It’s an interesting video from Peter Sinclair that claims that Americans are finally waking up from their refusal to recognized the evidence for global climate change. We’ll see. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few of the usual idiots popping up in the comments shrieking about “Warmists!”.
But who knows? Maybe they’ll realize they’re living in the Anthropocene.
I experienced an epiphany today.
Yesterday, i listened to an interview with David Suzuki. This morning i listened to an interview with Stephen Lewis, (formerly a Canadian NDP leader, & diplomat).
Suzuki mentioned the hassle his foundation’s been getting from the ‘right’. He also mentioned Milton Friedman, Nobel Economics laureate, & right-wing influencer of Reagan & Thatcher. Lewis talked about what we should be doing to make the world a better place rather than destroy it through Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Being quite familiar with the damage that Friedman’s ideas can do to society, such as eroding trust & promoting selfish competition, (i lived in England from 1985 thru 2012, & find ‘Englishness’ absolutely abhorrent), i resolved to promote socialism insofar as i can in Canada.
Yes indeedy, right before our eyes the semi-solid waste is hitting the climate management system. The pooch is screwed, because what we are experiencing now is most likely the result of decades of emissions & pollution. And, apart from worse weather, what will be the proximal result? Famine. I’ve little doubt that in the very near future we will be seeing global famine that will likely starve billions, with a “B.” And silly us, we continue to pour corn into our gas tanks…
If that’s not bad enough, Google “clathrate gun.” That’ll keep you awake tonight fer shur!
From the video:
Oh they’ll do something alright. They’ll pray for a solution. That’s what Americans do.
Here’s the link to http://darksnowproject.org/.
A lot of this video seemed to be about the weather in the US, not the global climate.
The global climate has, of course, been warming for some decades now, but there isn’t necessarily evidence that freak weather events in the US are the result of this. Weather elsewhere, in Europe, for example, hasn’t shown any such freak behavior.
We need to be really careful what we attribute to climate change.
I propose that inserting clips of disaster movies (Cloverfield in this case) into videos actually damages our cause of explaining climate change.
They can afford to. The global warming denialists won their battle.
We aren’t going to do anything but talk about it. The last great achievement of the USA was to invent highly efficient fracking. So we can get a lot more hydrocarbons out of the ground and burn them.
The lead time for a carbon sequestering coal power plant is 18 years. More or less none are planned. Three years ago, the EPA said we had four years left to do something about CO2 levels. One more year to not do anything, which won’t.
It’s no obvious we could have done anything anyway. Our civilization runs on fossil fuels. One thing we learned from the Bush catastrophe is that our economy and our society is very fragile. Without even trying, he managed to produce a lost generation.
The anti-AGW people will however lose the war. CO2 is going up and the earth is getting warmer. And we are all lab rats in a planetary sized experiment.
Oh really?
If you ignore the record heat wave and 70,000 dead people, nothing happened.
You also have to ignore some record heat records in Russia.
(Let me guess. Arthur also believes War is Peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery.)
Honestly? Even assuming we aren’t too far gone already — see comment #2 above — there’s a sort of inertia about things which means we’re going over the cliff whether we like it or not.
Take vehicle emissions: even if, tomorrow, someone brought a miracle car to market, one that somehow released zero greenhouse gas, ran on a combination of solar and wind, and was reasonably affordable, and the technology was part of a finished product available immediately, and the patents were made public domain so that anyone could build a car with similar technology, it would still be years before such vehicles were the majority of the U.S. fleet, and that’s assuming that all the other factors involved in bringing a car to market wouldn’t effectively knock it out of the running, or turn the efficiency on its head somehow so that the greenhouse gases were still emitted. (Oil companies have a positive genius for taking advances in efficiency and finding ways to make sure they don’t actually translate into burning less oil, either by using the extra efficiency to power extra processes instead of burning less oil, or by convincing everyone that high-efficiency vehicles are undesirable for reasons of style.)
The same applies to every other type of pollution — if you could find a way to handle solid waste which was as sanitary as water-based toilets but didn’t involve the massive waste of water which toilets technically produce, you would have to get it into hundreds of thousands of homes before the numbers would start changing appreciably — millions of homes which are designed around water toilets and probably would not have a lot of money to spend on new toilets. (Fortunately, water usage is one of the few things Americans are actually improving on already, possibly because the up-front costs are much more visible than with carbon emissions.)
