Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have found that current forecasts call for the U.S. electric power sector to meet the 2020 and 2025 CO2 reduction requirements in the Paris Agreement—even though the U.S. has announced its withdrawal—and also meet the 2030 CO2 reduction requirements contemplated by the Clean Power Plan—even though it has been repealed.
Despite the absence of a national policy aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, the U.S. is ahead of schedule to meet the short-term and mid-term goals of both the Paris Agreement and the Clean Power Plan, according to a recent viewpoint article published in Environmental Science & Technology.
"A year ago, it looked like our ability to meet these larger carbon reduction targets would have required more proactive steps, such as new regulation or new incentive programs," said Jeffrey Anderson, lead author of the paper and Ph.D. candidate of Engineering & Public Policy (EPP). "However, as renewable energy costs have fallen and are projected to continue decreasing even further, we are now well on the path to achieving even the 2030 goals in the Clean Power Plan."
Based on an analysis of projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these carbon reductions will be met without any additional legislative or regulatory activity, said David Rode, faculty of CMU's Electricity Industry Center. The team also included EPP professors Haibo Zhai and Paul Fischbeck, also a professor of Social & Decision Sciences.
(Score: 5, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 09 2019, @08:09PM (14 children)
If the source can be trusted:
Whose viewpoint? As important as nuclear weapons non-proliferation agreement inspections, everyone, everywhere should be open to independent audit / review of these kinds of claims. Whether we've signed on to the Paris agreement or not, we (being every nation on Earth) should have clear and accurate reporting of what our CO2 emissions profile is.
Or, you know, we could clam up like a Boomer politician refusing to show their tax returns. Hell, if you're going to be dead within 20 years or less, what do you care?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday November 09 2019, @08:22PM
The same goes for the climate change pushers. If the source can be trusted!
Indeed.
(Score: 5, Touché) by RamiK on Saturday November 09 2019, @08:50PM (1 child)
But how do you hide a recession when you have exact figures for efficiency, energy consumption and production?
compiling...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:30AM
I hear some people have learned how to lie to the penny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @08:55PM (8 children)
On the other hand, it shows we can do good things without having arbitrary, politically motivated policy shoved down our throats. If nothing else, public relations can be used to shame us into it, which is also good. We're looking for results here, not pearl clutching bullshit.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:17PM (6 children)
There is also technology. I see two possibilities:
1) Effective CO2 scrubbing is impossible.
2) Effective CO2 scrubbing is possible and will be developed in the foreseeable future.
3) Effective CO2 scrubbing is possible, but will not be developed in the foreseeable future.
We can discard #1 since we already use effective CO2 scrubbing in a whole array of avenues, such as making sure the astronauts on the ISS don't kill themselves with their own exhaust. And we can really also discard #3 for similar reasons. Even current technology deployed in large scale would be sufficient. The problem is money. Yet should even a fraction of the doomsday prophecies start to come true, money would no longer be an issue. Incidentally if politicians actually believed that preventable climate change is costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year, it'd no longer be a problem even today.
Ultimately I think it's a significant issue, but one that turned into a religion thanks to media fearmongering for clicks a - all alongside any more relevant or immediate enemy: it seems human society always needs something to fight against. And politicians are only too happy to play along since it would entail a revolutionary increase the scope, scale, and power of government likely paired alongside substantial increases in taxes.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:57PM
No amount of preaching "weather isn't climate" can warm hearts, and extremities, of freezing listeners, and instinct for self-preservation is a strong one.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:15PM (3 children)
For every gram of CO2 scrubbed on the ISS, multiple tons of CO2 are emitted into the Earth's atmosphere to make that happen.
Not sayin' industrial CO2 scrubbing is impossible, just that the ISS is a monumentally bad example.
"Saving the whales" may turn out to be a more cost effective form of CO2 scrubbing than any we have devised to-date.
Step 1: stop killing the whales.
Step 2: whale population increases exponentially, along with whale poop production.
