How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Mar 20, 2020 5:13 pm

Okay, enough though.

There can be a thread on global warming (or the ongoing human-driven extermination event generally) and the consequences, and there can be a thread on whether agw is a hoax, exaggerated, constructed, etc.

These are two different discussions, based on very different foundational premises. One requires us to debate things like whether Green New Deal measures are sufficient or a pacifier; whereas the other requires us to discuss whether oil companies or six dead rich men who were once in the Club of Rome are the bigger factor in duping society as a whole.

Sounder you are invited to start the new thread critiquing the very idea of agw. If you do not do it, it will be done by me. You and everyone else will be expected to post that kind of material there. So it's your choice whether the OP on the new thread is in your name. That thread can also link to this one, but not vice-versa. I'm sick of the complaints. Thank you.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Harvey » Sat Mar 21, 2020 7:45 am

About bloody time. Cheers Jack.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Sat Mar 21, 2020 9:00 am

Sounder » Fri Mar 20, 2020 5:38 pm wrote:This thread was started by Delta Dawn as a skeptical take on Climate Change.

Folk here think it is really bad, I do not. I think there are many other issues that have greater importance and that AGW is a grandstanding device for intellectuals, that serves to distract from those other issues, and that is the true objective of the ten percent protector class in service to their sponsors the .01%.

Of course, that is only my opinion, and we know what that is worth around here.

You are correct Sounder, and mods and others should respect the spirit of the OP. The question of climate change was not settled then and not now, if the true believers want an echo chamber, start their own thread that makes it clear that no contrarian view is welcome.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sat Mar 21, 2020 10:12 am

The question of climate change has been settled for decades, no matter how much you lie about it, even the big oil companies came to that conclusion thirty years ago. That you keep buying into their disinfo campaigns is your problem.

DeltaDawn's OP was basically: "it's cold outside in December! Take that climate change!", and the next few posts were all pointing out the flaw in that "argument" (hint: weather is year by year, climate is a thirty year average), and that was ten years ago. Since then temperatures have only been going up, and your own country just recently went up in flames. Maybe there is a connection?
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby brainpanhandler » Sat Mar 21, 2020 11:17 am

BenDhyan » Sat Mar 21, 2020 8:00 am wrote:
Sounder » Fri Mar 20, 2020 5:38 pm wrote:This thread was started by Delta Dawn as a skeptical take on Climate Change.

Folk here think it is really bad, I do not. I think there are many other issues that have greater importance and that AGW is a grandstanding device for intellectuals, that serves to distract from those other issues, and that is the true objective of the ten percent protector class in service to their sponsors the .01%.

Of course, that is only my opinion, and we know what that is worth around here.

You are correct Sounder, and mods and others should respect the spirit of the OP. The question of climate change was not settled then and not now, if the true believers want an echo chamber, start their own thread that makes it clear that no contrarian view is welcome.


Listen BenDhyuchebag, DeltaDawn posted exactly 5 times in this thread, including this Gem:

DeltaDawn » Sun Jan 17, 2010 11:42 pm wrote:How I wish I had the capacity to post links, because I surely would have posted the one about the Club of Rome...my original point EXactly!!

Haven't figured out even quote stuff here, but "The NWO are the good guys" lol, yeah maybe? We know the 666 beast will come first, could the beginning actually be the one world government? Will it take a deadly wound that will enable the Beast to come with wonderous acts to heal it? Is it all inevitable, because 'it is written'?

Just asking like in the beginning, "How bad is global warming?". Is it that bad or is it the entrance for something much bigger, more important, and a way for we as 'the people' to accept it all?

Food for thought!


DeltaDawn has not posted on this board in over ten years now. I think we can safely assume they have abdicated any rights with regard to this thread.

I just skimmed the first 20 pages of this thread. Other than Wrex making some interesting comments,

Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 17, 2010 11:44 am wrote:I don't even talk about Global Warming for a small handful of reasons.

1. First and foremost, it's not important. Humanity at the present time is faced with a massive laundry list of Serious Problems and Existential Risks, and climate change is not ranked very high among them. We are seeing real-time consequences for human pollution and waste right now that are considerably more dangerous and catastrophic than the slow burn of climate change. If we're going to take up the fragile bandwidth of the American Brain with an environmental issue, Global Warming is very suspiciously trivial in comparison to, say, contaminated water.

