Welp, you beat me to it. I was going to come in and say EXACTLY the same thing.
I don’t buy the notion that Republicans (who love fossil fuels and hate government spending outside of military) will actually invest in nuclear energy. This is just another way to blame Democrats when Republican shit starts hitting the fan. Republican play book: deny the problem (or even cause it in the first place), then blame Democrats when they can no longer deny.
I still think it is more like bullshitting, as I noted. Some would call that lying, but he is more like ChatGPT; like an AI for lukewarmers, he is not ever aware of why the talking points from deniers of what can be done now are shitty.
That makes the artificial ignorant Sam to follow the right wing mirages. Mirages that now attempt to discredit how Nuclear can be used, not as a main source of power, but as in support for the power sources that are needed.
Yes, but they haven’t gained traction. Check it out: the gap between left and right concern about climate change is a whomping 63 points in the US:
https://twitter.com/drvolts/status/1680013938157649920?s=20
Australia and Canada are pretty wack, but the remainder of the high income world has something resembling national consensus, gaps in the 8-25 percent range. Article: Climate Change Remains Top Global Threat Across 19-Country Survey | Pew Research Center
You can peel back my argument another layer by running a counterfactual: what if the GOP was less deranged? Well, laws would have been passed and we would have emitted less I say. CAFE standards would have been put in place sooner, and best case scenario we might have gotten a BTU tax in place during the early 1990s.
This wouldn’t be close to sufficient:
https://twitter.com/MeasureMeasure/status/1680030170777030657?s=20
… but maybe, maybe we could have had 20-30 years of greenhouse gas emission research under our belts, with technology ready to share and adopt at a WWII pace. The drops in solar energy prices can be attributed to Spain and Germany’s massive solar programs, along with the miracle that is Chinese manufacturing. That’s a big proof of concept. Too bad the West didn’t do more, sooner.
Lest anybody wants to blame China, recall that they’ve had massive solar adoption and an aggressive nuclear construction program. I say they would have done more if the West had stepped up.
If it doesn’t effect them directly, they will ignore efforts to fix it
If there is a possibility it will take money out of their pockets, they will actively fight efforts to fix it.
But if you can convince them that they can profit from fixing it then, and only then, they will spearhead the fight to fit it.
Well, that is mostly my line… 
In any case my point was that it is a bit unseemly to lean so hard on absolutes like declaring that Europe has no analogues to right wing science deniers, the shameful thing is that Europe exported a lot of them in the past decades, causing a lot of damage and delay.
Some like “not a lord” Viscount of Monckton then did go to bat in favor of Brexit, not a coincidence that a lot of the deniers in Europe see the success of Brexit as an attempt at doing what is possible to prevent nations or at least Europe to organize and deal with the issue.
When one repeats the lies of others then one is a liar whether intended or not.
Agreed. Climate is the great issue of the day and people of good faith should take care to get the details right. Less ignorance, a little more leverage, every tenth of a degree makes a difference.
Long ago I read a book by Mark Morano. His arguments seemed convincing, If you didn’t hear counter arguments.
The idea that humans haven’t been the driver of climate change strikes me as ludicrous on its face.
One only need to look out the window of an airplane to see the massive, undeniable impact that we’ve made to the environment; it’s just not a big leap to believe that all of the paving and construction and development that has completely changed the landscape has had an impact on climate, too.
It would seem odd if it didn’t.
Mark Morano made his name by pushing a lot of the “swift boaters for truth” malarkey, pushing lots of bullshit against then candidate John Kerry. The thing to notice here is how a bullshitter of military matters then became an “expert” on climate change. Instead of seeing the right condemn such stolen valor expertise, they swallowed the stupid idea that an expert on dirt became just in an instant an expert of climate change.
Things is that Mark Morano graduated in political science, so he may had the chops for the attack on Kerry, but he remains a willful ignorant about climate science.
Oreskes’ and Conway’s book Merchants of Doubt discussed this very phenomenon in the behavior of several notorious “contrarian” scientists, who were funded by conservative institutions to sow doubt about public-policy issues ranging from the tobacco/cancer link to acid rain to the ozone hole to pesticide use to anthropogenic global warming. (The same individuals, mind you, manufacturing uncertainty on all these diverse topics across a wide range of scientific fields irrespective of relevance to their own disciplinary expertise.)
One of the subjects of the documentary film based on the book was Marc Morano himself, btw.
Many of these Merchants of Doubt simply do it for the sweet sweet cash.
On the other hand, if you don’t have doubters and everyone is a fellow traveller, you are likely to make lots of errors and groupthink can easily replace evidence.
Contrarians may annoy you, but they serve a valuable purpose.
Of course it can be taken too far. But science is not or should not be a ‘consensus’ activity. HIstory is full of ideas that at one time were held by consensus that turned out to be completely wrong.