Step 3: whale poop fertilizes photosynthetic phytoplankton blooms across thousands of square miles of ocean surface, scaling up CO2 capture faster and more massively than munitions production in either World War.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @04:26PM (2 children)
Not a great example. The way CO2 is scrubbed on the ISS is the Sabatier reaction [wikipedia.org]. Add hydrogen to CO2 and you get methane with a byproduct of water. Really really handy for life support systems and also practically free. All you need is a a relatively small amount of hydrogen and then some heat. For the latter, the ISS has this handy little ball of fusion it can do neat stuff with. You get practically free scrubbing, not "tons of CO2 per gram of scrubbing".
It's fun to think about how neat this form of scrubbing truly is. Methane can be used as a rocket fuel (and indeed is the route that SpaceX is going). So the first colonies on Mars will have life support systems that, in the process of giving us breathable air, will also produce rocket fuel and water as byproducts. Stuff like this makes it feel like this entire universe is a game. It's just so unbelievably convenient and coincidental.
--
Back to Earth, costs for CO2 scrubbing are now starting potentially fall below the $100 [digitaljournal.com]/ton benchmark. We currently emit about 26 gigatons of CO2 per year using fairly liberal metrics. The net atmospheric increase is about 15gigatons. A gigaton is a billion tons. So you're looking at the possibility of starting to go 0 atmospheric increase for $1.5 trillion. While that's not a one-time fee, it's also not a yearly fee. You'd simply need to maintain the equipment, pay the employees, etc. Not sure what the annual cost would be, but since the world GDP is in the ballpark of $80 trillion, you're looking at a cost of 2% the world GDP even for the first 'huge' cost.
And its getting exponentially cheaper over time. That $100 is about an order of magnitude below the expected cost around a decade ago. I'd say climate change would be an interesting example to study on the effects of societal radicalism, but it's hardly new. The witch trials, the red scares, blah blah - we constantly, as a society, tend to lose our shit over things that often times literally don't even exist (not implying the earth is not warming). The only thing that's different today is most people are too arrogant to realize it's possible we're engaging in the same dumb human behaviors as we always have.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:40AM (1 child)
I think you miss the point, entirely. How much CO2 was emitted in the launching of the ISS modules? In the design of them? Remember to count the emissions of the designers' cars as they drive to work, planes as they fly to conferences, etc. How much CO2 is emitted every day by the ground support crew of the ISS? Point being: you can't just look at the micro scale of a process: hey, I take a drop of this and get that - what did it take to make that drop? To transport it to the point of use? To dispose of the byproducts in its production? How many people labor in its production, and what's their CO2 emission profile while they are performing that labor?
Agreed, and as I said, industrial CO2 scrubbing _is_ possible, but do remember that your initial $1.5 trillion cost of installation likely represents an additional CO2 emission in the ballpark of 1.5/80 of the current annual global CO2 emission to get the system going, and your annual costs of operation are going to continue to add to CO2 emission at least until they can be powered from green sources. 1.5/80 is a great ratio, less than 1.9%, very doable, but for perspective consider that the US military annual budget is less than $700B per year, and all Hollywood movie and TV production comes in somewhere under $30B per year, so shaking loose more than double that combined amount is going to upset a lot of people.
Also, while you might be able to scrub your first ton of CO2 for $100, as you try to scale that up to 15 billion times the capacity, many of the things you used in that first ton of scrubbing simply won't be available in 15 billion times the quantity at any price, at least not until additional resources and infrastructure are developed - and that infrastructure development may well cost more than $1.5T (in both money and CO2 emission) to accomplish.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:04AM
Three things there:
1) Your figures looked at just the US paying. That's very disingenuous. This would be a global payment, probably amortized over time (e.g. - in case of a build up as opposed to ultra-rapid deployment). Even in the case of an ultra-rapid deployment, you're looking at a US share of about $400 billion, a small fraction of what we wasted in Iraq, for one year.