2. It's a deliberately contentious issue. There's been a lot of social engineering behind this to ensure that. Al Gore and Tony Blair are the elite-level version of Mr. Gunderson or Mr. Icke...everything they touch turns to shit and we should be wary of any cause they champion. Actually getting to the point of being able to even explain my stance on this issue invariably takes a lot of fucking time. Climate Change has been reduced to a mere binary trap -- it's either the most important issue facing humanity or it's a vast left wing conspiracy, so tell me in one sentence or less, where do YOU stand? That's not a conversation I find very interesting.

3. I really do doubt the data and the models and especially the people pushing this. I was raised to be a liberal environmentalist and I knew about the Club of Rome long before I was told it was "the bad guys." My first grappling with complex modeling was trying to replicate the work of Paul Ehrlich and understand how he came to his conclusions. While I find Catton's massive tome "Overshoot" to be a compelling case, I find Ehrlich's work to be curiously dumb and full of holes, which is a view a great many of his colleagues in the hard sciences have shared for decades now. Furthermore, I find the contention that we as humans understand our planet, in it's entirety, well enough to model it accurately to be little more than fucking hilarious arrogance from the The Usual Suspects.

4. My opinion is not constructive. In light of all this, avoiding the topic is really the only constructive thing I can do. I'm not interested in debating it, there will be no value emerging from the debate no matter what the final result, and furthermore, my opinion is too complicated to be reduced to something easily explainable to anyone without a background in the issue. I hope I did an adequate job here, though.


... and reasonably concluding it is best in his opinion if he withdraws from the discussion, the balance of the posters claiming to be skeptics (you and sounder appear to be the only holdouts, brave souls that you are) and cowering in terror at the prospect of carbon taxes and the club of rome plotting like Thanos to kill half the population have long since moved on to more fertile pastures for their brand of dung.

Honestly, at this point, climate change denial is tantamount to holocaust denial. The effects of climate change are real. People are suffering and dying. The planet is being irrevocably altered, for the worse.

Enough already. Regardless of the original intent of DeltaDawn this thread has become a repository of climate change data, aside from the occasional bullshit post from you and Sounder, ALL of which have been thoroughly, unequivocally, undeniably debunked; over and over and over again.

Enough already.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Mar 21, 2020 3:25 pm

I am clear on the other side of this, at the view that climate change talk itself is denial, a way of rendering in abstract and seemingly measurable and simple terms (how many degrees or ppms the global target is supposed to be) something much bigger and harder to accept, an extinction event caused by the political economy as a whole, requiring changes in every aspect of how people live on earth. Something that carbon taxes and market solutions cannot possibly approach.

We don't need too much of a model to understand what is happening not only with the ice sheets but with the oceans, the forests, the wilderness, the wetlands, the atmosphere, the waters, the insects, the living things (biomass), the "resources." All these are visible, self-evident, simple, measurable. Ending hydrocarbon fuel dependence is only an absolute first necessity. It is nothing near a sufficient approach.

In any case, BenD and Sounder, we are being serious here: there will be two threads. Start the new one yourselves, or I'll start it. These are two different subjects, as I explained above, and I've got enough headaches.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Mar 21, 2020 7:31 pm

It's settled Ben.

I've fought fires in rainforests that haven't burned for thousands of years this last fire season. Some are gone and won't be coming back.

Thousands of people have died from unprecedented heatwaves this century and their frequency and duration is increasing.

This was the worst fire season in NSW history by so far it's not funny. Most of entire SE coast of Australia from Brisneyland to Bass Strait burnt this last year. We had fire conditions in mid Spring that have happened a handful of times before, and then in the height of summer not mid Spring.

It's settled.

This shit was predicted last century and it's happening now.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Mar 21, 2020 7:41 pm

smiths » 08 Jan 2010 11:56 wrote:its outrageous that a couple of important scientists fiddled with graphs and discredited the tens of thousands of honest scientists whose work all points overwhelmingly towards the same conclusion

the main architects of the 'global warming skepticism' being PR firms, oil companies and totally corrupt scientists who are paid and write what they are told to right must feel completely vindicated


anyone who cant work out whats going on here should fuck off and do some real reading on this subject

Australia suffers hottest decade as globe warms

Australia has sweltered through its hottest decade on record, officials said Tuesday, linking a rise in heatwaves, drought, dust storms and extreme wildfires with global warming.

