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Bridging the gap between left and right. I came across this clip showing Glenn Beck and Samantha Bee, and thought that this SoylentNews story / comment thread should be stickied till the new year so we have an ongoing conversation. It's a short clip from her show where Glenn Beck is a willing guest; the key point is they are trying to find common ground. Beck points out that Bee is following some of his own patterns of crying "catastrophe" but they really don't provide much insight beyond the significance of their little coming together moment.
The divide is clear and present on this site as most everywhere else, I would like to see a meta discussion where we fact check each other and drill down through the rhetoric until we get some straightforward lists and proposals on how we can move forward together. What are the fundamental blockers? Which ideas do we consider to be too outrageous for credibility? Many here are guilty of attacking each other — can we try and Spock it out for about a week?
I'll start us off with my supposition:
Climate change is real and human activity has an important effect on it. We must agree on this point in order to move forward, and social/economic issues must be handled after needed environmental changes."
If you post as AC — try and behave as if you were logged in — reduce the flames for better quality discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @10:38PM
I can get on board with this, regardless of whether humans are the primary cause at least we can work on minimizing our impact and planning for the future so we don't get civilization ending problems that we're too late to address.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 23 2016, @10:49PM
If the ice ages didn't do us in, I don't see the few degrees of predicted warming doing so. There are currently uninhabitable places on the planet. We resolve this problem by not inhabiting them, by in large. We're quite capable of doing that to more places should it become necessary.
I don't actually have an issue with eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels, only with the ridiculous doom and gloom arguments being put forth to that end and unproven hypotheses being called settled science. Consensus is not part of the scientific method.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @11:04PM
I've never heard of climate science being "settled" beyond "its definitely getting warmer". As for doom and gloom, that is directly referencing our current society. Sure humans will undoubtedly survive massive climate change and even nuclear war, but people are worried about more than pure simple species survival. We want to thrive, grow, and explore the stars!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 23 2016, @11:39PM
Listen to the President sometime. He specifically used the words settled science.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:17PM
And the president is an authority on science, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @11:43PM
Aleppo should be uninhabitable, but droves of people are still dying there. If warming increases natural disasters, millions of people will die because they will have no ability to migrate away from the coastal and desert areas where they currently live. Poor people might as well be early humans who moved very slowly over a long time.
It will be difficult to measure the exact effects of warming on natural disasters, and impossible to extract reparations for warming. So we can sweep these millions of dead under the rug.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:58AM
It will be difficult to measure the exact effects of warming on natural disasters, and impossible to extract reparations for warming. So we can sweep these millions of dead under the rug.
Another problem solved by the group mind of the internet. Carry on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:14AM
The issue of climate change is not whether it will make the world uninhabitable; most likely it won't. The coastlines where hundreds of millions of people now live, however, may be underwater, for starters. Armies of invasive species with sizes ranging from microorganisms to those much larger than man may be rampant, as more of the world's temperate zones increasingly resemble the Amazon basin. The severity of the worst hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and floods may increase, although this last part has admittedly not been proven.
Many of the residents of the developed world are fairly sedentary and spend much our time in climate-controlled environments. We do, however, have the option of getting out into nature, at least on weekends and vacation days, and during mornings and evenings during warmer months. Future generations would have a right to be pretty pissed off at our mismanagement if we don't preserve that option for them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:07AM
Many of the residents of the developed world are fairly sedentary and spend much our time in climate-controlled environments.
But you would need to be really, really sedentary not to be able to outrun a climate effect that moves at its theoretical fastest at the rate of meters per decade.
Future generations would have a right to be pretty pissed off at our mismanagement if we don't preserve that option for them.
The world wasn't created perfect. They will have to adapt to an imperfect world just like the rest of us no matter how virtuously we mismanage the current situation. But I can't help but notice, once again, a poster treating climate change as if it were the only problem that humanity has (well, that and sedentary people I suppose). It does no good for future humanity to make big problems worse in order to fix a minor problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:32AM
In so far as possible, we ought to make our choices knowingly, not blindly. Change is risky. Saying the hell with the status quo climate so we can burn fossil fuels a few more years is absolutely nuts when 1) we have alternatives and those alternatives are eminently practical, and 2) we don't know how bad (or good) change will be, and although we could find out, we don't want to know! Not many people would buy a new car that had never been tested. But we're willing to experiment on our very air?
You shouldn't feel so sure humanity will survive. That's a dangerously cavalier attitude. Civilizations absolutely have collapsed, many times, and many of those were caused by climate in the form of an extended drought. Another killer is bad farming practices. If not done carefully, irrigation causes salt to build up in the soil. That's a big reason why the Fertile Crescent is not as fertile today. Then there's plowing. If plowing is done recklessly, the top soil will erode away faster than it is replenished, and can be lost all at once in the next big flood. Overreliance on one variety of one crop makes our food supply more vulnerable to disease. We really can't let millions go hungry, not when some of them might have nuclear weapons.
Messing with the chemistry of the atmosphere changed life profoundly in the distant past. As in, mass extinctions. There was the Great Oxygenation Event.
