I don’t consider it innacurate hyperbole so much as you taking the least charitable reading of their statements. Obviously they mean the current, human-centred Earth with its current biosphere, no-one seriously thinks people saying “It will destroy the Earth” means lifeless-ball-of-rock-style destruction.
That’s Grey Goo’s job. 
My experiences with some environmentalists (usually the more spiritually guided, rather than science/rationality guided) is different, but I take your point. A small disagreement about rhetoric.
From the NYT frontpage, not my words:
devastating consequences
rising sea levels
severe droughts
severe flooding
widespread food and water shortages (a.k.a famine, war, rape, torture, death, death, death)
more destructive storms.
We are staring at foolish calamity and saying “meh, mankind won’t go extinct.”
This is what people are cheering for. 
.
Gee, like if something like this was not deemed impossible just a year ago.
So, there is that also in the deal and lets not forget that because people like Bill Gates are on board what I said before does apply, this will be solved not only by the efforts of the world governments, but by industry and business too that are not willing to go into the dark like the fossil fuel companies or the Republicans in congress that are in the pockets of that industry.
Like your sorry point about “it is too late” your point here is only to despair as if nothing will be done still.
And, as I said, there is no need for a world government; all kinds of government on earth do have very selfish reasons why they should control this issue sooner rather than later.
Words are wind. I am using historical data from the last 40 years. I hope you’re right and I’m wrong for both our sakes, but I have no duty to be cheerful for no reason. It is known that humans are consistently overoptimistic. A perfect example of that would be Joe the Plumber, the misguided sod that supported policies that would benefit (aspirational, statistically improbable) “future-him”, but actually harm present-him (as so many republican voters do, but that’s another debate).
Didn’t those governments have very selfish reasons why they should control this issue 40 years ago? All we’ve had instead has been lip service and increases in emissions instead of decreases. These are the sad, disappointing, gloomy facts.
All you have are the words of professional smooth talkers and your optimistic hope that everything is going to be alright.
Yes, we need a Robert Mugabe-style earth president…one that will enrich himself and his cronies…right. what we need is a real market, which will solve our energy problems=-price stuff according to pollution it creates-so that $12.00 sweater imported from a Chinese sweatshop is now $250.00-problem solved.
Heh, it seems that you do not know me really well.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16987983&postcount=7
The problem you have is that this issue has been full of pessimists from the right as a rule. And the funny thing is that I use Joe the Plumber as an example of why even conservatives should accept change for the simple reason that regardless of how we do the change we will still get guys like “Joe the solar panel installer”, “Joe the sea barrier maker”, etc etc. Point being that Joe the Plumber would not had found his job if it was not for the big change that developed and developing nations did with water sanitation.
And so it will with the new jobs that will come when we deal properly with the issue of controlling our emissions and to deal with the changes that will come for not acting sooner.
Gee, tell me something I don’t know.
(This seems to be a case of you trying to teach grandpa to suck eggs, sonny 
)
You are once again concentrating mostly in the American situation, almost all nations of the world also have scientists that have told them about the issue and do take them seriously, the few that ignored the warnings like Syria are paying a lot now.
Yet even here in the USA I have seen that local governments are listening to the projections of the scientists from the government universities and are preparing the desert city of Phoenix to be even more efficient in saving excess water that will come from less often but more intense torrential storms in underground reservoirs; regardless if officially the local politicians claim that they are deniers, thank goodness we are not Florida.
Like if Richard alley is not a scientist, BTW he consulted with economists like William Nordhaus to conclude that we can deal with the issue, like you I do think this was done too late to prevent some changes but the reality is that not making any changes will make the situation even worse. The end result from your despairing is precisely to discourage the efforts to make the change, and that sounds more like the deniers reaching for their old talking points.
So, no, you do not know me well, I’m actually pessimistic in issues related to this, but I do not close my mind to gloom and doom forever. Otherwise things like acid rain would not had been controlled, and neither cholera or other ugly diseases and filthy streets by being pessimistic for decades in Edinburgh until change took place and city plumbing and sanitation was build there and in many other cities.
So the deal made in Paris was more than I expected, for all the issues it has it is clearly a turning point. Our job locally now is to fight to remove the politician deniers from positions of power in the USA and to prevent any candidate to the presidency to become our leader. It just so happens that thanks to powerful fossil fuel interests that virtually all Republicans are deniers, so it simplifies things for us.
