Well I’m convinced. That computer solved tic tac toe dontchakno
Outside events beyond humanity’s control (disease, meteor impact, super-volcano, etc), I think the world is not heading for calamity. The world has been getting better and better in leaps and bounds since the Renaissance. We’re gradually dealing with CO2 and CFCs. We could cut CO2 emissions significantly within a few years if we moved to nuclear power. Famines are a thing of the past outside Africa. And so on.
Fusion Energy
Vat-grown produce
Battery-powered vehicles
VR businesses
I think the better summation of the libertarian position is, “Deaths in auto accidents are declining; therefore we should stop improving auto safety.”
Do you not believe that deaths from an unwarned catastrophic weather event would generally be higher than an event for which people had a chance to evacuate? I would suggest that a metric like property damage due to climate change would be more enlightening, mainly because a Galveston-like death toll from a hurricane is going to be much, much rarer today (notwithstanding the kooks who think that basically nobody died in Puerto Rico last year).
Of course we are done, the writers did the equivalent of people noticing that when more ice cream is sold more people are murdered, that therefore we should stop ice cream sales /s
Where your chart is misleading in the extreme is that it concentrates on an item that AFAIK it has not been an specific reason why to deal with climate change now, even when one looks at the ones reporting that disaster may come they are talking about the future, not what has been observed so far. So, less people die from extreme weather events now. But, that is more dependent on the advances in climate research too. (And again, we should be thankful to the overwhelming numbers of climate and weather scientists out there, but you will continue to check the few contrarians for info).
What the chart omits is that the costs many are currently concerned about are related more to economics.
Economics can tells us that even if people avoid death from extreme weather events, it points to people being displaced in big numbers, causing unrest and even death that is not added by misleaders like in the article you posted.
Not to mention (and the writers of the article don’t) the fact that the effects of climate change are being observed, and as the Ice loss shows, the effects can accelerate up to the point where more death can eventually be registered coming **directly **from extreme weather events. We are not quite there yet, and a lot of it can be avoided. But the main point is that the most worrisome aspect right now is economical, and from items that cause unrest we can then go to wars with deaths not directly caused by climate change but as a result of it, deaths that the misleaders will not bother to add to the likely deaths that will be caused by extreme weather due to climate change.
Indeed.
Of course, and I thank capitalism and fossil fuel technology for the abundance of energy needed for society to be rich enough to divert resources into forecasting capability.
The OP talked about catastrophe. I consider death and starvation to be catastrophic and both have plummeted.
Again, you are deftly avoiding who to thank:
The very same people that you refuse to take advise from.
And we can all see that you did not read the post.
Do you then agree with anti vaccine people that since there are less polio deaths that then we should not vaccinate people for it anymore? Of course not, so why listen to the ones that misleadingly tell you about weather deaths that are more preventable nowadays when ocean rise alone means that we will get a refugee problem much much bigger than the one president bone spurs is scaring us about now?
Oh perhaps you have a surreptitious recording of me murmuring phrases against climate research in my sleep because I have never taken such a position in my waking life. You on the other hand have cited dozens of anti-capitalist and anti-fossil fuel screeds from activist websites.
Taking perhaps the most privileged perspective in the history of human discourse, you deny that fossil fuel technology has brought warmth to the huddling masses cheaply and relatively cleanly compared to the surface energy foraging it replaced.
I actually do not think either one of those is catastrophic. Like everyone else posting, you are thinking only about one species – ours – and as if this species existed essentially inside our own machines. We don’t. We are supported, and only supported, by a web of climate, soil, water cycle, and biotic connections which we have not the intelligence to grasp the complexity of, nor the soul to understand the importance of.
If 95% of human beings died tomorrow, that would be the best thing that could possibly happen to the planet. That this is not going to happen, is the calamity I am talking about.
Yes I give priority to human beings. Those who do not share this value judgement should not listen to my positions until they have corrected themselves on this.
Then show it, stop going on as if that is the case. The ones who made the article you rely on make a life of being against what normal climate change researchers are doing.
And that is yet more evidence that you do not check cites, and that you are relying more on ignorance here. The people at clean technica are looking at the new businesses cropping up, and Nordhaus would be wondering why he is an anti-capitalist when he became/was president of the American Economic Association, and just won the Nobel price in economics for his work.
Mind you, he is considered a moderate on this, others do think that his taxation on carbon emissions do not go far enough.
Nope, that is called a straw man. Nowhere I do deny that, in fact in past discussions it is clear that going for personals attracts is a common thing directed at me. Suffice to say that I commented before (and you also ignore or is not aware of that) that I **also **acknowledged all the horses that died while giving power to human transportation before the arrival of fossil fuel technology.
But I do not anthropomorphize or sentimentalize about them like the fossil fuel defenders are going on about. The point is that once we de-carbonize our sources of energy we can acknowledge how useful they were, and go forward with the new ways to warm up that give us a better environment too.
Yes, we are heading for a calamity simply because we are always heading for a calamity. Periods of peace and prosperity are rare creatures that even when they exist tend to be localized and sooner or later the next wave of destruction will hit. Maybe the climate, maybe a disease, maybe a war, rest assured that something is coming and the best you can hope for is to die before it hits.
And in the future we can have even better forecasting capability and even more prosperity without having to rely on fossil fuels and their damaging effects. Yet, some simpletons think we must remain chained to fossil fuels no matter what the consequences.
That’s really what this is about: it isn’t about taking away things that have been achieved with fossil fuels. It’s about improving upon them.
It is about limiting access to fossil fuel technology through legislation, no? If you take away access, you take away energy and drive energy prices up. This means humans must divert resources from other fruitful avenues of research and capital investment and find ways to produce energy without fossil fuels.
Yes, and as a conservative economist like Nordhaus told us, it will be more costly to all if we do not change.
By now it looks more likely that it will be combination of basic economics (Alternative sources of power are getting cheaper than oil or gas) and stopping the insane preference to fossil fuels that some governments are harping about.
This stuff always makes me laugh. It’s completely unscientific to assume that “the planet” is somehow in danger because of us. That there is some scientifically definable good condition for “the planet” to be in. And that’s not even touching on the moral aspect of wishing death to 95% of the people alive today (one wonders if that includes you and your family members in the pool of potential fatalities).
Your argument just went from unscientific to logically contradicting itself: