Climate change and the point of no return

[chenille]

@carlosdanger

Obviously the UN thinks that Global Warming is on hiatus - it’s their word, not mine - and “hiatus” means stopped. Otherwise, why didn’t the UN say “decrease in heating”? - the real fact is that climate science is big business. Climate science is science based on relatively few statistics. To put it bluntly, it’s a joke. Obviously you don’t recall the Great Coming Of The Ice Age" fear-mongering hubbub of the early 1970s. Al Gore should be whipped with a wet noodle for the kooky scientific ridiculousness he’s fostered and profited from.

Thank you. I was taking the long odds that you had merely been misinformed, and for instance didn’t notice how hiatus was actually defined in the paper. But in mentioning the standard talking points of climate science being about money, the lie about few statistics, the entirely fictitious ice age thing, and the imaginary leadership of the evil Al Gore, I can be certain that you actually don’t care if what you say is true or not.

What’s the deal with this “climate science is big business” thing anyway? I mean, I’ve heard the saying that we fault in others what we see in ourselves, but it seems like the far right have made it their raison d’être:

• Bush had a questionable military record, and Kerry an excellent one, so they made Kerry’s horrible record a major campaign issue;
• Insurance companies regularly decide to cut people off or charge more than they can afford leading to tens of thousands of deaths per year, and Obama’s health care would help mitigate that, so it’s described as introducing death panels;
• Climate deniers receive large amounts of funding via think-tanks, while actual climate scientists don’t get any privileges beyond what a normal research career earns you, so of course climate scientists are only in it for the money (and sex-slaves per Nik).
• And so on and so on.

You’d think if there were something you were so obviously doing worse than your opponents, you wouldn’t want it at the forefront of the conversation, but for some reason they lead with it all the time. I don’t understand why it ever works.

@Comfortable

If you can google then you can read about that and understand that the history of organisms altering their environment is nothing new and that we evolved because of that change.

Evolution is all a question of rates - many species can adapt to a change over a million years that would wipe them out in a hundred. Not everything made it through the “oxygen holocaust”, as it is also called, and that was not actually a fast change at all, with lots of time for others to adapt and find new niches. Whether people should be included under the definition of “natural” or not is a semantic diversion; the real question is what the effects of our actions are, and whether we want to suffer through them.