Ask any scientist if climate change is man made, what should be the non-pressurized, non-politicized correct response “I don’t know”—because they don’t. Though it’s 97% popular to say so, the pressure to fall in line with this ideology shuts the door on authentic scientific inquiry.
“Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.” NASA. This is the tag line but is it true? Would NASA ever publish findings outside this narrative?
To know makes science a religion. Should I be wary of such religious claims, when those who claim to know, deny the basic premise of scientific inquiry? Is climate change no longer falsifiable? Theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false.
Is any “legitimate” climate scientist trying to falsify this premise? So what is the agenda? Is the great reset funded propagated by SARS cov2 and climate change more political than evidentiary?
According to a May 15, 2020 WEF article, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to “reset and reshape” the world in a way that is more aligned with the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as climate change, inequality and poverty gained even greater urgency during the pandemic. HERE
Man made climate change is no longer falsifiable, but a religion coupled with shaming and withholding any contrary evidence.
TheCommonAtheist 
For crying out loud jim. Of course anthropogenic climate change is falsifiable.
If greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere start declining without reducing human greenhouse gas output it’s falsified.
If atmospheric temperature averages start declining without reductions in greenhouse gases or confounding factors such as major volcanic eruptions it’s falsified.
If climate outcomes undergo sustained deviations from the predictions of models predicated on anthropogenic climate change it’s falsified.
The reason there is overwhelming consensus among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real is the same as the reason for consensus that the laws of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and relativity are real. Because the theories have made many robust and reliable predictions for a long time. If their predictions fail to be fulfilled they’ll be falsified and replaced with theories that better fit the observed evidence. Until that happens we’ll keep using them.
It’s called science, jim.
Climate change denialism isn’t science, even when it’s done by scientists. Not unless real evidence contradicting anthropogenic climate change comes in, rather than the same, stale, discredited talking points promoted over and over by the likes of Myron Ebell, Alan Carlin and Ian Pilmer.
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So even though there is considerably less pollution than 40 years ago, we have to find a reason it’s still increasing—and blame something. It seems a little odd that you of all people will accept this at face value in spite of those who have openly suggested we use it to promote a political stance, such as the great reset.
If I were to believe every scientific consensus I’d be living under water right now, as predicted by science, along with all the other apocalyptic claims, this is no different.
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That would depend on how you define and quantify ‘pollution’.
The fact is there’s considerably more anthropogenic atmospheric carbon output than 40 years ago and correspondingly higher levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases and mean atmospheric and ocean temperatures. All of that is perfectly consistent with anthropogenic climate change theory regardless of any reductions in lead, NO2, SO2 or ozone emissions.
And if you rejected every scientific consensus with a bogus invocation of Popper’s principle of falsifiability you’d be smoking two packs a day because the assertion smoking causes a range of serious health conditions is in accordance with scientific consensus. ‘Medical group-think’ was one of Ayn Rand’s arguments against the health risks of tobacco, before she died of smoking related lung cancer.
Whether or not you accept or can assess the evidence for or against a scientific theory you’re not justified in misrepresenting the philosophy of science to dismiss it.
BTW, what ‘science’ predicted you’d be living under water?
All the widely accepted climate change models I’ve heard of since the 1980s have tended to underestimate the effects of global warming; including sea-level rise.
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I’ll take it as a sign that atheism has gotten so big, that within its now big tent is at least one of the lunatic climate change deniers that used to be exclusivity populated by Christian morons.
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It’s no sign at all. It is a sign to be a proper atheist one must conform to the “correct” political leanings. I have none. Nice accusation though. It’s a discussion for you to present whatever contrary evidence you like yet you resort to Christian type blanket accusation with no evidence.
If it’s man made it should be declining based on pollution levels over the last 40 years.
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It might help if you defined ‘pollution’ in the sense of ‘levels’ that you think somehow refutes human caused climate change. I suspect this framing is causing you great confusion.
I don’t think you understand what is causing rapid climate change. It’s not ‘pollution’. It’s very specific kinds of atmospheric gases we are creating (by burning fossil fuels) at levels the world cannot render inert but causes heating on a global scale that results in deeply affecting all the heat exchange mechanisms the world undergoes by natural means. Increasing these the ratio of these gases in the atmospheric concentration then produces what we call rapid climate change. And the compilation of overwhelming evidence for this explanatory model cannot be reasonably ignored nor rationally rejected. In common parlance, we call this ‘knowledge’ not because it’s an imported belief like religion and imposed on the world as if true in spite of contrary evidence but an adduced conclusion that fits all the evidence. Might this explanation be wrong? Sure. But if so, the bar is extraordinarily high to replace it with a more likely explanation. I think it more likely for Dawkins to become a born again Mormon.
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There is no discussion needed. The evidence is beyond overwhelming, so do yourself a favor and give up this absurdity. Your mind took you down a rabbit hole of nonsense – perhaps an intervention here by the wordpress community will get through to you. Repeat – there is no discussion.
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No worries. I’ve never claimed to be error free or hold to any doctrine. These are arguments circulating around the web, I just find it odd how science is beyond reproach when it comes to a couple of topics. So, when all the global coastlines were predicted to be under water by now, where were you then? There is no discussion? Sounds like a true believer.
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You keep using this we-should-all-be-underwater trope as if it represents ‘science’. It doesn’t. As far back as Hansen in the 80s, there has never been such a claim as if it represented climate science. That’s disinformation. I attended Hansen’s talk and it was a major reason I decided to switch my major. In those days it was called ‘environmental science’ with climate modeling as the new kid in town. I know because I was part of it. I studied remote sensing and climate modeling and all the various applications being designed through remote sensing for all kinds of climate modeling (and worked with cutting and examining Antarctic ice cores and tree rings in the summer labs and comparing them to same age ice core samples from Greenland). No one anywhere that I’m aware of was suggesting that by 2021 we’d be under water, but we knew then that sea level rise was going to be what we called a marker for climate change. How much was uncertain. Hence, the modeling.
So you are quite mistaken to presume this ‘prediction’ you keep referring to in any way, shape, or form somehow represents ‘science’ and the study of climate change, and so your conclusion that it’s all therefore bogus religious belief is pure denialism of reality.
Hansen’s model among many sources used US air defense system data and the problems caused by atmospheric CO2 concentration (in the late 50s, for crying out loud) interfering with guided air to air missiles, as well as the compelling data gathered from the oil industry’s own atmospheric studies. They were good scientists being paid by at that time by Texaco (now I think it’s all Exxon-Mobile). Every marker even at that time was aiming squarely at increasing CO2 concentration as the driving factor for atmospheric warming that had all kinds of effects. The main testing, however, remained to be determined, namely time to determine whether these suspected driving factors would amplify frequency changes in climate patterns. In other words, would these factors be revealed over time to be unrelated or related, and if related causal or correlational, with increased concentrations of CO2. The answer is now available: Humans are driving rapid climate change by the burning of fossil fuels and amplifying the frequency of changes to historical climate patterns.
This translates to mean the dry will become drier, the wet wetter, the cold colder, and the hot hotter. Historical patterns will change. From this change, in North America we will experience Florida to be colder at times than Alaska (the Polar Vortex properly understood IS the Jetstream, and so when polar vortex wobbles and then a lobe descends in latitude to historical reaches, historical differences, we get huge omega signatures with cold on one side and warm on the other), the farming belt to be driven northwards (about 30 miles a year), the humidity to rise about 7% per degree Celsius, the fire season to extend closer to year round, the winters to get shorter, the summers longer, spring and fall squeezed to yoyo between the two extremes, more storms of longer duration, longer droughts, higher frequencies of rare events like derechos and atmospheric rivers (like over Lyton BC) and historical flooding to increase by a factor of 5 per degree Celsius (so a hundred year flood occurs on average every 20 years, a 20 year flood every 4, and so on… and reinsurance transnationals and nation insurance companies use this data). Oh, and yes, sea level will rise, salination will decrease, the mesopelagic ocean layer (200-1000 meters where most commercial fisheries operate) will de-oxygenate, the global ocean currents will slow, the northern gulf stream will deliver less latitude protection to Europe, and so on. None of this is a harbinger of Good Times Ahead! And all of it is going on today… as predicted.
The effects are happening now, right now, today, and they are increasing in speed. We had Death Valley temperatures just last year in glacial valleys in BC. That’s so rare as to be almost unimaginable. But if we know it can happen there, then imagine that same condition unfolding for a week or two or a month over a large urban population… say, one without air conditioning and add in water rationing as normal. Where’s the rain? Where it shouldn’t be. Remember the prediction: pattern change indicates climate change.
It was raining last summer over the heart of Greenland. That’s a first (remember, I know there’s no evidence of this ever happening in any of the ice core samples we had and that was ~140,000 years worth of samples, IIRC). There will be many more indicators.
The permafrost contains an astounding amount of methane, which is released when it is no longer permanently frozen. The Canadian arctic has already warmed about 4 degrees Celsius (if our understanding from the modeling is correct, climate change should be AMPLIFIED at the poles… and it is. The project is for 7 degrees Celsius by 2050. Happening right now. And remember, that melt zone is heading north – just like the farming belt – about 30 miles a year… and increasing in distance every year! Want me to go on? I can.
The examples are legion. Amplified frequency that is happening right now guarantees Miami is wasting its money raising streets by 4 feet and pumping out sea water that comes up the drains. The bed rock is porous! You can’t stop it. The sea is rising. It doesn’t care about Miami. Add in higher winds driving higher tides, throw in the monthly moon cycle and – presto! – not the best place to build. Yet people still do! That’s why homeowners today in some Florida neighbourhoods are receiving flood insurance bills per year going up by thousands and thousands of dollars. I saw a premium increase just a few weeks ago that had risen from $12,000 last year to over $17,000 this year. The owner was retired and living on a fixed pension. One year. Insurance is catching up with reality. Check out entire swaths of the West uninsurable for fire. These risks are real, they are growing as predicted, and they are KNOWN to be caused by climate change.
Just because you don’t like it, or choose not to trust the overwhelming scientific evidence and successful modeling for it, is entirely up to you. You either accept reality or deny it. There is no middle ground in this case, Jim.
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I’ve heard plenty of climate warnings the past 40 years to know what they sound like. Those warnings are fueled by science reports. Not sure why you think I’m denying climate change, like I told Nan, “Of course the climate is changing and it appears to be “faster than before prior extinction events” but the hypocrisy is nobody really believes it”. Nobody is downsizing, consuming less, moving away from the water or the desert. Only part of this is the phony predictions. Evidently we are at the point of no return, gasses trapped for a couple centuries is going to continue to release as the climate warms, (nonsense) so why curb your appetite? Las Vegas is still a fastest growing city. You can get all mad at me but I’m not the only one hesitating to embrace every science based UN report.
If there is no middle ground I’m afraid your are wrong here. Science isn’t beyond reproach.
Makes me wonder if you even read the post
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You know I do not trust science any farther than I trust religion. I go on experience. The last few summers the town I live in, at 58.5° North of the Equator, has often been the high temperature in all of Canada. You know where I live, Jim, 300 kms north of Peace River. There is no reason we should ever be anywhere close to the highest temperatures in a country that stretches below the 49th parallel. But our summer last year was hotter than the year before, and 2020 was hotter than 2019, and so on the last 3 or 4 years. Something is definitely happening. If not man-made, then what?
I think, and hope, you are just playing devil’s advocate (no capital D), because the words that came into my mind as I read your post were “conspiracy theorist,” and in the 5 years I have been reading your blog I have never thought that before. I do so hope this is just you trying to start debate. It is always possible climate change is not man-made, maybe 1% or less, but I hope you at least agree the climate of Rocket Ship Earth is changing, and human activities are most likely the number one cause!
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I agree with you. I live just below 49 and have noticed a significant difference. I am not a conspiracy nut and like you, I am not immediately trusting consensus. Can we save ourselves by bring new gadgets to market?
A total of 61.1 billion tons of metal ores, fossil energy, and non-metallic minerals are extracted from Earth a year (2020 estimate). On addition to this comes 20.5 billion tons of biomass – trees, fish and so on. How the hell do you stop that?
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I wish I knew. Humans are consumers far beyond their needs, and have been since Egyptian times at least, in my opinion. And we are also makers of waste. Instead of recovering what we already used and reusing it, we ignore that for the most part and start with new, There is a ship graveyard in Hay River, North West Territories, 3 hours north of me, with old metal ships sitting there rusting away. It isn’t a big graveyard, but it is a scary one, for me. It makes me wonder how many such graveyards exist elsewhere,
The one thing that is missing, in my mind, is a united voice at the grassroots level. Greta Thunberg is trying to create such a movement, but despite the size of her following no one is listening to her, yet. She is (or was) a child, a girl, and autistic. Three strikes, according to most world leaders. She is now 19, and I think of voting age. We shall see how she does in the near future. Hopefully she has not given up her cause yet!
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There’s absolutely no question that making predictions are hard, especially about the future.
Just as there is no sky daddy to reward those whose predictions come true, there is no death penalty for those whose informed opinions were a little off, like Paul Ehrlich.
Anybody without this virus that got into your brain can appreciate the beyond vast amount of evidence that confirms the basic contours of the Climatastrophe, if not down to the precise second.
You’ve got some remaining time on this planet before you kick the bucket. You’ve got some degree of critical thinking skills, or you wouldn’t be an atheist. You don’t need to stay a flat-earther, even though you have immense neural networks now working overtime on some foolish quest for confirmation of this whizbang elaborate plot. Maybe I’m getting paid by Gates/Soros or whoever the geniuses of social media are onto.
If you are so convinced of the hoax, move to Bangladesh. That’ll sure test your theory. Write a will if you do, though, immediately.
