No one did…just a big lake of brown goop.
Thing is there will never be significant effects from it, at least not over the course of any one generation. Whatever and however much its effects may or may not be, they will occur so gradually as to be impossible to definitively identify their cause (or get the public to accept it). And by that time we will have moved on to whatever next doomsday ecological disaster is ‘right on the horizon’. Most likely being the need for a fossil fuel replacement, but not because of climate change, simply because of economics…
It is no wonder because the right wing infosphere is not telling you all what is going on.
Again, the right wing media is misleading you, there is no way to go around that.
On what factual basis do you make this broad assertion?
Stranger
Kind of a mix of crystal gazing types and religious types and suspicious of government types with the first of these being liberal. But in liberal California we just passed a very strong vaccine requirement, and the anti-vaxxers couldn’t get enough signatures to put a repeal measure on the ballot.
Interestingly on the primaries in the USA the politicians that are supporting anti-vaxxer positions are all conservative, One idea I have is that specially in places like Orange County in California the anti-vaxxers are wealthy and conservative so it was a group that could not be ignored.
It is not a coincidence that one of the latest viral outbreaks did take place in Orange County. It is very interesting to me because polling shows that there are a good number of people from the left that do follow the woo woo but very few of them pop up in important political positions.
If conservatives are angry for that they only show that they are not paying attention. Or they do and they also reach for the demagoguery and tell their followers that this is an issue about free speech, when in reality it is not.
Nowhere it is mentioned that the targets are the ones making the trash like scientists like Willie Soon or Fred Singer. Or makers of blogs like WUWT, but they do love to misrepresent who is the target of the scientists and researchers making that letter, it is the corporations and groups that are deceiving the public and financing professional misleaders.
Because what they’re trying to do is predict the weather over the next couple of years, decades, even centuries. And we can only do that with moderate accuracy for maybe a week, tops. It isn’t merely the immense number of variables in terms of human effects on it, but the even larger number of unknown and impossible to accurately model variables that determine the long term climate itself. We know that the climate has gone thru cycles of heating and cooling on its own over eons, and we can’t even say for sure why & how that was.
But it’s very easy for left-wing politicians and academia to tell their fans that it’s obviously because, “Eaaaarth Maaaaaan Baaaaaaaad*!!*”
Something else that I find ludicrous. If you live in a developed first world society, from the moment you get up in the morning you are contributing to global warming. From the clothes you put on (how they were made, transported, regularly cleaned) to the energy to heat & light your house, to the coffee you make (again, grown, harvested overseas, transported thousands of miles) to the food you eat, to the two-cars your family uses to go to work, to the huge amounts of resources that the place you work at uses regardless of what it even does (industrial plant or small office) to the heated, lit, air conditioned and well furnished schools you send your kids to, all of this, every bit of it is (supposedly) significantly contributing to climate change.
So to paraphrase comedian George Carlin “Do you really think a couple of fucking aluminum cans and plastic bags are going to make any difference?!” If anyone does believe all this and seriously wants to do something about it, it would involve them giving up 80% or more of the modern, first-world societal norms. That ain’t gonna happen. And I just don’t kid myself that it even should.
Weather is not climate.
That was very ignorant, that is not what academia is basing their research, and it is clear that you are only wilfully avoiding what James Balog reported about the observed cap ice loss.
And that is why the bulk of the solution has to come from industry and government regulation. With then the ones getting up in their houses paying just a bit more for our modern civilization. What you are going about here is a very old straw man. What you keep forgetting is that the costs of not making changes now will make the issue become more expensive to deal later.
A lot of it might be that Saint Ronald Reagan dismissed the notion of global warming. Contradicting him would be like contradicting Jesus.
Global climate circulation models used in evaluating global climate trends over decades are completely distinct from meteorological models used for regional weather prediction over a period of a couple of weeks. The solution methods, inputs, granularity, and methods for correlation are so radically different there is very little comparison between the two types of models.
Your characterization of the people you disagree with checks of another box on the standard list of standard climate change skeptic: demonize your opponents (who are apparently all “left-wing politicians and academia” because nobody else accepts the hazards of climate change) to make them look radicalized and irrational. The Heartland Institute gives you a standing ovation.
And now we get to the, “It might be real but there is nothing I can do about it, so let’s just let whatever happen and God will sort it out.” The counter to that is that there is plenty that can be done about the waste and pollution that contributes to excess carbon dioxide being released at both an institutional and social level. We can seek greater energy efficacy through improved power generation and distribution processes, increased development of renewable energy resources, incentives and changes to building codes to encourage construction of zero net energy buildings, technical development and infrastructure for alternative low carbon or net zero carbon fuels, et cetera. In fact, we’ve been doing this since the oil and energy crises of the 'Seventies, in such a quietly insidious fashion that even the most avowed self-proclaimed climate skeptic and power hog can’t help but buy energy efficient appliances, cleaner burning automobiles, and some portion of renewable energy from their electrical utilities. Somehow nearly all of Europe seems to be able to maintain an industrial society with heat and light, coffee, schools, cars, et cetera, on less than half of the per capita energy consumption and net carbon production as the US, and (with the exception of Greece) they haven’t fallen into chaos and cannibalism yet.
