So, tell us, how do you reason someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to get to?
I can’t sell toothpaste to someone who refuses to brush his teeth. And as his teeth are falling out of his head, he’ll be complaining that we didn’t do enough to reach out to him and CONVINCE him that he needs to brush his teeth.
That I’m not able to sell my toothpaste to people who don’t believe in the benefits of oral hygiene does not mean that I should fire the people who have proven the benefits of oral hygiene.
I think it’s pretty clear that history will view the results to have been sorely inadequate. We appear to be on a trajectory of reaching close to 670 ppm CO2 by 2100, with a consequent global temperature rise of 3 to 4°C, which is approaching the category of “catastrophic”.
If I may mix metaphors a little, you’ve been beating that ridiculous strawman to death for a long time now. It’s not clear why you’re doing this, but it appears to be because you can’t debate the issue on factual scientific grounds, so you’re trying to deflect it to a pointless digression. Perhaps you’re not aware that every country in the world signed on the Paris climate accords (although the US, alone and ignominiously, pulled out due to the peculiar nature of the the current occupant of the White House who had declared all the accumulated science of the last 50 years to be “a Chinese hoax”).
Every country in the world signed on based on the strength of the scientific evidence. So who is it, exactly, that is “not convinced”? Even in the US, whose population is probably the most swayed by raw partisanship and mercenary objectives, poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans believe that climate change is real, that human activities are a significant contributor, and that climate action is warranted. And this despite a rather appalling ignorance not just of the science, but most don’t even seem to be aware of the simple basic fact that the vast majority of climate scientists believe that the anthropogenic nature of climate change has now been incontrovertibly established.
Even if you were right about people’s beliefs – and you’re not – why the hell would it even matter? What people happen to believe doesn’t change the facts of physical reality. You could have asked the fabled King Canute about that.
Your argument on these lines is both demonstrably wrong and irrelevant, and that’s about as bad as any argument ever gets.
Well, thanks for showing all that you skipped post #91.
Hard to take your points seriously when more people are convinced that the issue is happening as the report that is linked in post #91 tells us:
Speaking of Evolution, you have missed that a lot of the ones peddling Creationist nonsense are also into climate change denial. So much so that even the NCSE decided to add the defense of climate change education to their usual mission against Creationism in the classroom.
Evolution is a scientific theory, strongly supported by the evidence, which is doubted by much of the country. Climate change due to human actions is a scientific theory strongly supported by the evidence which is doubted by much of the country.
I’m just wondering if you support the teaching of evolution in the schools - and not the controversy, the evidence - despite the doubts of many. If so, do you support actions against climate change despite the doubts of many?
A quick search showed that in 2016 about 50% of Americans thought that climate change both is happening and is caused by humans. 40% of Americans thought that humans evolved from other animals, with 20% unsure. So the numbers are pretty comparable.
I don’t want to make this an evolution debate, of course, and your reticence in answering the question makes me doubt that you are any kind of creationist. I’m just curious if you apply the same standard to both issues.
Sure, because a bunch of poorly-informed/lazy/gullible people have decided they don’t have any responsibility to try not to be poorly-informed, lazy and/or gullible. (And because a bunch of very well-funded professional science deniers are encouraging them in that view.)
I readily admit that it’s much harder to persuade poorly-informed/lazy/gullible people to educate themselves about science than to persuade them to go on complacently being poorly-informed, lazy and/or gullible. But that doesn’t mean they ultimately get a pass for their ignorance, laziness and gullibility.
You are not merely a consumer being targeted by ad campaigns. You are also a citizen, with a citizen’s responsibility to be informed about important issues and to make prudent decisions about what policies to support. If you refuse to do that, it’s not the fault of other people for failing to CONVINCE you of the facts; it’s your own fault for choosing to CONVINCE yourself that facts don’t matter, and/or that you have no responsibility to learn and understand the facts.
Long run history will see them akin to how we see the Salem witch trial people or the Catholic Church fighting with Galileo over the motions of the planets. I.e., “people long ago believed stupid things.”
I think there’s a significant difference—certainly in the Salem witch trials example—based on availability of reliable information. Nowadays there is a fairly widespread social consensus that mainstream science provides largely accurate models of the physical world and predictions about it that have a very high likelihood of being true. And it is pretty easy to find out, in general terms, what mainstream science says about a particular issue.
