Keep yourself up-to-date on what the forces of antiscience are up to. As I have said, and clearly as I need to continue to say, they are fiddling while the world burns.
Fiddle dee dee.
Great to see how Mann is completely unaffected by the idiots attacking him. Makes a lot of jokes at their expense in the video. I’ll let him speak for me.
I thought that was what Mann said. Oh, have you been saying this “clearly” and “continuing to say it” as well?
Mighty big of you. I think that your endorsement is exactly what he needs to shore up that crumbling support. Oh, if only the hockey stick were not merely figurative, how I would “continue to use it.” 
I thought that was what Mann said. Oh, have you been saying this “clearly” and “continuing to say it” as well?
Mighty big of you. I think that your endorsement is exactly what he needs to shore up that crumbling support. Oh, if only the hockey stick were not merely figurative, how I would “continue to use it.” [/quote]
Hi Fred, could you please say something that actually makes sense?
If you follow Fred-loon Dafa, you don’t need to make sense. We know science is wrong because it comes to wrong conclusions.
I am a scientist, I accept the reality that there is a warming trend and I even accept that it is highly probable that it is human influenced to some degree or another. But, you are going to have to explain to me or direct me to the study that shows ‘the world is burning’. Both the Republicans and Democrats are anti-science until the specific science agrees with or reinforces their position.
In the case of AGW I believe that science supports the proponents of it. However, science doesn’t support many of their bat shit crazy ideas on how to respond to it.
[quote]science doesn’t support many of their bat shit crazy ideas on how to respond to it.[/quote]
Er, yes, that is and has always been the problem, but let’s not let that get in the way of a good millennarianist impending doom, er, rather DOOOOOOMMMMMMM. The world is going to end!!! Repent now!!! :loco: :loco: :loco:
No, the problem is with outright denialism and people arguing in bad faith.
Crumbling support? The hockey stick has been independently replicated repeatedly using a variety of statistical techniques and other data sets, such as the effects on stalagmite growth, bore hole temperatures, and glacial temperatures.
Magnanimous of you!
[quote=“Gman”]But, you are going to have to explain to me or direct me to the study that shows ‘the world is burning’. Both the Republicans and Democrats are anti-science until the specific science agrees with or reinforces their position.
In the case of AGW I believe that science supports the proponents of it. However, science doesn’t support many of their bat shit crazy ideas on how to respond to it.[/quote]
I find it ironic that the more we dinker on collectively cutting emissions, the more likely it is that the worst-case nightmare of the Republicans and Libertarians is going to come true: drastic, possibly draconian and most likely risky centrally-directed action such as government monopolization of the oil industry (to smother it) or geo-engineering schemes, for example.
[quote=“Vay”]
I find it ironic that the more we dinker on collectively cutting emissions, the more likely it is that the worst-case nightmare of the Republicans and Libertarians is going to come true: drastic, possibly draconian and most likely risky centrally-directed action such as government monopolization of the oil industry (to smother it) or geo-engineering schemes, for example.[/quote]
Won’t help your cause much, when the resulting economic collapse anlong with the follow on collapse in the standard of living occurs the masses will suddenly discover that concerns about global warming take a back seat to pesky little issues such as food and resource scarcity.
By the way, the government monoplization of the global oil industry is already a fact. The vast majority of oil production is done by state oil companies. So if you think that Venezuela, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Russia offer you a glimpse of hope interms of state dominated oil production vs reduction of emissions, you’re on crack.
Ah, and since I am being magnanimous, a big thank you for providing such a good example of the bat shit crazy responses I was alluding to earlier. Don’t hold your breath for that one sport.
There comes a point where one has to stop doing “studies” and look out of one’s bloody window. Or read the news, or listen to people who deal first-hand with environmental destruction and its consequences.
I also have a hard-sciences background, and I’m thoroughly sick of people treating science like an all-purpose Swiss Army Knife. Science is just the thingy that gets stones out of horse’s hooves: useful under certain circumstances, but not applicable to everything. The planet is in a disgraceful state, largely because it’s being run by self-declared “scientists” and economists (who also profess their half-assed subject to be a science); people who have no respect for or interest in anything outside of their narrow disciplines, not to mention a pretty shaky grasp of their own.