As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said, the self correcting political system we have will need to be used to convince the Republicans that it is ok to change as there are more corporations that do listen to the scientists so Republicans can be in the pockets of more responsible conservatives, I really do think that a lot of what is going on with the Republican party is that they are even denying that jobs that appear from change do not automatically mean that the new workers will become democrats, as Joe the Plumber showed, that is not the case. There is really then one more reason why change in this matter should be accepted by conservatives because it was not supposed to be a political football from the beginning.
The economic ignorance baked into this statement is unfortunate.
There is a huge difference between technological change derived from real improvements in productivity, and technological change driven by political demands, OR by the need to save something 100 years from now.
Public sanitation had real, immediate benefits to the population. So did the road system and other big infrastructure programs of the past. They improved the economy and the quality of life of the citizens on their own terms, and were therefore widely adopted and sustainable.
As of today, renewable energy sources are not cost competitive with fossil fuels, and no matter how many jobs you ‘create’ making solar panels and windmills, those industries would not exist without constant government subsidy or mandates.
Energy is the root of all our productivity. If you make energy more expensive, the world’s standard of living will decrease, all else being equal. The IPCC admits this, and in fact their integrated models use GDP as a proxy for carbon output, because GDP and energy are closely linked. There will be no net job creation from ‘green jobs’, because each green job will cost money that has to come from somewhere.
This is the classic ‘hidden man’ fallacy the left continually ignores. Yes, you can use tax money to build a solar panel industry. But that money is taxed from the people, and as a result causes job losses on the margin. But those jobs are unseen, because they are diffused across the economy. The struggling grocery store in a small town has to let go of their box-boy. The small manufacturing outfit can’t afford their hiked energy costs and goes out of business. Or even worse, the business that would have expanded no longer can, and therefore we never even see the jobs that would have been created.
This fallacy allows the government to crow about how many jobs their programs have ‘created’, while their economists wring their hands over the ‘unexpected’ and puzzling increase in the unemployment rate.
It’s easy for politicians to point to a shiny factory built on subsidies and say, “Look at all the jobs we created!” But it’s impossible to know how many jobs were lost due to the taxes required, or the jobs lost because a new carbon tax made a product non-viable or required a company to scale back operations.
The notion that the Syrian civil war is caused by global warming is, too be charitable, fanciful. A useful political argument, perhaps, but one devoid of any real factual basis.
The Paris deal was exactly what I expected: A promise to create framework that will address the problem some time in the future, but which requires absolutely zero political pain today. Lots of signing ceremonies before the ruling classes got back into their private jets and flew home home on a trail of carbon to pronounce that they had saved the planet for the voters, and with no definable costs to them. And to prove it, there will be ‘transparency’ requirements that will require countries to explain what they’ve done to solve the problem a few years down the road when most of the signees are out of office and don’t have to answer to the voters.
You wanted a political process to solve global warming, and you got a political ‘solution’. And if any of these countries do implement carbon taxes, it will be because they see them as a great way to tax the public to pay for their own pet projects, while claiming to be doing it for the planet.
Let’s see how many of them actually take hard steps to solve the problem that cause actual pain for the voters. There will be a few: Germany has gone down that path, and now pays through the nose for its energy. Canada just wrecked the economy of Alberta, and is wrecking the economy of Ontario on the altar of ‘green jobs’. But most countries will simply ignore their ‘commitments’ if the going gets tough. See the Kyoto treaty for an example.
Republicans don’t believe that new jobs will go to Democrats - I have no idea where you get that idea from. Perhaps you are conflating it with their opposition to hispanic immigration?
Republicans are worried that the left’s solutions to global warming are going to result in more government, more regulation, more debt, more power being ceded to extra-national agencies beyond the control of voters, and a weaker economy that in the long run will make us less able to respond to the real changes caused by global warming - changes that will happen regardless of the very expensive yet ultimately useless changes the left is proposing.
I thought for the record I’d point out the most egregious errors, though not really intending to engage with you much further on this subject.
So you’re saying that any programs whose objectives are intrinsically long term are stupid, even if they’re absolutely critical and perhaps essential to our very survival. Fortunately, rational people disagree. That’s why the COP21 agreement was reached in Paris despite many naysayers like yourself who were predicting failure.
Emissions are known independent of GDP, but a correlation does exist – today. The whole point is that energy isn’t intrinsically tied to fossil fuels. And you forgot to mention that the IPCC has also noted that many mitigation measures are either cost-neutral or actually financially positive. In the long run, they’re all financially advantageous when you consider the increasing costs of extreme weather and environmental catastrophe.