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Falsifiability is only one tool in the scientific toolbox. And cabrogal does a good job pointing out a few examples. There are many. But in the same way Dawkins admits on an atheist scale of one to seven he’s a six, so to do climate scientists admit a very high degree of confidence – 95% – in man made climate change. The mechanisms are well known, the effects demonstrated, the results reliable for prediction, and solutions clearly laid out. I don’t know how you convolute this to be equivalent to a religious belief other than continuing to insist as if true that anything less than absolute 100% certainty indicates a “I don’t know” position. Yet you continue to use this equivalent-to-I-don’t-know metric all the time in various ways to convince yourself no one knows anything about anything and so anything is possible and everything is equivalently ‘mysterious’. And every time you do this, you utterly fail to grasp at just how far out one must lean away from carefully collected and successfully applied knowledge to think this certainty framing is of any value whatsoever… short of a complete denialism of anything reality has to say in the matter. And reality is showing us in no uncertain terms that rapid climate change we are experiencing is both unprecedented in planetary history and indisputably headed by human activity in a direction that increases the pace of this change. Doing the same thing – burning fossil fuels for energy – and hoping for different result is the very definition of….
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I haven’t denied anything nor do I believe everything. You’re free to state your case but I would be leery of accepting your all-in, based on your previous inability to part with any government policy.
So what happens when we go all electric, stop burning anything at all for fuel, and climate change continues? So far we’ve reduced emissions over the past 40 years and nothing has changed. I’m supposed to be living underwater right now.
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What?
Jim, how do you change atmospheric concentration levels? If you can answer that, you’ll understand why concentration levels will continue to rise tomorrow even if every one of us stops burning fossil fuels today. You will understand feedback loops and how these can be reduced over time (flattening the curve… sound familiar?)… hence the urgency for action now. You will also encounter an understanding of what role tipping points play in natural mechanisms and why this is the real risk and why certain dates and concentration levels and temperature points keep making the news.
As for climate porn, of course this is what’s going to be highlight by the denialist crowd in the same way Don’t Look Up is the mantra used by the denialist crowd in the movie of the same name. Not respecting what’s true is not a good way to live.
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Is there any other politicized field of science with 97% in agreement? Not even the vaccination movement hit close to that mark. It’s a red flag when any alternate opinions are shamed and muted. Whatever the case for the sake of it all, there is little to be done about it when for every one that decides to live simply are outnumbered by the 1000’s who join the foray.
What do you make of this?
“The World Economic Forum generally suggests that a globalised world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations”. You think bureaucracy is impossible now, wait til that is in play using “emergency” for the common good.
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That smoking causes cancer.
That was widely accepted by non-English speaking scientists by the early 20th Century despite the implications for the powerful tobacco industry. The industry responded by pouring millions into PR campaigns such as Edward Bernay’s ‘Torches of Freedom” stunts that equated smoking with freedom of choice and feminism. It also paid doctors to make false claims that smoking particular brands was healthy. And it supported think tanks and political cults that suggested the increasing scientific consensus against smoking was the result of conspiracies and group-think. So it took Richard Doll’s 1950s research to produce an overwhelming consensus among English speaking physicians that smoking did in fact cause cancer and at least another decade for that fact to be widely recognised by the public in places like the United States that resisted regulations against false and misleading health claims in tobacco advertisements.
Now we’ve got something similar going on with regards to greenhouse gases, climate change and the fossil fuel industry. It’s only ‘political’ because powerful vested interests choose to make it so.
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So I agree with you. What exactly needs to be done? Is anyone really serious about this? Can technology save us from technology or do we have to have a big die-off for anything to correct itself?
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If we achieve net zero atmospheric carbon emissions and climate change continues to accelerate that would be another falsification of anthropogenic climate change theory.
So how about we test it out?
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I agree and I am willing. Other family members…not so much.
As I mentioned to rawgod, A total of 61.1 billion tons of metal ores, fossil energy, and non-metallic minerals are extracted from Earth a year (2020 estimate). On top of this comes 20.5 billion tons of biomass – trees, fish and so on.
I’m already living more simply than most and I don’t see anyone willing to cut profits or hold back the next invention willingly.
Everything in every store ends up in the landfill and we’re still cranking it out. Everyone is still getting theirs before it’s too late. We’ve never had any immunity to the gadgets. What are you willing to do?
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I think I’ve been taking what individual measures I can for a while, though I’m not fully aware enough of what impact my different actions have on climate outcomes and am aware that nothing I do individually will amount to even a drop in the bucket.
Nonetheless I had a vasectomy as a childless 23 year old (after about 5 years of trying to get one) mostly for environmental reasons. Despite having a lot of appreciation for muscle cars I decided as a teenager to never own a car and rely on public transport and hitchhiking as much as possible (though I’ve owned several motorbikes). I’ve been anti-consumerist for all my life and will never go to a shop if I think I can pick up what I need from someone’s discards. When I do go shopping I think second-hand stores first. I also use and repair my clothes until they fall apart then use them as cleaning rags.
OTOH, I averaged upwards of five airline flights a year in the 80s and 90s when I didn’t fully appreciate their environmental impact and have worked for several large companies who are part of the problem.
But all of that is apropos of very little other than my own self-respect. I can’t assess it’s overall impact but am confident it’s insignificant.
More important is the activist work I’ve done to try to change how our hierarchical, exploitative, disempowering social and economic structures operate in the hope I’ll contribute to a world in which we can make real contributions to the collective wellbeing. Again, I have no idea what the ultimate impact of my efforts are or will be except to be confident they’re trivial. But I’m pretty sure no amount of individual effort or goodwill is gonna change the outcomes, no matter how many people are onboard with it. We need to change the way our institutions operate so as to build the social vehicles we’re gonna need to get us where we need to go.
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Imagine erring on the side of caution! Oh, the risks!
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Hmmm. I have a bit of a problem with this statement: To know makes science a religion.
It seems to me that Science has made it POSSIBLE to “know” — whereas religion just plays at it.
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If what you say is true than what is the point of the falsifiability principle? Nothing at all is really known. If it can’t be disproven at any time it is kicked to the curb as junk science—because nothing is TRULY understood (except climate science)
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Never heard of it … but did a Google search. Seems it was proposed by a gentlemen named Karl Popper. Also seems it is a criterion. I also noted that it’s part of the philosophy of science — “according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false. ” https://www.britannica.com/topic/criterion-of-falsifiability
I said all this to establish that I’m not qualified to address the issue to any depth. I just based my comment on your comment as related to religion and science — which I sometimes find difficult to use in the same sentence. 😄
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It doesn’t restrict creating something useful with it, but to say it is truth is inaccurate. Take E=mc2. You have observation of 3 different things we know next to nothing about and manipulate that into stuff that works, all along with barely a rudimentary knowledge of the participants in the equation.
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*Sighs deeply*.
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Yes I get that Ben. That’s the same reaction I got when I left religion.
These arguments are circling around the web, but what’s maybe is more concerning is it is beyond reproach like nothing before. With all the failed climate prophecy, shouldn’t you be relocated away from the coast by now? There is a host of failed climate predictions yet nobody cares. But somehow this time will be different, and the ‘experts’ and 16-year olds of today will suddenly be correct in their new predictions of eco-doom and eco-disaster?
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Jim, as related to some of the climate predictions you mention … how many have actually put a date on them?
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There about 50 with dates. Here’s one from 2005
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/oct/12/naturaldisasters.climatechange1
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Re: the example you provided — I read it as an “estimation” that by the “end of the decade” –no actual date is provided. Of course, as you say, there may very well be “50 with dates.”
Nevertheless, I’m wondering why this is an issue you feel needs attention? Are you denying climate change? Are you suspicious that events that have been attributed to climate change are bogus? Do you feel scientists are unnecessarily waving red flags?
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Of course the climate is changing and it appears to be “faster than before prior extinction events” but the hypocrisy part is nobody really believes it. Possibly because of waving too many red flags, but probably not. The science can dismiss failed prediction as well as any religious propagand/prohecy. Nobody believes global warming is an issue worth addressing enough to change it. Maybe that’s because nothing really can be done about it, which leads people to believe nothing has been done to create it either. That I can only guess.
Part of the problem is being able to measure things to the nth° and what seemed cyclical in the past is now a catastrophe by the numbers, which isn’t real at all.
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The only prediction is 10 million environmental refugees. And the number in reality far exceeds this. You just don’t think of refugees in this way. You think 20,000 a day at the southern border is because… you think hundreds and sometimes thousands a day in the Mediterranean is because… you think Syria and Turkey and Lebanon and Israel has nothing to do with dwindling water supplies? And I know there are significant changes in various parts of Africa increasing tensions over grazing land and fishing rights.
What is better understood today than in 2005 when this article – and it IS an article – was written is the role of increasing humidity from rising ocean temperatures. This mitigates the rate of sea level rise and transfers it into atmospheric vapor and storms (sometimes reaching extraordinary heights) and more rainfall over land, not to mitigate droughts but to inundate rainy zones. How many ‘historic’ floods have there been in Europe just this past year while other places endure historically unusual droughts?
Another factor involves the rate of total ice loss (not just surface ice) particularly from Antarctic. This too varies. If a major ice sheet breaks off and then melts, we calculate the rise in ocean level. but this is not one-to-one. Many ice sheets already take up a significant amount of volume below the sea level; melting just changes its state. Greenland, for example, is really five islands all of which is covered by a single ice sheet. Only the parts above sea level contribute to sea level rise and then only after becoming past of the entire hydrological cycle.
Also, certain formations amplify sea level rise like certain long bays where tides themselves have increased the difference between high and low elevations. But the key factor here is that low tide is much higher than it used to be.
Anyway, when you read such articles, remember that they are trying to sell them. Fear is a great sales motivator. What we should be interested in is whether the pattern is changing and if so how to mitigate its effects. Climate change is the asteroid bearing down on humanity but it’s a slow motion disaster. That has a positive and negative effect: we have time to dramatically alter the effects if we are wise enough to recognize what reality is telling us about our energy source. We are filling the finite pot – the earth and its atmosphere – with water. Running the CO2 tap full out gives us less time to reach the tipping point. Slowing that rate is a good idea if we care about that approaching tipping point. But the real concern isn’t the rate of flow into that pot: it’s recognizing the need to SHUT THE WATER OFF. That’s the ONLY real and lasting solution. Denying the pot isn’t filling – because of this quibbling prediction of where in the pot the water should be at a particular time – is not sane. It’s disinformation intended create doubt about the importance of affecting the flow of water INTO the finite pot. It is a diversionary tactic to not look up.
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Thank you. Who’s willing to shut the water off? I’m not very confident anyone out there is willing to do much about it. It will have to be done for them.
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I don’t feel like writing counter arguments to what you wrote here, others here have done that already. But I will say this: go and educate yourself on what climate change really is and how it works. Then you will have a better understanding on what scientists ‘really believe’, although it’s not a belief system. While there are some uncertainties as to the rate of climate change, there is mountains of evidence out there that it’s occurring and that it’s being influenced by human activity.
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Thanks Ben. Playing a little devils advocate here. It’s a pretty overwhelming situation and no one is really willing to scale back consumption or hold off on the gadgets while the neighbors continue to party. We’re still mining 61 billion tonnes a year and filling the holes with garbage. We have a long way to go and a short time to get there.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/05/americans-above-average-temperature-increase-climate-crisis
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*Subbing
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Jim, if not man-made, then what?
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We know that some warming is cyclical. We know that this is faster than historically normal. That is it. Who can say, except nobody believes it enough to do what is really needed to find out.
Australia has a new battery storage facility for 100megawatts. The carbon footprint is massive over the entire process of the battery. If we are the problem here, there is little chance we are the solution. Shutting it down would be our obvious chance at this point, but you know how likely that is.
I did notice a few weeks after the pandemic hit that the skies were as blue as when I was a kid. Maybe I was just lucky?
“In 2019, a report released by Durham and Lancaster University found the US military to be “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries” along with commercial airlines and shipping cargo. It would be ugly. It’s do it to ourselves or wait and have it done to us.
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Sorry Jim, but you really didn’t answer the question.
Cyclical? Has the earth altered its orbit? Is volcanic activity up?
If not man’s activities, then what else could possibly be behind it?
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Was the earth not warming before the Industrial Age? That part is cyclical, no? Since there are palm fossils in Antarctica I’m sure this is partly a cycle of sorts? No?
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Sure, and freezing over. Changes over thousands of years. That still hasn’t answered my question.
If not mans activities, what is causing the rapid increase in temperatures now?
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Well I’m pretty certain that human activity has done a lot of this damage and continue to do so. Just fly over the east or west coast and look out the window. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be another geocentric model of the 20/21 century where everyone agrees and is equally wrong. There is inherent risk where everyone believes the same way. Target fixation and all the while every solution uses the same methods to fix it that caused the problem in the first place.
What are you willing to do or do without while every one else continues to party?
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Look, I am genuinely sorry to be a pain about this, but you still haven’t answered the question, Jim.
It’s important because you’re asking people to look at a possible alternative, but you seem unwilling to identify what that alternative is. Simply saying “cyclical” is meaningless. If not mans activities, what are you suggesting explains the rapid increase in global temperatures?
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John, your always a pain about everything. 😃
I thought I acquiesced that point in the last comment. If not us, I don’t know. But we’re not looking elsewhere so how would we know when everyone already knows we’re the problem? 97% know we’re the problem, I’m not too confident we’re also the solution.
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But we’re not looking elsewhere
I think we are. We measure the earth’s rotation/orbit/proximity to the sun and moon daily. We monitor volcanic activity. The simple fact is there’s nothing else to account for the increased Co2 in the atmosphere… worse still, the methane leaking from Siberia.