I agree that their ideas are (often) batshit crazy, but again, science not required to prove them so. Just a bit of common sense. Most of their ideas are band-aids designed to patch over something immensely stupid (ie., to allow the stupid thing to continue unchecked, at least for a while longer). I recall a quote (I’m paraphrasing) comparing the current approach to someone smashing up the roof of his house, and then declaring himself awfully clever because (at great expense) he eventually fixes it again.
There comes a point where one has to stop doing “studies” and look out of one’s bloody window. Or read the news, or listen to people who deal first-hand with environmental destruction and its consequences.
I also have a hard-sciences background, and I’m thoroughly sick of people treating science like an all-purpose Swiss Army Knife. Science is just the thingy that gets stones out of horse’s hooves: useful under certain circumstances, but not applicable to everything. The planet is in a disgraceful state, largely because it’s being run by self-declared “scientists” and economists (who also profess their half-assed subject to be a science); people who have no respect for or interest in anything outside of their narrow disciplines, not to mention a pretty shaky grasp of their own.[/quote]
In general I agree with you. My post was a response to the repeated nonsense of one political party being ‘the party of science’ versus ‘the party of anti science’. However, I split my time between Vancouver, The wilds of North Western Ontario, and Taiwan. When I ‘look out my window’ I don’t see the world in such a dismal state as you do. In my lifetime I’ve been told that the world is going to freeze, Australia will be populated by cosmic ray BBQ’d cancer victem and that the world will burn. Global warming will come and the Earth will adapt. After that, maybe as appeasement to all the doomsters the universe will reward them with a well placed asteriod just to validate their angst.
I agree that their ideas are (often) batshit crazy, but again, science not required to prove them so. Just a bit of common sense. Most of their ideas are band-aids designed to patch over something immensely stupid (ie., to allow the stupid thing to continue unchecked, at least for a while longer). I recall a quote (I’m paraphrasing) comparing the current approach to someone smashing up the roof of his house, and then declaring himself awfully clever because (at great expense) he eventually fixes it again.[/quote]
Sometimes, sometimes not. In some cases you actually have to show people the math (or force them to if they are too lazy to do it themselves). As for common sense, that fact that you have people talking about ceasing industrialisation should pretty much tell you how far common sense will get you. I don’t really get your analogy. Likely because I don’t know what you mean by the ‘current approach’. As near as I can tell it involves UN conferences, carbon taxes in jurstictions that produce only a minute proportion of the total CO2 emmisions and subsities to dubious ventures in the name of clean energy.
What is “my cause”? Do you think I am, as you said above, an “AGW proponent”? I’m not aware of anyone who’s actually promoting AGW; regardless, my only intention in these arguments is countering the various cards played in the deck of denialists.
As far as “food and resource scarcity”… some of the nastier predictions I’ve read have the USA, most of Europe, Asia, South America and Africa as uninhabitable desert by the end of the century. While those are undeniably “alarmist”, they are nevertheless not impossible (and thus, alarm is certainly warranted). But I’m sure such consequences or even somewhat less extreme ones are nothing compared to, say, the consequences of government restrictions or taxes on carbon… :ohreally:
Funny how free market ideologs have so little faith in the ingenuity of the free market in the face of regulations, despite the long and laudable history of success it has had at surviving and overcoming them in the past.
Honestly, I haven’t thought deeply about what potential draconian solutions will be tried when things get so bad that the masses are screaming for action and happily hand over their rights. What I do know is that “sin industries” are sometimes monopolized in countries to curtail their societal impacts, so it was an off-the-top-of-my-head example of a potential ill-thought response, NOT an actual suggestion from me for addressing the problem. (I assume you understood this from what I wrote, and weren’t actually trying to insult me with your statement. Hope I didn’t assume wrong!)