2) We should not be scrubbing today. Scrubbing becomes much cheaper each year that passes. This is in real costs (the cost of scrubbing) as well as relative costs as nations grow wealthier. Scrubbing should only happen when climate change starts to reach a near critical level. The thing I think we might debate is when that is. Should we try to prevent Miami from flooding? If you do so then you lose the benefit of warming increasing arable lands in other areas, creating new valuable Arctic shipping lanes (and generally improving the Arctic as a whole), and so on. I think the point we would probably agree on is if/when somewhere like Bangladesh starts to become meaningfully inhospitable. Nobody wants a couple hundred million displaced Muslims running about who may take the flooding to be a sign of the end of times.
3) You're shifting the goalposts on the ISS. You specifically said, "For every gram of CO2 scrubbed on the ISS, multiple tons of CO2 are emitted into the Earth's atmosphere to make that happen." You obviously were not talking about the entire footprint of the entire space program. Even if you count the entire space program your statement is equally absurd. Each day we breathe out on the order of a kilogram of CO2. Suffice to say we're not emitting millions of tons of CO2 per astronaut per day. A single launch entails 1000 tons of CO2 for some metric of absurdity there.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:35AM
CO2 scrubbing for life support is a very different situation than say a coal power plant. There's many orders of magnitude less CO2 processed on the ISS and energy inefficiency is not important for the ISS situation. Power generation requires a great deal of energy efficiency in the process.
Money not being an issue doesn't mean it'll happen. There's other resources at stake too. More likely is just fossil fuel power being discontinued except on small scales. But then again, maybe they will figure out how to push that CO2 through something, like say an algae farm to scrub it.
(Score: 1, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:07PM
Hey, John Ringling's circus showed some shiny Unicorns a few years back, too - impressed with those, were you?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:55PM (1 child)
If I were worried about climate change, I wouldn't take some grad student's word for what the nation's CO2 emissions will be in 10 years.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:05PM
But, if you're a CO2 emitter looking to push talking points with spin favorable to your industry to the press... who better than Mumble Mc Something Ph.D. something to lend sufficient legitimacy to the story to get it distributed as soundbites on all the sympathetic outlets?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by The Shire on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:07PM (1 child)
We just saved $2.5 trillion. Not bad for doing nothing we weren't already doing.
Pretty disappointing for the folks who were going to take that $2.5 trillion from the US though I suppose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:43PM
Don't worry, Al Gore is working in Plan B.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:39PM
More economic profit->more efficiency->more ecological.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:30PM (24 children)
Surveying the comments here, it appears we have an influx of poorly informed and politically charged Anonymous commenters.
Climate change is not a matter of opinion, it takes very little scientific understanding to look up some figures and ponder the links between fossil-fuel burning, emissions, thermal effects on the atmosphere and the resulting effects.
The costs to economies, human lives and the biosphere that maintains us on this most resourceful spaceship called Earth should by now be obvious to even the most ignorant humans.
Climate change mitigation is a problem that can be tackled, but the sort of changes required are now at a critical juncture. Preventing new greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere now has massive benefits (ecological and economic) for the future. So any rational actor would be calling for the most rapid decarbonisation possible. This will have big consequences for the status quo but is necessary, technologically achievable and simply requires some real backbone from government and the people. If we're so enamoured with capitalism, it can help too, once we set a decent global carbon price to factor in the cost of CO2 induced destruction.
The first step is to assist the anonymous cowards to see the dire picture we face (or encourage them to seriously use a little analytical skill to look at the facts themselves). The second and most important task is to actively call out the vested interests that hide behind denialism as if it's some mark of being an independent thinker. Independent fool is closer to the truth.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:16AM (6 children)
Sadly, as the old saw goes: "You cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into."
If you're not a shill for the fossil fuel industry, and you deny the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate, you do so for reasons that aren't reasoned or logical. As such, no amount of logic or fact will change your mind.
More's the pity.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:28AM (5 children)
The projected horrors of climate change are just that - projections. IOW, a load of political talk in an incessant torrent of same.
The increased regulations, taxes and fees on that pretext are the reality. IOW, actual damage dealers.
