How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:16 pm

Global warming is real and people are trying to exert agendas into it.

And yes, the models are fairly accurate. We've been doing it long enough that people can go back and check the predictions, and they line up with observations.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 10, 2021 12:28 pm

DrEvil » Mon Aug 09, 2021 3:16 pm wrote:Global warming is real and people are trying to exert agendas into it.


Always, and it's mighty hard to tease the two apart in theory or practice, this is the real value of the media psyops ecosystem.

You can see this dynamic in both of current megathreads that are generating most of the heat in General Discussion: media artifacts are brought to the table, dumped like a carcass, and people demand answers & responses. Whether it's the latest viral video presentation from someone with dubious credentials making the rounds on Telegram or Discord, or something like the IPCC report, currently the most important thing in the world until the next mass shooting event this weekend. It's a top-down system of control that dumps this bullshit into our laps to reckon with.

Ultimately, whatever the "solutions" that implemented over the next 20 years, they will make the rich richer and expand state control over their human subjects. Some of them might even tangentially address climate change; I'm not so cynical as to deny those silver linings. But it's telling that both sides of this debate, as it gets enacted in public by paid actors and informed voters, don't really address the problem in a realistic way.

The denial side trafficks in doubts about data & fatalism about the ways of the world. Yet, just like with nCoV, they build their own opinions and arguments out of models, numbers and anecdotes; just a matter of rival faiths rather than a more objective stance. And as for the ways of the world, those are already changing. Market demands and overhead costs are forcing those changes, not activism, which is mostly PR blackmail that uses genuinely concerned citizens as raw material. (Best of all, those suckers work for free.)

The green side trafficks in fad solutions & mortal terror, ever-increasing panicked admonitions that we must do something and do something now. The less serious end of that spectrum is goofy fucks like Extinction Rebellion, a performance art movement I would be handing money to hand over fist if I was running black ops for a petrocapitalism multinational. The more serious end, sadder still, suffers from a naive belief in democracy and popular power -- that "we" are doing this to the world, that "we" can do something about that.

I'm not saying there's a "they" involved here, either, although many others in the climate justice movement are: there's ever-proliferating messaging about "just 100 companies" or "the 1%" being responsible for emissions.

I'm saying that's wrong, too: this is about technics, not politics, and most politics in the western world deliberately omits technics because they don't want the proles thinking serious about power, in any sense. For our purposes here, this encompasses all of them.

That "1%" are rich because they are running a global machine that converts raw materials into a baseline quality of life that billions of human beings aspire to & desperately desire. Framing carbon emissions as some nefarious plot enacted by a wealthy cabal at the expense of the rest of the human race is a brittle and shallow knock-off Manichean rhetorical trick. The machine that is doing this is the exact same machine that made those billions of human beings even possible.

This is why overpopulation remains such a third rail in these conversations. Sure, you can trace a lineage of right wing & wealthy actors pushing that narrative, but this kind of tar baby political philosophy is for partisans, hacks. If the demand for energy and consumer products outstrips the carrying capacity of the finite planet your population lives on, that's overpopulation.

And the contortions people will do to escape from there are very telling: technological miracles (that will only make billions more human beings possible, exacerbating the problem on an even bigger scale), worldwide communism (that will only expand state power and require an infrastructure whose energy demands will scale up every year, exacerbating the problem on an even bigger scale) ... the eternal human dream of a global sovereign, of human agency increasing to such an extent we can control the same natural world that has buffeted & battered humility into us for a million years.

So the cooler heads on the climate justice side, wisely, have always emphasized transition, how to slow-walk the catastrophic changes to come without killing those billions when (and if) the machine suddenly stops. I say "if" because the past century of supply shocks and energy crises makes it pretty clear that we, as a species, are willing to countenance very high costs to get back to gas in the tank and light bulbs working.

As many observers have suggested, we're not going to get one transition, one apocalypse, we're going to get all of them, irregularly distributed, for centuries to come. As long as human beings have the technology to cause these problems we will not escape them: A Canticle for Leibowitz does come to mind.