I agree that geo-engineering may indeed be “batshit crazy”, but thanks to more moderate measures basically not happening, batshit crazy is probably what we’re going to be stuck with. I mainly write that off to the collective action problem, but a LOT of fucking spinning, obfuscating and often outright lying from people blinded by political ideology certainly isn’t helping.
File that in the bat shit crazy fear mongering file. We know the atomosperic CO2 levels have been much higher in the past. It would be instructive to look at what the earth looked like then.
It’s every bit as valid to say that increased CO2 and temperates will result in a lush and more diverse biosphere. I look at Vancouver which is much cleaner than Taipei yet I see much more bio diversity in Taipei than Vancouver if that observation is valid then it stands to reason warming is benificial to life on Earth. Increased atomsperic temperature mean increased atomsperic moisture ie humidity hard to imagine a world covered by desserts with a relative humidity of 90% or so. If you except the current explantion of the origin of the fossil fuel reserves then that implies that all of that carbon that man is happily releasing back into the atomspere was at one time part of the Earth’s biosphere/atomsphere. Pretty hard to get fossil fuels without abundant life. I present the above as reasoning not, hard scientific fact on why I don’t think AGW is the end of the world and perhaps could benefit wide sections of the globe.
To be honest, I’m much more worried about the vast floating pile of plastic in the Pacific Ocean than I am about AGW. If we stop using Oil as a fuel, we are just going to use it to make more plastic.
Any thing is possible so if you’re going to take the attitude that alarm is warranted by anything possible then you are going to or have lived your life paralyzed by fear.
The freemarket only is able to function when government regulation is minimized. Government regulation has a long history of destroying the action of the free market and the freemarket usually only overcomes challanges once restrictive government interference is removed. Most often only after much havoc and misery is wrought by that interference.
Examples?
Ah, so you agree with me in my opposition to government subsities of Wind an Solar companies as well as propaganda dressed up as documentries such as Gas Land.
occurred in the 1970s when CO2 levels were much lower and the global temperatures were much cooler… and there was desertification all over the Sahel. And the hundreds of millions who were to have died… didn’t… In fact, quite the opposite…
And without global warming, sorry, climate change, would that not be a possibility as well? If not, why the major droughts in the Sahel? Oh I KNOW!!! We cannot look at isolated (cough cough) regional events unless convenient then we can because they were predicted by models… right?
Who would have picked you for ironic understatement?
Some crazy ass gorillas could escape from the zoo and bust a cap in your ass but you haven’t hired a special swat team security force have you?
Well, given that the whole world is squealing about lower growth rates and higher unemployment, which is exactly what would happen if those taxes were imposed… I don’t know…what consequences would you like to discuss? Talk to the Greeks lately? Portuguese? Italians? Spanish? All those lower growth rates are not just predicted but would certainly happen if this high-tax on energy and restrictions on CO2 emission were fully implemented. And if you think that I am being “alarmist,” well, well, well, we have real scenarios where this HAS happened and nothing that needs a model to show us the end result.
Fair enough. My response was aimed in the same direction. What irks me is that the people blithering about science (or ‘anti-science’, whatever that is) are mostly scientifically illiterate.
You could be looking out of the wrong window. Canada, I’m sure, can absorb whatever its sparse population can throw at it. Taiwan, not so much. There are places in other countries that look like hell on earth: Canada and Taiwan are (relatively) civilized places, and they’re not representative of the general state of affairs.
You could also be looking with the wrong eyes. Remember, most pollution is not visible (which is the main reason the general public readily accept it), and even the effects are not readily apparent either, unless you’re paying attention. For example, you mentioned biodiversity: in places that are left alone (such as Taiwan’s central mountain ranges) there isn’t much of a problem, but anything that’s touched by humans is a different story. A rice field might look fecund, but there is no living thing there apart from the rice. The soil is devoid of burrowers, microbes and fungi because it’s been ploughed and drenched in nitrates. Nothing lives above the soil because it’s been sprayed with pesticides and selective herbicides. This state of affairs is wasteful, inefficient, unnecessary, and disrespectful, but we’ve allowed economists and biochemists to do this because we think they’re cleverer than farmers. They’re not. They just wear better suits.
