Well, what is clear is that you are not even aware of what conservative scientists that investigated the issue realized that dealing with mountains of bullshit from misleaders like Lomborg is needed rather than dealing with some hyperbole:
A bunch of people on a message board are not very good at supporting their own claims. I’m just the one here pointing that out.
foolsguinea disappeared from the thread as soon as I asked in which IPCC report I could read about the “clathrate gun”.
I asked Kimstu for a source for her (I think it’s “her”, my apologies if I’m wrong on that) claim about a billion people dying and she pointed me to a feminist blogger that mis-stated the alarmist’s article it used as source material. That was like two hours after she advised “If you (generic you) want to avoid implausible hyperbole and alarmism, it’s easy to do by sticking to serious sources of climate science reporting.”
Incidentally I was the one that also noticed that the item about the clathrate gun was not in the report, but regarding the “billion” number, that was mentioned first by you in a nutpickway. And then you missed that **Kimstu **was not defending that, but showing how it can be plausible if nothing is done and we do head for the worse scenarios. I do think we will be able to avoid the worse scenarios by getting rid of the idiot Republicans in congress, so there is still a big danger if we do not do so.
Why is this discussion still going on? Go out and have a bunch of American babies and check this whole problem off the to-do list! Utah seems to have taken this solution to heart:
Huh I heard America was full…
Um, not to be mean or anything, but I was trying to stick to popularized summaries of research findings that would be accessible to someone with the level of understanding and background knowledge about climate-science issues that you’ve been demonstrating.
Subsequently, since you objected to one of those popularized summaries and demanded hard-science citations, I’ve been citing directly from the IPCC report and popular-science publications such as National Geographic that discuss it. And, not surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to have helped your understanding one bit. In fact, you’ve simply ignored my direct citations in those later posts in favor of constantly reiterating how untrustworthy you think the blog site in my earlier post was.
But as I mentioned earlier, factual understanding is not what you’re after here. What you’re after is trying to reinforce your comfortable denialist assumptions by insulating yourself from facts: strenuously disparaging every detail that you can nitpick as potentially unreliable or uncertain, while stubbornly ignoring the very clear large-scale implications of a huge amount of solid science.
I will keep linking this page to you until you read it.
It’s not our job to spoonfeed you the basic science you somehow missed over the last two decades. We’ve given you every resource you need to understand just how completely fucking insane and dangerous your position is, and you seem uninterested. I mean, is that too high-level for you, or what?
That’s great, but try to stick to ones that don’t lie / make shit up out of whole cloth next time, OK?
Given the rest of your post, perhaps now’s a good time to dive into the “popularized summary” you linked to. We’ll start with your direct citations from the IPCC and work back to the feminist blogger, okay?
First up, your post #235:
I have no quibble with the IPCC’s assertions about “exposure to climate risk” (at least for purposes of our discussion here), but that’s not what I asked you for. I asked you to support your assertion about a billion dead people with an actual scientific cite. The IPCC does NOT claim a billion people are going to die from climate change. They decline to quantify it, because it’s uncertain, because they don’t know (and they’re at least smart enough to not make shit up when they don’t know it).
This is an important point: The IPCC doesn’t say what you, via your source, claim it says. It does NOT claim that a billion people are going to die from climate change (or even hundreds of millions).
Let’s keep following this chain back to the source you provided though. Next up: the middle man, our alarmist pal David Wallace-Wells, and his article in New York Magazine, “UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.” First off, does that sound to you like an article that’s going to hew closely to what the scientific consensus is? Me neither. It sounds like someone trying to sell a dramatized book. I mean, right there in the headline they’re blaring that the science is wrong. That’s not exactly confidence-building. But let’s continue. He actually does a fairly decent job of summarizing the relevant bits of the IPCC report that you quoted later. He writes:
Okay, maybe not that good of a job, but even he’s not dumb enough to directly claim hundreds of millions dead. He moderates his alarmism just a bit. He says the hundreds of millions of lives are “at stake”. There’s no claim that all those hundreds of millions are going to die. They’ll be “exposed to flooding” or “exposed to extreme drought” or “exposed to water scarcity”, but of course most of them will survive that “exposure”. Later on in his article he gives away the game:
Sure he’s got a flair for the dramatic, but notice what he’s actually saying: “inflicting climate suffering on hundreds of millions”. Those people, again, aren’t dead. They’re “suffering”.
Okay, having banged on that drum long enough, let’s move back up to your original cite, the one you now say was just offering a “popularized summary” of the IPCC report. Here’s the opening paragraph from our favorite aspiring PhD student:
No, bullshit, false, flat-out wrong! The IPCC report did NOT say that! The IPCC report declined to give an estimate for how many deaths “would result”. He made that up. Our wannabe PhD student is a liar, or at the very least bad enough at parsing Wallace-Wells’ bullshit alarmism that he doesn’t deserve a spot in a PhD program.
