there's a post about planting trees I haven't read yet, seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)
Surely, I can't be alone in this.
So people will do something that has very little effect on the problem, feel good for their contributions. Then, people will learn than this "something" had no meaningful impact, feel betrayed ("but we agreed on this"), and give up. "Oh, come on, I already did "something". They'll wait for someone else to pickup the burden.
That would be big waste of time and energy.
If your view of people pushing for something being done about climate change is that of a dooms-day cult you're going to have to admit that it's a rather politically successful cult.
It's not irrational fear.
Why do cynical eye-rollers like you always try and crab bucket people's attempts at changing things for the better?
How far back down the technology tree are we supposed to go?
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJn6pja_l8s "Climate crisis: the unsustainable use of online video"
Isn't that the cause of the issue though ? "Who cares about 100+ years in the future, my v8 mustang and my weekly plane trips are pretty convenient, and planting a tree won't change much anyway, and china is doing anyway, plus if I'm the only one doing it it won't help that much, and &c."
> seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)
The problem is that the things most countries agreed on are not nearly enough and even if they were almost none of the goals are met.
This is a caricature with little bearing on reality. Indeed, the biggest share of CO2 emissions isn't due to "rich Americans" living wasteful lifestyles, but people in emerging economies living a comparably modest lifestyle. That's what makes this problem extremely difficult. We would have to deny those people the lifestyle that we enjoyed for the past 50+ years.
We could achieve far more by, say, investing into replacing more primitive power generation in those countries than replacing inner-country air travel with more primitive transport.
> The problem is that the things most countries agreed on are not nearly enough and even if they were almost none of the goals are met.
Of course, moral posturing costs nothing. When you actually try to do something as political leader, such as putting a tax on fuels as Macron did, chaos ensues.
Not really https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...
> We would have to deny those people the lifestyle that we enjoyed for the past 50+ years.
It's not like they have to go through the industrial revolution 1800s UK style to attain our level, we have the tech (and they're using it, solar/wind is becoming extremely competitive for example, hell even nuclear is better than coal/gas). But yeah if everyone's going to live like the current US/EU citizen we're fucked for sure no matter how many trees we plant.
> We could achieve far more by, say, investing into replacing more primitive power generation in those countries than replacing inner-country air travel with more primitive transport.
Or we could do both since these things are 100% unrelated and not enough anyway.
We're all responsible and we can all do better, so let's stop playing dumb games and do what we can. It's not like skipping your trip to standard_tourisitic_location_#231, eating less meat, buying local food, using public transportation or buying less useless junk on amazon/ebay is going to turn your life to absolute shit so let's do it ... Yes cargo ships, asian factories, saudi's oil fields, pollute a lot, but guess who's profiting from them... Don't you see the big picture ? How do you think your colombian coffee, ecuadorian bananas, chinese phones, thai clothes, saudi's gas, japanese cameras are made / get to you to you ? "Yelp, it's not me, it's the chinese/indians/saudis, look at the stats!!!". It feels like talking about pollution is like asking your 8 years old to do his homework, "I'll do it in an hour".
Yes, really. Those number support my point. The vast majority of CO2 emissions are from countries with "relatively modest" living standards.
> But yeah if everyone's going to live like the current US/EU citizen we're fucked for sure no matter how many trees we plant.
I guess we're fucked then, right? Because that's the trajectory.
> Or we could do both since these things are 100% unrelated and not enough anyway.
They're not unrelated at all, because money spent on one thing can't be spent on something else. Furthermore, giving up airplane travel for, say, railroads, is a lowering in standard of living. Investing in infrastructure abroad isn't.
> We're all responsible and we can all do better, so let's stop playing dumb games and do what we can.
Sure "we" can, but "we" won't, so let's indeed stop playing dumb games of moral posturing and figure out how we can have the best impact without relying on humans suddenly acting in a rational and responsible manner. It's just not going to happen.