That’s certainly the right place to start, if we’re being intellectually honest, but I’ve found that the people who are incapable of roughing out the figures themselves are also incapable of understanding it if you do it for them. That includes people with PhDs. I’m pretty certain it’s wilful ignorance: people run on feelings, not figures, and technologists are often so emotionally invested in their own schemes, and so limited in their education, they that cannot conceive that their proposals might make no logical sense. They’ll often fall back on the assertion that, regardless of cost or complexity, “something must be done”, and since they have something, therefore it must be done.
Can you offer a “scientific” rationale why we should not? When discussing industrialisation and its desirability (and what is “industrialisation” anyway?) science can tell you that dumping industrial effluent in your drinking water is a Bad Idea, but plenty of countries do it regardless. So again, science is the place to start, but after that, you need to appeal to people’s common sense and human goals. For example, to demonstrate that there is no “tradeoff between development and the environment” (a phrase which makes me want to grab a chainsaw and hunt down some politicians) it’s not enough to present an economic case: you’ll be ignored, however watertight your argument. People need to feel good about their decisions. You’ll notice the best PR (on both sides) is essentially fact-free, but carefully targets people’s emotions.
There is all that, and it’s deeply frustrating: I see this all the time when managers are not competent to do their job, so they twiddle their thumbs and hold meetings and seek advice, knowing they are unable to make an informed decision but too proud to say, “well, this isn’t my expertise, so I’ll leave it to you guys on the ground”.
What I was referring to, though, is the modern propensity to fix technological failures with more technology. Carbon-absorbing artificial trees are a classic example. What’s wrong with ordinary trees, FFS? Ah yes - we’ve cut most of them down, for “economic development”. I have a favourite joke that goes like this:
Patient: Doctor, Doctor! It hurts when I do this!
Doctor: Well, don’t do that then.
When we found that CFCs were rotting away the ozone layer, we stopped using them. When we eventually conceded lead was rotting our brains, we stopped using it (and we’re getting to the same point with mercury). The sky didn’t fall on our heads. Business went on as usual. Indonesia is busy cutting down or burning all its forests. Everyone knows this is a Bad Thing, for all sorts of reasons. The sensible thing would be to stop it. I suggest complete and total international trade sanctions. It would take two weeks, tops. Won’t happen, of course. TPTB are content for Indonesia to disappear into a smoking hole in the ground - which it will, sometime within the next couple of decades - as long as they can keep their noses in the trough for a while longer. But it could stop, if we really wanted it to.
File that in the bat shit crazy fear mongering file. We know the atomosperic CO2 levels have been much higher in the past. It would be instructive to look at what the earth looked like then. [/quote]
It’s not crazy fearmongering. Desertification/salination is real, ongoing, and unchecked. You just haven’t been to the right places to see it. Vast tracts of once-fertile areas in Australia are now saltpans. Completely irreparable, at least on any human timescale. If you want to present yourself as a scientist, you owe it to yourself to do some research on the subject.
It’s nothing to do with CO2 though. CO2 emissions, like desertification, is a symptom of an underlying problem, not the problem itself. The patient is presenting with multiple organ failure, and the doctors are arguing about whether to prescribe aspirin for his headache.
In this case, the problem is excessive and inappropriate application of energy and obsolete technology. Stop doing it, use modern farming methods instead, and desertification will cease. It really is that simple.
This argument is often wheeled out, but it makes no sense. Plants do not live by CO2 alone: they need water and an assortment of nutrients. If the temperature is higher then transpiration and evaporation will be higher; depending on exact local conditions, this may simply result in more rainfall, or it may result in loss of groundcover as plants die, and a positive feedback loop (as groundcover disappears, evaporation will increase further). If vegetation is artificially removed, as it often is for agriculture, the problem gets far worse.
Having said that, I do like the idea of a planet covered by “desserts” 
Surely you appreciate that, when dealing with any dynamic system, timescales matter. We’ve released millions of years’ worth of stored CO2 in a few decades. If I take five hours to haul a car to the top of a hill, I bet I couldn’t convince you to stand in the road and catch it on the way back down.