Climate change is already well-advanced. By the time any solution is actually found — if a solution actually exists other than “humanity dies off and is replaced by something smarter, or maybe by nothing ‘intelligent’ at all” — it will be far too late to make use of it, thanks to this inertia. We would almost certainly be much better served by looking at the most dire predictions of the least-optimistic ecologists and trying to figure out ways to make those situations less horrible for the few who survive, than by pouring money into speculations on magic bullet solutions.
I read a similar article recently, and while 80% stat seems amazing, it’s apparently only up a couple of % from previous years. Incredibly, the same poll showed 70% of Republicans as accepting climate change as a problem.
Seems to me that the silent majority need to step up.
Come see Galveston while you can. The seawall held during Ike, but it will not hold during an Ike with a couple of feet of sea level rise. And the 2011 Texas drought was for real.
Loquats ripen in February instead of May. White wing doves are everywhere year round, Inca doves have moved north. Goldfinches and house finches haven’t been seen since the 90’s. Banana hedges get battered by frost as usual in early December, but that frost falls on ripe bananas. They never used to fruit so far inland when I was a kid. And three crops of corn per year if you’ve got the water? But in 2011 some people plowed their corn under and went for African millet.
Well, there’s not a lot that we sceptics can do in an environment like this apart from ‘shrieking about Warmists’, is there? since any comment or suggestion we make for supporters of AGW theory to educate themselves about its weak points is immediately shouted down with abuse. Your comments about religion are noteworthy, PZ, precisely because you have troubled to take the time and effort to learn about what theists say and how they think. Your comments on global warming are laughable because — as far as I can tell — you haven’t troubled to absorb anything but mass media coverage of the issue. How many of the seminal AGW sceptic books have you read? What’s your explanation for the fifteen-year hiatus in ‘global warming’? What are the economic foundations behind your implicit belief that mitigation is more effective than adaptation? How do you explain the absence of the tropospheric hotspot predicted by all the AGW theories?
Once you demonstrate that you have read the arguments of AGW sceptics and taken them seriously enough to think through your responses, then you’ll have the right to be taken as seriously as an opponent of AGW scepticism as you are as an opponent of atheism. Till then, you’re simply marking out your territory for a pack of approving acolytes.
jonjeremey @11,
It’s super disingenuous to argue that it hasn’t warmed since 1998, 1998 was an anomalously hot year. Using that as your baseline is like using Shaquille O’Neal as a baseline for average human height. Also, statistically, it HAS warmed since 1998.
You’re pointing to the hottest 15 years in human history, and saying “Look how hot it’s not getting!”, that’s fundamentally not a sensible argument.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm
jonjeremy @11 says
While you try to dodge this by saying “implicit belief”, PZs post doesn’t discuss what should be done about climate change at all. This is simply about whether people accept that it is happening or not. If I were grading this as part of an essay, I would tell you to remove that sentence, as it is off-topic.
And thanks to gjpetch for tackling the “no warming since 1998” meme. I’ve had to patiently explain that one so many times that I can’t help wincing a bit whenever it comes up.
Hey Jonjermey, once you’ve read the scientific literature (where 97% of currently publishing climate scientists agree that AGW is real and a problem) instead of the books written by industry shills, then you’ll have the right to be taken seriously as an informed commenter. Till then, you’re simply marking yourself as badly informed.
Really badly informed. If you don’t trust the scientists, ask farmers about the changing trends in crop choices over the last few decades. There’s an entire world of data and information out there that provides evidence for AGW.
Oh, and for a discussion of the tropospheric hotspot, see here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/tropospheric-hot-spot.htm
Essentially, a hotspot is found at times, but because of issues like wind shear, it is highly variable. And because it’s subtle, it doesn’t show up unless a lot of noise gets filtered out of the data–and the techniques for doing this vary. The fact that it isn’t consistently seen, then, doesn’t signify much.
I’d also like to note that this is now three comments criticizing the substance of your post, and no one has “shouted [you] down with abuse”. Certainly none of the comments are complimentary, but we’re providing rebuttals to your claims, which you can use to educate yourself, if you so choose.
As for your second PRATT there is this.
This is really dumb.
We aren’t going to do anything about CO2 so it is a moot question. Like what are the economic foundations behind your implicit belief that shooting Zombies is more effective than adapting to a Zombie overrun world.
