The intersection of Science and Politics means that no greater threat than climate change becomes drill, baby, drill. Thanks, Obama, for making my point that, no matter what you (say) you believe and what you (say) you really care about and no matter what science might say, in the end it’s not the science that is important but what people in power do with that knowledge.
Res, non verba. If Obama approves on his own drilling for more oil in Alaska, how can anyone believe that he really, really thinks it’s important.
Do you believe not drilling in Alaska reduces our oil use, and thus the carbon released from the oil, one iota? If it doesn’t come from there it will come from fracking or from Saudi Arabia.
Opposition to oil drilling in Alaska centers on the direct environmental impact of the drilling. That has nothing to do with climate change. Your second link is an opinion piece clearly from someone opposed to the drilling, and trying to use climate change as an argument against it. Shell could be seriously committed to alternative energy sources and still feel the need to drill in the Arctic - since our thirst for oil is not going away soon.
If you can cite Obama saying he has become a denier you might have something.
This is very true and a superb fact-based analysis. For example a European study some years ago showed that there were approximately 35,000 premature and preventable deaths per year in Europe due to air pollution. And now the tree-huggers claim that the same sources causing all that air pollution are also contributing to climate change! It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!!
Not only that, but the tree-huggers now have some new-fangled story about how trees are a good thing, because trees absorb CO2 or some horseshit like that, that they obviously just made up. Coincidence? I think not. I have trees in my back yard and I’ve never seen them absorb anything. They just sit there and attract noisy birds and squirrels, and the birds poop all over my Ford F-350 (with the giant dual exhausts) which is of course what the tree-huggers secretly want.
So nefarious is the evil of the tree-huggers that they’ve now convinced virtually all of the world’s climate scientists to go along with their hoax, probably by threatening their lives if they don’t. They’ve even somehow forced the US military to go along with the scam. So who’s left that actually knows The Truth™? Only you and me, brother, and a few other lonely voices in the wilderness. Oh, and the world’s major industries, led by pitiful ragtag groups like Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers, selflessly seeking only The Truth™, and so poor that they can barely afford to feed their own families. It’s a travesty, this conspiracy.
For policy to be rational and effective, it must be informed by facts, which is the business of science. If it isn’t, we ignore the facts at our peril and, sooner or later, inevitably face the consequences. Because, in the end, nature cares absolutely nothing about what you believe or don’t believe. Nature is neither beneficent nor evil – it is utterly indifferent. The forces that create hospitable environments for life are exactly the same ones that, under different conditions, precipitate mass extinctions. It’s up to us to care about the choices we make.
I understand the Alaska is more a pollution than AGW thing. However, the point you make “if not Alaska then somewhere else” is key. Someone who says AGW is the greatest threat and really means it, should be able to swallow the pill and say “I won’t make oil cheaper (by increasing usable reserves) and therefore incentivize its use which increases CO2”.
It’s an opinión piece, but the key part is the “drill, baby, drill”.
I will never claim that Obama is a denier. I’ll claim, however, the whatever he says about AGW and what he actually does, or even better, the actual results of what he does, is what’s important
Yes to all of that. However, public policy is not made/enforced by scientists, it is by politicians. The only thing that matter in a person’s life is not the albedo of a lightly forested area or the cooling effect of black carbon. What matter is the tax on my oil or how much money is spent on subsidizing solar energy and not or repairing potholes or school.
I’ll repeat my previous question. Let’s see if you can venture an answer.
Suppose that it became a 100% scientific fact, proven by countless studies in every (un)imaginable situation that legalizing rape reduced the incidence of forced, unwanted sexual intercourse by 50%. Legalize it and it gets cut in half.
That’s the science stuff. Incontrovertable.
Can you imagine any mayor, governor, representative, senator, secretary or president who’d sign the law that legalizes rape?
And I’ll add; would YOU sign it with the clear scientific conviction of its truth?
Yeah, all that cheap, renewable energy, getting cheaper every year as new windmills and solar farms come online! Instead of getting more expensive, scarcer, and less sustainable every year like gas and oil.
We already pretty much know when natural gas will be too expensive to heat homes like mine, and Boone Pickens wants to find more uses for it so it runs out faster?
I think the conspiracy is one of future societal success and common sense. I’ll gladly join that conspiracy, if I have to man an orbital hurricane-generating satellite to get there.
So many TEOTWAWKI predictions have been wrong, even when widely accepted. The further out the predicted events, the more likely it is to be wrong
Of a perception that short-term variations which skew away from the broad average prediction are confirmatory that something is amiss in our ability to predict
Of a general mistrust of science (boko haram light)
The underlying modeling theory is complex enough to be beyond the Denier’s ken
Denying leaves room for avoiding personal responsibility in service of a public good–i.e. it enables participation in the tragedy of the commons, where individual sacrifice is not made since not enough individuals in toto will sacrifice to an extent great enough to avoid a problem
Hypocrisy and/or secondary gain is easily assigned to major public figures or institutions promoting the Alarm (Al Gore and his consumption; a “concerned” starlet jetting around for recreation in between speeches against AGW; a government agency anxious to promote its reach…)
…etc
But I don’t see the “it’s all a hoax” promoted very vigorously by Deniers. I’m sure there may be a few. In general though, the “hoax” label seems to be applied unilaterally by Alarmists against those who oppose their concern.
