Speaking of “dire”, Pokémon brought back their coral Pokémon in sword and shield… As a ghost type that was killed by coral bleaching and global warming. Even Nintendo sees fit to reference this in their games.
While hoping for a technological breakthrough is nice, it isn’t like playing a video game where you get X number of research points a year and after a few turns clicking “NEXT TURN” you get to pick a technology. Research doesn’t work that way. Fusion power, for example, has been 10 years away now, for about 60 years. One of the projects I’m working on is developing a breed of Arabidopsis that absorbs more carbon when growing. I just joined the project a few months ago. They’ve been working on it for years. Even if they find some genomic modification today, then that isn’t the end of it. No, to fully develop the species to be used for widescale deployment would take at least 5-12 years. Pinning all your hopes on a sudden technological breakthough is unwise, while of course it would be very nice (by the way, it must upset you that the Trump administration has slashed the budget for such research).
I don’t know Elimination whatever is, but it sounds like a group used as a strawman argument by right-wing media. If you accept the IPCC report, and you indicate you do:
The timeframe for us to take decisive action does not really allow for a technological change. We have to change our behaviour. If you choose to listen to right-wing media and classify this as “draconian social re-engineering”, well whatever, more power to you. Stop listening to liars.
If you mean “Extinction Rebellion” they **are **a bunch of twats who are used as a strawman argument by right-wing media. But they’re not wrong about the problem. (They’re also not remotely a unified group, so bits of ER think other parts of ER are twats too.)
Like Occupy Wall Street, they’re high profile and mildly disruptive but largely irrelevant to the larger conversation.
Honestly, the name “Elimination Rebellion” kind of gave away that their viewpoints might be a bit askew and not representative of what scientific climate change action advocates are suggesting. I’m sure they do a good job of selling climate change advocacy as “draconian social re-engineering”, which is helpful if you want to stick your head in the (increasingly hot) sand and pretend nothing is wrong or something is wrong, but we don’t need to really do anything because <something> <something> Yay!
So I looked them up because I’m bored right now. Assuming the wikipedia entry is accurate here are their aims and principles.
Aim #1 seems pretty reasonable.
Aim #2 would be great, if highly unlikely to occur, advocating for it doesn’t seem so bad. The main thing is to not be so fixated on this aim so as to miss out on opportunities to advocate for good outcomes. Do not let the perfect, be the enemy of the good.
Aim #3 is unhelpful to the cause of climate change action.
Aim #4 (US only) is extremely unhelpful to the cause of climate change action.
This was exactly the same problem the Occupy Wall Streety movement had. Instead of keeping it simple and demanding regulatory reform on investment banks, they starting adding in all sorts of other unrelated elements. And this tarnished the whole movement. We do not need Aim #3 and 4 to address climate change. All this does is make it politically charged.
So yeah, I applaud aims 1 and 2, and I wish they had of just stopped there.
Also, some of their protests include vandalism, which I do not support anymore than violence.
This is why the left is the enemy of climate change action. By tying climate change policy to a host of left-wing demands, they are adding a poison pill to the debate that will simply harden positions on the right and prevent any consensus on what should be done.
Climate change is being turned into a another proxy battle between the left and right. It’s being hijacked by the left as a crisis too good to go to waste.
I have to admit I’m having difficulty with this. To be clear, I STRONGLY support all manner of restrictions on fossil fuels, as well as MASSIVE changes to our food production. But here in the US we seem very resistant to making any such changes. Hopefully that will change, but if not…?
The biggest problem I see is if there are massive numbers of climate refugees. What does the rest of the world do if several hundred million Indonesians (or whatever) have to start treading water? The US has habitually proven itself in eager to help with political/war refugees, so I’m not anticipating that we’ll be at the forefront of this effort.
The biggest effect is that some things will become more expensive for some people, and other assets will lose their value. How much will the US spend to maintain New Orleans and Miami? Because those folk can all move back to the Midwest and be high and dry. That’s just a redistribution of resources. Not sure why it qualifies as dire. And we’ll have to be pissing away tons of on things we could have easily avoided, which will reduce available for other things. That’s the cost of being short-sighted and selfish.
Weather will make agriculture more unpredictable, but the world will still be able to grow food - just not as much of the same foods where they have traditionally been grown.