We will adapt. Because we won’t have any choice. The die has been cast.
PS It took 11 posts for the first crackpot to show up. Shorter than usual. Crackpots are always desperate for attention because all people do is ignore them unless they are laughing at them.
@4. Rodney Nelson : That dark snow project seeking crowd sourcing for studying the Greenland ice cap and its darkening albedo due to forest fires is a good idea and a recommendation that I’d strongly second here.
More info and links on that can be found here via Greenman3610 :
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/06/sampling-greenland-the-dark-snow-project/
@11. jonjermey :
Well I haven’t exactly been counting but regarding good books on the HIRGO* issue I loved reading :
1. James Hansen’s ‘Storms of My Grandchildren’ (Bloomsbury 2009.)
2. Jo Chandler’s very well written and informative ‘Feeling the Heat’ (Melbourne University press 2011.)
3. Tim Flannery’s ‘The Weather Makers’ (text publishing,2005.)
4. Mark Lynas’ ‘Six Degrees – our Future on a Hotter Planet’ (Harper perennial, 2007-8)
5. The superbly informative and investigative ‘Poles Apart’ see :
http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781921640094/poles-apart-beyond-shouting-who-s-right-about-climate-change (borrowed from the local library – keen to get my own copy one day!)
Plus I’m currently nearly finished reading Mark Bowen’s Censoring Science – Inside the Political Attack on Dr James Hansen and the Truth of Global warming’ (Plume, 2008.) and that’s just in this year and not an exhaustive list.
Many years ago I read Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ -the book of the film which I’ve also seen and earlier still Gore’s Earth in the Balance’ (Earthscan, 1992) which includes that topic among others plus Fred Pearce’s ‘Turning Up the Heat – our perilous future in the global greenhouse’ (Grafton Books, 1989). I’ve also read a book by journalist George (?) Monbiot on the possible international realm solutions or at least ways to minimise emissions and make HIRGO* much less severe a year or so before but have now forgotten that particular books title and have additionally read and would recommend George Marshall’s often humerous but helpful Carbon Detox – Your step by step guide to getting real about Climate Change’ (Octopus publishing group**) in terms of what we individuals*** can do amongst other texts on this area.
Lest you think its too unbalanced a reading list there I’ve also read books by those on the other side of the argument; to my shame being formerly convinced by Ian Plimer’s woefully error-ridden ‘Heaven & Earth’ (Connor Court, 2009) and I’ve also attended one of Plimer’s lectures and met the man in person. I’ve also read a fair number other Climate Contrarian texts though I wouldn’t really recommend them to anyone. They tend to be engage in a lot of cherry picking, misquoting, strawpeople arguments and just repeat a whole lot of long debunked & sometimes mutually contradictory climate canards.
Well you did ask!
So ..
.. How about you, jonjermey? How many and what books have you read on this topic?
There hasn’t been one and claims to the contrary were pulled out some contrarian journalists backside and have been repeated by the Deniers ever since. See :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbn1rCZz1ow
‘Global warming has stopped? Again??” by Potholer54 on youtube. Seriously watch that please. Really.
Plus the older but still interesting and impressive :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmGIOMN-F4I
8 Climate Change Has the Earth been cooling? from potholer54 on youtube too.
Note that NASA has a press release on its website which you can find by searching there noting that 2010 was the hottest year on record, that 2010 was the hottest La Nina year ever. Note that 2012 saw the lowest Arctic sea ice levels ever recorded. Each decade since the 1970’s has been globally hotter than the last and than the previous mean. Go figure.
(Its 40 degrees Celsius and the middle of a heatwave today here in my home city in South Oz too as we set more temperature records locally and globally – for whatever that anecdata may be worth.)
* Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating as I prefer to call it because “warming” has too many positive connotations plus too mild and the Rapidity is a big part of the problem and emphasising its us who are responsible.
** Really. Er, you got anything to do with that publishing company and its apt name, PZ?
*** Is that an oxymoron or something? (Shrug.)
What’s a “Cain” ?
This one :
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2010-warmest-year.html#
On the whole “no warming” crock – see also :
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/11/16/noaa_climate_october_was_332nd_straight_month_with_above_average_temperatures.html
And an epic takedown and debunking deconstruction of Plimer’s Heaven & Earth book here :
done by Ian G. Enting from Melbourne university.