Notice the progression we went through. The IPCC says that hundreds of millions have “exposure to climate risk”. Wallace-Wells turns that into “Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake” and then your absolute dipshit of an original source, in his “popularized summary”, turns that into something that it never was: a claim that the IPCC said gobal warming “would result in hundreds of millions of deaths.” And then you spread that bullshit here, and we get poor misled Dopers believing that humanity is at risk of extinction, or that “billions will likely die”.
I can’t stress this enough, apparently, but this isn’t just a “detail” or some inane triviality. This is the core of your claim. It’s the precise thing that I asked for a cite for back in post #229 and the cite you claimed / thought you provided in post #232. And it’s bullshit. Your “cite” just made it up.
No, and I didn’t say they did. For the nth time, I am not claiming and have never claimed that it is demonstrably true that a billion people are going to die from climate change. I have simply been pointing out the realistic science-based reasons why such a prediction is nowhere near as ridiculously far-fetched as you’re trying to portray it.
No, and I didn’t say they did. See above.
This is a classic illustration of how you keep trying to dodge the actual science in order to focus only on what you consider the rhetorical weak points in popular descriptions of the science.
Ever since you complained about not liking the original popularization cite I provided, and mentioned the IPCC report as a source you would consider preferable, I’ve been citing only the IPCC report itself and articles that refer to it directly. And based on specific quotes from the IPCC report, I have given you considered and scientifically supported reasons why it is scientifically plausible to infer that hundreds of millions or even billions of people might die from climate change.
Not reasons why it’s absolutely guaranteed that they will, mind you, because as I’ve been noting all along, there is no such guarantee. Just reasons why you’re wrong in considering such inferences to be ridiculously hyperbolic and unrealistic.
And you have consistently ignored what I’ve said, in favor of hammering away at what you consider the rhetorical clincher that none of the science predicts conclusively that that number of people will die from climate change. Not because that’s germane to what I’m actually talking about, but because you’ve decided that that’s the aspect of the argument that you stand a chance of winning.
And winning some rhetorical point about climate change, even if it’s not the point I was actually making, allows you to feel reassured that your science-denial position is valid.
it’s not that I didn’t “like” the “popularization” you cited, it’s that your cite LIED, it said something that was demonstrably NOT TRUE. You don’t seem to be able to acknowledge this point, so yes, I’m going to continue hammering on it.
Here are the highlights of some of the key posts in our interaction that got us to this point:
Right here would have been the perfect spot to stop and say something like “well look HD, I don’t actually have a scientific source that estimates 900 million deaths. The IPCC doesn’t say that because there’s a lot of uncertainty, and they don’t give an estimate of 900 million deaths, but here’s my back-of-the-envelope figuring and best guess, and you can chalk that up to Kimstu’s opinion.” That could have led to some interesting examination of your personal opinions and best guesses on the matter. But that’s not what you did. You didn’t do anything even remotely like that. Instead, this was your reply:
You tried to convince me that the IPCC was estimating “hundreds of millions of deaths” (please contrast that with your most recent post that starts out “No, and I didn’t say they did”). I don’t know WHY you did it. Perhaps it was the first link you got back when you Googled something like “IPCC hundreds of millions dead”. Perhaps you were unaware at the time that Jake Thomas was feeding you a line of bullshit. Or perhaps you’re a regular reader of The Intellectualist and Jake has built up a reputation in your mind as a reliable source of information, but just this once he failed you. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that he LIED, and you fell for it. It’s right there in black and white for everyone to see.
:rolleyes: If you choose to read “warning that” as equivalent to “definitively predicting with very high certainty that”, then sure, you are absolutely correct in saying that my previous cite lied.
But that’s not the way I read the cite, and that’s not the way other posters here read the cite. The reason that it’s the way you insist on reading the cite, as I pointed out earlier, is because that’s the only part of this argument that you have a chance of winning.
The actual gist of the argument—i.e., whether you were wrong in dismissing the possibility of hundreds of millions or billions of deaths from climate change as ridiculously “hyperbolic” and disconnected from scientific reality—is the part you’ve already lost.
This should be super-simple for you then. Show me the part of the IPCC report that’s “warning that” global warming “would result in hundreds of millions of deaths”. It’s the “hundreds of millions of deaths” part that’s the lie, not “warning that”. I’m not demanding “very high certainty”. I’d accept only high certain, or medium certainty, or even low certainty, so long as it’s an estimate made by the IPCC that says “hundreds of millions of deaths”.