To your other point, I agree. We are stubborn gluttons. Quietly, I think everyone (governments especially) has placed their bets on carbon-scrubbing technology. The problem here is its footprint is (presently) larger than the capture.
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This may be the best scientific prediction in history—“It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so—Robert Oppenheimer
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Although the actual numbers will be somewhat different, the point is what matters. And the point I’m raising here is that carbon capture does fuck all. For example, Iceland just completed an expensive (IIRC 10-15 billion dollars?) carbon scrubbing plant that sucks air through various technologies that scrubs it of CO2 and then buries the CO2. Sounds great. Operating at full capacity over 1 full year will eliminate about 1 minute of global CO2 produced every minute of every day right now. That rate is growing. So this is not a solution. It’s part of the O&G strategy to put off implementing real solutions which starts with not burning fossil fuels.
Notice that Jim is falling into the same strategy orchestrated by the O&G industry that the ‘alternative’ is always doing without, giving up, doing ‘our’ part to ‘reduce’ the ‘carbon footprint’. It’s bullshit from top to bottom. And people wrap up some sense of virtue with not eating ‘carbon intensive’ foods, demanding expensive publicly funded recycling shit, turning off ‘gadgets’, and so on. It’s a dream result of one of the most successful strategic disinformation campaigns ever launched. And people think THEY are responsible and should feel guilty and depressed participating in living.
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Your just willing to trade a talking point for another, more popular trend. You’re still digging holes and pulling out raw materials.
“Global conservation efforts are often naive to the threats posed by significant growth in renewable energies. Production infrastructure (e.g. for wind and solar farms) has a significant spatial footprint16 and other environmental risks17, but potentially more extensive are the direct and indirect consequences of associated mining activities”.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s not Jims bullshit buy-in of the O&G. Your trading corn oil for flaxseed and calling it improvement. Conservation is probably our only ticket out, not new and improved (and destructive) technologies that continue to dig deeper holes and simultaneously expand surface impact. You’re dreaming.
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Sorry Jim: I thought we were talking about human caused rapid climate change. I didn’t realize we couldn’t address this unless and until all other environmental issues were addressed.
Okay. Let’s start with the very first requirement: the political, social, and cultural independence and respect for universal human rights for women.
Once you’ve got that in place, we can begin to address all the other problems. When you’ve accomplished that, let me know so we can get back to addressing the climate change problem.
You see what you’ve done here? By pretending we have to first address other stuff, you are in effect serving only one interest here: the business-as-usual O&G interests. I don’t think that’s a wise approach if one is honestly concerned with becoming part of the solution.
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Fossils in Antarctica are actually not really evidence of climate change, but rather of plate tectonics.
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If you’re looking this way for solutions you’re definitely looking in the wrong direction.
Australia has some major environmental advantages when it comes to generating green power – especially solar – but we’ve got a crippling disadvantage in that we’ve got a colonial economy based on unsustainable primary extraction and the corporations making mega profits from sit have both major political parties in their pockets.
The Hornsdale Power Reserve is currently over 150MWh, but it’s just a techno-boondoggle gifted to us by the richest clown on the planet as a PR exercise. Australian umped hydro power represents several orders of magnitude more grid storage than battery arrays (1-200 GWh per site) at a much lower environmental impact per GWh, but the government owned Snowy Hydro – which has a near monopoly on suitable sites – is being funded to invest in gas powered generators instead, a policy that has bipartisan support from our fossil fuel bankrolled political parties.
So viable large scale green infrastructure projects are subject to bipartisan veto while dead end fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure receive taxpayer funded subsidies and guarantees for what are set to be stranded assets in little more than a decade. I live a few kilometres from the biggest coal exporting port in the world and I can tell you there’s no plan to reduce the number of heavily laden miles-long coal trains that pass fifty metres from where I live every day. Or even to ditch their filthy, poorly maintained diesel locomotives in favour of electric drive-trains.
And that’s why we’re really fucked. All over the world the real political power is disproportionately in the hands of fossil fuel industries. They’ve been driving imperialist wars for over half a century and are now driving the whole biosphere off a cliff. We knew the Iraq war was about oil, but couldn’t stop it. We knew the Afghanistan debacle was about the TAPI pipeline, but couldn’t stop it. We know that most Islamic terrorism is driven by Western oil interests – whether it’s invading Arab homelands or installing terrorist supporting Salafist despots in oil rich allied countries – but we can’t stop it. Does anyone really believe we can stop the burning of fossil fuels in time to avert a civilisation ending disaster?
But I for one will keep protesting. I can’t save the planet but I might salvage some self-respect.
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Hi Jim! Good to see you. I know it’s been awhile. I don’t get on WordPress a lot. I hope you and your family are doing well.
There seems to be a good deal of confusion about Climate Change so since I have expertise in this subject hopefully I can provide some useful information.
First scientist don’t try to always falsify their premises. The scientific method is not about falsifying, but rather building an explanation. You have a hypothesis, you test. If it fails you adjust your hypothesis or maybe your methodology. If you reach a conclusion that supports your hypothesis, a scientist is usually satisfied. Of course this should be repeatable independently. Anthropogenic Global Warming has probably the largest set of independently researched evidence in the history of science. Evidence of rapid climate change is being seen all over the world.
When a conclusion is reached, you also have a new premise for a new problem. So this is the building part. Because if you proved A right, and I assume A is right when I try to solve problem B, but I can’t solve problem B then it’s quite possible than our of assumption of A being true is wrong and we take a look at A to see the applicability of it to other problems. But if A leads to B and B leads to C, we keep going until we get to something that doesn’t really make sense and then we have to reevaluate our assumptions.
For example if our hypothesis our temperature is going up quickly, and we look at the data and find that it is true. Then When can use that conclusion to then say, well if the temperature is going up, ice should be melting at a faster rate. If ice is not melting at a faster rate, then we would question our previous conclusion. But if ice is melting at a faster rate (and it is) then that says something about the truth of our initial premise. This plays also into the predictability of a theory. How well can we predict what we’ll find based on what we already know through the scientific method.
Climate change is absolutely falsifiable as was mentioned above. What you seem to not be aware is how rigorously we have looked to understand natural cycles. that cause the climate to change and how very different what we are seeing now compares to it. I strongly recommend reading An Introduction to Modern Climate Change by Andrew Dessler. There is some equations here are there but it is explained and written for I think a regular person who some scientific knowledge. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Climate-Change-Dessler/dp/1107480671
Should new information be found an climate cycle we didn’t previously understand, or some new information about the carbon cycle, or the sun, this might explain the warming. Thus far after rigorously studying all of these things, the only explanation for the warming is the increased CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuels. We know the carbon is from fossil fuels for a variety of reasons, but one of the more compelling pieces of evidence is the ratio of carbon 13 ro Carbon 12. Carbon 12 is natural carbon, and Carbon 13 is a heavier isotope. From ice data we know this ratio stayed very constant for as far back as the record goes (on the order of millions of years) then around the industrial revolution the amount of natural carbon in the air increased. This is because plants don’t take in heavy carbon as easily. Fossil fuels which are made of ancient plant material is very low in the carbon isotope. Burning fossil fuels therefore puts more Carbon 12 into the atmosphere.
I noticed above you have conflated pollution with greenhouse gas emissions. First of all, it’s not clear that global pollution has decreased. Certainly in the U.S. we have made great strides but the Beijing Olympics not long ago, it was pretty clear that in some places pollution is quite strong. And as many developing country become more industrialize they are going to go the same path we did and start dirty, which keeps pollution levels high. You can read more about the health effects of pollution and how it’s still very real problem.
In connection to climate change the main goal of the Paris Accord is to help support developing countries build cleaner energy infrastructure so they don’t start the way we do.
While factories and cars do release carbon dioxide and pollution, unlike the particulate matter that is the pollution we see, carbon dioxide remains a gas and is invisible to the naked eye. So while factories have made great efforts to reduce particulate matter that causes direct short term health issues (https://ourworldindata.org/air-pollution) that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. So it’s important to note that pollution isn’t the same carbon dioxide or any other greenhouse gas.
One of the things that was interesting to me was to see whether or not these predictions have come true as many people claim the predictions have not. Really the main source to trust accurately compiling this information is the International Panel on Climate Change. They have recently put out the 6th Assessment on Climate. One of the things I did was go back to the first one. You know what I found? Prediction after prediction came true. Of course predictions have ranges. In most cases the prediction was in the middle of these ranges which is what one would expect. What often happens though is somebody in the press, or perhaps a scientists who likes hypotheticals, or most likely someone in a misinformation campaign will take the upper end of a prediction and talk about what could happen if that upper end came to fruition. This can be further distorted by a journalist who lacks the requisite expertise and things get distorted. So if you look at the actual science and the predictions they’ve made, they’ve come true.
If you want to know Las Vegas still grows it is simply because we live in a country that isn’t taking it seriously. We have an entire party who won’t even sit down at the table to discussion solutions. They should. Las Vegas should stop growing. So should Phoenix. We should be doing a lot of things that we aren’t. It’s why as someone who understands the science I am very concerned about life on this planet.
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Nice to see you too Swarn. These are some arguments I’ve seen lately and this is the best place to get attacked for presenting them. Just to set the record straight, I never get solid explanations for anything by posting the answers. Your comment here as well as others is a fine example of what I was hoping for without the hate. Many non-choir members participate here as well.
I really don’t think anyone cares enough to change. We are such a part of the problem I don’t think we’ll agree on a solution until people start dying off. And that’s a late sign, like cancer. Once you realize you’re sick it’s pretty late in the game.
I hope you are well my friend. Thanks for that and your points are duly noted.
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I don’t think it’s true that no one cares to change, because when you look at countries like Sweden the attitude is very different. Ultimately we are a social species that defaults to hierarchies much of the time. Had climate change science been supported by both parties, I think we’d be seeing a lot more care from the public as well. There is a great book called “Merchants of Doubt” which talks a lot about the misinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry and of course they spent most of their energy presenting these argument in countries that are some of the big CO2 producers.
But I think it’s also the case that while we may have learned to be charitable to people on another side of the country or even the other side of the world, caring about people 100 years from now is a much harder leap for our human brains to make. Both are compassion for people we don’t know. One involves compassion for someone who exists now and can be helped. The other is someone who is very likely to exist, but doesn’t exist now. But we could also help them if we wanted to.
So when you add misinformation, the general difficulty in understanding a complex issue and how it involves extending our compassion over time rather than over space, and a failure of leadership to follow the expertise given to them by climate scientists we are in a position today that we needn’t be in.
Also wanted to clarify as I don’t think I said it explicitly before. Falsification is something that comes about, but not intentionally trying to prove the opposite, but by relying on previous research to form new hypotheses and test. When new hypotheses based on old information fail to be proven, then it is likely that the old information is wrong or at least true in only a certain subset of cases. For instance Newton’s Laws for were found later to not be applicable on a reference frame that is in motion. So a certain set of new hypotheses couldn’t be verified with the assumption of truth of Newton’s Laws of motion. It didn’t falsify Newton’s Laws it simply limited their applicability to certain problems. Sometimes new information doesn’t falsify old ideas just says that there is a broader overarching law at work here, that incorporates Newton’s Laws.
Finally…I am sorry…yesterdays was so long I forgot a few things. LOL
You said:
“Ask any scientist if climate change is man made, what should be the non-pressurized, non-politicized correct response “I don’t know””
This should not be the response. I don’t know is only the answer to the question, when you actually don’t know either way, because there is no evidence, little evidence, or conflicting evidence. In the face of overwhelming evidence one can be fairly certain. Are they 100% certain? I don’t think you will find any scientific paper that claims 100% certainty on anything. In fact that is guaranteed to be flagged in the peer review process. It is absolutely valid to say, “Based on the overwhelming evidence that his been collected, and our knowledge of physics, we can say with a high degree of confidence that the climate is rapidly changing and that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are the cause.” That is absolutely the scientific answer that a scientist with the expertise in the area should give.
Again gravity is also a theory. If you ask me…”When you drop an object is it going to hit the ground?” My answer absolutely shouldn’t be “I don’t know.” Because I do know with a high degree of certainty. One should say “Based on the known laws that govern the gravitational force, I can say with a high degree of certainty that this object will hit the ground.”
Not saying “I don’t know” in no way shuts the door to authentic scientific inquiry.
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I think plenty of people care enough to change. Unfortunately not enough of them know what needs changing or how to do it. But worse than that is it’s not an issue of individual intent – even when very large numbers of individuals are involved.
There are probably loads of people in oil companies, from board members, CEOs, geologists and engineers down to cleaners and canteen staff, who are very concerned about the futures of their kids and grandkids and would like to see change. Some are probably diligent energy savers and recyclers, others may make personal donations to environmental causes and politicians. But with regards to making the changes needed to reverse the problems the company is contributing to most probably feel their hands are tied.
Company executives are compelled by law to seek to maximise shareholder value, not address environmental issues. Engineers must contribute to corporate projects – regardless of their climate impact – or risk having to explain to their families why they’re out of work and unemployable in their chosen field. Board members know that if they make pro-environment decisions that impair their company’s competitiveness they will lose market share to rivals with more ruthless boards. The emergent ethics of the institution may be a very long way from the concerns and morality of those who participate in it. The same dynamic applies to political parties, PR companies and think tanks that facilitate such corporate behaviour.
Putting the onus for change upon individuals is misguided. What’s needed is fundamental change to the environments in which our institutions operate.
We’re not going to save the planet by putting hard plastics in the recycling bin. It’s infinite growth model, hyper-competitive economic systems that need to be binned and it’s gotta happen real soon. But it won’t.
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Climate change is not a fact. In fact, the very label “climate change” makes a mockery of anyone who would believe it; since change is what climate does by nature. Thus your comment is leftist political propaganda, not science.