D’oh! Last link is here : http://www.complex.org.au/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=91
Sorry.
I think clerever people than I have jonjeremy covered. It’s worth noting, however, that he’s fine with PZs expertise on religion and biology. But I bet good money PZ hasn’t read everything by Dembski, Yaha, Behe et al, of Pandas and People etc. And he doesn’t really need to, because a quick glance at their central claims throws up enough things they can’t find evidence for.
So to with everything but the most finely grained quibbles in the AGW “skeptic” movement. They can fuss til the cows come home, throw up specious criticisms. But like Intelligent Design most AGW “skepticism”, and certainly those canards jonjeremy has leapt to, comes from a place with no alternate theory and implies its own predicted observations (ie “It’s the sun!”) which are trivial to disprove. Like Intelligent Design, they have no intention of balancing the equation most of the time and give a true alternate explanation of any worth, preferring instead little quibble memes to throw doubts around about the accepted science.
So, no, I don’t think you do need to read everything the “skeptics” are saying to know what they are implying is wrong and is very unlikely to be right.
I’m sorry no-one remembered to tell you personally, Arthur @ 5, but we’ve been having extreme weather events in Europe over a couple of decades. You know the sort of thing – heatwaves, floods and some in places that never flooded before, excess deaths in both bad winters and unbearably hot summers, etc, etc.
My small town was flooded 4 times this year, partly because the jet stream was at an odd latitude and behaving erratically. The video is of the second time on 9th July when the ground was already so saturated that the unstoppable rain was simply running down the hill sides – in the back of house and out the front. Where there was no door or window it simply went through the walls. That’s not a stream bed you see: it’s a roadway.
Now let’s see if I can do this properly! http://youtu.be/aB8vJlThVuU
@ #1 Dick:
(Sorry) – Where did you hear a Suzuki interview? Is this available or was it local to Canada ota?
@ #5 Arthur:
Yes, I think using movie clips is not a good idea. Though apparently psychologically it works… people tend to believe things they see – even in fictional movies – even if they know it’s fiction. But I don’t think that’s a tactic scientists ought to be using, that’s for sure.
General Comment
I can see why people who accept global warming get emotional… Because its scary.
What I don’t understand is why people who deny global warming get so emotional about it?
I mean if you don’t think it’s true, why would you be worried & upset about someone else being worried about it? And if your concern was to salve the worries of those who think its happening… why would you abuse them?
Why take the time to bother about it at all?
Plus, why would you be so concerned to stop people from taking measures to avert global warming, even if you think it’s completely unlikely that it’s happening? It would be like saying you didn’t want airlines to have emergency measures & plans .. because airline crashes are extremely rare.
Are you fucking kidding me!? We have had unusual floods almost every year the past decade or so that have been linked to Global Warming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Central_European_flood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_2000_western_Europe_floods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_European_floods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_European_floods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_floods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_European_floods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Central_European_floods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_European_floods
We have had to set up a flood warning system: European Flood Alert System. Quoting from which:
Now you are gonna have to convince me that you are not some anti-AGW-bot, “Arthur”!
Are you bleeping kidding me!? We have had unusual floods almost every other year the past decade or so that have been linked to Global Warming: 1997, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011
We have had to set up a flood warning system: European Flood Alert System. Quoting from which:
Arthur, please convince me that you’re not just some anti-AGW-bot!
I know this is weather and not climate but this is what is going on this week in our closest state capitol to Antarctica in the Southern Ocean:
Sorry:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9782046/Tasmania-wildfires-destroy-100-homes-amid-record-temperatures.html
“What I don’t understand is why people who deny global warming get so emotional about it?”
I probably don’t really want to know the real answer answer.
I am sorry you can see that I have a hard time with proof reading it is either words that are not there or words that should not be. My mind edits what I write but does not seem to always tell my fingers.
uncle frogy
Dearest Darling Reap Paden,
Speaking as one of those people on the podcasty thing, the jokes Esteleth (and indeed I) were making about testicular donation and castration and the like were not jokes about actual bodily harm. They were jokes about fools like you who call male feminists “manginas” or pretend that feminists are out to “castrate men” and what not. It’s like those jokes that many, if not all of us, make about Christians accusing atheists of eating babies. We’re not actually joking about eating babies, we’re joking about idiots who have to violently demonise people opposed to them.
Hope that helps.
