Bill Nye on Texas floods and climate change denying politicians

Dude, all you have to do is post some links to the sources your opinion is built upon. I’m starting to think you don’t have any.

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Everyone needs to chill.

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You are not answering me, you seem to be responding to some other comment. I never said that there was a “failure of the general AGW model”.
But you are right, I’m not going to “gain any traction here”. This is not the place where any such discussion can take place. Thanks.

LOL! No, I understand this forum very well and won’t waste your or my time in such futile activities.
It has been a while since I was insulted and denigrated so much on a forum, and I have not insulted or denigrated anyone here. I appreciate that the moderator has removed some of the worst.
I thought that might happen, I was disappointed when it did but doesn’t bother me personally. Insults indicate something about the insulter, not me.
I have made pretty mild statements and mostly questions. What people apparently think I said is often quite different from what I said.
It has been an interesting experiment. Thanks for participating.

We’re already past the tipping point. It’s about how quickly and intently we can respond to mitigate the further damage that is coming.

A few degrees is all it takes to lose enough coastline to kill or at least displace millions. That includes some ENTIRE NATIONS which will disappear underwater forever. And we’ve already guaranteed that future. That is coming.

We’ve also already changed growing zones, and that rate of change will increase significantly too. We’ll gain some new growing areas for food, but lose even more. Humans do like to eat. That will become more difficult. So will finding enough water to drink. And finally, enough air to breath. 3 weeks, 3 days, 3 minutes.

So yes, catastrophic change is in the cards. All we can do now is try to slow down the train wreck we’ve put in motion.

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But you ARE wasting your time “in such futile activities”. You keep claiming the same things over and over again. How is that not futile, or a waste of time? Say something new. Show us why we should consider what you’re saying is valid. Or are you admitting that you know you’re wrong? Because, if you don’t answer, or keep answering by saying you don’t have to answer, we will all know that you’re admitting failure.

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I’m working on my BS in chemistry right now, considering branching out into atmospherics for grad school… only it does seem insanely complicated. What I find interesting, and possibly disturbing, is that I have yet to find an intro-level/popular primer on climate change science. I’m something of a weird connoisseur of popular science texts and materials, so I read and watch a lot of things that are now well below my level of understanding just to see how it’s done.

I see a lot of books on why AGCC is bad, and how it should be stopped, but there’s nothing out there that really summarizes the science and the evidence. I think something like that would go a long way to help bridge the information gap. People are still battling fundamental misconceptions about what climate change means, and I don’t think we need to show them advanced computer models to make the point that relatively small (compared to the total volume of the atmosphere) changes in carbon dioxide levels are sufficient to push more complex events in certain directions, and that much of human settlement is dependent on climate consistency. E.g. It’s not that Louisiana has never experienced hurricanes or flooding, it’s that it’s used to being within a certain ballpark of intensity for these events. Hence, the human catastrophe of Katrina.

I think that a lot of the science on what changes people’s minds about their beliefs is important, but I don’t think a lot of effort has been put into explaining the science, compared to declaring the truth of AGCC (which is also necessary.)

What I find interesting, and possibly disturbing, is that I have yet to find an intro-level/popular primer on climate change science.

Is there an intro-level/popular primer on how smoking causes lung cancer?

Perhaps not, but there were lots of posters, and using “equal time” laws there was a massive advertising push to point out its inherent dangers*. Still, you adapt your tactics to the world you live in. I think that we live in a more skeptical era, where [citation needed] is part of the popular parlance. I think people are right to ask for evidence, let’s give it to them, in a form they can digest.

*This is what pushed cigarette advertising off the air. For details, see The Emperor of All Maladies by Mukharjee.

Well, let’s take a look at what sort of things are happening now. Right now there’s an attempt by a number of people to migrate across the Mediterranean to Europe. It…isn’t going particularly well, in no small part because of locals who don’t want so many refugees.

This is largely in response to political turmoil, but then that’s going to be inherent when climate change causes enough problems to drive people away. To build on the dice analogy, it’s like a penalty to saving throws; stable countries may handle it, but for less stable ones it means a better chance of breaking. For instance, Syria has had an unprecedentedly long drought causing the collapse of many farms, and this helped exacerbate its collapse into civil war.

This is one look at how humanity is set to deal with climate change right now. The droughts and floods in the US are another. If you’re saying a full-fledged collapse of civilization is not in the cards, I’m not going to argue, but it’s undoubtedly hurting us and so far every indication is that it would be much better to deal by actually trying to avoid the damage.

Is this so? The very basic ideas of why carbon dioxide traps energy, how this is linked to rises in average global temperature, seem pretty well reported to me. It’s true a more detailed look at the quantitative evidence is more restricted to papers, but that’s how things normally are, and I feel like there have been some reasonable attempts to bridge the gap. What, for instance, do you think of skepticalscience and its basic-intermediate-advanced breakdown on different topics?