The Bureau of Meteorology also said 2009 was the second warmest year since detailed records began in 1910, with an annual mean temperature almost one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.

Senior climatologist Dean Collins said the average for the decade -- about 22.3 degrees Celsius (72.1 Fahrenheit) -- was 0.48 degrees Celsius (0.89 F) above Australia's 1961-1990 benchmark average and an indication of man-made global warming.

"For the past six decades, each decade has been warmer than the preceding one," Collins told AFP.

"To get six, seven decades in a row that are warmer than the previous one -- it doesn't happen by chance. It's reflecting what's happening at the global level."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100105/wl ... 0105072546

so lets make a big deal about one cold winter, as compared to six decades each warmer than the next


This was written over a decade ago. Since then we've had another warmest decade in record.

In that time we have repeated fire emergencies where the fires create their own weather (it's normal now and was rare when I started fire fighting), multiple "once in a century" floods, we're losing agricultural capacity and have effectively been in perpetual drought.

The climate has changed in Australia. We have faster cycles from one drought to another. We have intense wet periods followed by intense dry periods. We don't have decade periods of mild weather and average rainfall like we did. The ground has dried and doesn't recharge like it used to. When smiths posted that we used to hazard reduction burning in August and sometimes later in the year in my fire district..

The last three years has seen section 44 fires - local state of emergencies due to fire activity.

In August. That is winter here.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Cordelia » Sun Mar 22, 2020 11:00 am

This thread was started by Delta Dawn as a skeptical take on Climate Change.


DeltaDawn has not posted on this board in over ten years now. I think we can safely assume they have abdicated any rights with regard to this thread.


Delta Dawn originally came to this board in 2009 as a legitimate survivor searching for some answers about her past before she was called a troll (she wasn't) and cruelly hounded out. Sorry, Delta Dawn. :cry: . So it strikes me as a little ironic that the thread she started is (I think) the longest thread on RI; 212 pages as of today.

Just sayin' (sorry Laodicean).

Anyway, :backtotopic:
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Jul 30, 2021 6:20 pm

The last few weeks:

Pacific Northwest went up in flames. Siberia is going up in flames. Greece and Turkey are going up in flames. Trans-Siberian railway stopped because of extensive flooding. Germany and Belgium trashed by extensive flooding. China flooding. Heatwave in southern Europe and large parts of the US. Etc. And that's just the parts of the world with the resources to handle it (for now).

But I'm sure it's all just natural. Complete coincidence that several once-in-a-thousand-years events happen at the same time.

On the plus side, maybe now the deniers will get their heads out of their asses. Haha. Of course they won't. They'll just post something by their latest pet meteorologist claiming we can't prove this thing or that thing can be conclusively tied to global warming.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Jul 30, 2021 7:38 pm

.

The below take, pasted above as well, is a take I can get behind.

Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 17, 2010 11:44 am wrote:I don't even talk about Global Warming for a small handful of reasons.

1. First and foremost, it's not important. Humanity at the present time is faced with a massive laundry list of Serious Problems and Existential Risks, and climate change is not ranked very high among them. We are seeing real-time consequences for human pollution and waste right now that are considerably more dangerous and catastrophic than the slow burn of climate change. If we're going to take up the fragile bandwidth of the American Brain with an environmental issue, Global Warming is very suspiciously trivial in comparison to, say, contaminated water.

2. It's a deliberately contentious issue. There's been a lot of social engineering behind this to ensure that. Al Gore and Tony Blair are the elite-level version of Mr. Gunderson or Mr. Icke...everything they touch turns to shit and we should be wary of any cause they champion. Actually getting to the point of being able to even explain my stance on this issue invariably takes a lot of fucking time. Climate Change has been reduced to a mere binary trap -- it's either the most important issue facing humanity or it's a vast left wing conspiracy, so tell me in one sentence or less, where do YOU stand? That's not a conversation I find very interesting.

