Oog. That article suggests a depressing answer to the question that’s been bugging me for literally decades whether it’s even possible to build or sustain anything like what we’d recognize as a modern world without relying on human exploitation. I fear that for me to live, not lavishly, but just in what I’d consider basic civilization, absolutely requires a substantial portion of the human race to exist in conditions only nominally different from slavery, and sometimes not even nominally. It’s pretty well understood that the classical civilizations had the luxury to excel in art and philosophy because they had slaves doing all the real work. Today we find open slavery distasteful and barbaric, but we haven’t gotten rid of the slavery, just repackaged and rebranded it as allegedly free choices that really aren’t, and benefitting from slave labor turned into arms-length transactions by which companies can publish grand declarations about their commitment to humane working conditions, while clucking their tongues and promising to thoroughly investigate the practices of their contractors.
It’s not an exclusively Fox News view: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/03/14/the-energy-202-labor-opposition-to-green-new-deal-could-be-a-big-obstacle/5c89742e1b326b0f7f38f169/?utm_term=.3212df5ed088
You can enjoy the hot takes of people in restaurants like AOC and this rando or you can win an election - which the Democrats will not without the union support they rely on.
If catastrophe means “collapse of human civilization”, very few climate scientists believe it will come to that. Many activists believe it, but not the scientists. Scientists also tend to be reticent about talking about catastrophe/collapse/etc, because it cannot be framed as a scientific question. We can predict the impact on temperature, precipitation, extreme weather, and so on. But nobody really knows what it will do to human civilization.
So, what do they believe our continued increase in carbon emission will come to? “Substantial costs” and then what? Just some more “substantial costs”?
Depends who you ask. Some environmental economists, like Nicolas Stern, would say almost exactly that. There’s a section in the Stern report where they assess the value of each life lost to climate change in dollar values (and yes, it involves calculating what each person’s contribution might have been to their country’s GDP). So, substantial costs, followed by more substantial costs.
Physical climate scientists tend either to not talk about it at all, or cast it in terms of things they can quantify more readily: sea level rise, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, increases in extreme weather events, drought, etc. The impact on people is hard or impossible to quantify, so they don’t.
BTW it’s not even clear what “collapse” actually means. In order to discuss it, Jorgen Randers picks an arbitrary definition: 1 billion people each losing at least 50% of something they hold dear, within a period of 20 years. And he goes on to argue that we probably wouldn’t recognise it as climate-induced collapse as it was happening, and maybe not even afterwards, when histories of the 21st century get written. The collapse will be blamed on the proximal effect, whether that be epidemic, famine, or war.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632870800092X?via%3Dihub
And Randers’ paper, despite being fascinating, is well outside the scientific mainstream, mainly because what he’s trying to do would seem unscientific to most scientists.
seems to me more that most climate scientists hope it will not come to that. hence the increased urgency in their reports to do the neccessary steps right now.
BTW it’s not even clear what “collapse” actually means
precisely. thank you.
I think that’s mostly pretty stupid, for a lot of reasons, mostly because it grotesquely ignores the potential of global warming to become a self-amplifying outside of our inputs, e.g.:
- Shrinking and melting glaciers and snow-cover are increasing ground heat absorbtion.
- Rainforests no longer operate as carbon sinks. At our current level of carbon saturation, they have become net carbon emitters.
- The largest remaining sinks on land are the boreal forests, which are collapsing in area due to climate effects (such as beetles).
- Huge amounts of tundra are leaving the permafrost, allowing vast amounts of trapped methane to evaporate.
Right now our only safe carbon sink is algae. The question I can’t bring myself to look up is at what point of ocean acidification are they unable to form shells and die en masse? The Great Barrier Reef has already been effectively killed by it.
If it’s any comfort, we’ll never get to a point where “1 billion people each losing at least 50% of something they hold dear, within a period of 20 years”. Just a reminder: we began a 17 year war (pretending, as everyone does, that we do not still have soldiers fighting in Iraq) because the price of gas fluctuated by a few pennies. When Russia, China and India cannot feed large portions of their populations, they’re not going to say, “Well, this sucks! I guess a bunch of us are going to starve” they’re going to say, “We have nuclear weapons, give us your food.” At which point the nations they bully will say, “If we’re going to starve to death, you might as well nuke us.”
Who is this Cloud Daddy person of which you speak? Some sort of professional vapist?
Oh, trust me, climate scientists don’t ignore these feedbacks - they spend a lot of time studying them. The model runs for the next IPCC report are just starting to come in, and the representation of some of these feedbacks is much better in the new generation of models, which means in turn that the latest generation of models are showing higher sensitivity to increased GHGs. So the next IPCC report will certainly say it’s worse than we thought.
