We need something like this to stop global warming!
We need a huge collaboration of countries.
We don't need a mega project which creation will cause tons of CO2 (building stuff produces CO2 equivalent emissions) have devastating environmental damage, and massive security risks.
Assuming we can fix climate change by mega project is just the wrong approach.
We need a very (very very) high number on mostly smaller changes (and probably some larger law changes).
So that even if some of them fail it doesn't matter in the grater picture, and so that there is actually a realistic chance to pull it of (which for such a hypothetical mega construction is very small for various reasons).
Go ahead we are listening. Who would you go about coordinating and enforcing 'huge collaboration of countries'?
All i remember is world leaders coming together, year after year - shake hands, thump their chest expressing how sorrowful they feel, give great speeches how everything will change - and then nothing changes.
Just because it doesn't happen doesn't mean there is not need for it.
The Bering Strait Dam btw. would have required a higher degree of collaboration then is needed to limit climate change. Sure a few less countries would be involved be the involved countries still would need a much deeper level of collaboration which given that it's effect would have been rather negative for many of the cost countries it would have been rather hard to archive any agreement.
I don't want to go down a political rabbit hole here, but we should at least get the facts straight.
So what you're saying is we need a committee of countries.
I suspect the days of doing major engineering work are mostly behind us. For better or worse.
But that won't solve that we keep adding big amounts of fossil carbon to the atmosphere, nor the amount of fossil carbon that we managed to add to the cycle so far that is what is driving climate change now.
To stop global warming net zero plus massive carbon capture is needed, moving pieces in a mostly closed (or at least with stable enough inputs) system won't do the trick.
EDIT: ah, rain seems to leach it away from the amazon basin over time. Still wonder where it all goes though, into the sea?
As a side effect, growing in the Sahara would also potentially drastically reduce Atlantic hurricanes. So we have to decide what's more important, trees (move them to Sahara! Or at least replant equal numbers in Sahara and elsewhere) or human lives and infra.
63 years ago, there was a push to warm the arctic. In 1978, doomsayers predicted a new ice age. For all of the predictions of apocalypse, none have materialized. However, throughout history fear has been a powerful tool for motivating and manipulating the public.
"Ice Age 1978 Leonard Nimoy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0
"List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
> We’ll again refer to the 2008 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that found there was not a scientific consensus in the 1970s on the cooling idea. The authors, by surveying the peer-reviewed literature between 1965 and 1979, found quite the opposite.
>(00:12:30) The climatic record in these deep sea cores tells us that there have been eight ice ages in the last 700,000 years. It also tells us when they have occurred. This provides us with a test of various theories of the ice ages. We now have a theory that tells us that changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit act as a pacemaker for the ice age succession. Since this theory can precisely predict when ice ages occured in the past, it also can predict when ice ages will occur in the future. From this theory we can say with confidence that we are currently heading towards another ice age.
Dr. James D. Hays
https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%2...
Somehow, your link was missing a hyphen.
Science is absolutely about consensus. Being right is entirely meaningless if you can't produce enough evidence to convince others of your rightness.
There's a very significant difference between "basically everyone in the field agrees there's enough evidence for X" and "one guy advocates X".
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” -Keynes
Science is about understanding the facts that inform policy.
1) I changed my mind about the facts.
2) I declare that the facts have changed.
3) You must also change your mind or else I'll accuse you of adhering to dogma.
4) My view is now more popular. It is the prevailing dogma. You're against the consensus if you disagree with my "facts".
The word "Facts" does heavy lifting here. Ultimately, facts can't make any assertions, only humans can. At the core of Scientism, there's always a presumptuous attempt to lay claim to objective truth. Science becomes a dogma and belief rather than a method of investigation.
I think you are misinterpreting the word “dogma”. It does not mean “consensus understanding” but rather “incontrovertibly true”. The former can change, the latter cannot; wordsmithing a false equivalence doesn’t turn real science into dogma.
