Posted by doener 4 hours ago
Climate control is something more people will be on board with compared to trying to have a conversation about climate science to a person who didn’t graduate high school.
The answer has never laid in ever more elaborate designs to disenfranchise particular members of the population. It's always been in building community.
A community is what helps stabilize, helps tighten up distributions, and wrestles most authentically with the general premise that we are social creatures and only as strong as our weakest link.
If you think you're going to build the perfect society by way of careful electorate curation, I have some unfortunate stories to tell you.
Have you taken any class ever on disenfranchising events in history?
Also worth mentioning for those in these neighboring threads, the impulse to blame dysfunction during hard times on a particular minority of society has a name, you can read more about it here
Academics: - Hell bent on or at least open to trying communism (again) - Believe that the government should dictate individual health care decisions - Pretending that gender is complex
Farmers, soldiers, auto mechanics: - Look at the world and adapt to it - Worried about problems that are right in front of them, and solve them every time - Grounded in common sense and only occasionally think in philosophical abstractions
a) china is unwilling to do anything, and if that's the case, America shouldn't empty its pocket books on this issue.
b) this climate change alarmist stuff has caused a climate disaster in the US because all the migration to Electric Only is causing us to use generators all over the place, which is crazy. We should instead focus on making clean nuclear and expanding solar. PG&E (in CA) has decided to cancel this migration because CPUC (or whatever their called) is in Newsome's pocket who is in PG&Es pocket.
c) climate change extremists are unwilling to both hear yes it's happening and no we're not going to do anything about it, so the people responding are simply saying, no it's not happening.
- it's not warming, or not significantly
- if it's warming, it's not because of humans, (or)
- if it's warming, it's beneficial
- if it's warming because of humans and that's bad, there's nothing we can do about it
ETA: honorary mention for "what about China?"
People I've argued about this with will switch interchangeably between these. Press them hard enough on one issue, and they'll just switch to another. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
Because when were 4 degrees cooler, NYC was under 1000 feet of ice. We really don't want to find out what 4 degrees hotter is like.
Basically, anyone capable of thinking about it logically has at this point reached the conclusion that it's real. Anyone arguing otherwise is therefore necessarily not thinking about it logically, and you have to expect things like shifting claims.
The link to greenhouse gases is not hard to prove. We've got satellites that can measure global radiation inflow and outflow and see what the difference is. We can also measure this at various levels within the atmosphere, and at the surface of the land and oceans. We can see where outgoing radiation is getting caught and we can see what frequency bands of outgoing radiation is getting caught.
We know the frequency bands that get reflected, absorbed, or pass through for all the gases in the atmosphere and can see that the gases causing the problem are the greenhouse gases.
We can also see that the increase in greenhouse gases is mostly from burning fossil fuels. We can see this by looking at the isotope ratios in the C in greenhouse gases.
Cosmic ray bombardment in the upper atmosphere produces carbon 14, which is radioactive with a half live of 5730 years. It disperses throughout the atmosphere and becomes part of anything that regularly incorporates atmospheric carbon or exchanges its carbon with atmospheric carbon, including all living things.
Everything humans do in significant amounts that puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere other than burning fossil fuels has carbon with about the same isotope ratio as that of the carbon in living things. Even when we burn a dead forest to clear it out the isotope ratio is close to that of living things, because of that 5730 year half life for carbon 14.
It is only when we burn fossil fuels that we put carbon into the atmosphere with almost no carbon 14. They came from living things but have been dead long enough for hundreds of half lives to pass.
The isotope ratios in the excess greenhouse gases show that it is mostly carbon 14 free. There are natural processes that can dump carbon 14 free carbon into the atmosphere such as volcanoes and other geological processes. However, (1) the increases in carbon 14 free greenhouse gases matches very closely with the amount of carbon we've been emitting from fossil fuels, and (2) and monitoring of volcanoes and other natural sources doesn't find nearly enough to account for more than a small amount of the increase.
"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...
This is a weird statement coming from Trump. I wouldn't think his base would care for improving the lives and economies of other countries, specially undeveloped countries.
Doesn't seem weird to say that if you want to do nothing.
The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.
I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.
I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).
So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.
It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.
That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.
You've heard of the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Holding a hypothesis of water-vapor from air travel being the primary driver of warming trends is extraordinary.
Invoking the oft-repeated "do your own research" rhetorical crutch and referring to scientific consensus as "hype" doesn't help your case.
Do you have any reason to believe otherwise besides a couple of anecdotes about looking at the sky and short-term temperature variations?
Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants)
Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also don't want to discourage you from adopting a "check for yourself" mindset.
I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These effects are significant and there is little research on the bigger picture effects of this (that I've seen).
Intelligence is a scarcity and it cannot overcome the majority of people that are incredibly stupid or ignorant. So accepting that we are doomed relieves some of the stress. I won't have children to worry about their future, either.
I still live my life in such a way that minimizes my impact on the world as much as possible. I still surround myself with folks that want a better world. But there is no stopping the impending doom and I'm trying not to be miserable with the time I have.
If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption#Toba_ca...
I do think there's a decent chance of civilizational collapse in the near to medium term. It seems like everything is getting very fragile. So much economic activity revolves around extremely sophisticated machines with many critical components that are manufactured in just a few locations, sometimes a single location. A major war could shatter that, or climate change could push us over a tipping point where those capabilities can no longer be maintained, or it might just be a cascading random breakdown due to the modern economy being so complicated.
If it happens, then I'm very pessimistic about the ability to ever come back from it. With all the easily accessible fossil fuels gone, getting industry going again is going to be a really tall order. So humanity might survive a long time, but it may consist of life the way it was in prehistory.
Oh yeah, we'd all die.
Maybe we shouldn't cause that to happen.