It’s like trying to tie a particular hurricane event to climate change. Can you prove the connection? Very unlikely that you can. But over the long run the statistical increase in hurricane energy is clearly evident and supported by physical science. There’s little doubt about where climate change impacts are most severe, and many of them are in poor countries with the most vulnerable food crops and the least economic resiliency, most notably Africa and other poor tropical regions. Starvation makes people very desperate.
Right. As soon as Justin Trudeau was elected about 7 weeks ago, the price of oil suddenly dropped by 80% all over the world and Alberta went bankrupt! You can at least feel good that you didn’t vote for him!
COP21 was not a “personal” commitment, it was a national commitment on behalf of the nations of the world, nearly 200 in all. The transparency of a nation’s standing in the international community transcends whatever individual happens to be in power, whether you like it or not.
As wolfpup replied to your post already I have to say only that you completely lost it right there.
That is indeed just reaching for the denial that this is not affecting people now and that it will not affect us more in the future.
You can only talk about the benefit for health only on hindsight, the truth was that the reasons why Richard Alley and others do compare this issue with water works is that there was then a big current of denial that was, not only as a result of ignorance about what was causing disease, it included doom and gloom talking points that the change would bankrupt us all. Talk that delayed change by decades and many had to die until it was decided that something needed to be done.
It did not bankrupt the developed and developing nations, for the reason that then more business could develop where once before people died like flies.
Really, as China and India are finding now ignoring the effects of pollution are killing the very same people that they wanted to raise their standards of living, the real fallacy of yours is to ignore the incalculable worth that humanity gained by preventing many from dying of disease back with the water works done and now we will gain a lot by making efforts to prevent very harmful results because we are treating the atmosphere like a sewer.
And yet, you didn’t mention a single ‘error’. Just a disagreement about how important these things are.
I never even remotely said that. My point was that you can’t use the success of public sanitation and the jobs created from it as an example of how this can work out, because public sanitation had immediate environmental, financial and social benefits. That meant that money spent on it could be recouped in a reasonable time frame, and that the politics of it were much different.
Let me explain further: There is a big difference in terms of job creation, financial viability, and political support between a large project that will return measurable benefits to the electorate in the same political and economic timeframe as the investment, and a large project that will not show measurable benefits for decades, if ever.
Also, projects like public sanitation and roads are local-to-national projects. That means the voters are closely connected to them, and that their success or failure is not dependent on the votes of people half a world away. Climate change legislation requires total global cooperation. Huge difference.
Trying to maintain global political support for extremely expensive climate change policies over decades is going to be extremely difficult. One big recession and these countries will be reverting to the cheapest energy they can find, as we discovered during the last recession. Whatever happened to Kyoto? How many countries actually stuck to their ‘binding’ commitments?
Political regimes come and go. All it takes is for a ‘denier’ government to be elected in a major country and the wheels will fall off the whole enterprise. Maintaining unanimity of purpose over the long haul is a pipe dream. Your global climate change treaty has to stay intact for 50 years or more. Good luck.
Well… today the vast majority of it is, and there are no current technologies that can effectively replace it without driving up the cost dramatically. MAYBE we wll find a cheaper energy source - but if we do, we won’t need global treaties or big government interventions to ‘fix’ global warming - the world will transition to the cheaper energy all on its own.
If the alternate sources of energy are NOT cheaper, than GDP growth will suffer. That money has to come from somewhere.
There are lots of things we could be doing now that conservatives and liberals could agree on that would be smart policy regardless. For example, let’s end federal flood insurance that subsidizes building in areas that are likely going to be affected by sea level rise. Let’s stop subsidizing the stupid bio-fuel industry which is driving up food prices in the third world and is at best carbon neutral compared to the alternative. Let’s stop subsidizing agricultural water use in California - growing rice with subsidized water in an arid region when there are water shortages is insane, and uses up a lot of energy. Let’s streamline the regulatory process for new nuclear plants, which are the only technology we have today remotely capable of replacing base-load coal and gas plants.
I’m sure we could come up with dozens of things that could have an effect and for which you could find significant support on the right…
So you agree that there’s absolutely no proof that the war in Syria is caused by climate change? Thank you.
Except there’s very little to link Islamic extremism to poverty. The nutbars who killed 14 people in California were middle-class Americans. So were the Boston bombers, and the 9/11 terrorists were middle class and college educated. In the ME region, the primary sponsor of Islamist terror is probably Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was a millionaire. Religious extremism is its own thing.