Another fact is that atmospheric CO2 content is minuscule (far less than 1%). Therefore if climate change were to exist, it would not be caused atmospheric CO2. Further, CO2 is plant food. Therefore, Earth’s ecosystem regulates atmospheric CO2. The more CO2, the more plant life.
In conclusion, for those who have swallowed the absurd climate change myth, just go out and plant a tree.
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It’s good to know some things never change. Your being wrong about everything being one of them. You always speak authoritatively about things you know nothing about it.
This is my area of expertise and you know zero about how the climate works. It’s not even bringing a knife to a gunfight, more like a tall stalk of grass.
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Swarn, Your claim of expertise is fatuous. The entire West has been victimized by experts for the last 2 years of COVID. You are an expert in leftist propaganda. That is not science.
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Yeah, Swarn, you ain’t no stinkin’ expert and SOM knows what he’s talking about because he is an expert at knowing what constitutes expertise… aka anything that he believes is the case. So there. Case closed. Mic drop.
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That co2 argument is straight out of rush Limbaugh from several years back.
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It’s a trope as old as… well, for young earth creationists… when man roamed the plains with and on dinosaurs.
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And they’re still stepping in it right up to their eyeballs.
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Yup.. but sad, too.
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Ah Rush, finally practicing what he preaches. Up the chimney and at one with greenhouse gases.
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Given that you seem to know nothing about science, your opinion on what is and what isn’t science means very little.
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Whaddya mean Swarn?
Science is like any other branch of knowledge. The less you know the more certain you can be.
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I thought you were going to sign that “Dunning-Kruger.”
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Don’t get me started on Dunning and Kruger.
I reckon the only convincing argument for the Dunning-Kruger effect they made was themselves.
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I guess that makes him the expert. 😂😂
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People want profits, not a change that helps. Planned obsolescence, maybe?
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If that were true – that people want profits, not change – then the oil and gas industry’s campaign about reducing one’s individual ‘carbon footprint’ wouldn’t be so prevalent and popular to allow business-as-usual. I think what people want are legitimate and cheaper alternatives where energy is needed that are as robust and reliable as fossil fuels. It is happening – but very slowly compared to what is needed to shut off that CO2 tap. I think people will choose (and are choosing) alternatives (just look at the rise of EVs) but the main point is that what is needed is systemic change in how that energy is produced at source. And that requires government support and a level playing field to compete. Add in economic bonuses (like rural communities that gain an added source of revenue) and the shift will gain momentum seamlessly. So using energy isn’t the problem (which is what lies at the heart of the ‘carbon footprint’ manipulative campaign); the problem is the kind of energy being used. And there’s WAY more profit for clean energy than O&G. That’s why I think claiming ‘profits’ as a if a problem to be overcome rather than a bonus waiting to be realized is exactly the wrong approach that will make the switching over so much more difficult.
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In Australia you can select what energy you pay for on your bill. Coal is cheaper (bottom line), but you can tick the box and pay a few bucks more each month for the renewable options. Each bill also shows your greenhouse footprint now as opposed to the year before, and how you’re doing in comparison to other sin your area.
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And the reason it’s cheaper is because we’re already paying for it in government subsidies. And the reason we’re doing that is because coal companies are paying to get their patsies re-elected, which we’re also subsidising.
So while the fossil fuel company’s bottom lines get fatter an increasing number of Australians are struggling to make ends meet and so are having to forgo the ‘luxury’ of supporting renewable energy, even though it’s already much cheaper per MWh to produce. And that’s before you start counting externalised costs to the environment and public health.
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Regardless, the fossil fuel industry and ally governments can tell when a very large portion of the populace is too tired and worried about feeding/housing themselves or their family, and the virus-variant damage still being left in COVID-19’s wake — all while on insufficient income — to criticize them for whatever environmental damage their policies cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable. [In fact, until early last October, I had not heard Greta’s name in the mainstream corporate news-media since COVID-19 hit the world.]
I see collective human existence as still essentially analogous to a cafeteria lineup consisting of diversely societally represented people, all adamantly arguing over which identifiable person should be at the front and, conversely, at the back of the line. Many of them further fight over to whom amongst them should go the last piece of quality pie and how much they should have to pay for it; all the while the interstellar spaceship on which they are all permanently confined, owned/co-opted/operated by (besides the wealthiest passengers) the fossil fuel industry, is on fire and toxifying at locations not normally investigated thus noticed.
In a nutshell, as a species we can be so heavily preoccupied with our own individual little worlds, however overwhelming to us, that we will miss the biggest of crucial pictures.
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I agree. Most are so preoccupied staying alive they don’t even have time to investigate their own beliefs, speaking of cafeterias.
But even if we all came together, what will stop this spaceship from becoming a fireball, and who’s willing to live with less, while the neighbors party on…?
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Here’s a suggestion, Jim: check out r/collapse, and then report back to the internets. Humanity is going to ride its overshoot to the fireball stage, as the posters and lurkers there confirm day after day.
It may not be Venus by Tuesday forcing us to become cannibals (r/collapse sarcastic meme No. 1), but it’s acomin’. No one there is going to take issue with your precise summation: “who’s willing to live with less, while the neighbors party on?”
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I think we suffer greatly from target fixation. The more apocalyptic we focus the greater the chance it will happen.
“It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so—Robert Oppenheimer
John just mentioned technology devices that can eat up the carbon that produce (for now) more carbon than they eat. But that is what we do, fix thinks by making them worse.
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Not a bad quote from Oppenheimer, but then he sent humanity headlong into its nuclear nightmare, so what “chance” was the soon-to-be-disgraced physicist alluding to?
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He’s referring to wu wei—by leaving things alone and seeing what happens we likely have a better chance at everything than meddling.
But I have to assume a little bit here that even he, did not comprehend how much worse we’d make it in the next 50 years. You realize on average that since Jefferson was president we’ve build a dam a day on americas rivers and streams? Literally choking the planet of any natural course of things. Many of the great River basins are at a tipping point too in the quest for more energy. Even with zero emissions the planet will still be sick. Nothing is allowed to run its course, not even natural death. It’s systemic from head to tail.
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Makes sense though. Homo sapiens seems to be a self-basting life-form.
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Yes. And, meantime, global mass-addiction to fossil fuel products undoubtedly helps keep the average consumer quiet about the planet’s greatest polluter, lest they feel and/or be publicly deemed hypocritical.
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Not to mention helping to fund the PR and lobbying efforts of fossil fuel companies trying to maintain business as usual under a thin greenwash.
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Canada’s mainstream print news-media conglomerate Postmedia — which, except for The Toronto Star, owns Canada’s major print publications — is on record allying itself with not only the planet’s second most polluting forms of carbon-based “energy”, but also THE MOST polluting/dirtiest of crudes — bitumen.
[“Mair on Media’s ‘Unholiest of Alliances’ With Energy Industry”, Nov.14 2017, TheTyee.ca] https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/11/14/mair-media-unholiest-alliances
During a presentation it was stated, among other things, that: “Postmedia and CAPP [Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers] will bring energy to the forefront of our national conversation. Together, we will engage executives, the business community and the Canadian public to underscore the ways in which the energy sector powers Canada.”
A few years ago, Postmedia also had acquired a lobbying firm with close ties to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in order to participate in his government’s $30 million PR “war room” in promoting the interests of the fossil fuel industry in Canada. Furthermore, in late May, Postmedia refused to run paid ads by Leadnow, a social and environmental justice organization, that expose the Royal Bank of Canada as the largest financer of fossil fuel extraction in Canada.
Really, should the promotion of massive fossil fuel extraction, even Canada’s own, be a partisan position for any newspaper giant to take, especially considering fossil fuel’s immense role in manmade global warming thus climate change? And, at least in this case, whatever happened to the honorable journalistic role of ‘afflicting the comfortable’ (which went along with ‘comforting the afflicted’), especially one of such environmental monstrosity?
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Dunno if they’ve ever been more than empty slogans, but they’re sure pretty vacuous now.
Even where there’s no direct overlap in ownership between media and fossil fuel corporations the former is typically highly dependent on the latter (or its subsidiaries) for advertising revenue.
But probably even more significant is how the huge cuts in journalism budgets in recent decades has resulted in ubiquitous ‘churnalism’, in which press releases by corporations, think tanks and government departments are essentially paraphrased into copy with little or no fact checking or independent analysis. That includes organisations owned or funded by fossil fuel companies but also political and government groups strongly influenced by them.
Since WWII US hegemony has been largely reliant on controlling the movement of fossil fuels – particularly oil but increasingly gas – around the world. It’s been the main driving force behind most US wars since the 1980s and key to the economic and diplomatic leverage it exerts over both nominal friends and foes. The current manufactured crisis in the Ukraine is more about interfering with Russian gas supplies to Europe than any real concerns about the Russian military.
If the world shifts significantly to renewables – which are inherently more decentralised than fossil fuel infrastructure – it will mean a significant decrease in both US influence and the rationale underpinning its gigantic military-industrial budget.
There are many interlocking powerful interests with a stake in the fossil fuel industry and they and the corporate media have large stakes in each other.
Those who control the corporate media are the comfortable. It would be very naive to imagine they’d seriously afflict themselves.
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I forgot to mention that as well as traditional advertising and ‘churnalism’, the corporate media bottom line is increasingly dependent on native advertising (often by fossil fuel and arms companies) masquerading as journalism. This is particularly the case in liberal media outlets which pride themselves on a thin facade of editorial independence from their owners.
This Intercept piece about the greenwashing of natural gas in the Washington Post illustrates how it works.
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Your last sentence sums things up perfectly and accurately. And I tend to think humans will ultimately pay for their “individualism.”
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I can’t believe you’re throwing fuel on the debate about CC’s reality. Every question mark only serves to validate procrastination in cleaning up our act. I’ll be blunt, I don’t give a sh*t about CC’s reality or not. Humanity is over-running this planet, using up resources and mindlessly polluting land, sea and air. Even if nature can balance our reckless indulgences surely we need to clean up our acts rather spend another decade in the revolving door of debate over whether or not science is right!
Come on, the air is polluted with noxious gases that we are creating. The ocean is a floating garbage dump. The land is being deforested and fracked. Who cares if science has the dates wrong or even the information wrong. What is verifiable is our filthy habits and mindless greed!
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That was gonna be something like what I was going to say, only you said it first, so thank you.
Meanwhile, almost no one has responded to the “United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)” part of this post. I am not qualified to do so, but I really doubt the UN is trying to use climate change as a tool to reach those goals. The goals themselves “seem to be altruistic,” but that has never stopped greedy corporationss from using good ideas to serve their own interests. They do that all the time.
I think Swarn already said something like this, but stupid people do not listen to true prophets (like climate change scientists) if those prophets say things they don’t want to hear. A little true story for you: in the early 60s, Premier Duff listened to scientists and had the Winnipeg Floodway built to divert floodwaters around WInnipeg to stop the annual spring floods from causing major destruction over and over. It took till 1997 before its real worth was learned, but that year Winnipeg had what they called “The Flood of the Century!” Guess what happened after that. Winnipeg was expanding, and developers decided since there would no more such floods for another hundred years, and they convinced the city to let them build new communities on the sidewalls of the Floodway. After all, it was prime property going to waste. By the mid 2010s there was so much development, when the next big flood came along the homeowners did not want the floodgates opened to help the citizens of Winnipeg because it would destroy their expensive homes. I’ll let you guess who won that battle. The city was devastated in the low-lying areas along the Red River because stupid people built where houses were never intended to exist.
I don’t think people disbelieve in climate change, they just refuse to believe it will affect them! So they stay where they are. And that’s my four cents worth on this debate.
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Well said Wendy. Nobody is willing to do what will need to be undone. Can we mitigate it and how? Is anyone willing to turn off the machines? Either we initiate our own discomfort or it will do it for us.
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There are very real solutions. But it has to start by admitting there is a very real problem. That’s the hurdle the Merchants of Doubt have erected and what so many well-intentioned people fail to get over. Your post here is a perfect example.
Solutions exist. It just takes political will to ramp up to the required level. Let economy do the rest. And it will. Just look at the growth of wind/solar energy in, of all places, the heartland of oil country: Texas. During the last cold snap, these accounted for about 30% of the electrical grid supply. And it’s in its infancy. Look at the retooling going on in Michigan and Ohio for the auto industry. Literally thousands of new high paying jobs bringing life back to the ‘rust belt’. Look at the security of local energy production. Talk to the assessors of rural properties in Michigan (okay, I’m most familiar with this neck of the woods so I have lots of examples). Talk to local farmers. Talk to municipal politicians benefiting from infusions of revenue to build better roads, schools, libraries, basic infrastructure. Look at the new investments by and 50 year plans of northwestern utility companies. It ain’t oil and gas. It’s renewables. It’s batteries. It’s energy storage. It’s using old mines. It’s new investment. It’s more jobs. It’s high pay. It’s local economy driving this change while various levels of government pretend their hands are tied by economics and tax revolts! It’s disconnected from the real world.
And none of it is achieved by changing legislation around light bulbs or wearing recycled clothing or eating more leafy vegetable. But the bees sure love new fields of clover under rows of elevated solar panels and the local ground absorbs and holds far more moisture and recharges the depleted water tables that those same farmers can use as irrigation. The reclaimed land from advancing desertification in China with the installation of massive solar panel farms in less than a decade can easily be seen from space altering terrain the size of Connecticut from brown and dry to green and luscious. So soil and wind erosion in the valleys have declined significantly while food yield per acre has skyrocketed.
