I’m glad we agree on the likelihood of extinction. Now, for the rest of your post: how likely do you rate the 95%-of-humanity-will-die-off scenario? Would you say that a scientific consensus supports that belief, or do you think it’s more of a radical fringe idea?
Ah yes, the right wing call for mandatory denunciations of one person. Frankly, I don’t tend to answer or “call out” a lot of bullshit on a daily basis because if I had to, that would be my entire day.
If you want to walk that road, why didn’t you actually answer ALL of my questions above instead of just hedging about a couple of things?
I don’t understand why you think these two things (calling out ignorance & answering ALL of your questions) are connected, but I also don’t know what questions you are talking about. Could you link to it, or give me a post number, and then I’ll decide whether they’re worth my time and effort to answer or not?
Ah, so you will decide what is worth your time and effort to answer too then? How does that fit in with your demand that we all have to denounce begbert2?
I’ll spot you the ‘H’.
Uh, I read post #150 and it is clear that QuickSilver did answer it, it implies that the early reply from the other poster was hyperbole but the point that “planning/acting for the worst is entirely rational.” Stands.
My Kindle regularly “corrects” my work and makes it wrong.
I know who Tim Farron is, but my Ki code doesnt.
If this is supposed to imply that Republicans eventually come around to rationality on issues that they are irrational about, I disagree. The SSM issue was legally resolved through a confluence of two factors – a cultural shift mainly among liberals and moderates, joined by libertarian conservatives, that was driven by increasingly open discussions and a growing awareness of the number of gays among us, and secondly by the Supreme Court decision that the new cultural climate empowered.
It’s my impression that conservatives basically gave up the fight after that ruling, but strenuously disagreed with it and still do. At the time of the ruling, something like a dozen conservative states had anti-gay laws on the books, and some of them had even passed state constitutional amendments against SSM, amendments that were superfluous in view of existing laws and passed seemingly just for spite. The ruling itself was the usual 5-4 split, with the four dissenters being the usual hardcore conservative justices voicing strong and bitter opposition. Had Kennedy’s libertarian leanings not compelled him to join the court’s liberals, Obergefell v. Hodges would have gone the other way. One should make no mistake that the ruling was enabled by liberals, empowered in part by a cultural climate that was predominantly promulgated by liberals, and strongly opposed by conservatives both in the court and outside it.
John Roberts dissented in part because he reasoned that the ruling would prevent SSM supporters from winning “true acceptance” for their side because it closed the issue. I disagree with his reasoning because the support of an institution like the Supreme Court helped move SSM even further into mainstream acceptance, but there’s no doubt that it did largely close the issue, which is why conservatives were seething about the decision and most of them still are. It’s still a divisive issue, they just don’t see any point in fighting it any more since the kind of gay-bashing laws they favor would be instantly invalidated by Obergefell v. Hodges. What it does prove is how stupid and bigoted their position was since the institution of marriage remains just the same as it always was for heterosexual couples, but important civil rights have been guaranteed for gays at no cost to anyone except to elevate the blood pressure of bigots.
I think that it will not get that bad, because we will take steps, and are already taking steps to limit the damage we are doing. Without the US in a leadership role however, I do think that it will get much worse than it needs to.
As far as 95% death rate, yeah, if we keep doing what we were doing, with CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions increasing year to year, then absolutely, we will see massive death of all animals, including humans.
The majority of China is fed off farmland that is fed by two rivers that come from glaciers. Those glaciers are melting at a very fast rate, and will not be providing water to that farmland in a few decades if the current trend continues. That’s gonna be a problem.
The United states is a breadbasket, not just for itself, but to the world, because of or extensive arable land. That land is very precarious, between the aquifer drying up and the rain patterns changing, the source of food that we all rely upon could be in serious jeopardy in short order.
The same is true all over the world. As climate changes, rainfall patterns change. Land that was arable is no longer, and even if it is now raining in what used to be desert doesn’t mean you can grow crops there.
Throw in increased disease vectors, as warmer climates have more disease and disease transmitting pests, and an increased lack of drinking water to even larger sections of the globe, and you start to see some pretty serious humanitarian catastrophes.
Look at the struggles of third world countries in the midst of drought or famine. Then realize that not only will their struggles become insurmountable obstacles to their survival, but their current struggles will become our day to day life.
We could luck out, and only have a few billion or even as little as a few hundred million die, but that’s a poor form of luck.
Anyway, global climate change is a bit of a hijack off the topic, and it has been hashed out a couple of times on this board. The point is, though, that the consequences of doing nothing are extremely severe, and so calling it extinction, while slightly inaccurate, is not exactly hyperbole.