The argument about what steps get taken is completely closed to me, and likely to anyone reading this. Our betters will do studies, formulate plans, and make difficult decisions, likely stupid, and we will simply live with the consequences -- even then, only to the extent that we absolutely have to. There will always be black markets, autonomous zones, verdant margins, incremental improvements, low impact tech fixes.

Perhaps exchanging ideas and tips on that front would be more valuable than diagnosing one anothers failures and pathologies. Nobody here is responsible for anything we're discussing in any meaningful sense.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stickdog99 » Fri Oct 29, 2021 8:40 pm

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaia ... flna730066

'Gaia' scientist James Lovelock: I was 'alarmist' about climate change

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.

He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

However, the professor admitted in a telephone interview with msnbc.com that he now thinks he had been “extrapolating too far."

The new book, due to be published next year, will be the third in a trilogy, following his earlier works, “Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity,” and “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can.”

The new book will discuss how humanity can change the way it acts in order to help regulate the Earth’s natural systems, performing a role similar to the harmonious one played by plants when they absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.

Climate's 'usual tricks'

It will also reflect his new opinion that global warming has not occurred as he had expected.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

He pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future.

In 2007, Time magazine named Lovelock as one of 13 leaders and visionaries in an article on “Heroes of the Environment,” which also included Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert Redford.

“Jim Lovelock has no university, no research institute, no students. His almost unparalleled influence in environmental science is based instead on a particular way of seeing things,” Oliver Morton, of the journal Nature wrote in Time. “Humble, stubborn, charming, visionary, proud and generous, his ideas about Gaia have started a change in the conception of biology that may serve as a vital complement to the revolution that brought us the structures of DNA and proteins and the genetic code.”

Lovelock also won the U.K.’s Geological Society’s Wollaston Medal in 2006. In a posting on its website, the society said it was “rare to be able to say that the recipient has opened up a whole new field of Earth science study” – referring to the Gaia theory of the planet as single complex system.

However Lovelock, who works alone at his home in Devon, England, has fallen out with the green movement in the past, particularly after saying countries should build nuclear power stations to help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions caused by coal and oil.

'Perfect recipe' for wildfires as season starts early

Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”

He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role.

“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.

He said he still thought that climate change was happening, but that its effects would be felt farther in the future than he previously thought.

“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.

'I made a mistake'

As “an independent and a loner,” he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.

Lovelock -- who has previously worked with NASA and discovered the presence of harmful chemicals (CFCs) in the atmosphere but not their effect on the ozone layer -- stressed that humanity should still “do our best to cut back on fossil fuel burning” and try to adapt to the coming changes.

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the U.K.’s respected Met Office Hadley Centre, agreed Lovelock had been too alarmist with claims about people having to live in the Arctic by 2100.

And he also agreed with Lovelock that the rate of warming in recent years had been less than expected by the climate models.

However, Stott said this was a short-term trend that could be within the natural range of variation and it would need to continue for another 10 years or so before it could be considered evidence that something was missing from climate models.

Stott said temperature records and other observations were “broadly speaking continuing to pan out” with what was expected.

He said there did need to be greater understanding of the effect of the oceans on the climate and added that air particles caused by pollution – which cool the Earth by reflecting the sun’s heat -- from rapidly developing countries like China could be having an effect.

On Lovelock, Stott said he had “a lot of respect” for him, saying “he’s had a lot of good ideas and interesting thoughts.”

“I like the fact he’s provocative and provokes people to think about these things,” Stott said.

Keya Chatterjee, international climate policy director of environmental campaign group WWF-US, said in a statement that it was "hard not to get overwhelmed and be defeatist" about the challenges facing the planet, but suggested alarmist talk did not help persuade people to act to reduce climate change.

"While the problem is becoming increasingly urgent, we’ve found that focusing on the most dire predictions does not resonate with the public, governments, or business. People tend to shut off when a problem does not seem solvable," she said.

"And that’s not the case with climate change because we can still avoid its worst impacts. We know that we already have all of the technologies needed to slow climate change down. We only lack the political will to go up against vested interests," she added.

States where green jobs are going gangbusters

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading body on the subject, the world’s average temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. By 2100, it predicts it will rise by another 2 to 11.5 degrees, depending upon the levels of greenhouse gases emitted.