Don’t get me wrong - a warmed globe will be a far less pleasant place than we currently enjoy. But like cockroaches, we’ll still be living, working, eating, and fighting.
The problem with reasoning from recent disasters is that it’s not obvious that climate change is particularly responsible here.
I live in California. In Santa Barbara where there’s a big new fire. And obviously there have been lots of big fires lately. But these big fires have largely been driven by really high winds and the recent very bad drought. The problem with blaming those on climate change is that climate change models show Santa Ana winds getting calmer and California getting wetter due to climate change.
Those aren’t the only effects, but it’s actually not trivial to argue from the science that climate change will make California wildfires worse. It might make them less bad! (it’s almost certainly going to make floods worse)
But think about other factors that contribute to bigger fires that cause more death and damage: increased population, aging electrical infrastructure, more build-out into wooded areas, a century of forest management building up fuel. Even if climate change lessens fire risk slightly, all those other factors will still increase it, and the number of people hurt and financial damage will keep increasing because population and building stock keeps increasing.
This seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what a “hundred-year-flood” is. It’s a flood of a magnitude that you’d expect to happen every hundred years in a particular spot. There are more than 100 cities worldwide, so we should expect 100-year floods in multiple cities every year.
Climate change is clearly real and has real and devastating effects. But not every weather-related disaster is worse because of it.
No foolin?
Right. Some extremist clowns, who I’ve never heard of before this thread, represents “the left.” Despite the fact that no political leaders of the left in the US have expressed these positions that I’ve ever heard.
Further, these extremists are forcing the poor helpless right into being against reasonable action on climate change - despite them having these positions (courtesy of energy companies to a large extent) long before ER ever existed.
wah wah wah. Some leftie made me destroy the planet.
Does the right say that the left can be against any and all conservative positions because some right wingers are racist scum? Not that I’ve heard.
Climate change denial is the responsibility of the deniers, not ER, all five of them or whatever.
I’m not going to play chicken and egg here as to which side struck first in making it political. It doesn’t matter. At this moment, the problem by leagues and leagues and leagues, is the right since they tend to be in the spectrum of “It isn’t happening”, to “It is happening but caused by something other than humans”, “It is happening, but we shouldn’t do anything about it because of X,Y, Z.” I am more than happy to stand up the more extreme positions some climate change activists. It is strange that I don’t tend to see such behavior from people on the right side of the political spectrum that want to throw out the baby with the bath water, and rarely stand up to the liars on from right-wing media.
Let me ask you this. Do you acknowledge that Crowder, Shapiro, Carlson, Moore, Limbaugh, and other like them are liars?
When Florida and some Southern states go underwater.
I don’t think they are liars. I think they have let their ideology lead them down the path of rationalization, fueled by being in a bubble and confirmation bias - just like commentators on the left. I mean, there are still people on the left who believe that socialism works. I can’t even get my head around the amount of cognitive bias that must be required to believe that.
Well, there you have it. These people are known liars about climate change. At a minimum, Crowder, Shapiro, Moore and Limbaugh have misrepresented slices of data that cannot be explained by rationalization or bias. It requires a willful look at the information and to disregard it in a way that is not possible for any reasonably intelligent and honest person.
For example, this is a piece by Crowder.
Note, that he draws his conclusion SPECIFICALLY citing a NASA report. Which means he and/or his staff looked at the report.
That’s from the report that Crowder cited. Crowder is a liar. Note, in Crowder’s article how they cut and pasted different pieces of it together to paint a different picture than the one presented in the study. This is a willful, purposeful act of deception. I.e., a lie.
Everybody else on that list does similar things, and make similar statements. These are not honest mistakes, or rationalizations. They are lies. They’ve looked at the reports and extracted those little snippets which can be twisted to their narrative. That is a lie. Pure and simple.
So, again, I’m willing to point out when some leftist (with a minority viewpoint) is not being very helpful. Are you absolutely sure you’re not willing to call out these major right-wing media commentators on their explicit lies?
I want to clarify that there is a tremendous difference between these media commentators and a person on the street (or say this board). The person on the street can be mistaken. They can be misinformed (especially if they get their information from these liars), or ill-informed. There’s only so many hours in the day, and of course, the average Joe and Jane are not reading the scientific literature. What makes these commentator liars, is they do look at the information, and you know they do because they reference it either slicing it up to distort it or to outright dismiss it. That’s what makes them liars as opposed to somebody who is right-wing and believes these falsehoods, which makes them simply wrong.