We don’t need massive social change here or bottomless pessimism. We need pragmatic solutions that work at the local level by economy to kick start the renewable revolution. And it has to start with recognizing what the real problem is: burning fossil fuels. It’s NOT what the burning of fossil fuels allows that is somehow ‘bad’ (like transportation or home heating and cooling); it’s what effects the burning of fossil fuels does to the world. The solution is to stop burning fossil fuels. And that means we have to replace this energy source with another. And that is eminently doable. And the sooner is better than later because the change to climate is increasing in rate. That’s not good. And the economic impact – not to suggest the human cost is of any less consideration – from this changing climate in damage to property alone is now in the trillions every year. We can’t afford NOT to switch. We just need to convince more people to look up and demand our politicians look away from the the oil and gas balance sheet and join us making the future arrive sooner than later.
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The real cost of fracking has yet to break into public consciousness. The outrage will be unbelievable.
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Alberta is a prime example. It is a red neck province, with a red neck-elected government. They are pouring millions of dollars into trying to save their fracking cash cow, while the oil and gas companies are taking their huge profits elsewhere these days. We now have over 90,000 abandoned wells across the province, without enough money in the “dismantling abandoned wells” fund to take down maybe 1000 of them. Very poor planning. Farmers who used to get rich on the oil wells on their property are crying because the crops around them are failing. Nature gives, and nature takes away. The government is starting to realize the need for renewable resources, but they won’t even try to admit their obvious mistakes. We the People were told they had shut down the open-pit coal mines, only to learn they were still pulling millions of tons of it out of mines in places the public is not supposed to go to. Fossil fuels all, with no care about the cost to the climate.
When a government has to lie to its own people, you would think the people would rebel. But our resident red necks don’t care. They want the money that is in their hands, rather than the more money that is hiding in the the renewable resources future. The world be damned!
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There over a million such abandoned wells because the ‘industry’ was never profitable! And mineral rights are not owned by landowners, so although owners can receive money for having these extracted from their land, they have no say over allowing it. It is set up this way by legislation and it is a multinational policy carried out throughout the world. Again, it’s not any one person’s ‘fault’ this has gone on but a systemic issue. The constraints, therefore, have to be imposed systemically. Probably the most effective means for doing so is by legal primacy, where this kind of legislation has primacy over that kind of legislation. As far as fracking goes, that ship has sailed and the cost of capping literally millions of leaking wells and dealing with the effects of highly polluted ground water will be assumed by the public. It will cost trillions.
In Canada (I know you will be well aware of these examples, rawgod), we have a couple of examples of even small scale leakage: Iqaluit (pronounced i-cal-oo-wheat for those unfamiliar with the name) and the southwestern Ontario town of Wheatley. Iqaluit is dealing with petroleum in the city’s drinking water and cannot locate the source a year into the problem (so water has to be supplied) and Wheatley keeps enjoying random explosions and so people have been forced to evacuate… again, for the past year. Fun times. Buy a house, own a property, pay taxes, and then be told you have to leave because these explosions are actually dangerous (as if the crater down the block where Frank used to live wasn’t a pretty good hint that (Houston…) we have a problem. And we haven’t even begun to experience the effects from massive groundwater pollution across much of the northern and midwestern states caused directly by fracking injection practices. So the well heads are actually the least of the problem… even though just the uncapped or rusted out well heads themselves are a HUGE problem. But hey, alternative energy like wind turbines causes cancer, emits dangerous sound rays that only conspiracy believers seem to be subject to, and kills birds, donchaknow. And the wind, it doesn’t always blow… so do we really want to make Granny having to peddle the stationary bike to generate enough electricity to make it to the end of The Price Is Right?
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In a my years of watching wind turbines while living in southern Alberta, where there are quite a few “wind farms,” I think I only saw the turbines still once.
I was actually thinking of the Trump-dead birds situation while writing my previous reply, but decided against it as Trump didn’t need any more publicity from me. Now I’ve had to say two things about him in the past half hour (the first was a comment on today’s Claytoonz post). It”s going to be a horrible day.
But, yeah, the situation is a total mess. So far I have not heard about any fracking-caused explosions in Alberta, but given the political mood in the province, I doubt the UCP (the ruling United Conservative Party) and it’s mini-Trump leader (that”s three mentions now) would let such events be public news if they are happening. Nothing negative can be said about gas&oil&coal in this province without censure of some kind.
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Wow! Great post. I couldn’t agree more.
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Re “Ask any scientist if climate change is man made, what should be the non-pressurized, non-politicized correct response “I don’t know”—because they don’t.”
If you asked the question, is climate change–in the whole or in part–man made . . . ” then you would receive a large number of yeses because I think the evidence strongly indicates that part of the climate change currently occurring is man-made.
Asking, just any “scientist” off the street this question and their opinions are no better than ordinary citizen’s opinions because climate change is outside of their field of expertise, so “How would they know?” But pick a scientist on the outside, say me, who looks at the “97% of climate scientists statement . . . ” noting the caveats built into it and then considers that had the equivalent occurred in my field, chemistry, I would consider it a “lock” or a very, very, very probable provisional conclusion.
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Well considering the amount of blowback I’ve gotten from this post I must realize this argument isn’t very valid. I’m ok to change that as the smarter than me people have clarified very well.
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Wow, hot topic!😄
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Here’s an article describing the actual report by Exxon scientists about the rise between CO2 and global temperature rise… from 1982. The ‘science’ is not in question; the causal effects from burning carbon in its various forms have long been known.
Now, the ongoing disinformation campaign paid for by the O&G industry is aimed at convincing people that there’s some doubt about this causal link but, if there is, then it’s all the fault of those who USE the energy produced from it. Look how bad people are!
How’s that disinformation campaign working out? Who is promoting and spreading it? (How to reduce one’s carbon footprint will produce about 65 million hits on a quick Google search.) The O&G industry is having a mighty deep chuckle over just how successful this disinformation campaign has been; it’s working like a dream! And it’s got legs! They teach this stuff to kids! And. get this – the industry doesn’t even have to pay most people to spread it! (And so meaningful and necessary change at the production end that requires enforced regulation to move away from business-as-usual is put off for almost half a century. Now THAT,/i> is a campaign for the ages!)
Yup, we’re all such bad people donchaknow and so it’s all our fault we use fossil fuels. We’re the problem. Who cares there’s almost no significant or competitive alternative (especially against the multibillion dollar yearly public subsidy for oil and gas and coal extraction, transportation, distribution, and investment? Talk about a cash cow…)
Oh, and here’s a good one: Let’s pretend scaled up renewable energy has too big of a carbon footprint! People will swallow that one hook, line, and sinker! Seriously! Just watch!
My goodness, but the chuckles for the O&G industry must be a full on belly laugh with tears rolling down their faces by now as they count their cash.
People are bad? Umm… people are incredibly gullible BECAUSE we’re taught as children to be ever-so-willing to assume the mantle of guilt being alive and having to consume. It’s just another version of believing in Original Sin… and we know THAT one has legs, too. People LOVE feeling unworthy. And so it’s actually not much of a hard sell to get people to use misinformation to support what they presume are their righteous shamed-based beliefs, that’s for sure. After all, everything would be SO much better without any people at all, donchaknow. So let’s gather the kids, have a kumbaya circle and bang our drums, and lament our sin of being alive and requiring energy to do so together. We’ll call it ‘environmentalism’. Someone should go fire up the gas barbeque and prepare it for the vegee burgers. I’ll grab the alfalfa sprouts out of the plastic container.
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Interesting article and comment. I actually see the human deprecation a lot among atheists, yet on the flip side the children of god are just as dangerous for there is no accountability. After all, Jesus evidently can cool the earth back down to Edenic levels.
Restructuring the way money is made
Is going to be the key.
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The climate changes a lot where I live, but we just call it “the weather” and “seasonal changes”. Sometimes the weather “experts” give an accurate forecast — sometimes, but usually not.
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Can you stop it from changing?
I noticed the weather app just has a sliding prediction based on what’s happening outside. They are right almost always. How you measure is the key to success.
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Can I stop it from changing? Of course not. To think otherwise would be hubris.
As for forecasting accuracy, AccuWeather predicted >57% chance we’d receive over 2-4 inches (5-10 cm) of snow this morning before I went to bed last night, but when I got up this morning, it had changed to 52% <2" (5 cm). The most amusing moments though, are when they say it is currently sunny outside when a quick peak out the window reveals it's overcast and raining — or vice-versa.
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*peek
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A Peek at the peak can pique
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From the NYT about the psychological cost (Me: Dr. Doherty referenced below is a psychologist who deals with patients who are having trouble in life from climate-related worries) from climate change relevant to this thread:
“Dr. Doherty recalled the conversation as “cathartic in a basic way.” It was not unusual, in his practice; many clients harbor dark fears about the future and have no way to express them. “It is a terrible place to be,” he said. (Me: the article references a 10K 10 country attitude and outlook survey of those 16-25 years of age.)
A big part of his practice is helping people manage guilt over consumption: He takes a critical view of the notion of a climate footprint, a construct he says was created by corporations in order to shift the burden to individuals.
He uses elements of cognitive behavioral therapy, like training clients to manage their news intake and look critically at their assumptions.
He also draws on logotherapy, or existential therapy, a field founded by Viktor E. Frankl, who survived German concentration camps and then wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which described how prisoners in Auschwitz were able to live fulfilling lives. (Me: why understanding meaning comes from within and not from without is a very important mental health foundation.)
“I joke, you know it’s bad when you’ve got to bring out the Viktor Frankl,” he said. “But it’s true. It is exactly right. It is of that scale. It is that consolation: that ultimately I make meaning, even in a meaningless world.” (Source
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. . . in Peking.
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Deaths from weather-related events have declined dramatically in the past century. There is no climate emergency.
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Ed Sheeran is still in the top 100 Billboard Chart. There is no climate emergency.
The decline in the rate by which people die globally and directly from extreme weather events (which is where this stat – a 95+% reduction – comes from) is just as relevant to the rapidly approaching limit on keeping warming to 1.5C (which is what defines the climate ’emergency’ in that we are currently headed towards 3.5-4.5C by 2100 that will fundamentally change what life on earth looks like) as is Ed’s record sales… as in not at all related. Many mitigating factors of modernity play a very significant role in that death rate. But that’s a time-limited offer.
Prediction: as more and more infrastructure fails to protect more and more people from ever-rising temperatures and the very serious consequences this causes, we will see a rise in this number… if the data can be captured. That’s not easy to do.
For example, hundreds of people in BC died with the 2021 atmospheric river that caused the town of Lytton to reach almost 50C for several days. Not directly, of course, because these were already vulnerable people by age and condition often without timely access to air conditioning and proper hydration living elsewhere along this river of hot air. Nor does the fact that the town burnt down and killed 2 people count because it wasn’t the right kind of heat, you see. It was ‘just’ another forest fire. But what role did this anomaly play and how exactly did climate change factor into it?
People die all the time and so to directly link each death with a specific climate change effect is really hard to capture. Does it count if a brain eating water bug kills someone living 100 miles farther north than the last case? 5 miles? 10 yards? Does it count if nations war over water access that is blamed for crop failures yet a person fleeing the conflict drowns trying to get across, say, the Mediterranean? Is that ’caused’ directly by climate change? Is it an economic or climate related death when a person in Texas can’t afford electricity during a cold snap that froze natural gas lines and dies? How did climate change directly kill that person? Well, it didn’t. But climate change had everything to do with all of these examples.
There are so many connected issues with the rapidly closing window of opportunity to mitigate rising temperatures at the source (meaning the burning of fossil fuels for energy) that to deny the emergency descriptor is grossly irresponsible to the extent it is identical to head-in-the-sand climate change denialism. Just because climate change is a unidirectional slow moving disaster that hasn’t killed enough people directly YET doesn’t mean it is any less a human-caused disaster we really should avoid (because we can). And to assume only the rate of direct deaths yesterday indicate the scope of the looming disaster coming tomorrow is a rationalized excuse to deny that that rate is easily predictable to reverse course and rise significantly in the future.
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The majority of people tend to live in the “now.” To actually see how their immediate actions will– and do– affect future climate changes is simply beyond their comprehension. The people who will truly feel the effects of our actions and/or non-actions will be our children and grandchildren, although there are some places in the world where the evidence is on display TODAY.
But it’s human nature to deny things until is “hits home.”
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Don’t I know it. Just like atmospheric CO2, the extraordinary level of increasing production of general dumbfuckery as a virtue is only going up. And up. And up.
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And so will the earth’s temperature.
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Yup, and it looks like the global food supply this year is down about 30% from climate related problems (excluding Ukraine). And that’s what happens when we haven’t even reached 1.5C warming.
When we hit 3C by 2070 and 4.5C by 2100, this world is going to be a very different place.
If people think the cost of gas and inflation is a problem right now, remember this one thing: TODAY is what future generations will call The Good Old Days back when global temperatures were at their lowest and food production at its highest and fresh water most plentiful. This is as good as it gets even if your carbon footprint is zero. That’s not where mitigation lives; that’s where the problem is allowed to grow and get worse. That’s what I mean about the growth of dumbfuckery: this delusion about ‘doing our part’ is not just part of the problem but the means to not do enough soon enough when it comes to replacing our energy system.
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So what proactive measures will reduce the problem if “doing our part” is dumbfuckery?
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Doing our part STARTS by understanding what the problem is. The problem is adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere.
What can we do about this?
Doing our part MEANS understanding what adds over 90% of all carbon emissions to the atmosphere is using carbon products to create energy.
So the solution to the problem STARTS by using some other form of energy. Said another way, our part is DOING whatever we can to support the replacement of the energy system with non carbon producing energy. Not doing THAT fast enough and to scale adds to the problem. And the problem, let’s remind ourselves, is burning fossil fuels and adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Smaller amounts – the remaining 10% – is absorbed and recycled by natural processes (these processes are being overwhelmed because of the amount of energy produced by burning fossil fuels; the excess is stored in the atmosphere and that’s why the planet is warming).