But we have a few specific areas, such as climate change, evolution and vaccines, where a surprisingly large segment of the population selectively rejects this consensus. People who have no problem believing scientists’ predictions that, say, the next meteor shower will be unusually active or that DNA testing will reveal someone’s heritage or that this new bridge design will be safe are refusing to believe scientific findings about climate change.
That’s a point. I think a lot of conservative science denialism, besides being encouraged by professional propagandists trying to link it to “conservative values”, is fostered simply by widespread conservative determination not to agree with liberals or work together with liberals about anything, no matter how objectively valid it may be.
And vice versa, of course - Democrats didn’t do much to assist Bush with his hydrogen initiative, and don’t want to repudiate the “green” loonies when it come to nuclear energy.
What is the point of this irrelevancy and bullshit? Both Democrats and Republicans are in favor of nuclear energy. Every liberal I know – including American liberals who consistently vote Democrat and some are Democratic Party donors – is in favor of nuclear energy. I am in favor of nuclear energy. The liberal province I live in gets more than half of all its electric power from nuclear. A group of top climate scientists recently wrote an open letter urging more nuclear power as an essential component of emissions mitigation. What more do you want?
Your point seems to be that some whackadoodles exist who are opposed to nuclear power. So what? I’m sick and tired of having this constantly associated with imaginary liberals.
Imaginary, ehe? Let me ask you something then. Let’s pretend that you are correct…and both Democrats and Republicans support nuclear energy in the US. Why are we still not building new plants? Why don’t we have a nuclear wasted repository? Let me guess your answer…costs too much and it’s unpopular. Why does it cost too much? Let me guess…because nuclear can’t really compete with other energy types and have a huge upfront capital cost and it’s hard to get investment for long term projects that might not ever get built. Not sure if you’d say that last bit, but benefit of the doubt. So, why the huge capital costs and why might they never get built, if both Democrats and Republicans support them?
The thing is, we’ve moved beyond the rather tepid support of the Democrats (or Republicans) at this point…the left, especially the green left has poisoned this well so completely that without vigorous support from both parties the reality is we aren’t going to be building many, if any new plants. It’s not going to happen. And the prime reason is the left wing…which means, the Democrats, since most of the lefties were or are Democrats, at least nominally. So, Democrats tepidly supporting this now, or paying lip service to theoretical support costs them nothing really, since it ain’t gonna happen.
I get that there are green and eco types who support nuclear. Some even vigorously. But the majority don’t…and they really don’t need to be open about it anymore. The ship has sailed, the boat is out of the harbor and Elvis is out of the building. To do anything today we’d need both parties focused and agitating strongly for new plants and new designs. And it’s not happening. So, missed opportunity wrt global warming. Bummer, really, but there you go. It is what it is. What annoys me is this attempt to push all of this on the deniers and the idiot Republicans, because it’s not all on them. Your side, the Democrats get their share too. No one reined in those anti-science eco nuts, and their narrative won the day…and now we get to pay the price. And it’s a two-fer…we don’t, nor are we likely to ever have a central repository for our nuclear waste, so it’s just going to sit there, in situ at the plants, in ponds, percolating away for a few 10’s of thousands of years. Can’t even recycle most of it, even though we COULD.
You don’t have to “pretend” that I’m correct, just look at the party platforms. The only parties that don’t support nuclear are fringe parties that no one votes for anyway. You do have some valid points, though, and the problem isn’t so much that the major parties support nuclear but “not strongly enough”, the problem is that there’s a lot of NIMBYism. People may support nuclear in principle but by golly they don’t want something that’s gonna asplode in a mushroom cloud right beside their house, or make them grow two extra heads out of their earholes – disregarding the fact that you actually get more radiation out of a typical coal plant mostly due to concentrations of thorium in the fly ash, not to mention all the deadly cardiopulmonary diseases and other ailments from the smoke and pollution.
And if being “leftist” or liberal is somehow inherently tied to being majority anti-nuclear, how do you explain this, and this? The latter, BTW, is a private nuclear facility not owned or operated by Ontario Power Generation but which integrates with the public power grid, showing that both public and private forms of nuclear power generation work, and have been working successfully for a long time.
