# "I'm an energy voter" **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [September 6, 2016, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-an-energy-voter/765162 "2016-09-06T02:02:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Salvor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Salvor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Salvor)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2016, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-an-energy-voter/765162/42 "2016-09-18T17:19:32Z")
> [@asahi](#): > > I think GIGO quite adroitly challenged your post on substance, so I’ll just say that nobody is necessarily demanding that we cease all fossil fuel production. But what harm comes from putting serious resources into cleaner and more permanent sources of energy, like solar, wind, et al? The sooner, the better. I’m not against putting more resources into those things. I just don’t demand that we snap our fingers and switch over on a near dime like some of these radicals. One because I don’t think we are going to die off en masse, we are too technologically resilient for that. And two, whatever climate changes come I am confident we can adapt to them. I have more faith in the resilience of human civilization than the greens do. They think humanity is a cancer, an unwelcome guest with body odor and mud trampling along the rug. I do NOT believe they would care if we were gone and nature was whole and pure and unperturbed by our alterations. It’s a sickness, a human hating sickness. That guy above came out and admitted his radicalism, but GIGO just walked on by after seeing the puke all on the walls like nothing out of the ordinary, just a light tap on walking back the It’s ALL OVER talk, hide under a rock because we are doomed. A quasar burning off the earths ozone would be a bigger doomsday scenario, a large asteroid, a supervolcano eruption. But climate shifts are something beyond the capacity of mankind to deal with? These people think we are insects, willows blowing in the wind, TOTALLY inept at any and all capability to adapt and thrive in a variety of conditions. And when we gain MORE ability to adapt, like GMO crops that are more drought resistant and or able to be grown in more varied soil and climate with more nutrients, they fight against our increased resilience. And people like me who don’t automatically presume Its ALL OVER are the ones that get attacked like WE are the ones being unreasonable. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2016, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-an-energy-voter/765162/43 "2016-09-18T18:02:23Z")
> [@Salvor](#): > > I’m not against putting more resources into those things. I just don’t demand that we snap our fingers and switch over on a near dime like some of these radicals. You will have to tell me how it is that what scientists and economists are advising us to do is “radical” Really, you are only depending on bad sources of information for that say so. > [@Salvor](#): > > One because I don’t think we are going to die off en masse, we are too technologically resilient for that. And two, whatever climate changes come I am confident we can adapt to them. In theory, yes. But in practice the early results on what happens when issue hits a place like Syria tells me that the solution from societies in and around it will be to make that die off more likely. Again, I do think that big disruptions will happen on many regions of the earth if we continue as we are going. The interconnectedness of the modern world means that we all be affected, even if we manage to avoid the worst case scenarios. > [@Salvor](#): > > I have more faith in the resilience of human civilization than the greens do. They think humanity is a cancer, an unwelcome guest with body odor and mud trampling along the rug. I do NOT believe they would care if we were gone and nature was whole and pure and unperturbed by our alterations. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: The point was made already and it has been ignored, the scientists and most experts do not appreciate the extremists, and NASA and many other scientific organizations that are looking at the issue and reporting on the worrisome changes are not paying attention to that talk about humanity being a cancer, what you are referring there is also coming from climate denier propaganda and it has been very effective with many it seems. > **[RealClimate: James Lovelock’s Gloomy Vision](https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/02/james-lovelocks-gloomy-vision/)** > > RealClimate: James Lovelock, renegade Earth scientist and creator of the Gaia hypothesis, has written a gloomy new book called “Revenge of Gaia”, in which he argues that we should be stashing survival manuals, printed on good old-fashioned paper, in... > [@](#): > > The Earth has existed in hot-house configuration before, and contrary to Lovelock’s vision, I don’t know of anything intrinsic to the hot-house Earth which would preclude human life. The transition from present-day climate to a radically new climate could be catastrophic from the point of view of human civilization however, especially given that Earth is loaded with so many people already. Past climate transitions often drove extinctions and eventually new speciation. Past societies, such as the Classic Mayans, apparently vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind mute relics of past social structure. These societal collapses were regional, often triggered by regional climate changes. The world today is globalized to an extent that was never a factor in the past, and climate is poised to change in a global way such as civilized humanity has not before witnessed. > > **We should be very clear. No one, not Lovelock or anyone else, has proposed a specific, quantitative scenario for a climate-driven, all out, blow the doors off, civilization ending catastrophe. Mr. Lovelock has a feeling in his gut that something terrible is going to happen. He could be right, but for what it’s worth, there aren’t any models that explode as catastrophically as this. We can never say that it’s impossible that something might fall out of balance, something we haven’t thought of. But I think in general the consensus gut feeling among small-minded working scientists like me is that the odds of such a catastrophe are low.** > > **Low odds of catastrophe does not imply negligible.** Nordhaus [2001] considered the possibility of catastrophe in his analysis of the economics of climate change. He defined catastrophe as comparable to the Great Depression, a 25% decrease in global economic activity that lasts for a long time. The probability of such an event he estimated by polling the gut instincts of a group of climate scientists; for what it’s worth, they came up with probabilities of a few percent. Economically, Nordhaus found that this possibility imposed the largest cost of adapting to climate change, greater than the costs of sea level rise, potential change in storminess, and so on. My own belief is that economics is a flawed tool for managing global climate, because it neglects issues of fairness, and reduces the value of the natural world to units of money. The point is that, within this framework, a small possibility of a large catastrophe looms large as a practical issue. > [@Salvor](#): > > It’s a sickness, a human hating sickness. That guy above came out and admitted his radicalism, but GIGO just walked on by after seeing the puke all on the walls like nothing out of the ordinary, just a light tap on walking back the It’s ALL OVER talk, hide under a rock because we are doomed. Because that was just nutpicking over what one radical posted. The reality is that very few scientists and experts give that “vomit” the time of the day, and it is clear that you are only doing so to toss it at me with no good reason because I explained before who are the ones I’m listening too, As a way to show how silly your effort there was you are ignoring that many times in the past I have said that I do not rely or trust in the Greenpeace environmental group. > [@Salvor](#): > > A quasar burning off the earths ozone would be a bigger doomsday scenario, a large asteroid, a supervolcano eruption. But climate shifts are something beyond the capacity of mankind to deal with? Well, I really do think that telling us that humanity is not capable of walking and chewing gum is not helpful, searching for killer asteroids and investigating how the earth is warming are both beeing look at by NASA and other scientific organizations in the world. > [@Salvor](#): > > These people think we are insects, willows blowing in the wind, TOTALLY inept at any and all capability to adapt and thrive in a variety of conditions. And when we gain MORE ability to adapt, like GMO crops that are more drought resistant and or able to be grown in more varied soil and climate with more nutrients, they fight against our increased resilience. And people like me who don’t automatically presume Its ALL OVER are the ones that get attacked like WE are the ones being unreasonable. As shown, you were completely unreasonable by calling what the most respected scientists and economists to be “radical”, you were also unreasonable by saying that I support the “sickness” of specific points from radicals that are not being listened to by the experts I rely on. BTW I’m also on the record of being more optimistic, sure we will make it. The point however stands: We should be able to make it from the bottleneck that is coming thanks to the warming caused by more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It can indeed be made to be just an inconvenience… or a big human disaster (That we will still survive, but really, the maddening thing is that it doesn’t need to take place) depending on what we do today. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-an-energy-voter/765162.md?page=2)