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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: 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?