3. I really do doubt the data and the models and especially the people pushing this. I was raised to be a liberal environmentalist and I knew about the Club of Rome long before I was told it was "the bad guys." My first grappling with complex modeling was trying to replicate the work of Paul Ehrlich and understand how he came to his conclusions. While I find Catton's massive tome "Overshoot" to be a compelling case, I find Ehrlich's work to be curiously dumb and full of holes, which is a view a great many of his colleagues in the hard sciences have shared for decades now. Furthermore, I find the contention that we as humans understand our planet, in it's entirety, well enough to model it accurately to be little more than fucking hilarious arrogance from the The Usual Suspects.

4. My opinion is not constructive. In light of all this, avoiding the topic is really the only constructive thing I can do. I'm not interested in debating it, there will be no value emerging from the debate no matter what the final result, and furthermore, my opinion is too complicated to be reduced to something easily explainable to anyone without a background in the issue. I hope I did an adequate job here, though.


What is meant by "climate change denial" (I'm referring here to the references to this phrase by a number of forum members upthread and in prior pages)? Surely, climate has changed over time. But is it fully due to man-made causes, or are there other -- cyclical and/or natural -- factors at play? Or can it be all of the above, to varying degrees?

I'll also co-sign Rex's sentiment in point 3 of his missive, Re: "the people pushing this". The events over the past ~18 months should have EVERYONE re-thinking their historical takes on.... just about everything. If you're not doing this you're not paying attention -- or you're choosing to keep your eyes closed, refusing to challenge firmly-held beliefs.


Placing a few excerpts here as points of consideration, by someone far better-versed on this topic than I am:

Right now, the wealthiest ten per cent of humanity is directly or indirectly responsible for 50% of all the carbon dioxide being dumped into the atmosphere. (People who love to blame big business for the climate crisis don’t like to talk about the fact that most of what big business is doing with that carbon is producing goods and services, which are disproportionately consumed by the well-to-do.) Nor is it the teeming masses of the poor who are begging me to dream up a better future for them. No, it’s members of the comfortable classes of the industrial world, the same people who’ve benefited most from the joyride, who now want to find some way to avoid getting stuck with the bill.

...

It’s worth pointing to two crises building here in the United States. The one everyone is talking about these days is the extreme weather in the western half of the country: yet another recordbreaking drought, this time amplified with stunningly high temperatures along the west coast. Those of my readers who know paleoclimatology will be nodding; the rest of you might want to pick up a copy of E.C. Pielou’s classic work After the Ice Age and turn to the section on the Hypsithermal, the period of high temperatures that followed the end of the last ice age. When the global climate is warmer than it’s been in historic times, you see, the desert belt that keeps northern Mexico and the American Southwest dry as dust shifts northward, so that the western Great Plains and the intermountain West all the way north into Canada turns into desert.

Thus there’s every reason to expect that the steady drumbeat of heat, drought, and fire that has been hammering the west will pick up the pace year after year, until large sections of the mountain west and the western Great Plains no longer have the water or the climate to support agriculture or, for that matter, human settlements. Over the decades ahead, millions of people will have to find new homes, trillions of dollars of real estate and infrastructure will become worthless, and the consequences of those shifts will shake our economy the way a dog shakes a rat. Though those don’t mean the end of the world, they do mean that a lot of hopes and dreams are burning and there isn’t enough water left in the reservoir to put out the flames.


...Grist Magazine, one of those glossy and shallow environmental journals that strain to put the latest fashionable spin on everything they touch. The editors are soliciting short stories in the genre of cli-fi—that is, climate fiction, science fiction that takes climate change into account; you can read about the contest here. At first glance that seems promising, and it’s a nice omen that this came out right about the time that the first issue of New Maps, a new quarterly magazine of deindustrial fiction, was landing in mailboxes. If you haven’t checked New Maps out yet, do it—you’re missing a treat.

Ah, but what Grist has in mind isn’t that kind of cli-fi. They’re explicitly not interested in stories about people adapting, or failing to adapt, to the harsh limits of a deindustrial world, in which the absurd affluence and inflated expectations of the present have had to be discarded. “Our mission,” they say, “is to make the story of a better world so irresistible, you want it right now.” The things they expect in stories submitted to their contest are as follows, and I quote: “hope; intersectionality; resilience; a society that is radically different from the one we live in today, and how we got there;” and all the way down at the very bottom of the list, “a focus on climate, with creative and clearly articulated solutions that put people and planet first.”