Asked to give its latest position on climate change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a statement that observations collected by satellites, sensors on land, in the air and seas “continue to show that the average global surface temperature is rising.”

The statement said “the impacts of a changing climate” were already being felt around the globe, with “more frequent extreme weather events of certain types (heat waves, heavy rain events); changes in precipitation patterns … longer growing seasons; shifts in the ranges of plant and animal species; sea level rise; and decreases in snow, glacier and Arctic sea ice coverage.”

NOAA reports its data in monthly U.S. and global climate reports and annual State of the Climate reports.

Its annual climate summary for 2011 said that the combined land and ocean surface temperature for the world was 0.92 degrees above the 20th century average of 57.0 degrees, making it the 35th consecutive year since 1976 that the yearly global temperature was above average.

“All 11 years of the 21st century so far (2001-2011) rank among the 13 warmest in the 132-year period of record. Only one year during the 20th century, 1998, was warmer than 2011,” it said.

In the interview, Lovelock said he would not take back a word of his seminal work “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,” published in 1979.

But of “Revenge of Gaia,” published in 2006, he said he had gone too far in describing what the warming Earth would see over the next century.

“I would be a little more cautious -- but then that would have spoilt the book,” he quipped.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Oct 31, 2021 10:32 am

James Lovelock is now 102. Brilliant reporting, stickdog, of an article published April 23, 2012, 12:24 PM EDT
By msnbc.com U.S. & World News.

For what purpose have you offered us that nearly 20 year old now irrelevant article?
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Sun Oct 31, 2021 8:00 pm

I'll bet you he owns a leather chair too, the bastard!

Lovelock has moved on to the Singularity by now. He believes machine super-intelligence will save us from catastrophic climate change.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stickdog99 » Mon Nov 01, 2021 5:39 pm

I would like to see a far more concerted effort to move to renewable energy sources, but to me decentralization of power production is more key than anything else.

IMHO, we simply don't know how Gaia will ultimately react to our little carbon bonfire. The scientific consensus that claims we do is the exact same sort of scientific consensus that claimed with the same level of dogmatic certainty that "safe and effective" mRNA vaccines would end this pandemic. And it's also the same sort of scientific consensus that until very recently claimed that microbial life could not possibly survive the rigors of space travel.

Note that I am not saying that we should keep blithely filling our atmosphere with more and more carbon. I am just saying that we should show a bit more humility and bit less hubris in our "definitive" scientific predictions.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Mon Nov 01, 2021 8:10 pm

The world is in good hands, a look outside the COP conference...



The world is in good hands, a look inside the COP conference..
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:13 am

For almost 50 years, we've known about climate crisis, and yet our "leaders" are still hemming and hawing and trying to pass the buck, playing musical chairs waiting for the music to stop, except the chairs,the table and every effing thing is about to be swept up from under us and the game will be over, forever. That's how I see it.

We need to paradoxically foment a revolt against business-as-usual and partially dismantle industrial capitalist society, but also lean into hyper-optimization of resource allocation facilitated by super-intelligence in order to end the pushing and shoving for seats at the table.that has gotten us nowhere but Nowhere.

Curiously, I think some of what we need to do vaguely resembles the whole great reset & fourth industrial revolution PR blah-blah-blah----except they are just trying to get out in front of it, have their exploited wealth cake and eat it too and assure the new system is set up with the old paradigm's winners.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:13 pm

stickdog99 » Mon Nov 01, 2021 11:39 pm wrote:I would like to see a far more concerted effort to move to renewable energy sources, but to me decentralization of power production is more key than anything else.

IMHO, we simply don't know how Gaia will ultimately react to our little carbon bonfire. The scientific consensus that claims we do is the exact same sort of scientific consensus that claimed with the same level of dogmatic certainty that "safe and effective" mRNA vaccines would end this pandemic. And it's also the same sort of scientific consensus that until very recently claimed that microbial life could not possibly survive the rigors of space travel.

Note that I am not saying that we should keep blithely filling our atmosphere with more and more carbon. I am just saying that we should show a bit more humility and bit less hubris in our "definitive" scientific predictions.