Life is on a long journey and has never settled into a stable state. Always something new comes along. So far, life has survived every challenge. Life has stumbled blindly along and never yet run into a dead end. But you can't count on that. The next turn could end it all. This time, we and the things we do are the novelty. So far as we know, we're the most intelligent animal yet to evolve, and we've employed our superior intelligence to gain mastery over all other animals. No predators stand a chance against humans with weapons. We now have the knowledge and power to alter the world profoundly. We have the brains to predict some of the larger consequences of our actions. Shouldn't we use that gift, rather than stumble along blindly, just like all the other animals that have ever lived?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by ledow on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:04AM
What if it's not us?
What if it's not easily fixable?
What if it's like trying to un-cook an egg?
What if any action we take is actually zero-effect and we spend lots of time and money trying to fix something that we can do nothing about? Then all we've done is spent decades making people's lives more expensive and punished third-world nations for polluting?
What if the solution we implement is actually WORSE than the problems envisaged?
What if the world fluxes like this anyway, but by being energy efficient, penalising pollution, making people use less, etc. we actually guilt them into more ill health (because they turn off the heating/aircon/etc.)?
What if we spend all this on trying to find a solution where actually letting the oceans rise by a few meters displaces only a few million people but costs us billions which we could have spent on healthcare?
The problem I have with the whole issue is that we start from a handful of premises with differing certainties:
- The world, as we can tell from modern records, seems to be getting slightly warmer. Check. We'll take that as granted.
- This is then seen as part of a long-term radical trend, that we assume is unprecedented because we see no evidence of it. Okay. Let's call that a freebie.
- This is then going to cause the oceans to rise and parts of the world to become uninhabitable. Oookaaaay....
- This is going to mean millions of displaced people currently living an easy life to have to move somewhere else otherwise they'll die. Mmmm...
- This is then going to be fixed or stopped by us screwing in a new lightbulb, or converting oil into specialised plastics for solar panels. Er...
- Such actions will inevitably save the lives of millions and we'll never ever need the amount of energy we're using NOW every again, so we don't need to worry about future scaling either. Hold on a moment....
- And all of the above MASSIVE CHANGES OF HUMANITY will happen globally, co-operatively, freely, in humanity's interest, and cost less in the long run than losing even 5% of the worlds landmass.
- And this is the ONLY way to handle the situation, that we've known for sure is visible for less than two decades. Rather than waiting until we know more for sure.
Currently, I hover around the second step, possibly the third.
We have NO viable idea of what, if anything, we can actually change. If we get every country on the planet to change overnight to never pollute, what if the runaway effect is still just going to happen anyway? How many would die through lack of heat, goods, services, etc. compared to if we just carried on?
The problem I see is that everyone - from media to scientists - have established certain facts, and made certain assumptions. All good science so far.
Yet nobody seems to have made a prediction, tested it, demonstrated even the tiniest success, in the EFFECT of all the above.
In 100 years, or 1000 years even, are we going to be looking back and going "Those idiots, thinking that all that shit we did was making any difference at all and we could uncook the egg, dooming us to low-energy lives that have cost us more than land displacement ever could have!"? That's the bit that I see missing.
I trust that we see a pattern. We then can say that pattern is unusual and predictable.
Do we also see that when we reduce usage the pattern undoes itself or not? Like the ozone layer, that DID start to repair after we banned CFC's, are we actually seeing the effects of positive human climate change?
If so, then can we say with any shred of certainty that that pattern will repeat until we are "back" to normal levels?
If so, can we total up the cost of doing that, worldwide, adding in appropriate fudge factors for actual, realistic timescales and co-operation from third-world nations, etc.?
If so, can we total up the cost of NOT doing that, worldwide, similarly?
And where is the number which says - quite clearly, outside all error boundaries, to scientific significance, that one is better than the other?
Because I don't see that anywhere.
Everyone likes to shout about the problem and stab at solutions. Nobody considered whether - as has been demonstrated millions of times over the course of human history - the cure could be worse than the disease.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:28AM
You're the only one so far that mentioned the runaway effect. That (the runaway effect) is the tipping point where it will be past the point of no return, human intervention will no longer have an effect on reversing global warming. The big question is... Have we reached that point yet? and... How far will it go? The runaway effect could turn Earth into another Venus, or possibly another Pluto... hot as hell or frozen solid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:50AM
Venus is hot because the atmosphere is 60 km thick and the pressure at the surface is 90 x that of Earth. I have never been able to get an explanation, where the is all that gas supposed to come from?
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:20AM
It would come from the decomposition of calcium carbonate (and some other minerals), which is quite plentiful on Earth. It's not going to happen any time soon, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @04:01AM
So the runaway greenhouse effect requires ~0.05% of the Earth's crust to vaporize*?
* assuming mass of atmosphere is ~5e18 kg and mass of the crust is ~2.5e22 kg.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @04:05AM
Sorry, should be ~2%.
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Sunday December 25 2016, @11:49AM
No, there are other processes that can cause that. Still, it should take over 100 million years. I did say "not soon".