No idea whether 10 years made much of a difference, but in 2011 it was "more than half of the Republicans in the House and three-quarters of Republican senators" said "that the threat of global warming, as a man-made and highly threatening phenomenon, is at best an exaggeration and at worst an utter "hoax"" https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27FOB-WWLN-t.htm...
What you’re saying is “don’t trust economics experts to translate climate scientists’ projections into economic impact.” That’s silly.
But those are climate change deniers.
The stages of denial are denying that the problem exists, admitting it exists but denying we're responsible, admitting we're responsible but denying anything need be done, admitting something need be done but saying it's too late.... and so on. All of these different excuses are put forth by the same people on different days of the week and as the needs of the current argument demand. We saw the same thing with cigarette makers, leaded gasoline makers, or any other public health issue.
It's just a blizzard of justifications for why humans shouldn't do anything about the Earth getting 5-6-7-8 degrees C warmer so that my transnational corporation can keep making money now. They're all climate change deniers.
The way to eliminate the rich is for us to band together and strip them of their assets, then they will no longer be rich.
Anyone working against the state, against the current of history, has forfeit his right to exist. This is justified by the beacon on the hill, which is communism ("a planet of equals"). Sounds familiar.
On some level I admire you because you're really just extending commonly held ideas to their logical conclusion. That's something most people don't have the guts to do. But the lesson here is that we absolutely cannot extend these "big ideas" as you've done. We have to exist in an indeterminate state and avoid totalizing our worldviews. In other words, you should find a way to advocate for measures to deal with climate change without sounding like a psychopath.
We only have about 10-15 years until complete climate collapse. The time for advocating gentle measures was 50 years ago. Which was done, and ignored by the ruling classes.
Now we only have time for drastic measures: An end to countries, and end to capitalism. Global Ecosocialist cooperation of the working classes, taking the means of production by force and ensuring only sustainable processes are continued.
I think it's deeply sad that you haven't learned the lessons of the 20th century. "Gentle measures" are the only way to make progress, we can't sever our connection to the past, drastic measures of the kind you're proposing have always resulted in the vivisection of actual human communities based on a quasi-religious understanding of what's going to happen in the future.
Ecosocialism has never been tried, and it is now long past time. Stalin and Mao certainly didn't even try. And even if human communities are vivisected, so what? The Earth is more important.
The Earth is very much my religion and I stand by Her.
> sep_field 4 hours ago [–]
> Fines and jail time would be a start at correcting policy. Especially jail time for cops who refuse to wear masks.
> sep_field 2 hours ago [–]
> yeah I think jail is best reserved for cops and politicians.
Perhaps it's best to not engage in further discussion with an obvious troll account.
Calling me a troll is a personal attack designed to discredit me. I have very different ideas and motivations than you do, but I am a true believer, not a troll.
Now, do you have anything constructive to say or are you just going to continue personal attacks?
I'm a Earth-worshipping socialist, but not a Maoist. if I were a Maoist I'd be calling for executions of climate change deniers, but I don't believe in killing for any reason, so instead I am calling for imprisonment of those who seek to harm the Earth. these beliefs are internally consistent, though perhaps not what you expect.
Is it a serious problem? No. Is the Earth getting warmer because of human activity? Probably not.
Things that are a serious problem: Pollution, pesticides, increasing water scarcity due to population growth in (already) arid areas, loss of biodiversity due to a number of things, the corporate take over of government and society, over criminalization of society with unjust laws, endless wars where western nations kill the inhabitants of non-western nations.
There's much to be concerned about. Climate change is last on the list.
and here i am, waking up every day putting on my stupid pants and my stupid hoodie and meandering to my stupid laptop to make stupid little websites.
like normally i'm just going with the flow with this knowledge that the future is gonna suck but somedays like today it hits harder than it usually does when i see it written out this way
Were this issue not highly politicized, I could openly question the implications of kind of failures without qualification :/
This is just wrong. You are free to argue that 3° warming is no big deal, like one of your sibling comments does, but saying that humans are not responsible for climate change is factually wrong.
You might want to check the news. The arctic has melted, temperatures have topped 100 degrees. The sea ice, where still present, is less than an inch thick. Commercial shipping is happening in winter without the aid of icebreaking ships. The Polar Vortex has gotten completely destabilized, sending the Jet Stream careening deep into southern latitudes (which is why Texas froze).
This is ecological doom knocking at our door. There are multiple, overlapping positive feedback loops occurring. You really should be paying attention and not just smugly pretending that you can "own the libs".
The reality that most of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels is due to humans. We know this because different CO2 sources have different carbon isotope ratios.
The reality that increased CO2 results in increased warming. We know this from various experiments and direct measurements.
The reality were we have satellites that can measure the incoming and outgoing solar energy and see that the Earth is gaining energy.
We have good measurements of various recent phenomena.
We have bad, inferred, or proxy data of various past phenomena.
We have limited data on cyclic global and extraterrestrial phenomena.
We mash these data into computer simulations of the earth, hit "run", and observe the result.
Herein lies the problem: we're feeding good, not so good, and incomplete data into an incomplete model of a chaotic system the size of the entire planet and projecting this data many years into the future to a result of impressively narrow margins.
We frequently update these models as we learn about new phenomena and interactions. We refine the data we input as we learn to better calibrate or infer its correctness. We run the simulation again and observe the results.
While the desire to improve our methods in the face of new information is a very scientific process, I think the objection is that there is a combination of a tremendous amount of hubris to trust such a large model of such a chaotic system, as well as an incentive structure that is tremendously vulnerable to abuse or corruption.
Of course it is absolutely scientific to be skeptical; that is, after all, a crucial component of the scientific process. That skepticism of this particular process exists is not only to be expected, but should also welcomed.
However, there is exceedingly little dissent within the scientific community. This alone should raise skepticism.
Now, I'm not talking about dissent about CO2's thermal properties or ways in which we measure things. Obviously these are testable, so we can maintain a certain level of confidence in their methods or results.
The global models—and actual, physical global system—are not testable. We cannot "try a little of this and a little of that" to pull apart how the emergent sum of all the parts affect this great chaotic system.
So we have a majority of the scientific community vociferously defending our projections—mostly because of unrelated but adjacent social reasons—and very few pushing the narrative that yes, in fact this is a very brittle process that ultimately thrives on faith.
At least, this is how I imagine a reasoned skeptic may form the justification for their skepticism...
There is evidence in the geological record that CO2 increases lagged temperature increases. There is evidence in the geological record that CO2 levels, and temperatures, were much higher than they are today.
Water vapor and the sun are the two biggest inputs into the greenhouse effect on Earth, not CO2. CO2 is infinitesimal by comparison.