Exactly. Climate change is not a concern to the natural world. The natural world does not care what happens to the natural world. Nature will have her utterly indifferent consequences to the invasiveness of man as a species. Were humans to overrun the earth in any of a hundred ways, it would not be assigned any more import in the universe than a comet obliterating an uninhabited moon.
Climate change is a concern for humans, and only humans, since only humans are both prescient enough and sentient enough to care. The trickiness around the AGW message is that there is no proximate individual peril to be suffered by ignoring the facts. “We” as a species may collectively pay a price–even extinction–down the road. But if that price does not personally accrue to me, here, now, it becomes difficult to persuade me that I should personally undertake any cost.
I am not overly optimistic about our willingness to bear immediate burdens for any except immediate harms.
We need Sandy, but we also need to avoid having the following North Atlantic hurricane season be one of the most quiescent on record…until we get to in-your-face, all-the-time, obvious-to-a-dullard, accurate predictions of personal harm, climate change Alarm will remain the hooting and hollering of a hobbyist Great Cause to the average joe.
Besides giving away the real political ideology by once again concentrating on Gore, you only showed that you did not pay attention to what was said in the thread, also that there is no attention on what Republicans (and other conservatives like in Australia) are doing in government. As pointed before, the weakest link are the current Republicans that are not only denying this, but actively engaged in gutting the EPA, and preventing any regulations that would include taxes for emissions or can-n-trade. The lie that it is a hoax is promoted in congress constantly by the congress people in the pockets of the fossil fuel interests.
And of course, this shows once again who is really using religion to deny science; in reality the accusation seen before, that the proponents of humans causing the current warming are using religion or dogma, is just a massive projection; because deniers do think that the same move of ignoring science must be being done by their opponents.
Making oil more expensive is a critical part of a solution. However simply reducing the supply provides money to those who still have a supply - especially those overseas. A carbon tax or other method of increasing the price gives the money to us which can be used in a variety of purposes. The oil shock of 40 years ago did lead to more fuel efficient cars, but also gave money to a lot of people I wish hadn’t gotten it.
It’s not generally a popular move, though, and elected politicians have limits as to how far they can go in doing things that are not popular. Particularly elected politicians who have to work with their political rivals in the government, as Obama does with the Republican-controlled Congress. He’s not an absolute monarch who can do as he sees fit to curb AGW. There would be political repercussions for other Democrats if he did, and he knows this.
There is precious little that they can do, besides tax rebates and giving carpool stickers to electric cars, which going to be popular. But I’d say that shutting down current oil wells to make the price go up is going to be even less popular than a carbon tax. Especially since opponents can point to people newly out of work. That appears to be what Ají de Gallina thinks Obama intended to do.
In the long run higher prices are going to drive innovation for greater efficiency, like how high California gas prices have driven the large numbers of hybrids and electric cars we have here. But it won’t be popular at the beginning.
This is a patently bizarre line of argument. You seem to see no level of social concern between the selfish individual human and the universe as a whole. What about one’s family, or tribe, or city, or country, or race? What about biogeographical regions of interdependent life? What about the future?
What about* any *of the levels of social concern we normally think about? Not the fragile, replaceable mortal individual, nor the infinite and remote totality of the cosmos, but the exact sort of thing politics and statecraft have always been about. the management of moderately large systems and realms to address moderately large-scale concerns.
Is that “the only thing that matters”, really? People only care about the tax on oil and resent money spent on mitigating climate change, promoting sustainable energy, and creating a cleaner environment? Really?
If that were true, climate change wouldn’t be an issue, government wouldn’t have climate change offices like the ones that you were just complaining about in #79, the IPCC wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Perhaps you’re thinking of those whose science education didn’t extend past the third grade and whose ability to follow a chain of consequences doesn’t extend past the ends of their own noses, like the ones we were discussing earlier who wonder where the sun goes at night. Like some that I’ve had these discussions with elsewhere, who pride themselves on never recycling, driving a gas-guzzler, and turning on every light in the house during Earth Hour just out of spite, as a symbol of… I’m not sure what, perhaps some imagined intellectual superiority. But a great many of us, particularly those with some appreciation for science, and those of us with children with real concerns about the future, really do care. Here’s an example,
[quoted from the Environics Institute]
(http://www.environicsinstitute.org/uploads/news/environics%20institute%20-%20focus%20canada%202012%20-%20public%20opinion%20on%20climate%20change%20-%20december%2014-2012.pdf), an independent Canadian polling organization similar to Gallup [link is a PDF file] – I’ve bolded some interesting bits from the summary:
Despite the lack of media and political attention given to climate change over the past year, the Canadian public’s focus and concern about this issue has nudged upwards. While there is no public consensus, a clear majority believe the problem is real, that government must take the lead role through new regulations and standards, and that citizens like themselves must help pay for the necessary actions through taxes and higher prices for the goods and services they consume. British Columbians are increasingly embracing their three-year old carbon tax (64% now support it), and there is clear support for this type of climate change tax in most other parts of the country.