But a good scientist won’t report things that they don’t have data to support, and won’t talk about concepts that don’t have a clear definition. That’s not stupid, it’s pretty wise - scientists who do this lose their credibility fast. What’s stupid is that we never trained a generation of journalists & commentators in the science, ready to explain the science to a lay audience and talk clearly and rationally about the implications.
Why would we train a whole bunch of people for non-existent jobs? Where would these people work? Who would employ them?
Perhaps I should have called him Beard Daddy?
Or, Finger Daddy?
Just don’t call him late for the rapture.
Well not your taxes. But hey, the temporarily embarrassed billionaires gotta look out for that windfall that’s just around the corner any day now. Well, okay, there is one billionaire who actually watches Fox in earnest (as opposed to just making sure the Ministry of Truth is doing its job).
Finger Daddy seems a little risque, but I’m into it…
Um, what’s that that they say again; TMI (?)
You can’t reasonably justify the cost of the Green New Deal by claiming that WW II is analogous, for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that WW II cost the US about $5 trillion (adjusted for inflation to today) whereas the GND has virtually infinite cost (though, some suggest it could be as little as $90 trillion). The only way the nation was able to fund the war effort in WW II was by everyone going on severe rationing, sacrificing metal, sugar and fuel for the war effort, besides perpetual war bond sales.
WW II was a period of severe sacrifice implementing a known defense against a demonstrable foe. In contrast, not only is climate change mostly educated speculation of future changes, but nobody has even proposed effective solutions to it. All these initiatives, from the Paris “Accord” (really, a treaty signed illegally by Obama) to the GND, are just empty sound and fury, mere cover for the fact that none of it would do what it claims to do. That’s part of the reason that any proposal to mitigate negative climate change has essentially infinite cost; countermeasures cannot be effective, but the people who pass the taxes can constantly increase the expenditures made for it.
Yeah, Adams got ‘B’ Ark all wrong.
Oh good. Antivaxxer in one thread, climate change denier on this. If we get a flat earther, do we get the trifecta? Sigh…
it’s not a real treaty unless a white man signs it /s
Allow me to reply.
First off, I was a climate skeptic for many years. Coming from someone who studied geology and the ice ages and even had professors of the time suggest this was a natural pattern, I had concluded this was largely a non issue that would work itself out. But years later, and relatively recently, I was forced to confront my conclusions and acknowledge that yes - it was happening - and yes, man is at least partly involved. The CO2 being the main and obvious issue that can be measured.
So you’re right and wrong about “climate change mostly educated speculation of future changes”. The models DO run a gamut of “not that bad” to “mass extinction levels”. It most likely will be in the middle somewhere, but an honest scientist will say that they can’t be certain how bad it will be at this point.
But we have the evidence that it is getting worse. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2005. The hippy dippy Pentagon has released papers outlining issues global warming is threatening 2/3rds of their mission critical bases. So whether one wants to acknowledge it or not, or believes man is involved directly or not, things are happening.
Now - is WWII a good analogy? It’s decent, because it will take a global effort and people contributing in small ways - possibly even rationing and sacrificing for the greater good. It also is global problem that will effect everyone in some way.
It will be expensive - but it will also be expensive if we do nothing. The flooding we are seeing in the midwest is going to get worse. Coastal areas are going to see more flooding and most likely stronger hurricanes. In the past when things got too wet in an area, we just migrated back a little bit. But with established cities, people are going to fight pulling up tent stakes and just “moving back”. Do you spend money on the front end to try to get ahead of it, or money on the back end to clean up the mess?
Globally we have seen it cause massive issues already. The Syrian civil war was touched off due to a severe drought which forced people in the rural areas into the city to seek refuge. More problems where an area is hit hard and civil unrest erupts is a guarantee. How much have we spent in Syria? How much have other countries in dealing with the refuge crisis?
Then we have the issue of - do we want to still be number one? People are developing new technologies. China is the sleeping dragon that is awakening. They are making a massive push for greener technology. Their current pollution issues are like what the US had in the 70s pre EPA. They are working on clean coal plants (as that is the one raw source they can easily get), but they are also making a huge push with new nuclear plants being built. They already have tapped hydro power for the massive rivers. But they are also working solar and wind technology. The tech sector in China is exploding and they have about 2x the number of STEM graduates than in the US. India is also putting out more STEM grads. If we aren’t actively pushing to be the forefront of this technology, others will and we will lose our technological edge.
Finally, I do share your opinion that no one in the government has a good, clear picture on what to do. I am not sure anyone does. In fact I do worry about just throwing money at the issue like it will solve it, when those solutions might not be the best ones available. And certainly some of the proponents are making clunky statements that are easy to mock and make memes of. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be working towards that goal.