> It's not like skipping your trip to standard_tourisitic_location_#231, eating less meat, buying local food, using public transportation or buying less useless junk on amazon/ebay is going to turn your life to absolute shit so let's do it
Yeah, fuck that. I'm not giving up on any of it. Now what? What are you gonna do about it? Remember, I'm billions of people.
Tax.
You know what happens when you tax people too much and they don't like it, right?
Otherwise, I'm with you on that one.
Eh, what if we need to lower our living standards ? The earth is a finite space with finite resources. Do you really think we can get 8b people live like the average US/EU citizen ? We can barely do it with < 2b and it's already too much pressure on the environment.
What's the end goal ? We all have cars, amazon same day drone delivery, eat meat 3 times per day and go on vacation every 3 months ? Is that humanity's endgame ? Most intelligent specie on earth, intelligent enough to comprehend the issue, too primitive to act on it, if that's humanity's fate it's kind of ironic, I like it in some way. "I want it all today even if it means I won't have anything tomorrow"
> Yeah, fuck that. I'm not giving up on any of it. Now what? What are you gonna do about it? Remember, I'm billions of people.
I'll be long dead before it starts having real world impacts. But at least I can sleep at night knowing I'm not actively trying to make things worse for future generations. Earth will be fine even if we fuck it up, life will most likely survive and thrive. All in all it wouldn't be that bad, just like when dinosaurs went extinct, but instead of a natural disaster it's mass suicide.
All important resources that are either non-exhaustible or substitutable. While there are certain theoretical limits, there is no limit to economic growth. This is the cornucopian position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian
The Malthusian position, held by many scientists who do not actually understand what economic growth actually is, has been shown to be wrong time and time again.
> Do you really think we can get 8b people live like the average US/EU citizen ?
I believe we can get 80 billion people to live at a standard that far surpasses our current living standards. In due time, that is.
> What's the end goal ?
I don't know. Fully-Automated Gay Luxury Space Communism? Why does there need to be an end-goal?
> We all have cars, amazon same day drone delivery, eat meat 3 times per day and go on vacation every 3 months ?
We'll all have space-cars, same hour drone delivery, eat meat every fifteen minutes, and go to work for a week every three months.
> But at least I can sleep at night knowing I'm not actively trying to make things worse for future generations.
No you can't. What if future generations will think of you as "one of those fucking Malthusians" that held back human development by supporting austerity politics? What if you're completely wrong about all your beliefs about the future, just like Malthus before you?
You can't go "Just buck up and do something!" That's something you tell someone who is depressed and that doesn't work. Plus they can point to survivorship bias to the very, very few that meaningfully accomplish anything.
I yell at people who don't snip those rings and shame them with pictures of sea turtles. Lots of shaming. Don't use plastic straws, at least use paper ones if it has to be disposable (which Florida coastal restaurants do). Don't crank your AC too low, or get an HE fan to help it out. And again, I'm a republican. Little things compound over time.
But when someone goes "How the hell am I to offset the CO2 of a cruise ship or cargo ship?" I mean... yea. Little actions I can defend pretty easily. And while I understand the powers of compounding efforts. Still.
The current environmental rhetoric doesn't leave room for the average person to make change. In the 90s, the rhetoric was "everyone, down to the individual level can make a difference". Naive and childish statement now that I'm in my 30s. But I do see the value. And that message is no longer spread. It's just "Big companies and governments are to blame and there's nothing we can do about it! We have to rely on governments and companies to make change!"
If Americans, the richest most polluting people on earth can't be persuaded to release less CO2, good luck convincing a citizen of India or Indonesia to do the same.
And apparently a sizeable part of the population thinks that planting trees or buying a few Teslas will solve it.
To me inequality and global warning are siblings. They are about the same thing, and share a common cause. If you cannot solve inequality you cannot solve global warming.
Unless Elon Musk or somebody else is able to finance a big breakthrough in several technologies that makes ALL greenhouse gasses machines obsolete, there is literally no way humans will avoid having their population reduced.
This article is short and it's a good summary on why individualism not only makes society unfair, but also threatens humanity.