So the way the problem is actualized is by burning fossil fuels for system wide energy production. Eliminate that, eliminate the cause of global warming. Stabilize that, stabilize adaptation. Address the problem.
What we are slapped with all the time is that USING energy is the problem. It’s not. Using energy is NOT the problem if the energy doesn’t produce carbon emissions. Any approach that tries to convince you otherwise is itself a way to avoid facing and altering the problem and puts off, or makes, adaptation impossible. That’s where human suffering increases the most.
So… all of us and in every way need to stop pretending or going along with the lie that using energy is a moral problem. It’s not.
Stop pretending or going along with the lie that reducing our individual carbon footprint is virtuous BECAUSE it’s ‘part of the solution’. It’s not.
Stop pretending or going along with the lie that reaching the accounting game of calculating ‘net zero emissions’ is the goal. It’s not. It’s a way to excuse not doing enough now by pretending ‘offsetting’ addresses the problem when it puts a band-aid on the real problem. Offsetting is not a solution because it doesn’t address the problem.
Believing small scale mitigation that addresses only symptoms of the problem is what I call dumbfuckery because it does exactly NOTHING to address the real problem. And not addressing the problem is a HUGE problem when not addressing the growing problem is toxic to the human species.
It doesn’t get any dumber than that.
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It’s easy, right? What type of energy should we be using then? It’s too early to tell exactly, but it appears that our dams are emitting more co2 than fossil fuels. Not to mention virtually every river in the world has effectively killed the natural process by creating reservoirs.
You act as though you know something then… it’s not what it seemed to be all along.
I know this isn’t as comprehensive as it needs to be, but it’s a start. https://www.popsci.com/environment/dams-release-sequester-carbon/
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This article highlights one of the shortsighted aspects of ‘reaching’ net zero carbon: by transferring carbon into storage units called ‘trees’. The problem, however, is that they are only a temporary holding unit, which will release all the carbon they hold back into the atmosphere when they die. So flooding a large area will start this process so of course it will release that stored carbon. This notion of tree planting as a problem-solving policy for climate change is a diversionary con job championed by the paper pushers pretending the long term problem of burning carbon can be offset by accounting and playing with numbers and columns through short term carbon capture of trees. The piper – the atmosphere – however, must still be paid in full when the accounts come due. Reality is a bitch that way; it just can’t be convinced to go along with the accounting charade.
Hydro power as a concept is part of the solution. You assume damns and carbon producing flooded vegetated areas but the principle works just as well with using mines, for example. Water at elevation captures the potential energy. That’s green. There is zero carbon burned. That fact makes it part of the solution. Diverting from this principle based on carbon releasing practice is just another example of widespread dumbfuckery. Remember, the goal is to replace the carbon emitting energy system with a non carbon emitting energy system. Carbon itself is not ‘bad’; producing emissions from burning it is. Dumbfuckery is what leads away from replacing this toxic energy system for whatever bullshit reasons are brought forward; advocating for meaningful change leads us towards the necessary solution and the speed at which this is done SYSTEMICALLY is where individual effort and support is most needed. Hydro is a part of the solution as is nuclear but by far the smartest and most resilient and reliable solutions are renewables from solar and wind and tide. We have the technology. We have the money. We have the means. But we have far more dumbfuckery than we do understanding, basic intelligence, and political will.
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This had nothing to do with trees. Not sure where you reached for that? General dumbfuckery?
The student shows reservoirs emit more carbon than previously estimated—much more. The impact of 91,000 dams in North America alone, is no concern? That’s dumbfuckery at its finest. Your solution has accelerated the problem. Again
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Yes, Jim, the vast majority of carbon emission from damns is the rotting of vegetation at the bottom of reservoirs. Trees are part of the vegetation equation. That’s why I said today’s ever-so popular planting of more trees as a carbon capture is not a long term solution. Like the vegetation beneath reservoirs, this carbon will again be released, and then you’ll get people saying planting trees ’causes’ carbon emissions. This misunderstanding of what the problem really is translates into wider dumbfuckery, like claiming hydro power is part of the problem.
Many of the damns are made of cement. The production of cement using historical processes is greenhouse gas intensive. This is part of the problem. Using new non greenhouse gas processes for cement is part of the solution. Cement is not the problem just like hydro is not part of the problem. Not understanding the problem that causes climate change is very much part of the problem. And leading the problem is dumbfuckery.
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I’m definitely no expert on climate change/control … but as I read your remarks, I find myself asking … OK, so what do YOU suggest? Since you contend the methods the scientists are suggesting to help alleviate the problem are all wrong … what are your recommendations?
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I’m doing no such thing, Nan. I listen to, read, and follow climate scientists and scientific organizations and have for many decades. So I have no clue how you can accuse me of arguing that “the methods the scientists are suggesting to help alleviate the problem are all wrong.” That’s not true and intentionally paints me as some kind of science-denier when I do nothing BUT follow the science. I have heard many scientists ask people to do more, do what they can, and try to spread some optimism when all the data indicates our current path (shall I mention the EPA SCOTUS ruling described by Michael Mann as “they’ve removed our fundamental right to a livable planet”) is catastrophic no matter how many light bulbs are turned off or how much seaweed replaces meat. So I know the science is very, very, very clear: the increasing rate and frequency of climate change is caused by human activity, primarily by burning fossil fuels. That is the problem.
Now, if I try to offer you anything here about solutions, you’re going to probably stick to your script and accuse me of tl;dr. So, in a nutshell, anything and everything that takes steps towards addressing changing our energy system to renewables is a step towards a solution.
In the meantime, please show me the scientifically informed group of climate scientists or scientific climate organizations who disagree that the primary cause of climate change – you know, the cause I claim we can only effectively address if our energy system changes – isn’t the burning of fossil fuels but is, in fact, the varieties of ways in which we do so.
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You’ll notice (perhaps) I say the first step towards a solution is understanding the problem. When it comes to climate change and half a century of scientific consensus about it, dumbfuckery still rules the day. Once the problem is understood, however, one should be able to determine for one’s self how the problem is manifested in one’s local area and take whatever actions one thinks will help address moving towards a solution. So there are literally millions of things each of us can do not to solve the problem but to work towards the solution. This is a daily process and not a check list of virtuous activities and products to purchase.
The process of working towards a solution depends on understanding what’s going on and why. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that even HALF of our weather people – the meteorologists who relay information to the public about weather – grasped what the problem really was. I shit you not. The world meteorological body itself has been at the forefront of climate change denialism and have been the go-to scientists used by the oil and gas industry to create doubt about what the problem actually is. This strategy has been incredibly successful to promote dumbfuckery as a virtue. The product of this doubt – inaction while allowing the problem to get worse – is what I call dumbfuckery because it is anti-scientific to its core. It is unadulterated confirmation bias writ large and chalk full of misinformation and diversionary issues and often brought to the public by trusted meteorologists. For decades after the scientific consensus from climate researchers was made widely available.
So now the shoe is on the other foot. Meteorologists don’t have to convince many that a changing climate is a personal problem when local viewing areas are subject to ‘historic’ episodes of damaging weather and weird changes in weather patterns and rising levels of sea water. And these events keep happening. Repeatedly. Now meteorologists can start making the connections to why climate change experienced in a variety of ways locally is caused by atmospheric carbon emissions globally to a more receptive audience. And they can broadcast this well established scientific consensus every single time they take to the air and show what happens here in the viewing area what happens when we don’t act collectively to address the problem. It is this understanding of the way reality is that starts to reduce dumbfuckery. But the solution to the problem remains exactly the same year after year after year after decade after decade of intentional doubt being sown (ie the Petroleum Council ordering, funding, and then selling the truly idiotic individual carbon footprint virtue meme to the misinformed public, to the ignorant who think they know better than every climate scientist in the world, to those who do not understand the problem, as if this were a meaningful way to collectively ‘help’ while increased greenhouse emissions for energy production were, are, and continue to be allowed to rise, allowed to go unaddressed by MEANIGFUL policy, or excused in the name of something else).
I know you don’t like these, Nan, but here’s an insightful video – relatively short – about the role of meteorologists told by meteorologists trying now to reduce the level of general dumbfuckery and the harm they themselves have committed on the wider public (usually excused because their audiences just didn’t want to hear the truth. Gee, I wonder why.).
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Dams are an ecological disaster interrupting natural processes on a global scale. I don’t care what material they are made of. The Elwah dam (small) held about 33 million tons of sediment before its removal. It moved the estuary about a kilometer out to the strait of Juan de Fuca. Not insignificant by any means.
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I agree that dams can be and have been ecological disasters. I remember studying the world bank’s preference for loaning incredible sums of money to poor countries for building these megaprojects last century and why. Again, paying the piper of reality is part and parcel of engineering geared towards serving the desires of some over the real world need of others. So the decision makers – especially from financing and boards of directors who rely on cost/benefit analyses where environmental degradation and other negative effects simply don’t appear – should be held to account by being punished by investors and their broker firms in the form of lowering the value of the stock and the value of the expertise from the companies they use. This has just now started to happen. There’s some hope there.
How the dams have been built is the root cause of many long term negative consequences. But I think it’s a mistake to blame the idea of dams; I blame the implementation that does not adequately account for the very problems you raise, problems that are very well known now. Dams as an energy storage system, which is the context in which I have raised it, can be done without also creating legacy environmental travesties.
So energy capture and storage by using dams is not an either/or condition. Dams are scalable and can be environmentally beneficial, meaning even terraced farming relies on exactly the same principle as, say, the Hoover dam. And humans have been utilizing this renewable energy forever. You’ll get no disagreement from me that we can do better implementing this principle.
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Think about this—every single watershed worldwide has dammed runoff from the landscape which naturally flows to the oceans. The Columbia watershed for instance, is 250,000 square miles and 250 reservoirs capturing all the natural runoff and ecological waste into artificial basins. Terraced farming is nowhere near the process of the dam built below them, to house what runoff nature has disposed. It drastically interrupts the entire process—and as the Kogi would tell us, we have killed the river. The damming of the Colorado effectively IS the cause of the Midwest drought, where such large scale captures also change atmospheric conditions.
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You’re talking about megaproject dams. We are in agreement about their long term negative ecological impact.
But I keep saying the principle of dams is not a bad thing. I’m also talking about using the principle of dams and looking at opportunities we have for new infrastructure. My city incorporates renewable water management infrastructure for all urban development. And central to that are local dams. If one insists dams are bad, however, that dams are ecologically damaging because they’re dams and dams are bad, then one is engaging in dumbfuckery.
For example, look at how we can respond to managing forest fires with dams that could save billions in damage and help prevent both spread of fire and its accompanying loss of life and habitat. That’s not ‘bad’. We could improve soil hydration, raise the water table, and promote life-sustaining wetlands pone small reservoir at a time that, oh by the way, just so happens to purify water. Yes, dams. And (again) this is scalable.
Here’s a video explaining how, drawing upon that most noble of Canadian critters, that most truly irritating of intrusive neighbours, nature’s most excellent water management engineer, the beaver. We don’t need megaprojects. We need applicable low tech, common sense knowledge about the real world.
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I agree there is a better way. It is also incredibly far fetched to think anyone, including manufacturing would do with less energy without some kind of revolt. There are just too many people whose lives depend on what is killing them.
I often have thought tiny windmills the size of pinwheels could replace the giant eyesores but I’m not sure about that. There is a better way, but those better ways often lead to mega fund cleanup sites like Hanford. Idk.
Btw, the mega project dams are only a fraction of the problem.
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During a much touted ‘interview’ piece with the CEO of GM and all the grand plans of electrifying their vehicles by 2030, I think it was a new version of the Volt that was visited in the parking lot while being charged. The question was asked where the electricity was coming from and the CEO said the plant. When asked where the plant got its electricity she said she didn’t know. One of the workers out of the CEO’s earshot said it was from the utility and in this sector produced electricity from a coal burning plant.
Sigh.
Every Tesla battery pack is fully charged from its own Arizona solar array. Every gigafactory produces either enough or as close to possible renewable energy for what it uses. It builds its own cars. It mass produces them on three continents. It has the finest autonomous driving software with billions upon billions of data points no one else can even come close to copying. It designs its own chips. And it makes money. A lot of money. None of the highly touted ‘industry-leading’ legacy auto makers so coddled and subsidized by government and cattered to for its unionized workers are not even in the same technological or economic ballpark. Tesla isn’t even a car company, although that’s what everyone thinks it is; it is an energy technology company that demonstrates not only how to industrialize with renewable energy, employ over 100K well paid people with better benefits than any other making clean green quality products, but shows legacy industries how to change the world for the better. Tesla is a glimpse into what a renewable future looks like: integrated, profitable, and part of the solution to climate change. For example, at Ukraine’s request, Starlink (part of Tesla) had not only the entire country covered for high speed internet within 48 hours during an open war when all other sources failed but hardened its proprietary software against Russian cyber attacks and made the land links small and constantly mobile. Its new satellites with greater broadband are hardened against different kinds of physical, electrical, and radiative attacks. You can do this when you have vertical integration and own every step of the product (meaning supply issues and outside constraints are minimized) rather than see the world the old way and build something competitive for the last century using old tech and old energy.
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A car is a far cry from an 18 wheeler or a cargo ship, but certainly a step in the right direction.
I’ve seen Elon state he could power the whole earth on a couple hundred sq miles of solar panels…but determining the hidden ecological costs will again surprise us.
Since space time is doomed in the near future, who knows—efficiency may turn out to be a non sequitur with the next batch of physicists.