Love
Louis
I have no idea of what you’re talking about, you fuckwitted asshole. You’re banned here, and it would be ever so nice if you would simply fuck off and do your hoggling elsewhere. As you make it a point to hang out with liars and are one yourself, I’d look to your end when it comes to someone making up stories.
/derail
ChloeH@25:
In the case of my father, who is, despite a Master’s degree in physics, completely brainwashed by Fox News and the anti-AGW brigade, the reason is that the aim of the AGW conspiracy is to elect more Democrats to office, raise taxes, and increase spending on domestic programmes designed to combat the fictitious global warming effects (like subsidising solar and wind power), and cutting defence spending, thus leaving America wide open to attack by the Yellow Horde. That, plus give left-wing so-called ‘scientists’ more power and money. Or something.
I have a feeling that most of the emotional opposition is based on something along these lines.
le wut? just because the erratic weather in Europe doesn’t tend to take on the “exciting” form of larger/more hurricanes and tornadoes etc. doesn’t actually mean it’s not being erratic.
what is this i don’t even. entire countries are about to be swallowed up by the ocean, and so are many coastal population centers; agricultural belts are shifting northward, out of areas of fertile soil; increased erratic and extreme weather events destroy crops or prevent their planting on a regular basis already; and given that adaptation instead of prevention/mitigation means ever-growing CO2 and Methane concentrations, we might even have to deal with the worst-case-scenario presented in this paper.
I can’t think of how even the most drastic methods of prevention could have come even close to that kind of economic (and more importantly, human) cost.
ChloeH #25
What mikeconley #32 said. Also the idea of doing something about AGW is perceived by the small proportion of the world’s population that consumes the vast majority of its fossil fuels as being necessarily detrimental to their standard of living. If they’re right that it’s not happening, there’s no reason for them to go to the effort of being less extravagant.
Weird. The “Reap Paden” who posted here was actually dpitman. Or has dpitman been Reap Paden all along? Because that was a spot on imitation.
Banned, purged, deleted, etc.
@Dick the Damned #1
“(i lived in England from 1985 thru 2012, & find ‘Englishness’ absolutely abhorrent)”
What do you mean by “Englishness”?
PZ:
Anthony K said Paden outed himself as being dpitman over at Almost Diamonds.
Soooooo, slowdjinn! On a natural justice basis how many people should see their country disappear ‘neath the waves or find their land unproductive as the deserts advance or spend the next three generations as one of a million displaced persons* to keep one American in fantasies?
Isn’t that what Hollywood is for?
————–
* On displaced persons, we haven’t fully sorted out settled homes for the people still adrift after WWII. Doesn’t anyone think we should do that before creating more? And don’t start me on the the Chagossians!
And here’s the link. *sigh*
Hi Maureen…erm…none? I think you’ve mistaken which side I’m on.
This is really scary whenever I get to thinking about it. The demand for fossil fuels is jumping. We need affordable alternatives, and we need them ASAP. We needed them decades ago. Even if we can get people in the US to accept it, there are still plenty of places where we won’t be able to affect much change (simply because it won’t be feasible without affordable options). People will be ok, but there are so many species that really depend on us to make the right decisions.
I just watched a documentary, Ghost Bird, about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Its a really depressing film, but worth the watch (available on netflix). So much avoidable human error leads to severe consequences for animals that can’t fight for themselves. I’m definitely team people, but once a species is lost, its gone (excluding some jurassic park type scenario, but we all saw where that leads).
I like my comfortable life, but we need to start making some real sacrifices now. Its already too late. We need to halt the damage. We can’t wait until its causing severe problems, but I really feel thats what it will take.
jonjermey:
Yes, ‘abuse’ like “you are a complete fucking idiot, because, if you’ve actually looked at the data, you would realise how much of a crock of utter shit these ‘weak points’ actually are.” And the reason you get such ‘abuse’ is that it has been explained, numerous times, how these supposed ‘weak points’ are FAR from any sort of evidence that AGW is not happening, and is FAR outweighed by evidence that it is, yet some utterly stupid arseholes just stick their fingers in their ears, jump up and down, and go “la, la, la, I can’t hear you.” That is worthy of abuse.