1 usually disapproving : a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted These new findings challenge the current dogma in the field. political dogma 2: a belief or set of beliefs that is taught by a religious organization
1a: something held as an established opinion especially : a definite authoritative tenet b: a code of such tenets pedagogical dogma c: a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds 2: a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church
This is not congruent of science.
>doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith
Again, “faith” is antithetical to science. Faith requires no evidence, science does.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines dogma as:
“a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.”
I.e., dogma cannot be disputed. Science is meant to be disputed.
It seems you are confusing political opinion for science.
This is the point of using this word in this specific context. Scientism isn't science. Hope this helps.
Most new ideas that occur at the margins of that uncertainty won’t initially be accepted, but as more data comes in that uncertainty is reduced
In difference to that, we now have a scientific consensus and while there is a lot discussion about many details there is pretty much an agreement on:
- it's a lot of warming
- it's coming way to fast
- it's man made
- it already started
- the consequences if we don't change the current trajectory will be bad, very very bad
Doesn't mean it's an apocalypse and maybe the thread to the survival of humanity was larger during the cold war (not that ware aren't somewhat at the beginning of a new cold war), but then the a cold war can be resolved by everyone agreeing to not do anything. Climate change needs everyone to do something (change their power production and potential even living style). Which is bad, because people are better at not acting then they are at acting when it comes to hard decisions.
>None of them had anywhere the level "scientific consensus" on the topic as climate change has.
Which is fine as far as that goes. However, consensuses have been wrong before, even when dressed in the pretenses of science. Cannabis prohibition would be a good example where research was exclusively funded to show the harms of cannabis. Today CBD is presented as a cure all. A common thread would be the underlying financial and political incentives for prohibition. Incentives matter. Another parallel might exist in the fear based promotion of prohibition.
>Climate change needs everyone to do something...
Yes, and as we examine the proposed solutions most of them revolve around new taxes and supranational bodies issuing currency in the form of "carbon indulgences" or "carbon credits". We are supposed to believe that those horrible oil companies have every incentive to distort the facts about the climate. Yet simultaneously we should also believe there are no malign incentives for or distortions surrounding the inverse. We should unquestioningly believe there are no ulterior motives for those who would appoint themselves to issue carbon credits, permission slips to consume energy needed by every human on Earth.
That's a bit of a stretch, but it is possible. It is also possible that just like the proposed project in 1958, which was imagined as a boon for the Siberian region, future geoengineering projects will also have unanticipated dangers. It looked good at the time, just like the drug war looked good at one time. Today the climate agenda and geoengineering looks appealing to many.
Maybe not. Maybe we don't know as much as we think we know?
This is why instead of grand projects we should have many smaller projects which combined still have a large effect.
Also luckily many of the changes which are good for the climate are (at least in their idea) also good even without climate change. Like going way from coal power plants, which are not just bad for the climate but also bad for the environment. (Through in practice there might be drawbacks in whatever replaces it.)
> just like the drug war looked good at one time.
I get your point, but I'm not sure that this is a good example, the war on drugs looked from the get to go like it was overly targeting certain communities while even back then it was known that it's unlikely to work due to e.g. previous experiences with fighting alcohol during the prohibition period...
Plants used to be heavier and squatter, and usable material would have been greater, back when the atmosphere was closer to 2000ppm CO2. That is, realistically, and actually, plants get all of their food from the air, and soil amendments make it easier for the plants to grow tall/wide enough to get more usable sun and surface area to get their food out of the air.
Ask anyone who's ever tried CO2 with plants what happens to their fertilizer budget. It goes down, because plants are carbohydrate factories, and more carbon means more carbohydrates.
I'm off in the weeds, but cui Bono is something I ask of nearly everything and other than the carbon credit companies and all the people employed therein, who benefits from less CO2 financially? The Bayer/Monsanto and Dow of the world. Not me or you, not the oil companies, not a Rockefeller or whoever.