It would be like if you beat someone, breaking most of the bones in their body, and causing massive head trauma and internal bleeding, but they are currently hooked up to life support and managing to breathe with assistance. Someone says, “Man, you beat that guy to death!”, and you reply, “Don’t be hyperbolic.”, as if somehow or other, that defense actually makes you any less liable for the damage you have wrought.
The risk of climate change having major impacts on the earth’s ecosystem is substantial. Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at Berkeley, has been a major proponent of the idea that the earth’s biosphere has tipping points just like the climate system itself, and that either one can independently enter a critical state of cascading events that become self-reinforcing and unstoppable. It’s not particularly productive to speculate on the unlikely event of human extinction, but one can in fact scientifically assess probabilities of massive economic costs, loss of life, and suffering caused by climate change.
Oh boy, so it will just kill some of us but not all. Well, I am so relieved.
Really, do you want to drink or bathe from water that has been contaminated from the relaxed regulations 45 and his Environmental Putrification Agency promote? Even if that doesn’t kill people right away, it could have health consequences down the line. And why not push for research and development of other energy sources? Eventually there will be a day of reckoning when coal and natural gas are depleted or the environment is severely worsened or both. Doesn’t innovation create new jobs? Instead of trying to hang onto outdated technologies that harm the earth (and us) and don’t provide enough jobs anyway?
Underlined by me. Totally agree. It really sucks to live in Red America. The health care sucks too.
The fact that you want us to give you the freedom to oppress women and gays unfortunate enough to live in your theocracy in exchange for addressing climate change brings home the point that we don’t share the same values.
Well, and…
Half the CO2 cuts needed to make a difference is a compromise? :dubious:
That’s like saying we could have made a compromise with Hitler so that he only killed half the Jews and Gypsies.
And we completely throw out the ‘full faith and credit’ in the Constitution so that someone’s marriage is only valid in certain states? So what happens when a gay couple, fully married in NY, moves to Alabama? Their marriage is automatically invalid?
No, this idea is bullshit.
I also like the “no gun laws” part, so that those with criminal records and murderous tendencies and the mentally ill can buy and carry all the guns they want. It’s all good as long as you don’t give women any rights over their own bodies and really stick it to the sinful gay heathens, and basically run the place according to the fire-and-brimstone exhortations of Old Testament prophets. If you’re not willing to do that you obviously aren’t sincere about climate change!
Different definitions of marriage among jurisdictions can also make it difficult or impossible to get a divorce, so your remain legally married with all the encumbrances thereof whether you like it or not – real situations that have actually come up. It’s crazy to have that problem within a single country.
I don’t think climate change will kill 95% of us. However it could do endless trillions of dollars in economic damage and property damage, set back the course of technological growth by decades and kill endless millions.
Keeping a human being alive isn’t hard. Give them water, food, basic medicine, protection from violence and protection from the elements and they’ll mostly live. However mass flooding of coastal areas and flooding of areas full of developing world people will do a lot of damage to our species, to the point where the money we’d need to spend on renewables to avoid this fate seems like a good bargain in hindsight.
I read an article on NPR about how our divisions are changing how political parties operate. They said that when one party feels the other party is a threat to their well being and a threat to the nation, they start engaging in various behaviors:
- They obstruct as much as possible when the other party is in power
- They try to change the rules of democracy to disenfranchise their opposition.
- They attempt to undo whatever laws and initiatives the other party did.
As of 2017, the GOP is doing this more than the democrats. for point 1, there was a ton of obstruction under Obama. Point 2 is a pretty good explanation of gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts. Point 3 is what Trump is doing, trying to undo anything Obama did (including the ACA, which if repealed will make life harder and more miserable for tens of millions).
However I’ve seen people on the left calling more and more for point 1. People saying the dems should obstruct everything, no matter what it is. I see other leftists disagree, saying if the GOP wants to work on infrastructure, then to go ahead.
I think with the election of Trump, point 2 is going to become bigger among the left. A feeling that ‘these people can’t be trusted to act responsibly’ has really become an issue among the left when explaining the right, and I’m guessing a lot of suppression efforts will eventually come from it. I don’t see the election of Trump just going away, a lot of leftists will start to think that the right can’t be trusted with voting, and start engaging in voter suppression.
However, maybe the left will just respond by increasing their voter base. Getting their voters to the polls to drown out the right. But who knows what the future holds.
As for point 3, in some ways the left does this. Bush did the Iraq war, Obama ran on ending it. Whatever damage Trump does to our reputation the left will run on fixing.