A rational agent wants to avoid actual damage and any increase thereof, and can be dissuaded by a mere projection only if its source is implicitly believed. Which political class just isn't. And mercenary science isn't either.
Propaganda wars destroyed credibility of all participants. Live with it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:47AM (4 children)
Like I said, "you can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into."
As such, I won't try.
I will point you in the direction of a few things unrelated to AGW that I find relevant. Not to convince or convert you, but give some other perspectives that might inform your thought process and likely improve your rhetorical skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise [wikipedia.org] (if you're not big on reading books, here's a presentation and discussion [c-span.org] by the author)
http://theconversation.com/post-truth-politics-and-why-the-antidote-isnt-simply-fact-checking-and-truth-87364 [theconversation.com]
https://www.fastcompany.com/1665526/short-term-thinking-is-our-biggest-problem-heres-3-ways-to-fight-it [fastcompany.com]
I hope you find the above interesting, if not enlightening.
Good luck to you, friend.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:42PM (2 children)
Back at you on that one. I find the people who "won't try" to reason, can't try.
Notice how your entire argument is irrelevant to the discussion at hand and dreadfully misguided. Books like "The Death of Expertise" completely miss the corruption of expertise by conflict of interest, for example. For a crucial example, economics is routinely considered to not be a science merely because of the many failed predictions that just so happen to support some special interest. Climatology has conflicts of interest of similar magnitude.
And criticizing other people for not thinking long term is useless, when you're the short term thinker.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:18PM (1 child)
I love how you employ the very tactics you ascribe to me.
Your intellectual dishonesty is both obvious and amateurish.
As such, you don't deserve my time or attention.
Fuck off, jerk.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:34PM
I don't share your love for how hard you're projecting here. It's telling here that you aren't willing to defend your assertions about the urgency and harm of climate change, but you are willing to point a bunch of junk links to myths about anti-intellectualism (pro-tip: those links fall prey to the same anti-intellectualism that they claim to care about).
Meanwhile actual warming and secondary effects like sea level rise are far short of predictions (particular when one considers effects from the ongoing end of the last glacial period are lumped in), and harm of climate change is grossly, repeatedly, and consistently exaggerated. Warming exists, but we have bigger problems that the obsessive focus on climate change is harming.
But then what would be the point of trying to understand non-groupthink positions, right?
My take is that you, like most of the movement, ran out of reasonable arguments some time ago. Blaming your opponents for the weakness of your own arguments and evidence is pretty standard fare for climate change debate.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:42PM
The Death of Expertise ignores the heavy, institutional use of the appeal to authority fallacy over more than a century whether it be 4 out of 5 doctors recommending the product of the ad, tobacco companies publishing a plethora of fake studies on the relative healthiness of smoking, economics - the whole thing, War on Drugs, or contemporary attempts to panic us with dire climate change warnings. There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of the experts.
The second link about "Post-truth politics" signals its unworthiness with the term "post-truth" (and goes immediately downhill from there). There never was an era of "truth", so there never has been a genuine to use the label "post-truth". We and our stories are no more dishonest now than we have been for the entirety of human history. Instead, it's a dishonest term to vilify other speech and ideas.
And the third ("Short-Term Thinking Is Our Biggest Problem. Here’s 3 Ways To Fight It") just doesn't get it. The first solution, "reward people much, much later in life" was tried as pension funds and failed because short termers could raid the funds and pensioners put their interests over the interests of younger people still paying into the fund. It created both a food source for short term parasitism and encouraged conflict of interest. Another example is the creation of a variety of government systems and infrastructure for insuring people and businesses against failure. It encourages short term thinking and risk taking since there's always a sugar daddy to bail you out. In other words, a long term system to encourage short term thinking was created.
Further a lot of peoples' work is genuinely short term. In these cases, to delay payment/reward is to generate near term profit for the business rather than any long term benefit for anybody. Finally, if you guess wrong about the future (particularly of your would-be solution), then every single one of the solutions fails - you have rewards that aren't working right, costly life time products nobody uses, and huge bets that went way wrong. I favor betting markets as a way to address that issue. The subtle difference between that and the third "solution" is that you aren't making one bet on the future, but thousands on a bunch of different possibilities. One can quickly gauge the market's general opinion on the future and what's likely or not. Then you can place those big bets, using the market pricing as a guide and even hedge.