I get the impulse to mock or dismiss dissent when you think you are right, but I’m glad it’s there. No telling what extreme nonsense we’d be putting up with now and how many scientific blind alleys we’d still be walking down if there weren’t people out there willing to stand up and say “I know you all think you’re right, but…”
That would be fine if the dissent wasn’t Astroturf.
I have got no problem with honest dissent in pursuit of knowledge. I do have a problem with astroturfed organized dissent designed to support a particular industry or political group.
This tells me that you are not cognizant of the literature on climate change. You should try reading some of it sometime. Most of the literature, like most of the scholarly literature on every subject, is small and niched. Most of the papers are on a particular ecosystem, flower, animal, society, etc. A lot of these papers have a statistical analysis that the effect being observed is being caused by climate change. Every now and then, somebody will do a review paper and say “Based on there 10,000+ papers reporting the following statistical effects, the chance that climate change is not caused by humans is X% (usually an exceptionally small number).” It isn’t based on consensus but on analysis. Similarly, when you have paper after paper after paper after paper after paper after paper after paper all concluding that the local small niche field they’re looking at is in a dire situation, then you can gather that all together and analyze it to conclude that yes, the situation is dire. Of course, you also have some scientists that take a more global perspective, and their independent works come to the same conclusions based on different data sets. Scientists do not work by consensus.
I have read every IPCC report since, I believe, the second assessment report. Abstracts, conclusions, summaries for policymakers, and as much of the actual scientific papers as needed to satisfy my understanding.
The state of science in general today is not very good. The number of retractions, failures to replicate, outright fraud and other issues are grtting higher. It’s worst in the most politicized issues, and things like journal acceptance bias are a problem.
Climate science is as political as it gets, and scientists who may have contrarian ideas either might not get them published or not even follow up on them for fear of damage to their career.
And it’s been a political issue for so long now that I assume that some of the new generations of climate scientists went into the field because they already had a conclusion and want to help further a ‘cause’.
It is hard to keep bias out of science at the best of times, but when your career can be destroyed for bucking the ‘consensus’, and selection effects create new scientists that hacpve already reached a conclusion before their first experiment, it’s hard not to conclude that climate science is undoubtedly biased to some degree in one direction. Hard to quantify, but we should be skeptical - especially of results that perfectly fit your priors.
So I assume that papers will tend to be biased in one direction more than others, which means we need even more people to be skeptical.
“The first principle [of science] is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
The day we get to the point where questioning ‘science’ is not allowed, we’re finished. Tolerating cranks and misinformation is the price we pay for open debate, and the alternative sucks.
And that shows that you did bullshit or never learned anything in all the debates about climate change in the past. In reality most replications showed that early researchers were more on the money than the ones that claimed that it was going to cool down or that the warming had plateaued.
And as I looked at Richard Feynman as a role model in those past debates, allow me to say that you are the one being fooled by your information bubble.
As an example, where did you get that the retractions in climate science are getting higher? Or more important: have any of those retractions changed the overall conclusion? Logic tells me that when looking at the evidence and what they teach in college nowadays, yours is an imaginary position. IMHO this item is very telling when in past discussion many of the deniers in this message board claimed that it was going to be the retractions that were going to be taught in colleges in the near future.
So what I am supposed to have learned is that any paper on climate change that shows it to be a problem should be believed uncritically, and every paper that shows it to be less of a problem should be dismissed as disinformation? Is that it?
How about we just apply the proper amount of rigor to all of them, and stop trying to create political environments where papers that challenge the ‘consensus’ get the authors attacked and their careers ruined?
The problem is that there is climate science, then there is the political use of climate science, which seeks to demonize and put down anyone who doesn’t accept the conclusions the activists want accepted. When science mixes with politics, bad things happen.
This is not specific to climate change, and I’m not challenging any particular conclusion,and I have said repeatedy that I believe the science shows that the Earth is warming, and at a higher rate than would be natural for this period of the holocene, that we are almost certainly causing it, and that we will suffer future harms from it.
No matter how many times I say it, it’s apparently more useful for you to believe that I’m just another ‘denier’ that you can dismiss with the back of your hand, so I guess I’ll keep getting characterized that way.
Where did you get that I said that? I said that the state of SCIENCE was not good, that retractions are increasing, etc. And they are.
Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased? - PMC).
That was from 2013. I believe things have gotten worse since.
A good example pf how politiciaed science can lead to retractions and bad science would be Covid-19. There are mow hundreds of papers that have been retracted, Some of them quack papers with ‘alternative’ treatment infolike the Chinese Traditional Medicine one, and some that matched the ‘consensus’ but were bullshit anyway.
Nope you obtuse one, as Feinman would had say, it does not matter that the claim about lack of replication in climate science was looking like it was the truth to you, it does not matter how beautiful it was to you, If it is wrong, you should drop the claim.
Again, by this time colleges and universities, research centers and many others would had come declaring that there is no danger, there is, and bullshitting about it does not change what most of the evidence is telling us now.
As for demonizing the ones who are not activists, sorry but it the ones that prevent change are the ones who do the demonizing and what they do shows who they really are.