That said, I'm not convinced this is going to lead to a global population reduction. In modernized economies, food isn't the boundary on population growth (all modern economies are at near-zero growth or even negative growth, and developing nations are modernizing to low birth rates at an astounding pace). Barring any huge changes, we're looking at the global population growing maybe 50% over the next century, and being completely level or shrinking after that, and most of that growth happening in the next few decades.
So for the population to shrink significantly, it would require billions to die, of famine or resource wars. So what's going to shrink the food supply that much? Enough to induce famine at a global scale? Keep in mind that global warming moves more slowly than harvest cycles. Farmers and nations can make decisions on what crops to plant and adjust their farming practices based on new information and reasonable predictions. Next year's weather won't be much different than this year's was, even if it will be significantly different than the weather in 20 years.
We are also on the cusp of two massive technological changes that will impact our farming abilities - IoT, and GMO. IoT allows plant-by-plant management of crops, reducing tilling and chemical use. GMO allows adaptation of crops to growing conditions more quickly than hybridizing does.
It just seems to me that the concerns about feeding everyone, in the wake of a previous century that absorbed a quadrupling of the population while making more food than ever and a future of at least two key technological breakthroughs, is more doomsday than solid reasoning.
If you think the "other side" is a climate change denier, you don't have a grasp of the issues involved and I'm really suspect that your op-ed is preaching to your crowd rather than actually trying to engage the problem.
The issue has never been denying the scientific fact that CO2 reflects infrared light, causing a greenhouse effect. It's a question over the scale of the problem, the timelines in which it plays out, and the panic and alarmism exhibited by one side of political debate.
Moving off fossil fuels is going to cost a lot of money, and it is going to be substitutive spending, not the growth-building kind. The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Is is worth it? Is it necessary? That depends on how alarmist you are in your global warming predictions. And that is where we disagree. I've lived through two major economic recessions, and seen the effect that has on young people and opportunities. I wouldn't want to wish that on an entire generation. Millennials think boomers gave them a bad break, but wait until their kids see what opportunities their climate change policies leave them with...
We need to move off fossil fuels. But we can do it in a way that is gradual and growth-positive, while exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields and adds living space for the growing population of the world. That requires a healthy debate about trade-offs and choices, and recognition that this is a complex, multi-faceted issue that people come to with multiple opinions and that's okay.
Source? The last New Deal helped get us out of the Great Depression. Seems crazy to suggest that a new similar one would cause one.
But anyway, the only similarity is in the name. The FDR new deal built new infrastructure. The Green new deal replaces infrastructure. Adding infrastructure where there was none before increases productivity, and therefore causes economic growth. Replacing infrastructure has net-zero change and therefore while the activity adds to GDP, it has no lasting effect on the economy. And since it substitutes for things that would have led towards growth, it actually causes stagnation or decline.
In the social sciences, this is known as the "broken window fallacy." There's a lot of papers you can find with those search terms.
If you want an idea of the best-case scenario of what life would be like under the Green New Deal, look to Japan with it's 20+ years of economic stagnation. Except without nationalized pensions we'd be asking a whole generation to live through work-until-you-die conditions. I'm sorry, but I don't think I want to do that to my kids unless it is a real do-or-die scenario as the alarmists claim. But the alarmists are wrong. The world is not ending tomorrow, or even the day after. We can deal with the change at a pace that doesn't result in economic suicide.
If so, I would like to propose a Pink New Deal. It's even better than the Green one, trust me. And it seems crazy to suggest otherwise.
BTW, since you care about reducing wealth inequality, can you send a dono to my paypal?
You're the one who's being alarmist if you're trying to argue that the US is staring down some decades-long recession to move more in that direction, which is pretty much all that's being suggested by some fringe politicians in the US.
Is German and Norwegian youth looking at having to deal with decades of recession, rising unemployment, rising income equality etc? No, they're not.
The choice is a stark one: either invest in technologies and infrastructure to decrease CO2 production, or give future generations the gift of a dead planet.