The single unifying problem of these three links is that they're feelgood anti-intellectualism - do these rituals, or buy into these condescending stereotypes, and you'll be better than the people who don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:50AM (1 child)
And khallow, but he has always been like that. Less so since Exxon quit paying him, but he's still like that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:51PM
I think rather that the Chicken Little narrative has greatly weakened over the past decade. There's less nonsense that needs to be attacked than there used to be. We still get idiocy like The End Of Chocolate [soylentnews.org] because computer models say so, but people are starting to wonder where the evidence is to back up these claims.
My take is that the current bout of "We need to do something now" pseudo-crisis will evaporate in about two decades, and climate change will assume a more suitable priority as a much lesser problem for humanity than things like starvation, poverty, or habitat destruction.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by ChrisMaple on Sunday November 10 2019, @04:55AM (11 children)
The critical juncture claim has been made frequently for more than 40 years. It was a fraud then; it's a fraud now.
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday November 10 2019, @08:07AM (9 children)
Please explain. has global warming become less of a problem in the last 40 years?
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:35PM
You haven't even shown net harm from global warming. Think about that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:10PM (7 children)
Let me quote this [apnews.com] article, emphasizing how dire climate change has become:
So we're screwed! Or not...? That article was written in 1989. I changed the names/dates but left everything else verbatim. Kind of funny having to edit out "Soviet Union" which would have been a give-away. Anyhow, the "tipping point" in his article was not 2030, but 2000 - nearly 2 decades ago. We did nothing, nothing tipped. As for his "the most conservative scientific estimates" showing that Earth's temp will increase by 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, today is more than 30 years later. And here [nasa.gov] are NASA's climate temperature data. The temperature has increased by 0.52 degrees celcius. Perhaps he meant fahrenheit, since he was speaking to a US reporter and worked in New York. 0.52C = 0.936F. So... we're under even "the most conservative scientific estimate." Why? Well nobody really cares why we keep hitting well below predicted warming. They just keep repeating "well, it's warming at least" and then going on with more doomsday predictions several decades down the line.
I think a big part of the problem today is mostly the media. They've been struggling since the normalization of the internet, and so sensationalism, drama, and fear-mongering has become their go-to means of click/revenue generation. So, yes global warming has become less of a problem. Tell me the sky is falling once or twice, with a decent facade of science behind it and I'm very much concerned for the future (and indeed 20 years ago climate change was probably the single most relevant political issue for me). Do it for half a century while you just keep pushing your timelines back a few years, without ever engaging in any fundamental overhaul of the science, and at some point it becomes clear you are either a charlatan or basing your predictions on fundamentally broken
sciencecorrelations. It amounts to the same thing in either case.(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:54PM (6 children)
You heavily edited that source. There's no mention of a "tipping point" at all -- the UNEP official was simply stating that if we took action in the 90s, we could reduce the risk of an escalation to a 3 degrees celsius rise. The effects you try to present as belonging to your "tipping point" of the year 2000 are not associated by the report with that date; in fact, the article takes some pains to indicate these are long term effects -- the 2030s and beyond.
A pretty prescient report, with the UNEPs prediction most likely based on information provided by biologists and climatologists/meteorologists.
I do remember the head of the British Mycological Society, an Oxford Don, explicitly blocking us young scientists giving out a press release about the effects of climate change, in 1994.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @01:32AM (4 children)
No, I didn't. Literally the third sentence in that article, and in my quote:
And that was alongside his "most conservative scientific estimate" suggesting there would be 1-7 degrees of warming by 2019. If that's the "most scientific conservative estimate", what does it mean when we see real warming was below a degree while our emissions were not only capped by 2000, but roughly doubled? It means he was fundamentally incorrect and engaging in unjustified fear-mongering. As it seems to always be the case, what's new is old.
