Climate Change

[Snowman0147]

Can you now leave the activism thread alone?

Now my opinion is simple.  Yes there is climate change and we humans do have influence over it.  As much as the sun and other natural events?  No idea to be honest as environmental activists had spread so many lies they make environmentalism into a damn joke.

[Merrill]

Can you now leave the activism thread alone?

Now my opinion is simple.  Yes there is climate change and we humans do have influence over it.  As much as the sun and other natural events?  No idea to be honest as environmental activists had spread so many lies they make environmentalism into a damn joke.

We know that greenhouse gas emissions affect the climate. How much is due to human activity is unclear, as it is very difficult to estimate (scientists like Richard Lindzen have been called "climate change deniers" for pointing this out)

Beyond the issue of climate change is pollution. The immediate, and most effective way to reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution is to expand nuclear power and nuclear research. The science over the last 3-4 decades supports this.

Renewable energy, specifically solar and wind, is inefficient, unreliable, and very expensive for consumers. One mid-range nuclear plant will produce more energy than a solar plant in the desert that covers thousands of acres, and after the initial upfront costs, will deliver power far more reliably and cheaply. Germany has tried to convert their country to renewable energy, but after billions of Euros spent, and countless man-hours, only 7% of their electricity comes from solar. German Co2 emissions per-capita are twice those of France (which uses nuclear) and the cost to consumers has doubled since 2007. So they now have dirtier air and more expensive power. That's what happens when you let clueless environmentalists draft your energy policy.

[jhkim]

Should this be merged with the "I Love Global Warming!" thread?

It seems like there's going to be a lot of cross-talk.

[jeff37923]

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[Snowman0147]

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I want to like this.

Still if your not serious about removing plastic, reuse, installing nuclear energy, and getting on China's & India's asses about their environmental practices, then your not serious at all.

[Spinachcat]

So what happens when the Left's Climate Change religion becomes our national dogma...but then fails to change anything?

[Shasarak]

So what happens when the Left's Climate Change religion becomes our national dogma...but then fails to change anything?

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[Ratman_tf]

We gonna kick this topic around again?

[Snowman0147]

Well it is getting reused.

[Mordred Pendragon]

I find it ironic that the people who bitch the most about climate change are also the ones most opposed to nuclear power and willing to chase the Anarcho-Communist boondoggle of solar energy.

Never mind that nuclear energy is the one solution to climate change and CO2 emissions that is actually feasible and efficient and doesn't involve us reverting back to the Stone Age.

That says it all about the whiny far leftists like AOC. They're just exploiting an actual crisis to push their own unrelated agendas.

The right-wingers just deny the problem exists at all either because they get too much money from fossil fuel companies or because of their flawed interpretation of the Bible.

[Spinachcat]

Alarmism grabs attention short term, but damages credibility long term.

The problem is the climate change alarmism is decades old, leaving a long trail of prognostications by hysterics which never came true. Al Gore, instead of looking like a visionary, now looks like a clown. Notice he isn't dragged out by the MSM much anymore to do his global warming dance.

Also, politicizing climate change guaranteed a stalemate and animosity. It's why I used to push for the environmental message to focus on pollution because nobody likes pollution. You can get ranchers, hunters, moms and tree huggers all aboard cleaning up garbage out of rivers...until you make it a political issue. Or worse, tell people they shouldn't buy SUVs!

[Delete_me]

The environmentalist movement is also a victim of its own success. Example:

Oh no! the ozone layer is depleting! We have to do something about it! The following chemicals are actually eating the ozone!

*world collectively bans many of those chemicals; output of the harmful substance into the atmosphere drops like a rock; ozone problem recovers because of actions taken*

Oh... look. Nothing bad ever happened. I guess it was all alarmist. It couldn't possibly be we changed what we were doing. It's like all the alarmism about how Lake Superior would be a hazardous dump for 5 centuries and within 5 decades it was clean! (Ignoring the fact that we actively stopped poisoning the lake and took some efforts to clean up the worst parts; then nature took over the rest.) And it's not like rivers would ever catch on fire!

[Stephen Tannhauser]

Alarmism grabs attention short term, but damages credibility long term.

Which is as eloquent a summation of the Boy Who Cried Wolf fable as I've ever read.

(I've always thought that the Boy Who Cried Wolf actually becomes quite a terribly moving tragedy if you imagine the alarmist Boy as a sincerely terrified watchman who simply took his job altogether too seriously, and took the 'better too many false alarms than not enough real ones' philosophy to its counterproductive extreme.)