Hell, look at France. They are leftist, at least wrt to the US. They get over 70% of their energy from nuclear. The US? Not so much…it’s 20% and dropping as old plants are shut down and new ones aren’t being made. Thing is, I’m talking about the American left (which you aren’t, so not sure why you are copping to any of this in any case).
I totally agree that NIMBY-ism is the issue, but the root of NIMBY wrt nuclear power is…yep, the left wing in the US, especially the green eco left in the past. And it was the Dems who gave those guys a home. It’s going to take incredible effort and sacrifice to even keep us below 2 degrees C at this point…and it ain’t happening. Nuclear is only one thing, but it could have been a big one if the Dems had really pushed, oh, say 10 or 15 years ago. We could have new plants coming on stream now, replacing coal fired plants with nuclear, maybe a mix of nuclear and natural gas decommissioning those old plants at an accelerated rate. We could, equally, have a central repository for the waste, which wouldn’t fix the global climate change issue but would help in other ways. Instead, we don’t. Part of that was the unicorn dream that we didn’t/don’t need nuclear because solar and wind will do it all, instead of be a niche resource we could use to augment better, more scalable technologies that COULD really take a bite out of our CO2 footprint. Maybe if the US had gone all in on nuclear 10-20 years ago, China would have as well…instead of building a staggering number of coal fired plants. Maybe not. But we would be way ahead of where we are, had we done it that way. But we didn’t. And the Dems and the left can take credit for that part. Is it as much as what the Republicans have wrt blame? Nope. But it’s not nothing, either…it’s actually pretty big, IMHO, though the Republicans and the deniers get the lions share.
Just as people think air travel is more dangerous than car travel because plane crashes get more coverage, people think nuclear power is dangerous because the real disasters and near disasters get coverage. I propose a lot more stories on the dangers of coal. Maybe that would even the playing field.
I’m sure the Republicans would eat it right up.
Bullshit the root of nimbyism is the tech. We could use the old MSR/MSBR style tech, with that pool setup that makes nearly failsafe, but no one has been seriously suggesting that. They want to build BWRs or PWRs, so that Homer can fuck up and spill Pepsi on the control panel. No one wants to be anywhere near one of those things, but tPtB seem to be reluctant to sign on to the safer designs, which are quite venerable. Because they cannot be quickly converted to making the [sup]239[/sup]Pu for boom-boom. The government has to fund reactor construction, because private industry will not. There is no RoI. And the government, peaceful as they may be, wants to make sure they can build weapons. Blaming the greenies for our nuclear decay is stone wrong.
There was a discussion before where I pointed out that a lot of why there is not much nuclear power progress is because: we are not leftist enough.
No really, thanks to a lot of education and respect of science there is a lot of acceptance of nuclear power and with another factor: AFAICR in many places in France there is local investment on the nuclear power plants and people living close to the locations get lower electricity bills.
At the general level:
And that shows one very important factor why is that many conservatives fail to follow that model: it smells like socialism.
Good luck in convincing conservatives to follow that solution.
Way to spectacularly miss the point and then go off on some bizarre rant for no apparent reason. The 15 million people of Ontario are not my “acquaintances” (the word is spelled with a “c”, BTW). This is a province with a long tradition of environmental stewardship and a solid liberal tradition, even among conservatives, with massive hydroelectric plants, large wind farm installations, and many solar power initiatives. There are now zero (0) coal-fired power plants. Yet nuclear provides more than half of all electricity. One of those plants is located right in the Greater Toronto Area, surrounded by the highest population density around a nuclear plant anywhere in North America. So any claim that opposition to nuclear arises from liberal or “leftist” ideology or environmentalism stoking fear of nuclear is, as already noted, not supported by the facts.
So your survey showing that there is greater opposition to nuclear among Dems than Repubs requires looking for an explanation beyond simple ideology. But don’t bother looking too hard, because the spread isn’t nearly as big as it is for some of the key questions on something like climate change. On the question of nuclear, Dems and Repubs have at times been just a few percentage points apart, and anyway both parties currently advocate more nuclear power, though probably for much different reasons.