Of course genuflections toward the latest social-justice buzzwords repeat themselves all through the announcement with the inevitability of a nervous tic. It’s thus a safe bet that the contest will get plenty of those dreary little morality plays in which you can tell the good people from the bad people the moment you know their respective genders and skin colors, and the good people inevitably win through a heroic effort at virtue signaling while the bad people just as inevitably lose by tripping over their own privilege. That’s beside the point I want to discuss here, however. What interests me about this contest is that the people at Grist seem to think that this sort of onanism of the imagination is going to help solve the climate crisis.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone involved in launching this contest that there could possibly be a problem with encouraging people to confuse daydreams of the future they want most with meaningful responses to the predicament of our time. They haven’t even noticed that you can’t “put people and planet first,” because there’s only one spot at the head of the line: you can put people first or you can put the planet first, take your pick, but someone’s going to come in second. (As mathematician John von Neumann pointed out a good many years ago, you can only maximize the value of one variable at a time. It’s precisely because our civilization has tried to ignore that hard fact that we’re in our present predicament.)

The readers of Grist are drawn almost exclusively, after all, from the comfortable classes of today’s overdeveloped nations—precisely those classes whose lifestyles are responsible for the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions. In an era when those classes have to come to terms with the end of the conditions that made their affluence possible, encouraging them to think that they can have whatever future they find most scrumptious is hardly helpful. A strong case can be made, I think, that what Grist is asking for is not cli-fi but enti-fi, the fiction of entitlement, with no better purpose than to let their privileged and cosseted readers continue to wallow in the hugely counterproductive delusion that they can have their planet and eat it too.


Climate change is a known phenomenon in Earth’s long history; it can be caused by any phenomenon that dumps trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, be that volcanic eruptions or industrial smokestacks; it’s not the end of the world, though it can cause some whopping disruptions—sharp changes in sea level, drastic shifts in what plants grow where, and so on. Climate change is still in process, and we’re going to see a lot of climate-related disasters in the years ahead, but here again, it’s not the end of the world.


https://www.ecosophia.net/tag/climate-change/
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Sat Jul 31, 2021 6:20 am

The world has warmed a whole 1.3 C since preindustrial levels,, wow!

Sure the world has been warmed, but there are worse problems facing humanity, and that is being ruled by the worst kind of humanity, those who are intent on using intimidation on those who are skeptical of their hyped "we're all doomed" so called scientific scenarios. So I look forward to the release of the UN's latest IPCC report in the hope it does admit that some of their past predicted warming scenarios are implausible.

U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming

By Paul VoosenJul. 27, 2021 , 4:50 PM

Next month, after a yearlong delay because of the pandemic, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will begin to release its first major assessment of human-caused global warming since 2013. The report, the first part of which will appear on 9 August, will drop on a world that has starkly changed in 8 years, warming by more than 0.3°C to nearly 1.3°C above preindustrial levels. Weather has grown more severe, seas are measurably higher, and mountain glaciers and polar ice have shrunk sharply. And after years of limited action, many countries, pushed by a concerned public and corporations, seem willing to curb their carbon emissions.

But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/un-climate-panel-confronts-implausibly-hot-forecasts-future-warming

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sat Jul 31, 2021 11:54 am

BenDhyan » Sat Jul 31, 2021 12:20 pm wrote:The world has warmed a whole 1.3 C since preindustrial levels,, wow!


Uh, yeah, that's a big fucking deal. Every square inch of the planet is 1.3 C warmer on average. That's an insane amount of energy being put into the system, and we're starting to see the consequences of that now. 0.3 C of that warming was in the last eight years.

Sure the world has been warmed, but there are worse problems facing humanity, and that is being ruled by the worst kind of humanity, those who are intent on using intimidation on those who are skeptical of their hyped "we're all doomed" so called scientific scenarios. So I look forward to the release of the UN's latest IPCC report in the hope it does admit that some of their past predicted warming scenarios are implausible.


What are these worse problems? What else causes massive fires, flooding and droughts, and potentially starvation, mass migration and war?

The IPCC reports have been pretty spot on for the most part. Some predicted slightly more warming than observed, some less.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-ho ... al-warming

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Harvey » Sat Jul 31, 2021 12:23 pm

I remember when we had winter in the UK, from the regular two feet of snow to a dribble of rain - in less than one lifetime. I appreciate that some people have differences of opinion on why it is happening, but that it is happening and at a rate which is unusually rapid, is not a question. Anyone who thinks the world is not warming at a catastrophic rate is fucking deluded.

