That is a lot of waste. If Americans are good at nothing else, making waste is our forte.
I hear “Carnot’s a bitch” a lot when I’m with energy people.
(Also, given that this exact discussion has happened in the past with doorhinge (I found it by trying to figure out what the fuck “MMCO2IE” means), it seems like a poor use of literally anyone’s time to go further on that line.)
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Thanks for the video. It didn’t my question because, according to it’s caveat at 18:35, “This video is only looking at the consequences of climate change over the next 100 years __”. Thanks for trying.
I also noticed that at 06:43 the author stated, “Secondly, I don’t use the IPCC as a source.” Which is interesting because I don’t use the IPCC as a source either.
Hmmm. Tough choice. Your failure to convince people to change the status quo is not because you are unable to CONVINCE them that you must be correct, but because the other side is more CONVINCING than you are. Maybe, just maybe, you need to rethink your PR campaign. Just sayin’.
If all the polar ice melted, sea level would rise by over 200 feet from water volume alone. Thermal expansion is an even bigger factor. And bigger still is the loss of albedo from polar and boreal ice and snow cover, which greatly accelerates warming in the northern latitudes. All these amplification factors work together.
Of course you don’t. It’s always good to have a denier present to prove my earlier point:
But in fact, the IPCC is not a “source”. Each series of assessments is just a synthesis of thousands of peer-reviewed papers. Rejecting those conclusions because you don’t like them is not saying “I don’t use the IPCC as a source”, it’s saying “I reject science as a source”.
You must also think that when tides at sea are said to be very low on a day at noon, that then it will be just as good to speed up into a swamp, with a low depth, on a boat, simply because you think that there will be plenty of depth all the time, until noon comes.
As noted, it is really unconvincing when the argument goes like: ‘it will be ok to continue as nothing will change until 100 hundred years have passed’ when the point is that a lot of inconvenient things will take place within our lifetimes even before the end of the century comes. And then, even more ocean rise will take place after that.
The point stands, there is good accordance among scientists about what to expect if we do not control our emissions.
Just saying that you are supporting the sweetshop owner here.
[QUOTE] Ancient Athens had painful experience of demagogues, for example, the louche figure of Alcibiades, a rich, charismatic, smooth-talking wealthy man who eroded basic freedoms and helped to push Athens to its disastrous military adventures in Sicily.Socrates knew how easily people seeking election could exploit our desire for easy answers. He asked us to imagine an election debate between two candidates, one who was like a doctor and the other who was like a sweet shop owner. The sweet shop owner would say of his rival: Look, this person here has worked many evils on you. He hurts you, gives you bitter potions and tells you he not to eat and drink whatever you like.
He’ll never serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things like I will. Socrates asks us to consider the audience response: Do you think the doctor would be able to reply effectively? The true answer – ‘I cause you trouble, and go against you desires in order to help you’ would cause an uproar among the voters, don’t you think? We have forgotten all about Socrates’s salient warnings against democracy.
We have preferred to think of democracy as an unambiguous good – rather than as something that is only ever as effective as the education system that surrounds it. As a result, we have elected many sweet shop owners, and very few doctors.
[/QUOTE]
As said, there’s no new ground being tread here, and I highly recommend that we stop responding to this. 
Speaking of which, Vox brought out an excellent article discussing exactly the kind of propagandizing I’m talking about:
And they will always find people who will defend their interests, using whatever language serves the purpose. The arguments offered to the public may be scientific, political, or economic, or some jumble thereof, as with Trump. They may make occasional rhetorical concessions, if the tide of public opinion threatens them. They will perform substantive engagement, to the extent circumstances demand it.
But defense of the status quo is the point, not the arguments. And the only way it can be overcome is through power and money, i.e., organized political opposition. Focusing on the words — scrutinizing the exact mathematical degree of denial displayed in a particular Republican’s comments, as though it reflects anything deeper — is just getting played.
They are gaslighting, not persuading, and it will end when they are beaten and removed from office, not when climate scientists find just the right argument.
That last sentence seems particularly saliant given the last page of this thread. The only question remaining for the rank-and-file denialists like UltraVires or doorhinge is, when it comes to the right-wing climate change con, are you the mark or the hustler?
This is exactly right, and the truth of it is found in the oft-cited fact that presenting stronger arguments to those inclined to hold contrary opinions only emboldens their contrarianism. It appears to be related to the famous statement by Upton Sinclair that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
From an article datelined October 31, 2011, in the October 29 - Nov 4 issue of New Scientist, one of two cover stories on the cover theme “Unscientific America: A dangerous retreat from reason”:
In January, [John Holdren, science advisor to President Obama] welcomed the prospect of climatologists being called to testify before Congress: “I think we’ll probably move the opinions of some of the members of Congress who currently call themselves sceptics, because I think a lot of good scientists are going to come in and explain very clearly what we know and how we know it and what it means, and it’s a very persuasive case.”
Fat chance. In March, an impressive array of climate scientists did exactly what Holdren wanted, but their efforts seemed only to inflame the scepticism of Republicans opposed to regulation of emissions.
