SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
acid andy (1683)
(email not shown publicly)
https://soylentn ... nonymous+Coward/
Rationalistic, dualistic, vegan, cynical, scientific hippie
I just read that Greta Thunberg has recorded a radio show called Humanity has not yet failed. Comparing her title to that of my last couple of journal entries, it seems, while thinking about a lot of the same issues, she's rather more optimistic than I am!
In reality of course it's a call to action and one I applaud. The levels of irritation she seems to cause in supporters of various vested interests tells me she must be doing something right!
It's worth mentioning that when I was searching for Greta's radio show link I was a little taken aback to see one of the highest ranking results in Duckduckgo was a National Review article attempting to discredit her. The argument seemed to revolve around pointing out that she was a child and then listing some negative generalizations about children--most notably claiming they just repeat what adults tell them. The unspoken suggestion to an adult reader of the article is that, of course, because they're adults and not silly children like Greta, they can form their own opinions about an important issue and certainly don't need to rely only on what other adults tell them. These intelligent, adult readers can always form cast iron, watertight opinions based on evidence. They certainly don't need a little girl, or, say, an opinion piece in a right wing magazine, to tell them what to think, or who to listen to! Certainly not! Oh, the delicious irony.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @06:55PM (40 children)
do get their call to action indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marionette [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @07:08PM (4 children)
Self-referential humor is hard to pull off, keep working at it little buddy!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @07:16PM (3 children)
You tried. You failed. Try harder, oh the scare of crows.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:08PM (2 children)
Hmmm, moron arguing against climate change or teenage girl who has learned enough science to understand reality.
Hmmmmmmmm
Such a tough call, I'll go with useful idiot pulling hus own strings for 99 shmeckels! Do please continue posting your stupidity, future generations need to understand how we got to this point.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @04:45AM (1 child)
You know buddy I think you lose the right to ad hominem anybody's credentials when praising a Greta. Greta's family created her when she was literally 8 years old, and the media and low brow public - like you - were not far behind. People following her is the clearest evidence people don't really care about anything so long as 'does this person or datum agree with me'.
Actually maybe the most terrifying thing it illustrates is how people can rationalize away absolutely *anything*. If people want to do something, they'll do it - and then create an after-the-fact rationalization explaining why it was a good or justifiable thing to do. We must engage in an indefinite and absolute lockdown. It is essential and any other option is bordering on assault! Wait, some dude got murderered - time for massive public gatherings!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:49AM
Don't call me buddy guy!
Sorry, I saw you say buddy and read no further. Was it a good point? Did your perspective grow? Or just some ranty nonsense about how Trump is your real daddy but you're confused about your feelings for Melania?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday June 23 2020, @08:37PM (34 children)
I'm not sure whose side you're on here. Are you saying the shills for the climate change deniers are the marionettes or are you resorting to the common, probably unfounded, allegation that adults are putting words in Thunberg's mouth?
Even if Greta had been repeating some of the words of those older than her, so what? That doesn't make her points any less valid or urgent.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:31PM (2 children)
True. The biggest issue with Greta we need to keep in mind is that, she being from a showbiz family, how much of her act is showbiz?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:34PM
Well, so let's determine that. What solutions is she proposing? What ideas does she bring to the table, and how does she intend to implement them?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday June 28 2020, @07:19PM
And a U.S. president actually was an actor, what of it?
It might help her to have a bit more stage presence and a better ability to hold an audience's attention, but whay would that be a problem?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:01AM (23 children)
Greta started being indoctrinated when she was 8 years old. Here [movingbeyondthepage.com] is a sampling of curriculum for 8 year olds if you don't happen to be familiar with it:
- Able to read and comprehend basic picture books
- Able to add and subtract single digit numbers
- Able to write simple sentences
- etc
In her own recounting after her parents told her about climate change as an 8 year old, she became depressed, stopped eating, and lost 22 (!!) pounds. Whatever happened to her, she was going through some severe and cult-like indoctrination. The only reason people aren't outraged by this is because they like what she was indoctrinated towards. And yes, this does make everything she says *far* less valid. The reason is because when you indoctrinate a child in this way, you effectively brainwash them and can have them say, and believe, anything you want. Appealing to the product of this is really messed up. Try to imagine a parallel world where you had the exact scenario except the child was saying things you happened to disagree with. Would you have disagreed with the behavior that got him there?