This is the middle of winter in Chester last year, but more often during the increasing droughts, it looks almost the same in summer:

Image
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sat Jul 31, 2021 4:53 pm

Belligerent Savant » Sat Jul 31, 2021 1:38 am wrote:.

The below take, pasted above as well, is a take I can get behind.

Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 17, 2010 11:44 am wrote:I don't even talk about Global Warming for a small handful of reasons.

1. First and foremost, it's not important. Humanity at the present time is faced with a massive laundry list of Serious Problems and Existential Risks, and climate change is not ranked very high among them. We are seeing real-time consequences for human pollution and waste right now that are considerably more dangerous and catastrophic than the slow burn of climate change. If we're going to take up the fragile bandwidth of the American Brain with an environmental issue, Global Warming is very suspiciously trivial in comparison to, say, contaminated water.

2. It's a deliberately contentious issue. There's been a lot of social engineering behind this to ensure that. Al Gore and Tony Blair are the elite-level version of Mr. Gunderson or Mr. Icke...everything they touch turns to shit and we should be wary of any cause they champion. Actually getting to the point of being able to even explain my stance on this issue invariably takes a lot of fucking time. Climate Change has been reduced to a mere binary trap -- it's either the most important issue facing humanity or it's a vast left wing conspiracy, so tell me in one sentence or less, where do YOU stand? That's not a conversation I find very interesting.

3. I really do doubt the data and the models and especially the people pushing this. I was raised to be a liberal environmentalist and I knew about the Club of Rome long before I was told it was "the bad guys." My first grappling with complex modeling was trying to replicate the work of Paul Ehrlich and understand how he came to his conclusions. While I find Catton's massive tome "Overshoot" to be a compelling case, I find Ehrlich's work to be curiously dumb and full of holes, which is a view a great many of his colleagues in the hard sciences have shared for decades now. Furthermore, I find the contention that we as humans understand our planet, in it's entirety, well enough to model it accurately to be little more than fucking hilarious arrogance from the The Usual Suspects.

4. My opinion is not constructive. In light of all this, avoiding the topic is really the only constructive thing I can do. I'm not interested in debating it, there will be no value emerging from the debate no matter what the final result, and furthermore, my opinion is too complicated to be reduced to something easily explainable to anyone without a background in the issue. I hope I did an adequate job here, though.


What is meant by "climate change denial" (I'm referring here to the references to this phrase by a number of forum members upthread and in prior pages)? Surely, climate has changed over time. But is it fully due to man-made causes, or are there other -- cyclical and/or natural -- factors at play? Or can it be all of the above, to varying degrees?


You're ten years out of date on your talking points. Natural cycles are accounted for and make up a tiny fraction of the heating we're seeing. 90% is human civilization. If there was some unknown cycle or influence capable of warming the world as much as it has in such a short time we would have noticed it.

I'll also co-sign Rex's sentiment in point 3 of his missive, Re: "the people pushing this". The events over the past ~18 months should have EVERYONE re-thinking their historical takes on.... just about everything. If you're not doing this you're not paying attention -- or you're choosing to keep your eyes closed, refusing to challenge firmly-held beliefs.


Placing a few excerpts here as points of consideration, by someone far better-versed on this topic than I am:

Right now, the wealthiest ten per cent of humanity is directly or indirectly responsible for 50% of all the carbon dioxide being dumped into the atmosphere. (People who love to blame big business for the climate crisis don’t like to talk about the fact that most of what big business is doing with that carbon is producing goods and services, which are disproportionately consumed by the well-to-do.) Nor is it the teeming masses of the poor who are begging me to dream up a better future for them. No, it’s members of the comfortable classes of the industrial world, the same people who’ve benefited most from the joyride, who now want to find some way to avoid getting stuck with the bill.

...

It’s worth pointing to two crises building here in the United States. The one everyone is talking about these days is the extreme weather in the western half of the country: yet another recordbreaking drought, this time amplified with stunningly high temperatures along the west coast. Those of my readers who know paleoclimatology will be nodding; the rest of you might want to pick up a copy of E.C. Pielou’s classic work After the Ice Age and turn to the section on the Hypsithermal, the period of high temperatures that followed the end of the last ice age. When the global climate is warmer than it’s been in historic times, you see, the desert belt that keeps northern Mexico and the American Southwest dry as dust shifts northward, so that the western Great Plains and the intermountain West all the way north into Canada turns into desert.