The planet’s population continues to increase. If there is less food for them, then large-scale starvation results along with epic migrations out of the food deserts.
We’re not talking about a bad cold. That future you describe means the deaths of millions and the destruction of vast homelands. It’s a knowing legacy of horror being passed on to our descendants globally. Is your response really a shrug and an “oh well”? How does that make you different from the conservatives?
When multiple “hundred-year-floods” occur in a particular location over a short period of time, it may be just chance. When multiple “hundred-year-floods” occur in multiple locations over a short period of time, it may be just chance but the odds of that greatly decrease. When multiple types of unusual activities occur in multiple locations over the same short period of time, panic.
Sam, I’ve not going to bother refuting you. I’ll just leave you on that limb you crawled out on, naked and alone in the wind.
God dammit guys I considered responding to that post but thought, “Nah, maybe if I don’t, nobody will, and the thread won’t be thrown wildly off track by an obscenely bad argument.” And now everyone else has gone and done it. :mad: But yeah, the “left” has policitized climate science. Not like the right has thrown billions of dollars into a propaganda machine to make people believe it isn’t real, which people like Sam Stone swallow hook, line, and sinker. He even believes that they’re not lying on purpose, despite the fact that oil CEOs have known about the threat of climate change since before I was born, and buried the information for the sake of their profits.
This is just the latest volley of right-wing propaganda - the right going from “climate change is fake” to “the left (read: some fringe group on the left) isn’t sufficiently pure in their opposition/willing to do exactly what we want, therefore they’re the people really politicizing it”.
Do you include the Sierra Club as “extremist clowns”?
Conservatives who deny climate change are idiots.
But the left is also guilty of politicizing the issue.
Twenty years ago, I started to think,“gee, this climate change stuff might be pretty important. And this Al Gore guy looks like he’s got some important info”.(An Inconvenient Truth)
So I figured it was obvious: let’s do something about it and fix the problem.
But then I realized that it will never happen.
Because in order to do fix it, we would have to do something totally politically incorrect: use the n-word.
And the left would never stoop so low; they will never allow society to go back to the dark days when the n-word was acceptable.
And now 20 years later, as climate change is becoming critical, they still refuse to use the n-word.
The Sierra Club proudly remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.
The largest green organization in America is as fanatic and illogical as evangelical bible-thumpers who believe in the rapture.
Instead of pushing for weird economic solutions like carbon credits, they should be screaming for more nuclear power plants.
The Wall Street Journal derides the greens as tree huggers and “Birkenstock brigades”.
But if the left would call for nuclear power*, then the right would get on board, too; The Wall Street Journal ,the one-percenters and the Republicans would join in – because there would be profits to be made.
*( to preserve their moral sense of political correctness, they could re-name the plants as “carbon-free” energy. Language really does matter, and affects people’s attitudes.)
To avoid a hijack I opened a separate thread about that last bit.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=885989
EDIT: and here we go with the nuclear stuff again. Weird how every climate change thread eventually devolves into that, huh?
Well, I’ve already said that I’m pro-nuclear power (I’m not sure that I’m the “left”). I’m already said that I’m willing to disagree with organizations on the left. So yes, I completely disagree with The Sierra Club on this issue. We should be building nuclear power plants. Lots of them. We should have started 20 years ago. Fully 100% support nuclear energy.
I’m not so convinced Republicans would be on board though. Since they are very much in the mode of “What? Democrats support this. Then it must be EVIL and we oppose it!” (see Obamacare)
But what I’ve observed is that people on the right seem incapable of separating issues. They cannot admit that anybody on their side could be wrong (and lying) on any issue they talk about. Like somehow, if they’re wrong on one thing, then it would mean they’re wrong/lying on everything. It is a very all-or-nothing kind of thinking that I don’t understand.
I agree with some of the things that the Sierra Club stand for. Protecting the forests is a good idea. Opposing coal. Awesome. Opposing nuclear power. No. You don’t HAVE to be in lock step with organizations/pundits/etc. on your side.
Again, I’m not going to play chicken and egg to determine which side struck first at politicizing climate change because it doesn’t fraking matter. If it was the left, then let it go, who cares. Let’s take action and stop bickering about the politics of it.