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I think the Internet is an excellent method for both disseminating information and also keeping people in their own bubbles of ignorance. Ask yourself what kind of person goes to Skeptical Science in the first place.

I’m not saying there aren’t any break-downs out there, but there doesn’t appear to be a place that collects a lot of the evidence in one place that many people will visit of their own volition, and I think people can understand a little more than the basics if explained correctly and in a way that builds up from more basic principles. . It’s not a panacea, but I’ve seen people who accept the truth of climate change be unable to rebut very simple arguments because they don’t understand it well enough. I do think that saying that people’s ignorance is their own fault is short-sighted at best, and catastrophic (literally, in this case) at worst. Ignorance is a default state. Let’s close up as many opportunities to take advantage of that as possible.

This should be mandatory reading for any online debate/forum regarding “controversial” topics:

https://www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-05/5319c4add63a707e780000cd

Lord and colleagues found that people didn’t change their minds in the direction of the arguments presented to them, far from it. Rather, people who had pro-death penalty views found flaws and biases in the anti-death penalty studies, and vice versa. The participants in the experiment ended up with more extreme views than they started with - the pro- people becoming more pro and the anti- becoming more anti. This “biased assimilation effect”, whereby we only believe evidence that fits with what we already believe, is no historical artifact.

Adam Corner and colleagues from the University of Cardiff showed in 2012 that this bias holds for a very contemporary topic - climate change. People who were more skeptical about climate change rated editorials supporting the reality and importance of climate change as less persuasive and reliable than those people who were less skeptical.

And don’t be tempted to dismiss this as evidence that the people in the experiment are bad thinkers or somehow not qualified think about the topic. Another recent study showed that the more scientific education a climate skeptic had, the stronger their skepticism was likely to be.

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LOL! No, I won’t take orders from you. Would anything I could possibly provide change your mind? Of course not. But, more importantly, I don’t want to convince you of anything. Seriously, I want you to continue to believe what you believe.
I found this little experiment interesting for a while but, seriously, aren’t you bored by now?
“Bla, bla, bla, skeptic, bla, bla”.
“Oh yeah? Bla, bla, bla, AGW, bla, bla.”
Go ahead and continue if you want. NOTHING is happening here.

Depends on what you mean by terms like “dealable” and “hurt.”

Did the Dust Bowl “hurt us?” You’d probably get a different answer if you asked Rockefeller than a Joad. Are mass extinctions “dealable?” Depends if you’re a member of that species or not (or if you depend on that ecosystem for your livelihood).

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Are you talking to yourself now?

Would anything I could possibly provide change your mind?

Absolutely. Ten years ago I was of the opinion that the human contribution to global warming was overblown. Look at all the CO2 volcanoes spit out was my go-to argument.

I want you to continue to believe what you believe.

I believe in the scientific method. I know very little about climate science and have a high-school level understanding of the greenhouse effect. However, if 97% of the papers published on global warming say it’s caused by people, that’s good enough for me the same way that I trust the researchers who say cigarettes make it more likely that I will develop lung cancer.

If the fringe scientists are correct and AGW is bogus, then we will have wasted a lot of resources trying to do something we didn’t need to do. If the fringe scientists are wrong but we still do nothing, the trouble we are in for is many orders of magnitude worse.

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well I disagree that humans can cause a climate change.

Edit: or that you can ever prove that.

Oh please. Even with the dramatic ice melting from the end of the last Ice Age sea levels raised on average .39" per year. Even at the worst peak jumps the levels raised less than 2 inches year. We can move out of the way with ease.

And that is assuming computer models are correct. Which I still have a very hard time putting my faith in. I can speak with more confidence than in 15000 years everything south of North Dakota will be under a mile of ice. Those smug Canadians will literally be scraped off the map. I see that being a bigger threat to humanity in the long run.

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Insulted and denigrated so much? First, awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Second, we’re reading the same thread, and about the nastiest reply to you that I’ve seen was essentially someone saying “you’re wrong…get your facts straight”. Maybe that’s really hard on you? Perhaps our non-climate-changing world has thinned your skin due to UV rays and such?
Lastly, you’re posting a dearth of good information–perhaps you have some science that would support your view?

Not to mention the knock-on effects from war, lack of water resources, rained out or dried up crops, etc. etc. Anyone who watches the news can certainly tell that it would not take a “drastic, catastrophic change to really hurt us”.

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Well that is partly my point. Partly people aren’t willing to migrate. In the US we are pretty content. It will have to get really bad to get people to move. And when people do move there is going to be resistance by other who are already there.

I am not saying it won’t be messy, but doable.

In the short term for some people, yes. It didn’t help it happened in the depression either. But really - what was the cost on human lives? Not a lot. My quick search came up with “possibly thousands” who died from “dust pneumonia”.

New Orleans after Katrina?

Black migration to the north and midwest after WWII?

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