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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: 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?