This complete lack of logic or values in society today is, in my opinion, one of the scariest things there is. Should we treat children like this, or not? This is a question that should not be conditionally answered, but absolutely. To do so otherwise, as the vast majority do, emphasizes that people no longer have any real values beyond accepting anything and everything if the perceived endgame is something they personally like. And you wonder why society has failed?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @06:59AM (5 children)
Source [wikipedia.org] on Greta's indoctrination stuff (and the consequences of such) since I do think it sounds somewhat unbelievable. She stated such things herself and to an adoring crowd at a TedX conference. She was told many things, including that climate change was going to lead to the literal extinction of humanity. That claim is something that even the most extreme models do not support or justify in any way, shape, or form. But people nonetheless just sat there looking on smiling, and laughing at her comments which indicate her parents were not only indoctrinating her also actively lying and exaggerating doomsday stories to their 8 year old child who also has various psychological problems. But hey, she's against fossil fuels so who the fuck cares, yeah?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 24 2020, @12:35PM (4 children)
Climate change might not do it directly, alone, but over a long enough timescale, combined with over-consumption, destruction of habitat and pollution, it can cause a collapse of the ecosystems and food chains we rely on. Global famine could lead civilizations to collapse, leading to war on a scale not seen, and an even worse ability to control disease.
Humanity undoubtedly has the capability to extinguish all life on this planet. No-one knows if or when that will happen, but on our current trajectory it becomes more likely, not less likely, with each passing year. The more the population increases, and the more advances in technology increase the power any one individual can yield over other organisms, the greater the existential risk.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:40PM
I'm curious, what would your response be if most of what you just said is provably false? Would it in any way whatsoever change your world view? I hope you'd say yes, but in practice I find the answer is often no.
You just made an extremely common mistake. What causes deserts? You are implicitly suggesting, as most people would, that it's hot weather. What are the two largest deserts in the world? #1 is Antarctica, #2 is the Arctic! Heat doesn't cause deserts, the lack of precipitation does. But doesn't heat cause less precipitation? Nope! In general it's exactly the opposite. This [bgs.ac.uk] site offers a climatological map of the world over time. Horribly designed site, but informative nonetheless. Click the time scale at the top to see the climatic state of the world rendered in the smaller box in the right.
You might notice that as we enter into ice ages (which we just came out of) the world sees the emergence of more desserts. Yet as we enter into periods of heating, the world turns nice and green. But aren't we heating up like never before you might say. You might find this [wikipedia.org] handy. In a nutshell, the ancient world that was not only vastly greener but *dramatically* hotter than today - as in 14+ C hotter when the dinos were romping around on a lush planet just thriving with all sorts of animal and plant life.
And you can also rest assured that nothing like Venus is possible. Literally even if we somehow simultaneously burnt every single ounce of remaining fossil fuels today, it wouldn't start a runaway greenhouse effect. We simply do not have enough CO2 on the entire planet to get even remotely close to Venus' 97% CO2 atmosphere. Poses an interesting question of how they were able to get so much CO2 but that's another (and very fun) topic.
---
And the above is all speaking in generalities while ignoring what we can do. We are humans. We have sophisticated technology and have already created numerous self sustaining primarily artificial biomes throughout the planet. And indeed the vast majority of our ecosystems and food chains are almost entirely artificial. It's not like our beef comes from harvesting migrating cattle. Nope, they're shoved into little cages and fed massive amounts of food that's also entirely artificially grown and harvested. Similar for things like 'overpopulation'. China, relative to the US, is a mostly inhospitable land. It's geographically a little bit smaller than the US, and of course has more than 400% our population. And until very recently they were a net exporter of food. In terms of calories they probably still are. The reason they've become a net importer is because they're important more expensive 'luxury' foods due to a skyrocketing middle class. Point being - they're in great shape with much less hospitable conditions than much of the rest of the world, yet a vastly higher population.
No, our chances of extinction from anything like climate change are literally 0%. There is simply no possible path there.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday June 25 2020, @10:56AM (1 child)
This is bullshit.
The only way humanity could extinguish all life on this planet would be a deliberate global effort involving converting most industry into producing launch vehicles to build a 40,000 km diameter parabolic solar reflector, and then focusing it on the earth for a few millennia.
Even then some of the deep extremophiles might survive.