The science says otherwise. Did you know that for most of Earth's evolutionary history the climate was far, far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations than today? Global warming has lots of negative ramifications, but it is not going to create a "dead planet."
Spreading outright falsehoods doesn't help things.
Literally the science states that continued warming is going to have devastating impact on the environment and on the ability of industrial society to exist.
We're facing ecological collapse on more than a few fronts (the collapse of fisheries, insect and bird populations, water crises in heavily populated regions, etc), why throw in a full-blown climate crisis in there as well.
Are you sure of that? Increased CO2 causes plants to grow faster. Higher temperatures lead to greater precipitation. Shorter winter means you can squeeze in an additional growing season.
In fact the fossil and sedimentary record shows that until recently in evolutionary history CO2 levels and temperatures were much higher, and the world was covered in tropical rainforest.
If anything we are greening the world, reversing a desertification trend that started when grasses started out competing rainforest.
Of course we are doing it while polluting the planet and acidifying the ocean, which are real problems.
Aside from a few extinction events in which the vast majority of life on Earth did indeed die, the climate has changed slow enough for evolution to take its course. If what "naturally" would've happened over the course of a million years instead happens over centuries or even decades years then things become much more bleak.
The world getting 1.5C hotter on average doesn't mean everywhere just gets 1.5C hotter all the time. If the increase means more droughts and more excessive rainfall, it's limited what you can do to exploit it for agricultural yields.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.p...
Which is taken from this excellent Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
A change of 1.5C is just a nudge in the direction of historical averages.
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.
However big they seemed compared to the past, they're nothing compared to the future, though everything we do affects it. We can still avoid some of the worst.
Climate change is not a single event, nor a cluster of events, that occur(s) over a summer. Strong hurricanes have occurred well before Dorian [1]. So have heat waves [2].
Extreme weather happens. The change in the frequency of (some) extreme events can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but a single event cannot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave
I don't like it but I would roll with it if that is the pragmatic solution.
How do you propose to win?
So, to be clear, your "pragmatic" solution is to deceive the public, because you think you are smarter than they are.
Well, you're about 23 years behind:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
--Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5.
Which raises the question: what if you are one of the public?
I've propose appealing to emotion, which I don't think needs to include deception.
>Which raises the question: what if you are one of the public?
I am absolutely am, though I've also done my own climate reconstructions from raw, unadjusted data, which was the beginning of me deciding which 'side' of this debate was correct and honest, and which side were clowns. That is to say after doing the math myself it became clear one side was not even arguing in good faith, or incredibly ignorant.
There are people on the other side of the issue who have done the same thing and come to the opposite conclusion. For example, over 500 scientists and engineers recently signed a letter to the U.N. saying:
· “Nature as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming” · “Warming is far slower than predicted” · “Climate policy relies on inadequate models” · Carbon dioxide is “plant food, the basis of all life on Earth” · “Global warming has not increased natural disasters” · “Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities”
Signers of the letter include: MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen; Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, and Stanford University professor emeritus Elliott D. Bloom, as well as several signers formerly affiliated with NASA.
Are they all "incredibly ignorant clowns, not even arguing in good faith"?
Resulting in endless gridlock, getting nothing done aside from increasing outrage and spectacle.
But I guess if I were a NYT's reader I wouldn't even think about asking these questions, I'd just yell ERMEGERD Dorian and start trash talking anyone who doesn't immediately panic.
That is not a scientific claim.
From the chapter 3.3.6:
> There is thus limited evidence that the global number of tropical cyclones will be lower under 2°C compared to 1.5°C of global warming, but with an increase in the number of very intense cyclones (low confidence).
The qualifiers are important - they're not as confident about this claim as others, but feel the risk of it being true given that there is some scientific support for it, merits it being mentioned so people can make informed decisions.