I won’t address the rest of your post, because that has been answered by others, but this utter fucking nonsense just really gets on my tits – you take a position that is utterly fucking nonsensical, insist you’re right to the degree that any sane person would just tell you to fuck off because you’re an utter fucking idiot, then, when that’s what happens, you complain that you’re ‘shouted down with abuse’ and accuse the people giving you this ‘abuse’ of not reading the opposing literature, when it seems quite clear that accusation is one you should be levelling at yourself, judging by how easily others here have been able to pull up links and cites to literature that utterly debunks and refutes the claims you have made.
@23. Maureen Brian
As well as here in Oz and practically everywhere else around the globe.
On tonights The Drum show this :
http://www.dw.de/australia-scorching-gillard-blames-climate-change/a-16502401
got a mention particularly this part :
Where they showed the actual footage of our (atheist, female,unmarried) Prime Minister’s words on it – she was, I thought very clear and impressive on that but cannot find the footage anywhere on youtube or elsewhere. (Yet.)
Climate Contrarianism / HIRGO Denial has been pretty huge over here in Oz sadly – probably second only to the States with people like Ian Plimer and Bob Carter and Andrew Bolt notorious for it. The local Astronomical Society even hosted an Ian Plimer lecture as guest speaker a few years ago and many in the astronomical community were taken in – incl. as noted to my shame, myself for awhile.
Like in the USA I think reality here is, by weight of sheer visible, experienced directly evidence becoming undeniable to (almost) everyone.
@ 39. Maureen Brian :
The who / what now, sorry? Should I wiki it?
Thinking of the Drum before I go to bed just post this :
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4455022.html
From their website. There’s also (somewhat confusingly) a separate TV news panel discussion show kinda like if FTB was an hour /1/2 hour TV program too. (Hmm ..? )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians
Oh.
Fuck.
StevoR@45 et seq: Go watch. John Pilger has been talking about this for decades.
That’s the thing, for all their “reasonable skepticism” AGW deniers sure get all huffy when you debunk their BS talking points. And because they love being a brave martyr, they will stomp their feet and cry about persecution instead of looking at the evidence and admitting they are wrong. It’s hilarious how they act exactly like creationists and seem to be completely unaware of it. Dunning-Kruger at its finest.
Also, did Reap make an appearance here? Why? We are talking about a different set of reality denying kooks here. The MRA thread is on your next left down the hall. Go shriek about FTBullies there. Or don’t and just fuck off. I would take option two. It will save both of us a lot of grief.
w00dview:
Yes, to accuse me of doing something I haven’t done.
Caine:
Just seen the comment you quoted of him over on the Lounge. Why bother derailing this thread, though? If he was not banned, he could have went on Thunderdome. Futile of me to make sense of his behaviour at this point. Anything to cause drama, I suppose.
It’s more effective because, if we don’t mitigate the causes of global climate change, it will keep changing.
Sorry for my double-post #25 & #26. My first post was awaiting moderation, so I was experimenting to find a way to circumvent that.
Chloe #24, TVO in Ontario has aired an interview with David Suzuki by Allan Gregg.
I had a quick look for it on the intertubes, with no luck. DS was explaining why he’s decided to stand down from his foundation, because of right-wing interference that is using its charitable status as a weak point to disrupt it.
Bradley #37,
I just don’t have time to go into that in detail. Relative to Canada, there’s a culture of violence that is often random in nature; a general meanness in interpersonal relations; & trust seems to be in short supply.
I was born in the UK. When i returned there after a vacation in Canada in 2011, using my Canadian passport, i was refused permission to stay more than six months. However, my passport states that i was born in the UK, which means that i am therefore a citizen, so should be able to stay as long as i want. I also showed the Border Control guy an out of date British passport, which he disregarded. That was an example of Englishness – a slavish following of rules rather than using common sense. I ignored the six month restriction anyway, & no one tried to deport me
Since Thatcher, i think the country has prospered enormously in economic terms, but something that was beneficial to broader human flourishing has been lost in achieving that. I blame Thatcher & Milton Friedman.
Deniers like jonjermey @ #11 are swinging after the bell. All they needed to win was to instill some doubt for governments to cling to, and that doubt, though unfounded, is now endemic.
The polls showing large majorities believing in anthropogenic AGW could be virtually reversed by asking the question differently: “Do you believe that there is still some real doubt among scientists about global warming?”. I believe that wording would also yield a majority of assent in a poll. That is enough for most Americans to dismiss the threat from their minds as an urgent issue, and thus for their elected officials to do nothing and get away with it in elections.