If you actually meant the extinction of homo sapiens, yeah, we probably could, but it would not be easy. Giga-deaths if we are careless or stupid, but not extinction.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:54PM
Fair point, especially regarding the extremophiles. I think was subconsciously biased to thinking about humans and other mammals--yep I'm a bigot!
I admit that with today's technology, even nuclear armageddon or a deliberately engineered pandemic would be very unlikely to take out all species. With a future nanotechnology or something that disrupted Earth's magnetic field (which could cause damage from solar wind and an eventual loss of the atmosphere), I'm not so sure.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NickM on Thursday June 25 2020, @10:57PM
seems to be a much bigger problem than global warming. Yet almost all the attention on environmental issues is almost laser focused on the warming. And addressing the production of CO² only addresses a fraction of the problems you listed and I don't know what should be the solution...
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 24 2020, @12:04PM (16 children)
Unless you grew up alone in a cave, we're all indoctrinated, by our parents, our schools, our peers, advertising and journalism. The difference is that some of us reject the narrative of the consumerist, profit worshiping establishment, embrace environmentalism, and. like Greta, despair at the path humanity continues to take.
You clearly believe she was fed false information. Nothing she says makes me think that. Rather, I suspect you might be one of the many that have grown up with a distorted picture of humanity's impact on the environment.
If you try to attack the validity of someone's words by questioning their nurture, rather than examining the words on their own merit, then you're sinking to a type of ad hominem. Her message is what's important and it's one I agree with. Her background is only relevant to those who rely on the cult of personality (an appeal to authority), rather than critical thinking, to assess her words.
I've still seen nothing to suggest that her depression was a result of any maltreatment. The linked Wikipedia entry mentioning her mental health actually cites a claim that her parents didn't support her activism and reluctantly changed their lifestyle. Regarding giving up flying, it says her mother "didn't do it to save the climate. She did it to save her child". Could the parents be fabricating a narrative? It's possible, but it's your word against theirs, and again, it's a distraction from the message itself about humanity's role in the enviornmental crisis that is currently underway. It depresses me too and most of the brainwashing I've had in my life has been to try and turn me into a right wing consumerist worker drone--funny thing is if anything it had the opposite of the intended effect.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @02:43PM (15 children)
There's a difference between passing on your views to your child and emotionally abusing your 8 year old child to the point that they drop 20+ pounds and forcing them to believe that not only they but everybody and the entire human species is going to imminently die. For some reference the average 8 year old girl weighs 25kg, and she was almost certainly on the lower end of that due to their small stature and musculature. In any case she dropped at least 40% of her weight due to her parent's abuse. That is sufficient to put her at risk of organ failure and other physical problems. You have not been brainwashed - *that* is brainwashing: breaking a person down mentally and physically to the point they have nothing and then writing whatever you want in the void that remains of what was probably, at some point, a happy little girl.
I have an oddly related question for you. What do you think of fascists? Here [wikipedia.org] is the Fascist Manifesto - the original and ultimate document laying out the original Fascist party's views and values. You might find something interesting. You'd probably love the fascist party's ideals. And, with some exceptions, I'd generally agree. So why are they so reviled by history? Because views don't mean anything - it's all about behavior. Now nobody cares why the fascists did or what they believed in, we only remember them as the fascists. And fascism is primarily driven by Machiavellian pursuit of ends and the intolerance of anything except your own ends.
People don't get it. Bad guys are not bad guys in their mind. Far from it, the bad guys almost invariably think they're saving the world. All the awful stuff they do? It's not awful, because it's just what needs to be done. The Nazis, Fascists, and others no doubt they'd be going down on the "right side of history" - a recurring meme. History disagreed.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:07PM (14 children)
If, as you allege, her parents did emotionally abuse her, then no, I'm absolutely not OK with that. However, I'm yet to see any evidence that her parents were responsible for causing her depression, only hearsay. If you're right about it though, that still doesn't justify ignoring everything she says (sounds like another kind of abuse) given that she's now old enough and educated enough to develop informed opinions of her own.
Yes views only really count in that sense when they align with behavior. If the views turned out to be lies, any potential benefit is lost. I'm really struggling to see though how this is "oddly related" to Greta Thunberg. Or were you still talking about her parents?
I think you're talking about authoritarians. I dislike authoritarians, generally speaking, because they take away civil liberties. However, I am also an environmentalist. Maximum liberty for corporations and industry damages the environment massively, which is effectively impinging on the rights of other species, and in the longer term on humans as well for reasons I've already stated.