Therefore, to say, "However big they seemed compared to the past, they're nothing compared to the future," is clearly unscientific, alarmist propaganda. Of course, it's not surprising, given that some scientists have advocated misleading the public on this matter for over 20 years.[0]
Further note (edit). I think it is unlikely that a single state will ever be able to mitigate alone unless all other states stop or drastically reduce CO2 release. Maybe one state could threaten to set off a bunch of nukes in the upper atmosphere to destroy electronics and power grids around the world as a threat to encourage compliance, but that seems extremely far fetched.
Climate change, as a single, isolated factor, won't cause by itself human extinction or at least the end of the human civilization in a foreseeable future, but reality is complex, current civilization and most of mankind depends on a lot of connected systems. Positive feedback loops happen, in climate, economics and in cultures, and from time to time the effects catch by surprise experts. We might be betting it all, and losing the bet, forever.
And we are not talking about the fly of a butterfly, the climate system is gaining an atomic bomb worth of energy each second https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/global-w...
Edit: [0] Had someone argue with me that this just means we had record hot months before. I'm like, no, that's not how that works. Those record days were from different years. The new ones were from the same year.
>How much more common does this have to be before people start acting?
Because it is becoming more common. Just as predicted.
On average, how many record-high days have been recorded each year, for as long as your records have been kept?
How many record-low days?
A number out of context is not useful for drawing a scientific conclusion.
Robert Wright's book Nonzero, which advocates for these kinds of reforms, deeply influenced my worldview, way back when.
https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/d...
--
I'm a treehugger. During the 90s, I volunteered at Wetlands Conservation Network (WetNet), a short lived Audubon offshoot trying to save the Pacific salmon.
During my time there, I somehow got the impression that all environmental (ecological) challenges could be fixed with better accounting and fair markets.
More than just addressing externalities.
With our salmon, the (economic) winners were timber companies and developers. Who reaped outsized rewards for developing habitat. (Timber companies were turning second growth forests into urban sprawl thru their subsidiaries.)
Other beneficiaries were power (hydroelectric) and some farmers (irrigation).
The biggest losers were the commercial & tribal fishers, anglers, and the hard to quantify "culture".
But for some reason, beyond my experience and understanding, commonsense structural reforms were completely out of bounds.
For instance, (I'm told) that water rights in the West are "use it or lose it", so potato farmers in Idaho continue to grow an oversupply. Whereas if they somehow rent (or transfer) those water rights in an open marketplace, that water could be put to better uses.
--
Note that I've been out of the treehugger game since 2000, so I don't know what, if any progress, has been made since.
Also, I continue to be surprised that Wright's Nonzero thesis apparently hasn't gotten any traction. Neither with the libertarian Freedom Markets™ cultists. Or the weirdly regressive leftists who reject markets and incentives, and continue to conflate corporatism & cronyism with capitalism.
Oh well.
What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then?
Climate change is a problem whether or not it's anthropogenic (which there is massive evidence that it is).
> Yet, if we DID control the planet, we could simply fix it.
Us having the capacity to initiate a warming trend doesn't imply that we could simply stop it.
> What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then?
Then we'd have just as much interest in bringing it under control. The impacts don't change of the source is different.
>What do you mean plague vaccine? We need to stop dreaming about magic solutions and just stop living in cities
>Farming? No this will never work, just stop reproducing. And collect more berries.
>Fire? Why do we need fire? It's dangerous and hot food is a luxury.
2. With the exception of up until modern times, farming, like many other major changes in human habitation, never threatened our existence on this planet.
3. Fire is dangerous, but the benefits vastly outweighed the dangers, and also did not permanently, in the chronological perspective of human beings, threaten our ecosystem.
Better or worse?
We've got exactly one planet's worth of resources to consume in our reach for the stars. Doing nothing and doing it wrong gets us extinction on basically the same galactic time scale.
What a tragedy though, to have a real shot and burn it all up trying to get each other to click on ads for plastic crap no one needed.
Also, and more importantly - it's easy to categorize problems retroactively based on how they were eventually resolved; not so easy to apply this categorization with foresight.
Finally - some problems have both societal and technological aspects, and so do their solutions.