Human civilization is in for a wild climate ride, and the roller coaster that we are building has only just begun with some mild dips and bumps. By the end of the century, it will most likely fly completely off the tracks, thanks in large part to the misinformation campaign created by fossil fuel companies, free market ideologues and their legions of willing stooges like jonjermey, above. Those of us riding unwillingly may protest, but no one’s getting off this ride alive.
Dick the Damned@56: When i returned there after a vacation in Canada in 2011, using my Canadian passport, i was refused permission to stay more than six months.
I’m fairly certain you can blame the US and their 11/9 hysteria for that. It’s become standard operating procedure now, pretty much everywhere, and due to their insistence, that, if you are a citizen of a country, you must enter the country on a passport issued by that country. Whenever I travel to the US, I use my US passport, and when I return to the UK, I use my UK passport. Works fine.
That having been said, I’m all in favour of blaming that gorgon, Thatcher, and her mentor, Friedman, for any ills in British society that you’d care to list. Friedman’s dead; I wish Thatcher would do as she did while he was alive and just follow him.
belief that mitigation is more effective than adaptation?
While it’s true that people will adapt, it might be extremely unpleasant. Mitigation strategies focus on trying to avoid slamming face-first into a wall because it’s less painful than just taking the hit and acknowledging that it’s likely to be survivable. I’m guessing that your life is full of mitigation strategies rather than adaptive ones.
Another way of putting it is that adaptation is a response that is best avoided except when mitigation fails.
Human society hasn’t shown an effective response to AGW and it looks like it may be too late to mitigate. But that doesn’t mean that trying to survive through the resulting disaster should have been “Plan A” all along. It should have been “Plan B” or maybe “Plan Q”.
petrander, the moderation wasn’t because of the fucking, it was because your comment had more than 5 links.
WTF. I had no idea. :-O
Last time we had today’s carbon dioxide levels, the world was a lot warmer. Looks like quite some warming is yet to come. I just hope it won’t become necessary to evacuate Bangladesh.
Is that how it works in the UK? It is in the US, but not all countries are like that.
Could one argue that “adaptation” means the end of humanity? I was reading something a few weeks ago about how human evolution toward intelligence may have been a result of some cyclical changes in the region where the proto-humans lived that may have bottlenecked the population as well as stressing it from the outside and triggering a lot of adaptation. So, do I interpret that correctly as saying, in effect, that humanity was partially created by survival adaptation due to climate change? Well, if we fuck the environment up badly enough that we force ourselves to evolve, we’ll have accomplished a rather stupid form of upgrade to Human 2.0. Maybe human 2.0 would be collectively wise enough not to shit the bed, but human 1.0 – so far, not so good.
In point of fact, it doesn’t work that way here, unless you are born to parents who are UK citizens. And it’s unlikely that a Canadian passport would record that fact. A good reason to make sure you have a UK passport if you are a UK citizen.
Mike #58.
Thanks for that info. No one told me! I’m going over there in a few days, on my Canadian passport, but as a visitor this time.
Regarding Thatcher, i sort of met her once, about 13 years ago. I was walking, as fast as i could, along Upper Belgrave Street, to get to a meeting. I was aware of a car pulling up to the curb some way ahead of me, & then a small figure headed right at me from the direction of the car, on a collision course. I took avoiding action, but had a powerful, overwhelming impression of ‘witch’. Then i realized it was her. (At the time, she & Dennis lived just round the corner from there.)
David & Mike, i was born at a time (the war years) & in a place where it was obvious that i would be automatically qualified as a citizen. If my parents had been diplomats, it’s unlikely that i would’ve been born there. But i also had an out-of-date British passport which proved that i qualified. And i look & sound like a native.
@petrander: You ran into the five-link limit, so I suppose the way around it is to break them up into multiple posts.
Isn’t mitigation a more efficient form of adaptation?
But mitigation would deny us the SuperHumans that will develop in response to the stressed environment! Why do you want to stop human evolution?
(attempted humour)
Somehow, I feel like a fresh install might be more likely.
Especially since the current version feels more like an early beta-test than an actual 1.0.
along with crop problems due to warming climate there are also pest problems that getting worse also.
uncle frogy
Ocean acidification.