Awful stuff? Anyone who obliterates a habitat or causes an extinction is absolutely doing awful stuff. Emotional abuse is awful stuff too, sure. Did I miss anything?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:04PM (13 children)
Watch the video - it is literally Greta herself saying that her depression and dangerous condition were caused by what her parents told her and describing it in some detail. It's not hearsay when the literal person we are talking about is the source. And it's not just emotional abuse. When your child lose 40% of their weight, that goes well beyond simple emotional abuse.
The fascists were not lying. They very much wanted what they said they want but they acted like well.. fascists.. in trying to obtain it. Fascism has most accurately been described as turning politics into a religion. And like all religions it entails a fervent and unquestioning belief in their own righteousness and ideals. The authoritarian rules at his whim and has no concern with justification - his word is the law. The fascist, by contrast, will do anything to further the ends of their religion and will justify anything in its name. But the authority derives from the righteousness of their views, not from they themselves. Of course fascism naturally trends towards authoritarianism pretty quickly in practice.
Increasingly our behaviors on many topics are trending towards fascism. I think many people no longer care about anything other than advancing their ideology. There is no behavior that cannot be defended so long as it furthers the cause. And any and all evidence that's inconvenient to the cause is ignored or attacked. There is nothing left to learn or discuss because in fascism you start with the assumption that you are incontrovertibly and absolutely right.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:10PM (12 children)
Methinks you might be projecting.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:42PM (11 children)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:30AM (10 children)
Yeah. I presume the observations were aimed at me, but I don't have "a fervent and unquestioning belief in [my] own righteousness and ideals." I'm always ready to examine and modify my views based on new evidence, if I consider the evidence sound. I have already done so on a number of occasions over the years.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:51AM (7 children)
Was that directed towards you? Are you starving Greta?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:25AM (6 children)
You are so reasonable on many topics, but when it comes to climate change you just lose all perspective. Do you work for oil? Own some oil wells? Anything along those lines??
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:20PM (5 children)
Perspective? Nowhere else do we have this level of over-the-top drama that climate change provides:
Consider this. Nobody has threatened [slashdot.org] me with jail or execution for my opinions on anything else (though Azuma Hazuki has threatened me with burning in Hell for stuff that Azuma never really gets around to describing - could be "climate change-related"!). Only a climate change nut has stalked [archive.org] me for years, quoting and rebutting my posts near invisibly on a hole in the wall website. Imagine finding out one day that someone has been whining about your posts for years and never bothering to tell you about it? That same person also stalked Jane Q. Public (a Slashdot user who also expressed the wrong opinion repeatedly on climate change) creating a chain of post referrals many dozens and perhaps hundreds deep.
But sure, I probably ought to check my optics, right? All this crazy has to be my fault.
Well, hopefully in a decade or two, my optics will improve to the point that this insanity is history and we can have grown up discussions about climate change.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:24PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:06PM (1 child)
I only brought her up because she gave her radio show a name that was strikingly similar to these "Humanity Failed" journal entries and relating to one of the same topics. Oh, and also because Bot brought her up in the comments of the last journal. I don't need to "argue by" her--I'm just glad that she's bringing to attention an environmental crisis which I feel deserves urgent mitigation.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 26 2020, @12:59AM
This thing is already massively propagandized. It's not going to become any more well known because of this latest theater.
My view on this sort of thing is that it's a sign of a losing ideology. They can't appeal to reason. They can't appeal to a compelling real world problem. So they appeal to myth and pomp - which can at times bypass reason or the need to show there's an actual problem. Here, there's many myths about the virginal woman who brings society to righteous action. Joan of Arc is only one of the more famous ones. Retreading that legend isn't going to get them far, but maybe that isn't the point. I suspect at this point, a lot of supporters do so more for status/virtue signaling than because they care about the climate.
Another glaring example of how badly climate change propaganda has gone wrong was the before mentioned "No Pressure" campaign. The video in question goes wrong in a way that needs to be seen to be believed - it's basically a fantasy about climate change deniers and skeptics getting brutally murdered by pushing a button. The whole thing was obvious meant to be in jest, but it's so tone-deaf and heavy-handed that it utterly fails except as an enormous self-parody of the climate change movement. Big Oil couldn't have done better, if they had filmed that themselves.