I find it interesting to consider how and why people are rationalizing being actively deceived. Stockholm Syndrome [wikipedia.org] is quite a real phenomena. Obviously nobody's being held captive here, but they are being actively deceived. But, like Stockholm Syndrone, because people get convinced by the deceivers that they have good intentions, they become immune to impartial consideration of what's happening.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday November 11 2019, @12:49PM (3 children)
And I find your reading comprehension skills ... interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @01:46PM (2 children)
Feel free to elaborate if you think you have any particular insight. I'm quite happy to change my views in light of evidence that contradicts my biases or misunderstandings, unlike most. So a few questions:
1) You suggest, quote, "the article takes some pains to indicate these are long term effects -- the 2030s and beyond." Where at?
2) You seemingly do not consider the statement "governments have [until 1999] to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control." as suggesting a tipping point. How, then, do you interpret it?
3) The article states, "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees [by 2019]". That presumably was a best case scenario of solving climate change before the not-a-tipping-point deadline he mentioned. Needless to say we not only did not solve emissions before his not-a-tipping-point deadline, but dramatically increased emissions. The real temperature rise since then was less than a degree (regardless of whether we measure in C or F). How do you reconcile this?
I anxiously await your enlightenment.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:55PM (1 child)
LMAO. Your bias is that you know better than the vast majority of scientists all over the world -- and yet you'll be swayed by an anonymous comment on the Internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:33PM
As you go back in our history it's quite remarkable how often we collectively adapt unbelievably awful ideas. It was less than a century ago that the brightest minds in this nation were all vocally advocating for government driven eugenics. It's pretty easy to see that this is an absolutely idiotic idea, even if only because of the inevitability of abuse. Yet nonetheless it happened and indeed we were a major inspiration for a young German artist who would come to power some time later.
Why did that happen? Nearly all of top tier academia was fully supportive of eugenics, including Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc. And all of the old money philanthropists - Carnegies, Rockefellers, etc- were also fully in support of it. And needless to say the government was full on board with having the right to choose who can and cannot reproduce. Even though government driven mandatory eugenics is clearly an awful idea - people became afraid to speak for themselves out of social pressure. It become very much the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes [wikipedia.org]. And this wasn't like some far gone time hundreds of years ago - this was happening as recently as about 80 years ago. The only thing that really changed our trajectory was that aforementioned German artist. Social pressure is powerful, and dangerous.
The only way to avoid such scenarios happening in the future is for each person to think for themselves. And indeed you do risk being wrong - such is life. But cowering under appeals to authority is precisely how so many awful things have happened in our past. Even look more recently than eugenics and the "scientific consensus" was that leaded fuel was safe. Everybody knew lead was dangerous, but "science" claimed leaded fuel was safe. It was just a little bit of lead in it, after all. Those who chose to think for themselves and made every effort to avoid exhaust so much as possible, regardless of the "scientific consensus", would have been quite wise - and indeed there were plenty who did just that.
---
So yes, give me a stark raving fool and the world's most brilliant man. If the stark raving fool can present a more compelling and logical argument than the world's most brilliant man, then I would be more than happy to adopt the argument of the fool. And so here is your chance! Presumably if you never thought you could convince me of anything you would not have engaged in this discussion to begin with. So, again, I await your enlightenment with bated breath.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @01:45AM
Ahhh!! I think I see the mistake you might be making. This is what the first sentence actually says:
There was 0 mention of 2030 (let alone beyond) in the original article. I changed the date there. It, like his tipping point, originally said 2000 - but it quite ruins the point I was making if you realize the article is from 30 years ago after the first sentence. It's "prescient" only in the sense that people keep saying the same doomsday nonsense and simply adjusting their dates after none of it comes to pass.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:31PM
> The critical juncture claim has been made frequently for more than 40 years. It was a fraud then; it's a fraud now.
Longer than that, I've seen newspaper clippings from the 1920s saying that climate disaster is 20 years away unless more taxes and government come into being to restrict what people do.