Those comparisons are flawed. We can see, right now, the effects of all that carbon. Of course we don't know every possible consequence of that, but we know the planet is heating up, and we know it's because of us, and we know it's starting to fuck with our climate in unpredictable ways, because it's happening right now. It's not a hypothetical. If climate change was microbial life we would already know they could survive in space because we tested it and saw that they could.

Even if there was some question about it (which there is not. The oft cited 97% of climate scientists agree with climate change is now 99.9%), it would be completely insane to not do everything in our power to fight it. Even if the chance of the worst outcomes was only one in a hundred, that's not the kind of odds you gamble the future of human civilization on.

A small aside: the argument that people were wrong in the past, ergo they can be wrong now bothers me. Not that it isn't sometimes true, but the use of it as an argument against $subject_matter is annoying. Sometimes the minority turns out to be right, most of the time they aren't, so in a sense, by using that argument someone is effectively saying they're probably wrong.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Nov 03, 2021 4:45 pm

.

Related - from the comments section of the latest piece from eugyppius, which will be shared in the Covid thread:

skintnick11

Why is everyone here skirting round the Davos crowd and their well-publicised and apparently near-complete plans for social control? Is it not sophisticated enough? I'm hesitant to raise the climate issue as it introduces the opportunity for disagreement between the already inadequate cohort of people who are looking at covid through an objective lens (and need to stick together), but the coincidence of seeing The Usual Suspects arriving in Glasgow this week with their parading, rule-flouting arrogance and entitlement being lapped-up by MSM - enough to turn this 20yr climate activist into a skeptic.


Rich Seager

I've got a few years on you, a postgrad diploma in climate science and several extra papers on the topic. And I'm pretty much like you at the moment, have I been conned? Maybe, maybe not. But if global warming wasn't happening for this agenda they would have invented it.

Rich Seager

Oh and btw I go straight to climate science if I get into a debate on this topic because I think most people who support this at the conscious lower levels have been told that's what it's about. I watched Soil a few nights ago and I suspect that it has some good points. One direction is corporate agriculture which is running out of the materials that it needs (fertilizer, oil both of them very closely related plus the poisons that are sprayed every year which kill all the good stuff as well as the 'bad' stuff) the other direction is a more natural approach which may run into quantity (can we produce enough food) issues for a few years at least. Meanwhile the first is trying to push out the second from places where it still predominates (i.e. India where Thunberg should be asked some hard questions about her role) and even trying to push out the farmers in Australia (where banks are foreclosing on viable farmers) and New Zealand (where corporates are buying up farming land to convert to forests). Maybe part of the problem, a major part even, of the increasing CO2 is from crap soil (dirt/dust). What part does pollution from dust & fires have in the warming of the Northern Hemisphere. Meanwhile I havn't had a close look lately but the WAIC is still intact, East Antarctica hasn't fallen into the ocean either and overall Antarctica is actually accruing ice not discarding it.

https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensin ... pected-ice

Is the warming only in the Northern hemisphere (sea temperatures around NZ the last few years would tend to dispute that)

It's a hell of a mess. We are throwing up simplicity in the face of complex questions. And eugenicists are taking advantage.



https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/stupid ... nt-3469496
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Nov 04, 2021 8:22 pm

Just stopped in to share a link to The Story of Plastic. I posted the video in the Environment Forum, found below in the RI index. http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=42275

Hopefully, I'll soon return to discuss Rex's and §ê¢rꆧ comments above.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Grizzly » Thu Nov 04, 2021 10:17 pm

https://twitter.com/1Fubar/status/1456172131067125760
What percentage of the Earth’s atmosphere is CO2? Thinking face
Doh!!! :moresarcasm
Carbon taxes for thee, private jets for me. The hypocrisy never ends with these fucks...
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Nov 05, 2021 12:49 pm

Small changes can have big impacts, and we have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 50% compared to any point in human history before the industrial revolution. Alan Jones (the guy in the video) is a climate change denier, so of course he's going to engage in bad-faith bullshit like this.

Image
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Elvis » Fri Nov 05, 2021 5:45 pm

coal climate 1912.jpg
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Elvis » Fri Nov 05, 2021 5:47 pm

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