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Notice the gigafactories are tall enough and divided with interior roads to produce 18 wheelers from a single production line start to finish.
Also, notice the Boring Company’s recent funding and plans. The first goal is 150 mph, which involves autonomous movement (in a vacuum!) including Tesla vehicles. But, again, notice the vertical structure where Tesla controls the entire production. Hence the boring current capability 10 times exceeding the next nearest rival but geared towards achieving miles per day versus a mile per month that is today’s standard. The challenges are many but the point is that the energy is electric and self produced. Also notice that the Democrats want nothing to do with any of this and actually work to block as much of this necessary change as they are able because, you know, Musk is bad… because now he is rich. And criticizes bad policies. Not a peep of criticism about Gates constantly and to the tune of billions of dollars per year short selling Tesla to impede its growth as much as possible. It’s dumbfuckery to the extreme.
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It’s easy to criticize. Why doesn’t Canada just do it right and build an equal product in complete cooperation?
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Can you clarify what you’re referring to and what you mean?
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This is very interesting. It could easily be argued dams are causing the drought. Especially in consideration of the earth as a self governing organism.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-warming-and-drought-increase-a-new-case-for-ending-big-dams
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Using the US as an example, it has been entirely predictable that with ever advancing climate change the southwest will become arid to the point of desertification, much of the west semi-arid with much longer periods of drought (yeah, gotta love the arsenic dust storms from the evaporating Salt Lake), a middle band subject not just to tremendous swings in both temperature and precipitation with year round thunderstorms, tornadoes, wild fire, and floods, and an east coast that will be much wetter and subject to hurricanes and inland tropical storms and derechos. We know all these will areas become worse and more challenging for human habitation. A massive project now to pump excess fresh water dumped in the east by slow moving tropical and very wet air masses to the thirsty west would be smart. That’s what I mean by improving infrastructure. Harden the bridges and move highways and rail lines now. Buy out flood plane housing now. Remove public subsidy for insurance now. Get people out of harms way by economic reality.
For people paying attention, the most stable place to live is the Great Lakes basin particularly its eastern section. It has the most stable weather, a diversified first world economy, productive farmland, first world education and medicine, and – most importantly – lots of rechargeable fresh water. It has good wind and topography for turbines, lots of sun for solar, and lots of urban and rural people with easy access to global transportation, forestry, mining, shipping, and industry. It has – gasp – four seasons! And maple syrup.
The dams are not causing the drought. Climate change is the cause for all these shifts in weather patterns and circulations. And it’s not going away as long as we continue to make the problem worse by burning carbon. The way to think of the changes in weather is like taking a stable sine wave and stretching to crests and troughs while shortening the distance between them. This wave represents temperature and precipitation across the country. The drought areas are in the trough to begin with; it’s only going to get drier regardless of what we do. So it’s time to start to adapt.
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The rate (that word means something important, one that measures something against some other quantity) mentioned in the article that you think says “emits more carbon” doesn’t say what you think it does. The word ‘rate’ should have alerted you to this fact that we’re comparing one thing to another. It says the rate of carbon emission from hydroelectric reservoirs is twice that of carbon sequestration and then explains a bunch of reasons why: carbon sequestration under water is dependent on how much or how little vegetation has been flooded, how much water movement there is (stable water sequesters better), how much turbidity enters the reservoir, and so on. Because many of the reservoirs have falling levels of water, we have a bunch of factors in play for this rate to be realized: more water moves rather than stays, the concentration of fertilizers and bacteria increases AND the smaller volume of water warms produces more carbon emitting algae, the exposed soils have increased evaporation and produces a faster release of concentrated once-sequestered carbon, and so on. From all of this, you misunderstand hydro itself in the form of damns to be part of the problem when it’s clearly shrinking reservoirs made on top of vegetation that emits more rather than sequester carbon. There are many damns – especially earthen damns in the east – that have far too much water going into reservoirs never built to handle the increased quantity. Both are good example of how a changing climate causes unforeseen results for infrastructure around which many tens of millions of people live their lives. This is just another reason to harden the energy grid in new ways that solve not only the problem but accounts for new conditions. Renewables check all the boxes: cheaper, more reliable, more flexible, more resilient, higher security, fewer concentrated sources, better jobs, longer lasting… tell me when to stop. Where to store all the power? Yup, hydro as part of a diverse system is looking very good. When power is available, pump water to the higher elevation; when it’s not, release it to drive turbines. Rinse and repeat. That’s why disused mines are particularly attractive.
Remember, it takes under 22,000 square miles of solar to produce the same amount of energy the US uses per year. That’s a strip of land about 200 miles by 110 miles. That’s it. That’s a tiny fraction of Arizona. For the whole country. And you seem to believe the lie that this is a pie-in-the-sky kind of technology we couldn’t possibly build. Let me assure you, however, that the problems associating the electrification of systemic energy needs is a champagne kind of problem compared to unfettered climate change caused by the continued burning of fossil fuels.
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I see Italy’s Po river (the watershed river for Italy’s food producing northern region) is now so low that it has salinized from the Mediterranean 90 miles upstream. You want to talk about killing natural processes? Let’s talk salt. This is the INEVITABLE result from the loss of historical and reliable weather patterns, a loss CAUSED by global warming CAUSED by humans burning fossil fuels. This is reality.
Again, historical droughts and increased summer temperatures from a rise of LESS than 1.5C already being felt today is the canary in the coal mine. That’s why the loss of 30% food production from what appears as a ‘small’ change in average global temperature compared to the projected path we are on (guaranteed 3.5C at today’s emission levels but now closer to 4.5C by 2100) should be a stark and brutal wakeup call to all of us who are not championing immediate and national plans for altering carbon based energy to majority renewables by 2035 and at least 90% by 2050. That would keep the rise to about 2.5C… catastrophic for billions of people, to be sure with today’s completely inadequate infrastructure, but necessary for future generations to be able to adapt.
Remember, for each rise of 1C, divide historical floods by 5 (a hundred year flood will become 20 year flood, which with another degree then becomes a 4 year flood, which then becomes… you get the idea). Conversely, multiply droughts by 5 per degree. That’s why we’re into the 23rd year of a California drought. That’s why you keep hearing about all of these presentations by nature of what a warming planet MEANS as ‘historical’. Humanity has never faced such change so fast and to such a degree. Dumbfuckery of inaction is based on either not understanding what the real problem is or deciding to ignore it all in the hopes it will all go away. For example, believing climate change caused by human activity is a political partisan issue is dumbfuckery in action and on a grand scale.
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I expect the climate alarmists to demonstrate the strength of their convictions by “offing” themselves for the good of society. 🙂
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I expect climate change deniers to continue living in a fantasy world where they know better than literally thousands and thousands of climate scientists around the globe and from every major scientific organization in the world. Yup, Ron knows better. He can call people names.
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Few doubt the climate is changing — as it always has. Some of just refuse to buy into the hysteria being propagated by the “science experts” — who are nothing of the sort.
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It’s not hysteria; it’s a slow moving crisis so that when tipping points are reached, it’s too late to mitigate and people are thrust into having to maker awful choices. In some parts of New South Wales just this past weekend, some area have received more than a year’s rainfall in 24 hours: a meter and a half (59 inches). That’s why I say those who fail to appreciate why the ‘historical’ aspect that has become a refrain in meteorology – what you call record-breaking ‘weather’ – are engaging in dumbfuckery. When the number of days over 110 F in some southwestern US cities goes from 20 per year to over 60 per year in less than a decade, it’s not ‘hysteria’ that is killing people, Ron; it is people like you who refuse to understand why we need to make radical changes to our energy system now and vote accordingly while feeling all smug and self righteous that YOU know better when, obviously, you don’t. When you then go out of your way to malign those who do, you are very much part of the problem that will end up causing irrevocable and irreparable harm to the planet if we don;t act in harmony with the scope of the problem all of us face. Your denialism in effect with other deniers ends up harming real people in real life and all in the service of your own tiny little ego. You need to wake up and stop promoting dumbfuckery.
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Hysteria – behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language)
That is precisely the behavior being exhibited by climate alarmists — like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez — who conflate meteorological phenomena with climate change .
It’s a well-established fact that NSW has rain during the rainy season. And this year it’s been exacerbated by a lingering La Nina and a negative dipole in the Indian Ocean (both of which are natural climate patterns that bring cool wet weather to Australia).
It’s also a well-established fact that southwestern US cities experience extremely high temperatures during the summer months.
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Feel fortunate that you most likely won’t be around when the scientifically predicted effects of climate change are clearly and unmistakably manifested. In the meantime, continue to look at the immediate picture to confirm your theories.
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I’m still waiting for that coming “Ice Age” that was all the rage in the late 70s. And here’s a short list of all the failed “scientifically predicted effects of climate change” from the late 20th century that failed to come true:
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
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Ron, there will ALWAYS be doomsayers and people who claim to have inside information. Just look at religion and its innumerable “failed” predictions. This doesn’t change the fact that there are signs of change. If you refuse to accept this, like I said, you most likely won’t be around to experience the ones that count anyway.
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I’ve never denied that the climate is changing. I just don’t buy into the “we’re all doomed” hype being propagated by the current group of climate alarmists.
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Nobody is saying we’re all doomed, Ron. We’re saying this is a global five alarm fire unfolding in slow motion – as it has been for decades with zero action taken – and we need to respond now rather than deny it’s happening or that’s it’s not really a life and limb threat to literally billions of people and entire ecosystems upon which we ALL depend. When the temperatures are higher in glacial valleys in Canada than they are at high noon in the desert of Death Valley, something more is going on than a few anomalies in weather. And when these ‘anomalies’ occur globally with increasing frequency and at increased rates and we understand how human activity drives these changes to historic levels, only deniers of reality think the growing alarm over doing nothing is ‘hysterical’.
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lol
“global five alarm fire”
“a life and limb threat to literally billions of people and entire ecosystems”
“temperatures are higher in glacial valleys in Canada than they are at high noon in the desert of Death Valley” [citation needed]
Your entire comment is laden with doom and gloom and hysteria.
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Death Valley highest temperature June 29th 2021: 120F
Lytton BC June 29th 2021: 121.1F
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And what were the respective temperatures of those two locales on the 29th of June this year? Or the year before? Or any other year?
I submit that it’s a meaningless comparison, because summer heat waves are a common occurrence in the BC interior — so it comes as no surprise that high temps there could exceed those of Death Valley on any specific day once in a while.
By way of comparison, Midland, Texas received more snow than NYC or Boston during the winter 2011/12. Is that indicative of a cooling trend? Or just an anomaly?
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What’s tough to reconcile for me is they say you can’t take an individual event and determine a scientific claim—no personal experience can dictate the trend, yet they use these single events to try and prove a point.
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The whole notion of an “average” global temperature based on readings from around the world seems preposterous. It’s the equivalent of saying the average room temperature was calculated based on temperature readings taken from your oven and freezer.
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Don’t know why I bother but this might help you UNDERSTAND why daily information matters in establishing rates of change with climate. This area of study is called climate shifting, where you use historical data as a base line and then feed the model daily information to determine what, if any, shifting is going on.
So what?
Well, again Ron, the point about climate CHANGE is about understanding shifts of RATES and FREQUENCIES to establish various links and impacts they cause about which we as humans can then use to effect… in a variety of ways. Well… unless one simply dismisses everything relevant, pretend there is no understanding required, and then continues to live in a denialist bubble world of belief unrelated to reality. For those of us living in reality, it helps us to align our beliefs through understanding with the real world.
If we don’t understand the PROBLEM, then we sure as hell can’t come up with any SOLUTIONS. So understanding shifting then helps us to figure out various inputs and influences over time to what climate change presents to us, which then helps us understand HOW to make the kinds of alternations that will then adjust LOCALLY to a changed climate.
I don’t expect you to grasp any of this if you remain determined to believe otherwise. But should you want, perhaps a bit of knowledge might help (dangerous in the hands of a denialist, I know). And, in this case, an opportunity to understand why local singular events play a role in understanding the change in climate ALL of us are experiencing whether we know it or not, whether we believe it or not, whether we want to or not. This is reality.
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Now you’re being duplicitous. You asked for a citation: I gave it. You’re welcome. Again, all I mention are facts.
As for the comparison being meaningless, “because heat waves are a common occurrence in the BC interior,” climate change is revealed, as I’ve said MANY times, by the increase rate and frequency of extreme weather. The example is one of not just EXTREME weather by “common occurrence in the BC interior” but by just how extreme it was. It was historical BY AN ICREDIBLE MARGIN FOR THE INTERIOR OF BC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That you COMPLETELY miss the point demonstrates your determination to deny reality by pretending the increase – often a MASSIVE increase obliterating historical amounts – in the rate and frequency of extreme weather are ‘nothing-to-see-here’ kind of events by trivializing the extraordinary differences and waving the magical Ron hand to dismiss it everywhere and call the APPROPRIATE concern about this increasING change in the rate and frequency of extreme weather ‘hysteria’ and ‘doom and gloom’ to be dismissed on this basis IS climate change denialism in action. And, if you stay true to denialist form, you’ll carry on dismissing and waving away legitimate concern. Just like creationists raising the same tropes as if reasonable you’ll continue to peddle PRATT (points refuted a thousand times) like this little gem. But hey, you should at least be paid by the petroleum industry for your work on their behalf. If you’re not, then you’re just a dupe.
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Who is being duplicitous?
Your original statement was:
“When the temperatures are higher in glacial valleys in Canada than they are at high noon in the desert of Death Valley, something more is going on than a few anomalies in weather.”
I asked for a citation and all you provided was a one-time occurrence in which the temperature in Lytton, BC was higher than the temperature of Death Valley.