Seems the chicken-littles have been at it for almost as long as the modern industrial era has existed. Only difference now is that global communications are so cheap and easy that the messages can be blasted worldwide instantly, coupled with what seems to have been a general reduction in the world populations ability to reason and think for themselves.
The result is the current behaviour from environmentalists that looks more and more like a religious cult, and less like anything based in proper science. Most politicians are more than happy to support the cause, as it means far more power, money and control for them over the population, and they never shy away from that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:46AM (2 children)
I take it as very telling that the climate change deniers are all AC, and all the skeptics other than khallow are AC as well.
I really wonder why they don't just create an account, even a throwaway, and post with a more legitimate name - is it that they are afraid of people reading their posting history and connecting the dots that they're always spouting irrational nonsense? Posting AC is just as damaging from my perspective.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:57AM (1 child)
Next year we'll have an election. And it's probably going to be another roughly 50/50 race. Yet you personally probably think you know very few people, if any, that would vote for Trump. The pollsters certainly can't find them. So where are they?
The folks that openly do things like oppose climate change or support Trump fall into two camps: untouchables (such as Peter Thiel or Richard Lindzen [wikipedia.org]) and idiots. They're idiots because doing things like openly supporting Trump or running contrary to the "consensus" on climate change is more than sufficient for doxing, threats, harassment, and worse. And they don't have the clout to resist such threats. Even look at the Wiki page on Lindzen. He is, without doubt, one of the single most qualified individuals on climate change living today. Yet the vast majority of his Wiki page is dedicated to trying to discredit him and spinning every statement he's ever made to try to frame him as a fool, because he has has a different scientific opinion than the "consensus". Questioning the "consensus" today is becoming akin to questioning the "consensus" of times past by suggesting that perhaps it is the Earth that revolves around the sun, and not the sun revolving around the Earth.
And that is precisely why when I discuss topics that trend towards radicalization it's done so exclusively anonymously. It's the same reason if a pollster calls me on the phone asking for my views on these I'll immediately disconnect, though I'd be happy to share my views on less controversial topics. I have little to gain by offering my view to a pollster, and much to lose even if it happens to be a loony individual trying to confirm their "suspicions" that I am indeed a witch. The odds of either happening are extremely low, but I simply make it a point to avoid tying my "real life" persona to any of these issues.
This is ultimately the major problem with our trend towards becoming an ever less tolerant society. You may achieve the end of making discussion go away, but far from making views go away I think it galvanizes many folks in their views. After all, being harassed for an otherwise perfectly rational belief is a pretty good indicator, throughout our history, that you're going to be the one who will end up on "the right side of history."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @07:40AM
And to be clear the reason I put consensus in quotes had nothing to do with doubting it. It's obviously true. It's equally obviously irrelevant. Were science driven by consensus, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages if not even times prior. The cases where scientific change is globally rapidly adopted and accepted (such as Einstein's development of spacetime/relativity in lieu of aether theory) are few and far between. Change mostly comes against a grudging resistance that only changes over many decades, sometimes longer. It was none other than Max Planck who witted that "Science progresses one funeral at a time." And he said that at a time before science had become so absurdly radicalized and politicized. He was speaking only of the powerful influence of inertia. Now it's not only inertia but also ubiquitous and [literally] mind-boggling bias that we must face.
And to further elaborate I am also not suggesting e.g. Lindzen is right and the consensus is wrong. Rather the issue I have is that even discussion of the possibility of issues have become taboo. For instance why were the 1990 IPCC projections so wrong? In spite of massively increasing emissions our real temperature increase was well below the entire range given by the "IPCC best" modeling scenario. This problem is generally handwaved away when it is extremely critical. We're talking about predictions on the level of many decades when we already have evidence that our models are quite wrong. I think the problem is that this question is clearly very difficult to try to answer, yet creating a new correlation to suggest the end of times is nigh is very easy to do. Yet far from ease suggesting some sort of scientific occam's razor, in science there is often an inverse relationship between the ease of an answer and it's correctness.