Fox and Friends reporter seems sorry he talked to a smart person about the Green New Deal

[RickMycroft]

@hecep

don’t push your agenda in so obvious a manner that you end up looking like an idiot.

[sme]

@Sam_Debater

but nobody has even proposed effective solutions to it

ahem

Project Drawdown

[Ratel]

@Mister44

man is at least partly involved.

Who else is involved?

@Mister44

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.

1. We are already in the middle of a mass extinction that will be readily apparent in our fossil record.

2. Things are already bad. Any model saying things will be “not that bad” is failing to measure the present.

3. Every new climate report admits that previous models underestimated where we are, much less where we are going. The latest horrifying news is that we have dramatically underestimated the rise in ocean temperatures, which a little physics will tell you is an order of magnitude more important than atmospheric temperature.

The thing I don’t get about the “there will be some problems” analysis is by what mechanism to people think the hockey stick is going to level off? We have a pretty good idea of what point in global warming we all die, because it’s happened before, and the current trend is pointed directly at that mark. As I pointed out above, there are no natural processes that still mitigate this, in fact we are rapidly approaching a situation where natural processes start to exacerbate it. So what possible analysis says, “Oh, it’s going to cost us $X billion a year, but that’s it.”

I don’t mean to sound as aggro as I probably do, but I think these are cases of scientific “caution” effectively misinforming people.

And if you think this extreme conservatism in interpreting research is some sort of scientific requirement, rather than the fact that climate scientists have been very effectively intimidated by conservative media, you’ve never read a paper on genetics or cancer research.

[Barradeno]

@Pooua

Spending money on less effective means of production can give only the illusion of boosting an economy. Simply put, it costs more money in real dollars to get a watt of power out of wind or solar than from a steam- or gas-driven power plant, particularly if the goal is reliable and regular wattage.

That doesn’t seem to be true anymore, even when excluding the externalities of CO₂ and NO_x generation or groundwater pollution. The life-cycle costs of wind and solar electricity production keep dropping and, according to some studies, are already lower than the costs for coal and gas plants. And when you include the externalities, the cost of renewables is less than half of the cost of fossil-fuel burning generation.

Even the current administration cannot hide this fact in their 2019 Annual Energy Outlook report:

These do not include externalities and notice how they are not even showing conventional coal and nuclear, they are not competitive anymore.

[AnthonyC]

You may want to add a bullet for “loss of global cloud cover due to warming triggers several degrees more warming, along with enormous changes in weather patterns” as well.

[AnthonyC]

@sme

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.

What’s also stupid is that we never train scientists on how to talk to the press. Or even to each other, really, as anyone who has read a few papers or been to an academic conference on a technical subject can tell you.

Newspapers optimize for selling stories. Only scientists want to optimize for understanding, and almost all have almost no training or natural talent in how to do that. Who is the “we” in your comment that could and should have so trained journalists?

[Ratel]

Danger of the North Atlantic conveyer collapsing, etc.

Honestly, when I spend this much time thinking about it, I get nauseous.

[sme]

@AnthonyC

What’s also stupid is that we never train scientists on how to talk to the press. Or even to each other, really, as anyone who has read a few papers or been to an academic conference on a technical subject can tell you.

Never? There are several excellent programs specifically designed to train climate scientists to talk to the press. I’ve been through one. Some scientists take to this, and are excellent at it - people like Kathryn Hayhoe and Mike Mann. But the personal cost is huge, as they get bombarded with nonsense, including the occasional death threat. Entering the fray is not something to do lightly.

But for the most part, the skillset that makes for a brilliant scientist has little overlap with the skillset that makes someone a good public speaker. So telling scientists to be better communicators is very much an “attack the messenger” strategy. It’s not the scientist’s fault that you do not have enough of an education to understand their technical papers. And it’s not the scientist’s job to take time out to explain it to you. We need scientists to do science, and we need communicators to communicate. In most case, it works a lot better if it’s not the same person trying to do both.

So rather than attacking scientists, attack the politicians who have, over the decades, so stripped public education of resources that very few people have any kind of science literacy any more. Attack the fossil fuel lobbyists who have poured money into one of the biggest disinformation campaigns ever waged. Attack the entire neo-liberal establishment that has prioritized short term profit-taking over long term sustainability. But don’t attack the scientists.

[AnthonyC]

Agreed on all points, and thanks for pointing out that those programs exist!

[tekna2007]

Emily Atkin (emorwee)

[Mister44]

@Ratel

I don’t mean to sound as aggro as I probably do, but I think these are cases of scientific “caution” effectively misinforming people.

Fair enough, but in the case where one is heading off a cliff and one refused that there is a cliff, I am attempting to show all the warning signs that the cliff is ahead. Screaming that here is a cliff ahead will get written off as hysteria. It is attempting to not completely challenge one’s views at once, but inject the possibility that some of those views are wrong. This can lead to a domino effect if one wants to actively pursue the issue and think about it. For example, even if one refuses to believe it’s not bad or that it isn’t mad made, if they look around a little one can’t deny changes are happening. Regardless of the cause, it is going to cause a lot of issues. Once one acknowledges this I think they are more likely to agree later that limiting mans’ effects is the smart thing to do.

This reflects my own journey where eventually former skeptics given talks on the issue is what turned me around. YMMV

[killick]

Carbon is only cheaper when you leave out the environmental costs