There is notion that all of the readily available energy, and the cheap oil and coal that drives it is, if not exactly a God-given right of Americans, at least a yield of the free market that shines its smiling face and benefice upon America. In fact, that petroleum and energy prices are so low is due to the very government intervention and subsidies that self-proclaimed “conservatives” love to be seen hating except where it benefits them, in the form of tax credits and incentives to energy producers, in the lowest user taxes on gasoline and diesel of any industrialized nation save for Mexico, and of course, political and military intervention in regions where “strategic” access to petroleum is threatened to the tune of uncountable trillion of dollars. In fact, none of this is a “right” or unending cornucopia of energy supplies, and the smart thing to do from a security and futures perspective even if you aren’t concerned about global climate change would be to support the development of sustainable domestic energy resources that don’t require digging progressively more deeply into the ground, hydraulically beating at oil shale, or blasting the the tops off of mountains.
Frankly, you seem to be operating from a deep lack of information on the topic and assuming that everyone else does to, with only pasted in arguments from the standard list of climate skeptic arguments, nearly all of which have been concocted by the same “merchants of doubt” whose expertise in agnotology convinced generations of people that tobacco wasn’t harmful, that margarine and trans are more healthy than butter, and that that chlorofluorocarbons weren’t responsible for the nonexistent erosion of the ozone layer that we don’t actually need anyway. If you are going to remain a skeptic, at least do yourself the favor of becoming actually educated rather than reiterating claims you’ve heard from pundits that are misleading, counterfactual, or just flat out wrong.
Well, he was clearly so right about missile defense; why should we doubt him on this topic?
Stranger
True. It’s very difficult to forecast the weather more than ten days or so out.
But I guarantee it’s going to be quite a bit colder in about three months. That’s the difference between *weather *and climate, and the fact that you can’t seem to realize the difference kind of makes me wonder why you’re bothering to try to argue.
Siam Sam and Stranger On A Train are correct about how blind the current Republicans in power are. (What it is important to note is that many Republicans that are moderate or that want to do something about the issue are not aware of how out of tune their current congress critters are).
But there is a nit, that anyhow makes the current Republican leadership to look more foolish so here it goes:
Saint Reagan actually did follow the science (and so did Bush father and British conservative Margaret Thatcher), the current Republican leaders and denier groups out there do not want that item to be well known. (Courtesy of Little Green Footballs, that also was a very conservative blog until their main writers noted how insane the Republicans in congress were getting)
The main problem is that the “remedies” for AGW are all intended to:
-make the government larger and more expensive
-enrich a new class of "Green " con men (like Al Gore)
-accelerate the loss of US manufacturing jobs to the 3rd world.
Taker Al Gore’s “carbon credits”-this is a huge subsidy/tax that will be paid by citizens of the USA, and will be used to destroy the American economy. Meanwhile, the people who decide how much carbon dioxide we are allowed to create, become billionaires.
Now, Al Gore has huge mansions, travels by private jet, and probably has the carbon footprint of a small town…but he’s trying to save us.
Right!:smack:
Leaders don’t save the planet unless it’s under attack from aliens.
Which also seems to be a popular conservative reaction to economic issues. Big business and the global market may not be the working man’s best buddy, but anyone who wants to fuck with them is disturbing natural laws and is an idiot or worse.
To the OP.
I also found the way you asked it to be rude but if it helps, I tend to look at climate change with a mixture of scientific realism and skepticism.
Realism in the sense that YES, it is happening. However, #1 Living in the midwest where we used to have terrible winters of blizzards and subzero temperatures - is this so bad? #2. Looking at North America it is in a kind of Y-shape meaning warming could open up alot of land in Canada that right now is tundra so why not? #3. Warming and cooling has been a part of the Earths cycles for centuries.
And skepticism - could this be due to some areas where humans have no control such as sunspots?
I think for many it really is about wanting to believe that “God is in control” (and also on their side). They don’t want to contemplate living in a world where a human activity we have accepted as normal and everyday can destroy their economy and their habitat. Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in.
I can’t help but notice that most of your problem with AGW solutions is that you just don’t like Al Gore.
[QUOTE=Wesley Clark]
What is a good liberal equivalent?
[/QUOTE]
I think nuclear power is an example more relevant to global warming than others.
ISTM that the scientific consensus is at least as strong that global warming is really happening and is caused by human activity as it is that solar power is not a viable, wide-scale solution to the issue. Nuclear power, however, is much more likely to be practical. If liberals were interested in actually solving the problem, they could work with conservatives (who are broadly in favor of nuclear power) to implement a practical solution. But they tend to push solar and other forms of energy instead. Witness Obama spending hundreds of millions on Solyndra, which failed, and shutting down Yucca Mountain.
Liberals seem to want to pour money into looking for a technological solution to the impracticalities of solar (and try to hide the costs by pretending that subsidies don’t cost anything). Which is not very different from conservatives simply saying “we will come up with a technological solution” to global warming overall.
So liberals are handling the issue as badly as possible. People in general are bad at dealing with long-term problems. So the approach seems to be
[ul][li]Name-calling[/li][li]Assume the worst case scenario is what we need to prepare for[/li][li]Propose a solution that costs a lot, and won’t work[/li][li]More name-calling for any form of cost-benefit analysis that doesn’t say “we need to convert to solar and damn the cost”[/ul]China is going to continue to build a lot of solar installations. They are also going to build a lot of coal-fired installations, and change the subject when the subject is brought up. [/li]
If the scientific consensus is that the risks of global warming are real and significant, then the risks of nuclear power are also real and less significant. If we need a solution now, then nuclear power is the only practical solution now.
If liberals would rather just yell at the other side, have at it, but don’t expect to be patted on the back for being realistic about risk.
Regards,
Shodan