You know what. Was interested in keeping this going for discussions sake. But I just badly lacerated both my feet on a poorly placed yard tool.
So hope shit looks better for you some time soon, and goodnight.
3 Likes
No hard feelings, sorry for the sharp reply. Accidental poking of a sore spot.
4 Likes
The last two sentences seem mutually contradictory.
1 Like
Is everyone actually going to die if we don’t make the environment our number one priority right now? Because if they aren’t, that statement and the numerous ones like it that have become staples of political discourse for certain parties will be assigned to the Crying Wolf category by a lot of other people, and actually make it harder to do anything about the situation.
They also occasionally send out the occasional racist or conspiracy driven message and have gained popularity in skinhead circles. They do a lot of good, but Wikileaks has its own problems.
1 Like
Only if you have the myopic view that change can only happen through a presidential election.
…which is part of the reason change is hard to implement. So many True Believers who somehow imagine that one big act will be all that is required of them, so unwilling to do the little things daily that produce real and sustainable change.
Bernie was never going to do this alone.
4 Likes
Yeah, I look at wikileaks as more of an agent of chaos… no discretion just dumping crap out there without regard as to why it was kept secret. Definitely a double-edged sword.
1 Like
[quote=“starrygordon, post:206, topic:82006, full:true”]
Is everyone actually going to die if we don’t make the environment our number one priority right now? Because if they aren’t, that statement and the numerous ones like it that have become staples of political discourse for certain parties will be assigned to the Crying Wolf category by a lot of other people, and actually make it harder to do anything about the situation.[/quote]
Yes.
I am not a climate scientist, but I am a scientist. I know how to read the literature and interpret the back-channels of scientific opinion; I can tell the difference between “this is what we suspect might be happening” and “this is what’s happening”.
This is what’s happening:
James Hansen was the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1981 to 2013; he now runs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. For the last thirty years, Hansen has been repeatedly proven correct in his climate predictions.
For a layperson-readable but thorough background introduction, see Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren. Then consider that our complete inaction in the time since that was written has made the situation much, much worse.
In any sort of predictive natural science, absolute certainty is hard to come by; this is why we use things like p-values and error bars. Normally, as you refine your data over time, the error bars shrink towards the middle and the initial estimate turns out to be roughly correct.
This has not been happening with climate science. Across a wide range of studies, the error bars have been contracting towards the top of the range. The overall theme of climate science over the last decade is that the worst-case scenarios are coming true.
The major reason for this appears to be that there was a systematic bias towards excessive optimism, driven largely by the fear you describe in your post. Nobody wanted their work dismissed as scaremongering, and journals were unwilling to publish any studies that weren’t conservative in their conclusions.
This is particularly the case with large, international collaborative efforts like the IPCC reports. Basically, nothing got into those unless pretty much the entire scientific community agreed with it. Again, this biases the results towards excessive conservatism.
The IPCC estimated 2-2.5°C as the maximum tolerable temperature increase. This, in itself, is probably over-optimistic; it is likely that 2.5°C is enough to trigger runaway positive feedbacks, and it will certainly cause mass human casualties. They also estimated 450ppm CO2 as the maximum atmospheric concentration allowable if we want to hold warming to that level. Again, this is almost certainly optimistic; Hansen argues that 350ppm is more realistic, and that even that level may be too high.
We blew past 350ppm quite some time ago. It’s over 400ppm now, and is still accelerating upwards. And, due to the persistent nature of CO2, it’s going to stay above 400ppm for a very long time, even if we stopped adding to it.
Which we haven’t.
We’ve only seen about 1°C of warming so far. Because the ocean acts as a buffering heat sink (among other reasons, but that’s the big one), temperature rise lags behind climate forcing. But that is only a temporary reprieve; after the ocean heats (buggering the reefs and fisheries in the process), the atmospheric temperatures follow. Even if we shut everything down today, we’ve got at least another few degrees “in the bank”.
You can see the trajectory of that here:
The youngest person on the planet who has seen a globally cooler-than-average month is 31 years old. These days, that story gets repeated every year with the age incremented by one.
A few degrees may not sound like a big deal, but it is. This is for two reasons:
-
Heat is energy. More heat, more storms, more hurricanes, more floods, more New Orleans, Sandy and Katrina. And much higher sea levels, from both melting icecaps and the expansion of water when heated. Say goodbye to every coastal city (i.e.: almost all of them).
-
Positive feedback mechanisms. There are a bunch of these, but for the most obvious: heat melts the icecaps, which reduces the albedo of the northern oceans, which in turn means we gather more heat from the sun.
This is what the North Pole has looked like during Summer for the last fourteen years:
Thanks to the positive feedback mechanisms, there are climate “tipping points”, where more heat triggers more warming in a runaway fashion. Because of this, it is very likely that there is no such thing as a 4°C warming, except as a waypoint that we rapidly pass on the way to 10°C or worse.
Given enough time, a runaway greenhouse could potentially lead to total extinction, but that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s the long-term threat, but we’re in deep trouble long before we have to deal with that.
The short-term threat of climate change is that it is a risk multiplier: it makes all of the existing problems worse. Famine, pestilence, war; the danger of all of these is enhanced by climate change, and they all feed into each other.
Food crops are both location and climate dependent. As the US rain band shifts north to the defrosting Canadian tundra, you can’t just shift the crops with it; the recently-thawed mud needs time to develop into proper agricultural soil. Shifting climate also trashes pollination mechanisms for wild flora and drives extinction of endangered species. Changing watercourses exacerbate already-dangerous shortages of potable water. Expanding tropical zones bring tropical diseases with them; you can already track the march of Dengue fever etc. southwards along the north Queensland coast.