When they're expending such considerable effort to shoot themselves in the foot, bringing attention to it is going to dig that hole faster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @07:39PM (1 child)
Better than pretending to be a whiny pseudo-libertarian Big Oil shill on a marginal new-aggregating website, right, khallow?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 26 2020, @01:01AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @09:35AM (1 child)
Most people think this, but for very few is it actually the case.
In this thread you've already made multiple plainly falsifiable statements. For instance the statement you made near the top of this thread suggests you believe that warming temperatures and increasing CO2 tends to be destructive to vegetation, when that is completely and absolutely false. But I suspect like most people, when the evidence is inconvenient you tend to ignore and/or deny it. I sometimes wonder if the internet has destroyed many people's ability to be at all objective. In times past if we wanted to learn about a topic we would generally look up information in an encyclopedia and derive our opinions from there. Now a days the pattern is instead to assume an opinion based on spurious bias and then search either the media or the internet at large for "evidence my new bias is right".
And the problem is that the internet is loaded with more than enough information to let somebody who wants to believe one side of a topic or another, that their new bias is the undeniable and absolutely impartial and correct view. Thus you end up with groups full of self righteousness doing little other than screaming at one another in almost the complete absence of listening.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday June 26 2020, @03:25AM
What statement? You say you're looking for logic and yet you make an assumption about my beliefs and then attempt to falsify it without presenting any evidence of your own.
If you pay more attention to my comments you'll notice I've been talking about the destruction of habitat, over-consumption, pollution and loss of biodiversity arising from human activity. I mentioned these things in the same sentence as climate change but was careful to state that it would be all those factors in combination that can cause the widespread environmental destruction we've been discussing.
Warming temperatures are already destructive to some forms of vegetation. Some species will benefit from a rise in temperature but many of the characteristics of climate change are already demonstrably destructive to many species. Rising CO2 levels are destroying coral reefs through ocean acidification, for example. Melting ice caps remove habitat for some polar animal species. I didn't claim warming temperature and rising CO2 are necessarily destructive to vegetation in the general case, though they may turn out to be.
It's not just all about climate change. Slash and burn and intensive agriculture replace habitats with monocultures, destroying biodiversity. The greater the population, and the more consumed per capita, the greater the demand for this.
Maybe sometimes, but not in this case. I'm listening and enjoying discussing these issues.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:36PM (6 children)
It doesn't make them any more valid or urgent either. For me, the real problem is that it's narrative argument. There's this really cool story about older generations screwing things environmentally up for younger generations and it makes this Joan of Arc mad. But narratives need not be true to be repeated.
Well, I just have a couple of questions here, not just for Thunberg, or even the "Ok, Boomers", but everyone who'll live on after my death. What's the expectation? How perfect are we supposed to make the world for future generations?
If the expectation is merely to leave the world a better place than we found it, that box will already be checked off despite many feelz to the contrary. 1970 was in many important ways a recent nadir for humanity. We've been doing better since, particularly on a global scale. That includes such things as the environment, poverty, health, population growth, etc.
I think if we were to judge the progress of humanity on a much broader standard than the latest environmental fad, I think we would do well as probably would future generations currently living. And future generations should be expected to carry part of the load. I don't believe it's my job to make a perfect world, so you don't have to.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:21AM (5 children)
Does it? What about deforestation [wikipedia.org]?
The world population has about doubled since the early 1970s. I wouldn't call that "doing better since".
Ice caps are retreating. The ocean is acidifying due to dissolving CO2. Plastic pollution has greatly increased in recent years.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:18AM (4 children)
"Only half" is a lot better than it used to be. We could do a lot better with deforestation, but large parts of the world are doing better than they were.
Population growth rate peaked at 2.1% for a few years ending with 1970. If that rate had continued through today, we would have ~40% more people than we currently have (10.4 billion people). So three billion less people is doing better.
And? None of these are significant problems for humans or environment.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday June 26 2020, @02:51AM (3 children)
The situation is made worse by the fact that much of the forest being destroyed consists of ancient, established ecosystems. Planting new saplings elsewhere it will take many years for that kind of biodiversity to thrive in that new location. In the meantime, species are lost. It doesn't help that a lot of the new woodland is monoculture grown to optimize profit rather than improve the ecology.
That's some twisted logic you got there. I mean, yes, I suppose slower growth is better, in one sense, than more growth, but given I'm interested in the total impact on the environment of a population, it's the absolute quantity rather than the growth that counts. Slower growth just gives us a little more time to adapt and mitigate or stick our fingers in our ears and ignore our fate.