Opinions differ somewhat across the country. Public concern and support for policies like carbon taxes are most widespread in Quebec, among younger, urban Canadians and those who support the federal NDP, Green Party and Bloc Quebecois; they are less evident in the Prairies, among older, less educated Canadians and those who support the federal Conservatives. But these differences are one of degree rather than fundamental disagreement, and are modest in comparison to the starkly partisan divide on this issue among Americans. Canadians are no longer relying on their elected representatives to tell them whether they should be taking climate change seriously; they care about this issue and are looking for leadership from those who can
marshal collective action.
P.S.- re “cooling effect of black carbon” – no offense, but I hate seeing incorrect science, like your earlier incorrect drive-by inference about Antarctic sea ice. Black carbon surface deposits are a source of warming, not cooling. Black carbon on snow is a measurable warming factor in the Arctic.
This is the classic straw man argument writ large. I know we often get straw man arguments in this forum, but they rarely sink to that level of meaningless absurdity, or demonstrate such a basic misunderstanding of the subject under discussion. It also conveniently implies that the findings of climate science about the consequences of AGW are so preposterous that they are equivalent to the total nonsense in your straw man, so the only sensible thing to do (obviously!) is to ignore the science.
You admitted quite clearly earlier that these findings are supported by a very broad consensus: your own words: “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t believe that the majority of climate scientists agree with AGW … I’ll ammed [sic] any quote to the contrary by clearly and unequivocally stating ‘It’s not a mere majority of specialists. It’s an overwhelming one’.” Your position is therefore strangely inconsistent and downright inexplicable. Your position, in short, is that either the vast majority of the world’s scientists are conspiratorial liars, or you actually accept the science but prefer to ignore it anyway, a form denial often referred to as cognitive dissonance.
I don’t get what’s so hard to understand.
People **say **they care about AGW or micronutrients for pregnant red pandas. This has a total effect of zero in changing anything.
It is only what people **do **what matters.
Many men who swear they love their wives beat the crap out of them. Doesn’t matter what they say, but rather what they do.
For most people, caring about AGW demands so little effort (especially considering that act as if they deserve a medal for using a plastic bottle twice) that it is a piece of cake to say they not only say but do. However, what they do has no real effect. I’d love to see them actually making drastic changes in their lifestyles the inconvenience them.
Yup. I really wasn’t trying to be scientific, but, yup, my bad, should’ve said “peristaltic effect of black carbon in short-order-cook bass-playing Vanadium atoms”
I was right, however, that no matter the reason, Antarctic ice was a record high. It wasn’t a drive-by. I stopped and peed in the front yard. It may have been alien tacos or Voldemort’s semen, by it was a record high and I’m sorry facts offend you, especially after your I’m-so-sciencey post.
Or are you saying that it wasn’t a record high?
Please, don’t forget that it was originally a comment not on the science, but on how science is reported. You avoided that fact then and not conveniently forget it.
It doesn’t imply anything. It’s a hypothetical, we get hypotheticals all the time. Extreme? Sure. It’s exactly the point because it has no ambiguities.
So, simply say that your “science rules” stance is simply a pose and that’s it. Say that, in real life you understand that, no matter what science says, people who completely understand the science will act against that knowledge.
This is the only thing I like about AGW debates: seeing warmists at a loss when their knucle-dragging denier opponents won’t say what they “should” (because that what they read in their wamist blogs). Even if you repeat something over and over, they still can’t hear it because it goes against what the “know” about you.
I’ll re-re-re-re-re-re-repeat.
I fully, 100%, unreservedly believe these things:
The average temperature of the Earth increased about 1°C from 1900 to today.
An increase of CO2 in the atmosphere will, ceteris paribus, increase temperatures.
CO2 concentration has increased from about 295ppm in 1900 to about 404 now.
Human activity has played a part in this increase. I’d say 1/3 at the very least, probably much more.
Climate is a super-complex system and the cause-effect relations of the many factors are not always clear. Many are clear, at least in first and second order.
The vast majority of the world’s scientists are not conspiratorial liars. I’m sure a teeny tiny part are, but that’s true for anything.
How do you feel about these first six? I have some more on my list but if we don’t agree on these, it’s pointless to go on.