Nothing bad ever happened. I guess it was all alarmist. It couldn't possibly be we changed what we were doing.

When the alarms are for a specific visible problem for which specific actions have demonstrable curative effects, that's one thing. When the alarms are for a problem that isn't predicted to be unequivocally visible sooner than ten years from now (and for which all such previous predictions have egregiously failed without taking preventative measures), for which our understanding of the (proposed) extremely complex causes is unclear, and the effectiveness of the (proposed) solutions is likewise unclear, it's hard to make meaningful conclusions about what will work that avoid the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

It's also worth noting that one of the biggest things politicizing such issues is about is determining who pays for whatever solution is eventually implemented. Cleaning up specific sources of pollution is usually a popular measure because it provides visible external benefits and tends to incur mostly internal costs (fines and corrective expenses to the polluters specifically). Worldwide imposition of energy use restriction, on the other hand, is highly unlikely to ever be popular, because the externalized costs are highly tangible while the externalized benefits are mostly intangible -- even if winters start feeling more like they did during our childhoods again, I doubt most people would think that was worth doubling their gasoline budget.

(The internalized tangible benefits of being the people who enforce that restriction, on the other hand, are massive, which is why people are rightly suspicious of the centralized power almost always claimed to be necessary for such measures.)

This in turn is why the climate-disruption warning campaigns always took such an apocalyptic, catastrophic tone -- one of the few ways to get people to willingly accept a policy with onerous costs is to convince them things will be even worse if they don't, even if that requires feigning a certainty the evidence may not yet justify; it's always a plausibly reasonable stance to say, "Even if we're not sure our worst-case scenarios will happen, is it worth the risk given what's at stake?"  The biggest problem of this stance, of course, is that if you have to pay too much for not enough guarantee of being worth it, eventually equally reasonable people are going to say, "Compared to the cost of your proposed preventatives, yes, it is." (There's a reason nobody buys meteor insurance.)

[Ratman_tf]

The environmentalist movement is also a victim of its own success. Example:

Oh no! the ozone layer is depleting! We have to do something about it! The following chemicals are actually eating the ozone!

*world collectively bans many of those chemicals; output of the harmful substance into the atmosphere drops like a rock; ozone problem recovers because of actions taken*

Topically enough, it looks like China is emitting banned CFC-11.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/22/ozone-layer-china-emitting-banned-cfcs/3767724002/

[Delete_me]

Which is as eloquent a summation of the Boy Who Cried Wolf fable as I've ever read.

(I've always thought that the Boy Who Cried Wolf actually becomes quite a terribly moving tragedy if you imagine the alarmist Boy as a sincerely terrified watchman who simply took his job altogether too seriously, and took the 'better too many false alarms than not enough real ones' philosophy to its counterproductive extreme.)

There's 3 possible lessons in the boy who cried wolf. The first is as you say, and the one everyone knows. The second is that sometimes there really is a wolf. The third (assuming the boy is being a little shit) is Garrak's lesson: never tell the same lie twice.

When the alarms are for a specific visible problem for which specific actions have demonstrable curative effects, that's one thing.

So we're not seeing visible changes?

When the alarms are for a problem that isn't predicted to be unequivocally visible sooner than ten years from now (and for which all such previous predictions have egregiously failed without taking preventative measures), for which our understanding of the (proposed) extremely complex causes is unclear, and the effectiveness of the (proposed) solutions is likewise unclear, it's hard to make meaningful conclusions about what will work that avoid the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

...again, so we're not seeing visible changes? Because we kind of are. (EDIT: and before anyone get's ruffled, please note I did not say anything about whether or not we are causing it, merely that we are seeing the effects.)

This in turn is why the climate-disruption warning campaigns always took such an apocalyptic, catastrophic tone -- one of the few ways to get people to willingly accept a policy with onerous costs is to convince them things will be even worse if they don't, even if that requires feigning a certainty the evidence may not yet justify; it's always a plausibly reasonable stance to say, "Even if we're not sure our worst-case scenarios will happen, is it worth the risk given what's at stake?"  The biggest problem of this stance, of course, is that if you have to pay too much for not enough guarantee of being worth it, eventually equally reasonable people are going to say, "Compared to the cost of your proposed preventatives, yes, it is."

Maybe. But be careful of the second lesson: sometimes there really is a wolf. Don't just assume the boy is just crying out again.

(There's a reason nobody buys meteor insurance.)

Funny enough, my homeowners insurance DOES have a line about meteors and space debris, what is covered and what is not.