The issue you have here is not any imaginary demand for certainty. The issue is that the IPCC report did NOT predict “hundreds of millions of deaths”, with any degree of certainty you choose. If you believe I’m mistake about this, and I know you’d LOVE to show that I am, just quote the part of the report that was “warning that” global warming “would result in hundreds of millions of deaths.” if “would”, despite being the word that your own cite used, is too strong for you, let’s go with: quote the part of the report that was warning that global warming MAY result in hundreds of millions of deaths.
You are absolutely right that nowhere in the IPCC report does it state that there will be, or may be, “hundreds of millions of deaths”. I have never asserted that such a prediction appears in the text of the report.
If you don’t understand why the detailed predictions and scenarios in the IPCC report nonetheless provide a scientifically plausible warning that hundreds of millions of deaths as an outcome of climate change is well within the range of realistic possibility—as opposed to your sneering dismissal of that prospect as absurdly “alarmist” or "hyperbolic—then I can try to explain it to you again. If you just don’t want to understand it, there’s probably not much I can do to help you.
I think, HD, you have a point about the speculative nature of a death toll in the 100s of millions or north of a billion. OTOH, I think you overlooked that the IPCC is talking about the consequences of an increase in global temperatures of 1.5 or 2 degrees C, while the article you are criticizing refers to a scenario of 4 degrees warming. Look:
Ok. Genocidal level of warming? The Nazi genocide murdered about 10 million people, counting the Gypsies and gays and so on, but not counting war casualties. I am pretty confident believing the climate change already underway will result in 10 million deaths by the end of the century. I think we may want to look at it 300 years out, because the napkin calculations in my head are roughly suggesting it could be that long, or longer, before we get things back to “normal”. Anyway, 10 million deaths seems very plausible. Genocidal level of warming.
But more than 4 degrees? :eek: Average temperatures during the carboniferous period dropped from a peak of 20-25 C to 12 C as carbon was sequestered to a level of 200-300 ppm (from a peak of as much as 3000!)
More than 4 degrees means we go roughly 1/3 of the way to peak Carboniferous. What does that really mean? Um, I am not prepared to say exactly, but for sure we’ll see a lot of thermal expansion of the oceans, and surely accelerated ice melt. All the effects mentioned in the IPCC report, only far worse. Now, if we actually see that much warming, it is going to be a fucking cataclysm. A billion deaths? I dunno, maybe. Farmland will dry up. Coasts will get swamped. Storms + tsunamis/surges will devastate cities. Heat itself will be deadly in places. End of the century, or 300+ years… pretty fucking bad if we are talking 4+ degrees.
What HD misses is that indeed, this does not go away magically after reaching the end of the century, it can get worse the longer we do not do something. And clearly a lot of the reason why not much is done in the USA is due to idiot like senator lee. The IPCC is conservative in the expected number of deaths because it is not their job to look at what societies will do in the future as a reaction to the expected displacements due to loss of land and water.
There is however plenty of sad evidence that shows that when thousands or millions are displaced one usual result is to see warfare pop up and then thousands or millions die. And as usual, people like HD will only listen to misleaders that never make the connection and lie to their viewers by only looking at a number that only deals with predictable weather disasters where we have the tools to minimize the danger, the lie from FOX news and the likes of Lomborg is in the omission of what is very likely to take place in a warming world where leaders continue to ignore evidence and solutions that shows that there is no need to aim for those worse scenarios.
Been working pretty well for the climate change denialists. They even got the president to pull out of the Paris Accords and appoint cabinet people to destroy previous efforts to preserve clean air and water and to inhibit successful efforts to actually mitigate the upcoming disaster.
Yep, things like that does make many that thought that we should had been already doing harder efforts to control emissions, are realizing now that not talking too much about the worse scenarios was a big mistake.
In their effort to be so conservative so as to not get it wrong or sound alarmist, scientists that are making reports for the governments are falling in to a trap that I do think comes from powerful interests that constantly harangue the scientific establishment to not be “alarmist” **even after they already demonstrated in the past to be conservative in their projections. **
Problem is that then very plausible dangers and worries are minimized, ignoring the worst outcomes then came also because it was expected that we were more likely to listen to the scientists like it was done with the issues of acid rain and CFCs. That that is not happening here is then a sign that the worse scenarios are now plausible.
If Lee is correct then he should discourage children born in the USA because they consume stupid stuff by consumer-driven parents, and instead welcome poorer people with children from different countries plus th those immigrants have more than two children per family. IF.
I don’t know if you saw this, but he touched on this point in his speech:
Yeah. Non-American babies are poorer, stupider, and more wasteful.