For researchers who study how people form their opinions, and how we are influenced by the messages we receive, it was all too predictable. Holdren’s prescription was a classic example of the “deficit model” of science communication, which assumes that mistrust of unwelcome scientific findings stems from a lack of knowledge. Ergo, if you provide more facts, scepticism should melt away. This approach appeals to people trained to treat evidence as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The problem is that in many cases, it just doesn’t work. Perversely, just giving people more information can sometimes polarise views and cause sceptics to harden their line.
So we already have the answer as to how climate change denialists will be regarded in the future. It’s the same way they are regarded now by scientists and people who understand science: they will be viewed with contempt, as obstructionists to vital progress.
I think they will be judged in much the same way as we look at the perpetrators of the Salem witch trials, as profoundly ignorant and superstitious people. What will be interesting to me is how climate change deniers will see themselves as the reality of climate change becomes more obvious. How will Fox News pivot? How will posters here make excuses for themselves? Will there ever be a moment of clarity when they realize the damage they did by not taking action sooner? We’re at a point now where even the most aggressively ignorant among us are finding it hard to ignore climate change.
There was a recent article in the Washington Post about how belief in climate change has tripled in the past year among Republicans in North Carolina as storms ravage their state.
A lot of them are trying to split tsunamis, saying “yeah yeah it is getting warmer, but [that’s always happened / it’s not manmade / it’s the chinese who are causing it / it’s third-world countries causing it / the scientists’ numbers are all fake / hey I like summer]”.
You can kind of see it in real time here. Just do an advanced search for “Global Warming” in the thread title. You get lots of posters here being outright dismissive of climate change as alarmist liberal fear campaign.
Wow, a full third who believe the obvious, easy-to-grok part of the scientific consensus (no telling whether they think that that warming is man-made), and all it took was getting whacked by a massive hurricane!
We’re completely and utterly fucked.
Absolutely. Don’t forget that not only do we have to build consensus within the US, we still need to also build international consensus and then launch aggressive mitigation actions immediately. It’s simply not going to happen.
I think the best case scenario is that climate change deniers live long enough to see their children suffer and to beg their forgiveness.
We are a lot closer to the latter than the former though. Embarrassing as that is.
Yes efforts to limit CO2 have been inadequate, but it’s better than business-as-usual.
And it’s not either-or here: the US can cut its CO2 emissions and *then *start wagging its finger at developing countries. Rather than sticking that same metaphorical finger up its ass and saying “I’m not going to do anything until everyone else is *already *doing the right thing”!
I hope that all of them are making sure to tell their children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, etc., very clearly about their views on the climate change “hoax” or “myth” or whatever they believe it to be.
First, every child needs some “nutty/stupid older relative” anecdotes to share with their friends as they grow into adulthood and learn that their elders aren’t always right. “My mom thought vaccines caused autism!” “Yeah well, my grandma always said we never went to the moon!” “Uncle doorhinge went to his grave still insisting that climate change was a hoax!” (or whatever it is that doorhinge says about it)
Second, it’s good for people to recognize how their own past can be part of the problem. When tomorrow’s young adults with the arrogance of youth are wondering how we earlier generations could have been so ignorant and superstitious and irresponsible as to deny or ignore this problem, it will hopefully be beneficial and humility-inducing for them to remember that their own beloved Mom or Dad or Gramps or Uncle doorhinge or whoever bought into this ignorant superstitious irresponsibility. It may make them think twice during the next public controversy about scientific findings that they wish to believe are just a hoax or an exaggeration or a tempest in a teapot.
But climate change denial is not as harmless as kooks believing the earth is flat or we never landed on the moon. They did real harm to the world. My guess is they back track and try to claim they never really serious about doubting the science and anyway it’s the scientist fault for not convincing them. The kind of person who denies climate change isn’t the kind of person who can look himself in the mirror and tell some hard truths, let alone look his children in the eye and admit that the reason they will have a shitty future is because of people like him. They’re not introspective, they always blame others and lash outward.
Let’s also be clear that the fate of the Yucca Mountain repository is an example of democracy in action, despite strong pro-Yucca propaganda* by various interests.
Yucca Mountain was selected to be a deep geological repository storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in 1987. Nevada protested, but was overruled/outvoted – the other states effectively said, “we will put this waste in your state, because we have political power. That’s how it works. When you get political power, you can dictate.”
Harry Reid was first elected to the Senate in 1986 – he was a freshman senator when the bill went through, and politically weak, not able to stop it. But he remained in office, re-elected several times, and due to the seniority system in Congress, Nevada’s political fortunes rose with him. He was lucky enough to be an early backer of Barack Obama, and earned political favor when Obama won.
Then Nevada effectively said “NOW we have political power and we’re going to use it. Bye-bye out-of-state waste dump!” And everybody cried that Nevada was anti-science. Boo hoo. Nevada played by the rules of the game.
*Example of propaganda in the Wikipedia article:
“highly contested by the non-local public,” eh? Someone had to shoehorn in the implication that outsiders did it! But what about “strong state and regional opposition?” Those aren’t local?