Nah, Trudeau hasn’t done anything yet. But our provincial government sure has. Since being elected they have announced no pipelines will be allowed out of Alberta, there will be a cap on oil development, there’s a new carbon tax, a host of new regulations on industry to force them to be more energy efficient, and on and on.
This government had nothing to do with the drop in oil prices obviously, but they’ve made a bad situation much worse with all their new mandates, taxes, and regulations.
Interestingly, and to the point about the seriousness of this all, the carbon tax money is going to go into general revenues to be spent however they like, and all their new ‘stimulus’ spending is going to cause us to run huge deficits for the forseeable future. But they are promising to balance the budget in 5 years. How? Why by raising more money from oil, of course. They are betting on oil being back at $90/bbl within three years, which can only happen if the demand for oil increases dramatically. So I guess they don’t believe that much will be done to curb its use - or they are lying to us and have no plan to stop the bleeding of red ink. Either way, they suck.
In a democracy, a ‘national commitment’ lasts until exactly the next election. In the U.S., I believe there’s a rule that prevents presidents from binding future congresses to executive orders or even treaties, although a treaty requires a supermajority to revoke. In other countries with fewer constitutional protections, new governments can simply abandon them.
And in any case, COP21 has no enforcement mechanism - it’s counting on something like ‘national shaming’ and transparency to keep everyone in line. That’s kind of laughable. That’s not how countries relate to each other. Countries act in their own interest, and rarely care what others think of them if there’s no teeth behind it.
Many denier government were the ones that were canned recently, and we had this conversation before, it is because of bad luck that we are in this position*, and it is more likely that more bad luck is coming that will ensure that the climate treaty will become stronger as it is designed.
As usual, you missed the point. I suspect you don’t even read my messages - you just scan them looking for key words you can tee off on or something.
My whole point was about political viability, not whether it’s worth doing. The fact is, Climate Change mitigation will require global support for very expensive restrictions over many decades, and it will be exceedingly hard to prove that the costs are worth it. Or, we’ll figure out a cheaper way to make energy, in which case there will be widespread adoption anyway and COP21 will become moot.
If you think the global electorate is okay with incurring current costs for future benefits, you might ask yourself why the world is drowning in debt, and why most countries need to face a fiscal crisis before they’ll do anything about their debt problem. Politicians love to kick cans down the road.
When Kyoto was signed, it was in the middle of a global economic boom. Even so, the U.S. stayed out of it and Clinton didn’t even try to get Congress on board because there was massive opposition to it - even among Democrats. The countries that did sign on to it did so after being offered all kinds of exemptions and credits that made it cheap (and non-effective). And yet, as soon as the economy took a downturn, the Kyoto restrictions were the first to go.
That’s just reality. Sorry if it doesn’t comport with your desires.
And here you are only ignoring what it as pointed out about countries like China and India, indeed they are acting also in their own interest and that is why I expect the treaty to become stronger in the future.
So… You are basing your hopes on the belief that the world has permanently moved to the left, and you’ll have nothing but progressive governments for the next 50 years? Good luck with that. The wheel always turns. After every election the victorious party declares that there is a new permanent alignment and the opposition has been vanquished forever. That belief usually lasts approximately 4 years.
piffle, the fact is that you are the one that never acknowledged that the anti environmentalists fooled you about DDT.
I do read your messages, so that is why I can not respect your ideas as I have seen them debunked before.
And this demonstrated that you are accusing others of what you are doing, many times I have pointed that this issue will be solved only in part by governments, a lot of the effort will come from industry and free enterprise as Bill Gates told us in Paris too.
:rolleyes:
Since the USA did not sign I wonder what restrictions from that treaty where the first to go over here.
Incidentally most of Europe did sign, it was not seen as the end of their economies, and even with a downturn they surpassed the target.
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/news/articles/news_2013100901_en.htm
The world would be in a better footing now if we had signed the treaty back then.
The political reality is that currently the Republican party in the USA is the weakest link. And I’m realistic enough to think that they might still win the presidency in 2016, but as Al Smith can tell you, the bigger they get the harder they fall.
Like when the nations moved to the left when confronting bad water, acid rain, ozone layer depletion and lead contamination? You are indeed implying that all changes to improve or preserve our environment are only leftist ideas, that is a very dumb argument.
This only shows that it is you the one that is still using politics, the point I make always is that it is unfortunate that this has been politicized, but you are only ignoring history if you think it was the left or the Democratas who did it.