This appears to concede jonjeremy’s idiotic belief that it’s a question of mitigation xor adaptation. Adaptation is already going on (ask a farmer, or Munich Re), and will inevitably continue. We probably are now committed to more than 2C anthropogenic warming above pre-industrial levels, which is likely to have grave consequences; but it is probably not too late to mitigate to avoid 6C above pre-industrial levels, which in all probability means civilizational collapse. And all that’s aside from the other big problem of GHG emissions: ocean acidification.
Incidentally, jonjeremy, it doesn’t matter how many times you repeat the lie that there has been a 15-year hiatus in warming; it remains a lie.
Oh, and I notice you don’t actually identify any of these supposed “seminal AGW sceptic books”, or any other specific “sceptic” sources we should read. That’s because you know perfectly well they are all utter shit.
I think this sort of self-indulgent bilge makes me even angrier than the denialists, if that’s possible. I tell you what, Vicar, I think not having the likes of you hoggling all over the place would make any situation considerably less horrible.
Not too late, too difficult. The necessary will cannot be marshaled in time, especially considering that the world’s economy still depends on extracted wealth for growth.
There are trillions of dollars of fossil fuel in the ground and zero chance that our greedy race of über-chimpanzees is going to leave it there. We are going to mine it, pipe it, pump it, sell it and burn it all. That will almost certainly produce 4c of warming by 2100, and much more beyond then. If James Hansen is correct, it will mean a mass extinction exceeding the Permian-Triassic event in scope. There will be no adaptation to that.
Well, since others have effectively destroyed most of jonjermy’s claims I’ll go ahead and destroy his economic argument as well:
Here
Here
Here
So apparently if you read all those super-awesome, legit AGW skeptic books you can confidently be wrong about everything AGW related. Bam!
I think this article from yesterday’s National Times by Roy Robins-Browne is a pretty good refutation of almost ALL climate-change skeptics (deniers). It’s in reply to a piece by a guy named Spooner, who is a climate-change skeptic (denier).
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/spooners-views-on-climate-change-are-far-from-weathertight-20130106-2cb1a.html
I do not have much to say about jonjermey because their actual points have been refuted so many times here and elsewhere. However, it amazes me that someone can come here and chastise people for not paying attention to the weaknesses of climate change research and generally being ignorant, yet trot out such old and well refuted claims about climate change. Really, I am dumbfounded by it. I should not be because this is something one sees all of the time when talking to denialists of all stripes, from creationists to holocaust denialists and everything in between, but I have such a hard time figuring out how one can have such a huge blindspot. In the very least they could acknowledge the arguments against those claims and indicate why they are wrong. But I suppose that would require taking their own medicine, reading things they disagree with and turning a critical eye on their own ideas. That is something “skeptics” struggle with. And they really wonder why people make fun of them and are mean to them?
QFT.
Its really amazing to me how often such blowhards fold up and leave when peer reviewed scientific literature citations are demanded of them, while trashing anything less than the gold standard for evidence.
I don’t think there will be vast improvements as long as the code is still based on Windows 3.1.
For a long time now I’ve thought what several people upthread have said: there was never any chance of avoiding this, because we’re already locked into climate change.
Mitigation is a form of adaptation; specifically, adapting our social and economic structures so that they are more resistant to the utter collapse which would otherwise result from climate change.
The efforts need to be multidisciplinary: we need hydroponic and tower farms NOW, we need thermal-mass solar (think mirrors and giant salt tanks) NOW, we need massive R&D done on passive-safe thorium reactors NOW.
The goal should be to decouple our power, water, and food generation from the changing climate. At any given time, we should be able to draw off clean energy to desalinate water, light homes and greenhouses, and run our data centers. I believe we need to do this no matter what, but that the climate change makes it a matter of do or die, in large numbers, unmercifully slowly.
May the people responsible for these catastrophes rot.
@49. mikeconley : Thanks, I think.
Still waiting for jonjermey to turn up again and answer my question of How many and what books *he* has read & would recomend on this topic?
Rather rude of him really. Guess I’m in for a really long wait?
PS. Thanks I guess (#39.) Maureen Brian too. I had no idea of that before.
I was in a meeting today where four of my co workers are convinced that Climate Change is a scam and no facts or science is behind it at all. One of them made the comment that the Climate change came from a high school science project that was based on falsified evidence.
In the midst of this all I can think of doing is getting out of the room because with that kind of mentality how do you fight it? I loathe their politics here since they will shout down anyone who does not conform to them.