Except when they are; to coin a phrase! There are already animals dying right now as a result of this. The human impact is more subtle at this stage, but that's no reason to ignore an obviously escalating problem.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:26PM (2 children)
There's several things to note. First, it still is better than it used to be. Recall my argument was simply that we're making the world a better place. Slowing deforestation and compensating with forest regrowth, even of the monoculture farm sort, is a substantial improvement (it's still plants pulling in carbon and still provides animal habitat). What's the point of embracing narratives that ignore the very progress you claim to be interested in? Sounds to me like having the problem is more important to these sorts of narratives than fixing the problem!
"In one sense"? You already mentioned: slower population growth; lower total impact on the environment; and more time to adapt and mitigate. That's three such senses!
I think for me the takeaway from this discussion is that first, one can't fix problems if one never acknowledges the successes. Second, that there are professional nags behind much of this ignoring of genuine progress - because otherwise they just might be out of a job. Thunberg falls solidly in that camp, though I grant she probably hasn't learned enough yet to know what she's ignoring. Third, we're already delivering that better future which will be greatly hampered or even reversed by the economically destructive environmental proposals that the nags want. It's time to look at the world as it really is, and do what's worked for decades or centuries.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday July 21 2020, @01:43PM (1 child)
Better to you, not to me. Your metric for "better" or "worse" differs from mine because you have different priorities to me. We both already know this, but it's something you choose not to think about as it makes it easier to get to a point where you feel you've won the argument.
If you were back at school and one year you dropped from an A grade to a C, but the next year you managed to slow your rate of decline so you only dropped to a D instead of an E grade, somehow I don't think your school report would praise you as doing "better" or having made "a substantial improvement". A decline means things are getting worse. Slower decline just means things are getting worse slower. It couldn't be simpler. For the foreseeable future, a bigger human population is simply worse for other species (and arguably most humans) than a smaller one.
They're only economically destructive if we stubbornly cling to the old economic models rather than adapting. In the medium to long term, unfettered growth will wind up being even more destructive.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 22 2020, @05:58AM
What priority is relevant here? You've acknowledged that reforestation is better than not. That three billion more people today would be worse than their absence. It looks to me like we're using similar enough metrics to be relevant.
But you do acknowledge that an A is better than a C is better than a D is better than an E.
Second, you ignore the context. This isn't a healthy situation where the student just has to change their work ethnic, study habits, and avoid some parties. In the past, there simply weren't that many people. Die offs and weak technology kept the human race away from most sorts of climate change. That's equivalent to the "A grade" being for courses that you could pass, if you knew how to breathe.
Now, as you've acknowledged, we have vastly more people, more change, the stakes are more serious, and the challenges are much harder. That "D grade" being better than an "E grade" is a serious matter and reflects real world progress - while that "A grade" merely meant that we weren't dead. That difference, particularly since the improvements most strongly manifest in the most advanced societies(!), means we have a chance and that we're heading in the right direction.
In other words, by killing a bunch of people and throwing most of the rest into perpetual poverty you hope to duplicate the environmental success of the developed world today. The old (capitalist) economic models worked to deliver a billion people into the developed world and are presently delivering many billions more. The new ones are already demonstrated to be a shitshow. There is no economic success story in the battle against global warming for a glaring example. It's a wasteland of terrible ideas and half-ass strategies.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:40PM (3 children)
Most Americans say climate change should be addressed now — CBS News poll [cbsnews.com]
And, in fact, the deniers only make up about 1/3:
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:06PM (1 child)
And then those same people shut down when the only option you give us is the equivalent of the virus lockdown forever to reduce CO2.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday June 28 2020, @07:44PM
Which is why the vested interests so love to present that as a false dichotomy.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @04:34AM
Awesome, so 56% of Americans thinking we should do something is now an argument to do it? Should I start listing things? Or might it be we only appeal to statistics for our own little pet projects and suddenly pretend it means nothing else the rest of the time?
You partisan guys are so hypocritical it's hilarious.
(Score: 2, Informative) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 23 2020, @11:35PM
For the National Review right-wing whine, the proper term is a cast-irony? For their argumentum ad pediam.
(Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:47PM (1 child)
so far she gets score of 7/9 from me.
(Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:58PM
High praise in Nerddom...
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.