Well, one sparrow does not a summer make. And neither does one record-breaking temperature in Lytton, BC a climate crisis make.
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Regrading the ASCMO resource (Advances in Statistical Climatology, Meteorology, and Oceanography), it’s important to understand that these temperature shifts we see on the various maps undergo modeling that are then used to demonstrate the degree that the PROBLEM – atmospheric GHG – plays in driving up temperatures globally. So a key element of the resource’s usefulness is predicting and then evaluating by real world result how well the model reflects reality. Of course it remains “challenging to rapidly and continuously assess the degree to which human activity alters the probability of specific events.” (…which is the correct PROBLEM)
So the reason why this resource is important is because they have produced a new framework to enable the production and communication of global real-time estimates of how human-driven climate change has changed the LIKELIHOOD of daily weather events.
Some of key findings play out on a daily basis. Again, we’re looking at rates and frequencies. This matters for all infrastructure. And we’re earning a grade of F.
For example, temperatures greater than the preindustrial 99th percentile have become at least twice as likely in today’s human-influenced climate. (That’s called a ‘signal’ for GHG to cause a predicted effect.) Additionally, over 52 % of land in the tropics, human-caused climate change is responsible for at least five-fold increases in the likelihood of preindustrial 99th percentile maximum temperatures. That matters when people presume incorrectly that these (increasing in frequency) extremes are just temporary ‘weather’. They’re not. They are predicted and then actualized SIGNALS. And we know what the problem is! GHG emissions.
“By systematically applying this framework to near-term forecasts or daily observations, local attribution analyses can be provided in real time worldwide. These new analyses create opportunities to enhance communication and provide input and/or context for policy, adaptation, human health, and other ecosystem/human system impact studies.”
Offering such timely information presumes people actually CARE about human health and preparing for climate change adaptation. When too many people engage in dumbfuckery like denialism, however, like calling the warnings AND the predicted results ‘hysteria’ and ‘doom and gloom’, without any clue WHY these are the only RATIONAL response to a known problem going unaddressed or even exacerbated by business-as-usual policies and practices, it makes reasonable preparation for adaptation very difficult if not impossible. This is what I call dumbfuckery. And so much championed dumbfuckery in the face of reality – and in contrast to if not in conflict with of our understanding of it in the form of facts and real world evidence – is itself a major player responsible for causing real harm to real people in real life unfold without proper mitigating steps taken because of the popularity of and preference for so much dumbfuckery.
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My comment is laden with fact. How you describe it is coming from you, not reality.
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I see no facts. Just hyperbole.
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That’s because you don’t care about facts, Ron. You just want to cause work for others and then COMPLETELY ignore the listed sources and citations when provided if they don’t align with your dismissive attitude. This is a common denialist tactic. You demonstrate that you don’t care about what’s true and you certainly don’t care to learn. You’re the man, Ron… the smartest guy who already who knows he’s right to be in a position to judge scientific climate consensus as irrational. And you can continue believing that only by dismissing facts, which you do by calling it ‘hyperbole’. Do you see the denialist pattern here yet, Ron?
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Yawn. Get back to me when you have something more substantive to offer than a long rant.
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Denying the growing need to respond and altering our energy system as fast as possible to shut off the tap of atmospheric carbon pollution is the highest level of dumbfuckery humans can commit.
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Carbon dioxide is not “pollution”.
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Title III, Section 7602(g) of the Clean Air Act defines ‘air pollutant’ to mean “any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive (including source material, special nuclear material, and byproduct material) substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air” that “endanger(s) public health or welfare.”
“(G)reenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated both to endanger public health and to endanger public welfare.”
Ya think?
This comes from the major assessments by the U.S. Global Climate Research Program (USGCRP), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the National Research Council (NRC). This scientific assessment and consensus serves as the primary scientific basis for this classification.
But of course, Ron knows better.
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The EPA is a political body. And so are the IPCC and the NRC. Hence, it can be argued that the field of climate science is polluted by political agendas.
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Due to people who can be so easily duped as you, Ron, the idea of spending over half a trillion dollars to get us off 90% of oil and gas by 2016 was successfully blocked… for decades… as “too expensive.”
Over the past 10 years, the US federal government alone has spent over a trillion dollars responding to climate change weather damage. This cost is not linear; it is close to being exponential. This is why reinsurers – the transnational companies that insure national insurance companies – are now factoring in climate related costs to their actuarial tables and denying coverage. What few people seem to know in the US (until it hits home in the form of an insurance premium) is that the public now covers almost all flood insurance on the East coast and there are plans to do the same for fire coverage in the West. This is now a high 2 digit trillion dollar liability the public is taking on with almost zero public input by elected officials.
People like Ron who deny and cast doubt and name call legitimate concerns raised about our human caused changing climate various derogatory names (with a snort and a wink about how stupid it is to be very concerned) allow this kind of colossal dumbfuckery to evolve into a waiting financial timebomb of epic proportions. The usual cover is ‘concern’ about costs when, in fact, multiplying costs exponentially is exactly the real world, real life effect from catering to such staggering dumbfuckery and pretending the cover is legitimate… as if there really, really, really is is an alternate reality such ‘reasonable’ people inhabit versus the ‘hysteria’ of those who point out the literal dumbfuckery of not taking this issue with the rising seriousness it deserves as we run out of time to mitigate rather than just respond to massive climate disasters.
We are at the very front end of a changing world due to well entrenched dumbfuckery. If the sleight global changes we see today are of any concern – like historic droughts, historic fires, historic temperatures, historic melting, historic thunderstorms and derechos, historic flooding – coming from a rise of under 1C, imagine if you can what 3.5C to 4.5 C will look like by 2100. That means a 20 minute time limit being outdoors before death ensues for the people left sweltering in the southern US. And due to this incredible entrenched dumbfuckery in the age of the internet, the chances of keeping this change to 1.5C by 2050 are now zero for everyone… including the deluded who played, and STILL continue to play, a vital role in keeping the dumbfuckery going strong and forcing everyone to enjoy that upper projection. The real world cost of not doing enough now is catastrophically high in every conceivable metric of human well being. That’s why denialism of human caused climate change is understated when called historical dumbfuckery.
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There’s not a shred of empirical evidence to substantiate anything you’ve written. They are merely the rantings of a cult follower.
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Again, all I’m writing about here is fact and widely available in the public domain for your own inquiry. Go for it, Ron.
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I have looked at the facts available within the public domain. The frequency of Atlantic storms and hurricanes in the US has actually declined over the past three decades. As has the reported wild fires and total burn acreage across the continent. The only reason the insurance payouts are greater is due to inflation and increased population density.
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Here’s a sign… flights in and out RAF base Brize Norton in Oxfordshire have been halted because the “runway has melted.” Happens all the time there…. says no one ever.
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I saw that.
And to think they’re actually debating whether or not it should be called a ‘National Security Threat’….
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Just to be the bundle of joy you have come to know and love, I offer this rosy outlook:
This summer in western Europe as hot as it is will be one of the coolest we’ll every have from this point on until carbon production and burning fossil fuels reaches zero and stays that way.
Doesn’t that fill you with optimism and pride, to have finally turned that corner on this behaviour and know better days are ahead for our future generations?
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Why does weather demonstrate that your claim that climate simply changes and concern about it is infused with hysteria is unfettered dumbfuckery, Ron?
Let’s take the recent case of Western Europe these past few months. Let’s compare and contrast and find out what’s really going on with these heat waves, why they are historically different, why this understanding matters in how to respond to them.
The extreme heat events in Europe have been occurring with greater frequency and intensity in the past decade. There’s the signature of climate change. A pattern change in frequency and intensity. There has to be a reason, Ron. The pattern change is manifested by weather. Historic weather. Are these heat waves historic?
Yes.
The pattern of heat waves in Western Europe has altered. How do we know? Because these heat waves have now occur three to four times more often than in the rest of the northern mid latitudes. This is the historic element. It is NOW geographically different in pattern. Not hysteria: a pattern change that is killing people with heat, massively affecting food production, and significantly altering the supply of fresh water. This is a Very Big Deal… if you are the least concerned with the health and welfare of real people in real life today.
As to why this increase is happening, we now know it has everything to do with increased atmospheric greenhouse produced heat. The jet stream lengthens in distance as it crosses a warmed Atlantic and with greater undulations weakens. The weakening splits it into two atmospheric rivers over western Europe allowing for greater duration of heat waves that are pushed north from the south by the southern branch of the jet stream and then held in place by the blocking feature of the northern stream. The result? Historic heat waves. Today.
Unlike other land related heat waves common to historical norms, these heat waves are the direct result of atmosphere dynamical processes that have been altered by atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Although about 30% of heat-wave trends in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe are caused by dry soils (the air above them heated by reflected radiation and carried by humidity over distance), almost 100% in Western Europe are caused only by the atmosphere. These heat waves now being experienced in Western Europe are due to human caused climate change BECAUSE that is what reality – atmospheric science – shows us is the case.
It’s not political. It’s not hysteria. It’s understanding what’s really going on and why doing something about it while concentrations are lower today than higher tomorrow (and the problems associated that much more drastic) is much more reasonable than pretending as you do with a smugness of arrogance and ignorance that raising concern now is hysterical. Not raising the concern to as high a level as possible now, Ron, is insane. It is global dumbfuckery.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1757_heatwave
Was that also attributable to high carbon emissions? Or is it reasonable to concede that natural atmospheric cycles can cause extreme weather events.
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Ron, I know that you aren’t going to change your dismissive wave towards human caused climate change. The reasons why, however, are not based on having a good understanding of how climate works. Because of this lack of understanding, you are not basing your opinion on either knowledge or science.
But to compensate, you are pretending the problem here lies somewhere else, that the problem is not really a problem, that if it were a problem then the response is overblown, that because the overblown response is actually ‘hysterical’ others don’t need to pay it much mind because it’s not reasonable. In every case you are factually wrong and have no means to correct it so that your opinion aligns with reality. This is why I claim you denying reality yet think yourself justified doing so. That kind of protected thinking creates a bubble world for your own opinions but, more importantly, helps to promote this denialism which has a known and profound effect on making the necessary changes to alleviate our highly negative effect for future generations. I think this position you defend is unpardonable stupidity and selfishness because it is based not only on fooling yourself but because you WANT to fool yourself.
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Then you are mistaken on my position. I can appreciate that humans have an impact upon their environment without necessarily succumbing to the doom and gloom predictions being propagated by the merchants of fear.
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47C in Portugal today. 40C in northern England. This is not, “humans have an impact upon their environment,” Ron. This is changing the climate to make it more and more hostile for real people in real life just trying to live. For those living in conditions that do not provide the same capability to cool and they do to heat a domicile to the same differential from outside conditions is very dangerous to their lives.
This is not bullshit.
This is a fact.
This is known.
This is predictable.
This is why your ignorant opinion is deplorable in that it insists this understandable weather feedback engine caused by humans using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for massive quantities of additional carbon far beyond its ability to absorb it by burning more and more and more and more for energy consumption with KNOWN greenhouse effects for the byproduct (that elevates global temperature at an understandable if conservative rate estimates). This reality-denying opinion is about as anti-human an opinion as one can get. And the only way to prot4ect this belief against the intrusion of knowledge is to choose to not care about other people as much as you do the right to deny what the problem actually is and pretend those who raise it are the ‘real’ problem. That’s so Star Chamber of you. But hey, that’s your investment: to continue to think yourself right, impose your belief on others by proxy, even when you are absolutely and factually wrong. You do not respect what’s true.
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It’s -71°C (-96°F) at the South Pole today with a wind chill value of -93°C (-135°F).
Now that’s hostile.
Certain areas of Portugal tend to get hot in the summer and extreme temps in the mid- to high-40s are not unusual there. And the high temps in the UK are attributable to a vortex affecting the Jet stream. Citing seasonal temperature extremes when they are most likely to occur does not equate to evidence of climate change.
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I agree the temperatures alone are not evidence of climate change but historic temperatures can be, especially taken (and I keep saying) because of the rate and frequency of these historic levels. So this is why understanding why the jet stream now splits to drive this heated air northwards but trapped by the northern jet stream branch is very strong evidence of climate change in action. The pattern of this change is historic and we understand why this is happening. This is purely an atmospheric driven heat wave, Ron, because the atmosphere has changed composition and so it behaves differently to produce these temperatures and heat waves. And that change is DIRECTLY related to increased atmospheric green house gases from burning carbon. The link is scientifically undeniable.
But you don’t care about what’s true. You don’t care enough to try to understand it. You care about denying it. (Sorry to break it to you, Ron, but you’re not the smartest guy in the world able to see what thousands of working climate scientists and every single major scientific organization can’t. That level of hubris is Trumpian. That’s what YOU bring to the table: hubris and denialism.)
If you bothered to understand climate science, you wouldn’t be cherry picking selected data as if supportive of your denialism. It isn’t. But this is the same PRATT tactic (points refuted a thousand times) creationists use ‘against’ evolution. It’s not just very lazy and ignorant thinking; it is an intentional tactic of denialism aimed not at understanding anything but done to promote doubt for the sake not of what’s true but in the service of those who want the lies and deceit to stand in order to continue to profit from them. That’s where your hubris takes you. You are acting here as defender of the oil and gas sector (whose own scientists accurately predicted these climate changes four decades ago) even though the product they sell when used for energy is not just toxic to life on this planet but highly addictive to those who need easy energy no matter how dirty. And the brains of the addicted are just as desperate for the next fix and will say and do anything, sacrifice anybody, for the supply to remain protected… even from what’s true. That’s who you are working for whether you know it or not.
There is a solution that doesn’t involve altering the planet’s atmosphere and overwhelming every carbon sink the planet offers. But it does involve getting off this drug.
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