Thus there’s every reason to expect that the steady drumbeat of heat, drought, and fire that has been hammering the west will pick up the pace year after year, until large sections of the mountain west and the western Great Plains no longer have the water or the climate to support agriculture or, for that matter, human settlements. Over the decades ahead, millions of people will have to find new homes, trillions of dollars of real estate and infrastructure will become worthless, and the consequences of those shifts will shake our economy the way a dog shakes a rat. Though those don’t mean the end of the world, they do mean that a lot of hopes and dreams are burning and there isn’t enough water left in the reservoir to put out the flames.


...Grist Magazine, one of those glossy and shallow environmental journals that strain to put the latest fashionable spin on everything they touch. The editors are soliciting short stories in the genre of cli-fi—that is, climate fiction, science fiction that takes climate change into account; you can read about the contest here. At first glance that seems promising, and it’s a nice omen that this came out right about the time that the first issue of New Maps, a new quarterly magazine of deindustrial fiction, was landing in mailboxes. If you haven’t checked New Maps out yet, do it—you’re missing a treat.

Ah, but what Grist has in mind isn’t that kind of cli-fi. They’re explicitly not interested in stories about people adapting, or failing to adapt, to the harsh limits of a deindustrial world, in which the absurd affluence and inflated expectations of the present have had to be discarded. “Our mission,” they say, “is to make the story of a better world so irresistible, you want it right now.” The things they expect in stories submitted to their contest are as follows, and I quote: “hope; intersectionality; resilience; a society that is radically different from the one we live in today, and how we got there;” and all the way down at the very bottom of the list, “a focus on climate, with creative and clearly articulated solutions that put people and planet first.”

Of course genuflections toward the latest social-justice buzzwords repeat themselves all through the announcement with the inevitability of a nervous tic. It’s thus a safe bet that the contest will get plenty of those dreary little morality plays in which you can tell the good people from the bad people the moment you know their respective genders and skin colors, and the good people inevitably win through a heroic effort at virtue signaling while the bad people just as inevitably lose by tripping over their own privilege. That’s beside the point I want to discuss here, however. What interests me about this contest is that the people at Grist seem to think that this sort of onanism of the imagination is going to help solve the climate crisis.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone involved in launching this contest that there could possibly be a problem with encouraging people to confuse daydreams of the future they want most with meaningful responses to the predicament of our time. They haven’t even noticed that you can’t “put people and planet first,” because there’s only one spot at the head of the line: you can put people first or you can put the planet first, take your pick, but someone’s going to come in second. (As mathematician John von Neumann pointed out a good many years ago, you can only maximize the value of one variable at a time. It’s precisely because our civilization has tried to ignore that hard fact that we’re in our present predicament.)

The readers of Grist are drawn almost exclusively, after all, from the comfortable classes of today’s overdeveloped nations—precisely those classes whose lifestyles are responsible for the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions. In an era when those classes have to come to terms with the end of the conditions that made their affluence possible, encouraging them to think that they can have whatever future they find most scrumptious is hardly helpful. A strong case can be made, I think, that what Grist is asking for is not cli-fi but enti-fi, the fiction of entitlement, with no better purpose than to let their privileged and cosseted readers continue to wallow in the hugely counterproductive delusion that they can have their planet and eat it too.


Climate change is a known phenomenon in Earth’s long history; it can be caused by any phenomenon that dumps trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, be that volcanic eruptions or industrial smokestacks; it’s not the end of the world, though it can cause some whopping disruptions—sharp changes in sea level, drastic shifts in what plants grow where, and so on. Climate change is still in process, and we’re going to see a lot of climate-related disasters in the years ahead, but here again, it’s not the end of the world.


https://www.ecosophia.net/tag/climate-change/


That last bolded part is.. I don't know what, but not useful. So what if the climate changed before? Doesn't change the fact that we are changing it at an unprecedented rate right now. Uncontrolled, greed-fueled geo-engineering at its finest.

He's right that there will be a lot of climate-related disasters though, so maybe we should try to minimize that instead of waffling on about how volcanoes can also change the climate. Last I checked Yellowstone isn't erupting.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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