Point is, I don’t think there is an answer. I think our values and sense of identity is so demarcated that there is no real coming together.
I still believe in compromise and bipartisan cooperation, at least as ideals, if not as something immediately obtainable.
I actually do like the idea of offering swaps, and one swap that is actually within reach is tighter immigration and border control, in return for some form of amnesty for those who live here now and don’t have criminal records. Heck, even Trump just extended the DACA (deferring deportation for people brought here illegally as young children.)
As long as the Republicans demand border-tightening first, we’re stalemated. (“Give me what I want, now, and later we’ll talk about what you want.”) But as part of an overall deal, it could pretty easily be managed.
(As I understand it, it would have been done by now, but the Republican leadership refused to allow it to come up for a vote. Is this correct, or have I gotten the wrong end of the stick?)
I’m FAR less comfortable making swaps on non-related issues, e.g. climate protection in exchange for loss of abortion rights or gay rights. They have nothing to do with each other, and shouldn’t be used as bargaining chips that way. But climate protection in return for corporate tax cuts? Hey, that could actually work.
That climate change can kill species is not at all controversial; in fact, it’s not even debatable. Climate change and evolution go hand in hand with each other. That is the very catalyst for why some species survive and why others die out. The odds of our perpetual existence as a species are actually quite long, which is not an excuse to do nothing but just a scientific realization.
What concerns scientists right now is the prospect that human-induced climate change could so profoundly change our climate with such speed that we would be presented with so many challenges at once that it would overwhelm humanity. With weapons proliferation, it wouldn’t be just food shortages and droughts we’d have to worry about.
Well that is the history of Humanity, up until now.
People moved en-masse because of pressure from other groups, exhausting their resources, drought, flood, etc.
Now imagine if large swaths of the Earth are rendered uninhabitable - no water, extreme heat, flooding of coast lines, etc. Does anyone think everyone will just stay where they are and wait for help that wouldn’t do any long term good? Nope, people will start packing up and moving to more habitable areas. And they’ll have to fight for it, so they’ll be bringing their guns.
Good post, and I agree with this a lot. I think bipartisanship is more than just a desire to tone down the rhetoric; there has to be a commitment on both sides of the political spectrum to enter a debate in good faith. There also has to be a shared value system, and when I look at how politics has evolved since the 1970s and 1980s (we can debate the ‘when’ I suppose), I think that’s where we’ve gone off the rails.
When I look at America, historically, there are 2 Americas that I see. There’s the original America which was founded on economic exploitation and subjugation of other people, largely based on race and class. In fact, race and class became inextricably tied to each other, though there have obviously been differences of class even among whites. But in that early America, from 1620 until the 2nd half of the 19th century, America was not a country based on true equality. There were harsh differences between people, with disproportionate levels of wealth.
The America that began to emerge in the 20th century was a country that embraced the idea that America didn’t have to accept inequality. The labor movement began. Americans began to talk about racial equality. World Wars I and II, and the Depression allowed Americans to reconsider their relationship with government. The generation that came out of the Great Depression and WWII in particular, often referred to as the greatest generation, was a society that understood shared sacrifices. Hell they lived through rations and economic controls at home. Most Americans contributed to the war effort in some way. There was over time the evolution in the minds of Americans that they were individuals with individual rights, but they were also part of something bigger. And when they came back home having liberated Europe and Asia, there were programs that ensured the continued growth of the middle class. There was also a greater demand for racial equality and equality of the sexes. And you know what? It produced the highest standard of living this country has ever known.
Naturally, a new generation of Americans questioned whether the government had become too expansive – not an unreasonable question to ask in the late 1970s with marginal income tax rates still well above 50% and with a strong regulatory bureaucracy in place. But since then there has been a gradual reversal of these ideals that came out of the shared sacrifices of the 1930s and 40s. Our generations never had to stand in breadlines. We were never required to go to war to fight a foreign nemesis. Never had to endure rationing of basic resources for that purpose. We have less and less in common with each other, and increasingly we’re suspicious of each other’s motives. And there is no longer a common understanding what America ought to be. I sense that people on the right don’t really care about things like income inequality, access to healthcare, access to education, and things that improve the quality of life for all people: as long as they’re wealthy, then everyone else is on their own. Their idea of America is more like the original America, the one that existed from 1620 to the early 1900s. Progressives want the New Deal America back. But our policies over the last 40 years have indeed been more to the liking of conservatives.
That pretty much describes all Western nations. Not seeing a uniquely American experience there. And if you don’t think things are better now for women and minorities (including gays) in the US than they were 40 years ago, I’m not sure what I can say.