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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.
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.
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!
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.
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 warmsAustralia 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 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.
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.
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.
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
BenDhyan » Sat Jul 31, 2021 12:20 pm wrote: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.
....
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?
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.
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