For the most obvious example: almost all of Bangladesh is within spitting distance of sea level. On current rates, the country is likely to be largely uninhabitable (without Dutch-style water management, which the Bangladeshis don’t have the resources to implement) within a century. Bangladesh’s neighbours (India, China, Pakistan etc.) are all nuclear armed and have a history of military conflict. How do you think they’re going to react when 100 million Bangladeshi refugees land on their doorstep? What will India do if China attempts to divert all of the Bangladeshis to the south and vice-versa?
That’s just one example, but similar scenarios recur again and again across the world. And they’ll all be happening at the same time, substantially impairing the ability of the global community to respond to them.
Throughout history, most military conflict has ultimately been caused by competition over resources. Climate change, in the near future, is going to substantially damage the global food supply and the already-running-short supply of potable water. Desperate people do desperate things, and there’s nothing like hunger and thirst to drive desperation. Historically, starvation leads to revolution.
If you go talk to the academics who specialise in conflict studies, they’ll tell you that we’re already seeing the first climate-driven wars. So will the people in charge of medium-term planning for the militaries of the industrialised world. Marginal environments like northern Africa are the first to go, but it will spread beyond that with time. We live in an interconnected world; everything affects everything else.
The situation we are seeing now is not “the climate changing as it always has”. Yes, climates change over geological timescales; the slow pace has historically given the biosphere time to adapt (and, in the rare cases of sudden change like Chicxulub, the slow pace afterwards has provided time to recover). What we’re doing to the place is unprecedented in both its suddenness and its momentum. We’re driving the change way too fast, and there is enough momentum built up that it’s either too late to stop it or very close to that point.
The scientists ten years ago who were desperately trying to warn everyone that we needed to take immediate action or we’re all fucked? They weren’t wrong, and it wasn’t an ambit claim. If anything, they were sounding the alarm much too late.
If you aren’t scared shitless by climate change, you don’t understand the situation.
64 Likes
NateSilver538: TRUMP now leads in 538’s now-cast, our estimate of what would happen in an election today. https://t.co/djsqNajFrh https://t.co/7DvrdieHOw
You could have made pretty much the same argument about Obama. Castro was one of those community organizers that the GOP hates so much, the mayor of a major US city for 5 years, and is a member of Obama’s Cabinet as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Agreed. I do tend to be pretty sensitive about anything that sounds like the appropriation argument. It is one of the easy ways to push my buttons. you were not really trying to do that, but I responded anyway.
1 Like
This should be on the front page of BB, not a mere reply post 200 down.
10 Likes
They did make that argument about Obama, and they were right. His first few months included a few international gaffes and trying to hand off the health care bill to congress turned into a bit of a gong show.
He was still the right choice to be president, but his lack of experience was real and had consequences.
Even so, Obama had many years as a state legislator, four years as a senator, and had shown he could run and win a great primary campaign. That’s far in excess of what Castro has done.
The mayor of San Antonio doesn’t have a lot of power and Secretary of HUD is unelected and isn’t very high profile.
1 Like
He’s still failing in the more reliable long-term poll. But still, Hilary needs to start fighting him, and saying “OMG HE’S SO SCARY” is a losing strategy. He is. So we need you to take this seriously, and give some hope, Clinton.
2 Likes
Agreed and flagged to draw attention to it.
3 Likes
In his first 100 days, Obama accomplished:
-
Passing the largest economic stimulus bill in American history.
-
Setting a fixed timetable for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq.
-
Ordering 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and enlisting, with modest new assistance, European allies in a new multi-layered strategy there and in Pakistan.
-
“Returning science to its rightful place” by lifting the Bush restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research.
-
Signing laws to expand children’s health insurance (financed by a 61-cent per pack increase in the federal cigarette tax the adviser did not tout).
-
Signing a law meant to improve the ability of women who allege pay discrimination to sue their employer.
-
Diminishing the role of lobbyists in the White House
-
“Forge a meaningful statement from the United Nations” criticizing North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile.
-
Lifting travel and remittance restrictions for Cuban Americans who seek to travel more frequently to the island and send more US currency to their immediate family.
And yet he was one of the top 3 or 4 picks for VP.
You are welcome to your opinion, but I don’t ascribe to it.
2 Likes
Considering that her appointees kept opposition to the TPP out of the platform, I’d be surprised if this lasts past the election.
1 Like
I recently read a book, or at least part of a book, by Mark Levin, and in that book it describes the ‘Degrowthers’ people trying to impair economic growth by making false claims about climate change. It says and I quote, “Carbon Dioxide is a naturally occurring by-product of photosynthesis.” … Seriously…
I hear he is quite popular too, and I understand why, he gives people who don’t know better someone to aim their blame at.
For me, climate change due to CO2 can be proven, not just by years of statistical data, but by a simple question. Which is more? 16 or 22
4 Likes
I think what Clinton will be like after the election is the biggest mystery out there. From the time she was a college student until around halfway through Bill’s first term HRC was an outspoken progressive. The intervening years seem to have changed her…maybe. One of her early major influences was Saul Alinsky (that’s the Lucifer supporter that Ben Carson was referring to), and the triangulation that almost defines Clinton since the mid-90s can be seen as an Alinsky tactic to gain power. If so then being elected president will represent a kind of policy singularity for her, where it is simply not possible to make that kind of inference.
1 Like
He was incredibly talented and not completely inexperienced, but his inexperience was a liability. There were a couple minor diplomatic embarrassments and I really do wonder if he could have something to avoid Republicans from becoming as alienated as they did.
1 Like
