Climate change

[stui magpie]

Unfortunately there's an element of truth to it, global warming has been going to kill us all in 20 years for the past 30 years.

[Skids]

Yeah them rising sea levels are.... well, non existent. Scary stuff.

[stui magpie]

Thank christ the internet wasn't around 5000 years ago when sea levels rose 100m.

[David]

Yeah them rising sea levels are.... well, non existent. Scary stuff.

Try telling people from Pacific Island countries that. Guess they're all super-gullible for worrying about this and not listening to Andrew Bolt.

[Skids]

[pietillidie]

^You should officially complain to Breitbart, Fox, the Daily Mail and Daily Express for missing this monumental world incident. The Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph mentioned it for you given its enormous implications for Australia.

[watt price tully]

^You should officially complain to Breitbart, Fox, the Daily Mail and Daily Express for missing this monumental world incident. The Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph mentioned it for you given its enormous implications for Australia.

Don’t worry, he has

[David]

On the other side of the time-wasting of climate scepticism is the rather more trendy climate apocalypticism, most recently epitomised by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker, in which we're all doomed now regardless of what we do:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultu ... pretending

Overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.

To judge from recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of Americans (many of them Republican) are pessimistic about the planet’s future, and from the success of a book like David Wallace-Wells’s harrowing “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was released this year, I’m not alone in having reached this conclusion. But there continues to be a reluctance to broadcast it. Some climate activists argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date. The activists who make it remind me of the religious leaders who fear that, without the promise of eternal salvation, people won’t bother to behave well. In my experience, nonbelievers are no less loving of their neighbors than believers. And so I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the truth.

Here's a good response to Franzen's fatalism:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/ ... nd-useless

Franzen’s more dangerous argument rests on the premise that, after a certain warming threshold, the climate apocalypse is inevitable. Franzen claims baselessly that “it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees,” because the whole system would fall apart. This is not true, and I have no idea how that claim made it past the New Yorker’s legendary fact-checking department. As actual climate scientist Kate Marvel points out, there is no magical point of temperature rise separating “apocalypse” from “not-apocalypse,” only a gradual slope of worsening futures. 3 degrees of warming is worse than 2, but it is much better than 4. (Embarrassingly, Dr. Marvel did not account for Franzen’s brain model in her calculations.)

[stui magpie]

So translation, we don't have an emergency despite the propaganda?

[David]

[stui magpie]

I feel the same way with the emergency stuff. It's not an emergency, it's a problem that needs consideration and action, not just panicked reaction.

[Pies4shaw]

Nothing evere needs a panicked reaction. It is an emergency, though.

[Wokko]

[Pies4shaw]

https://theconversation.com/climate-cha ... ite-123164

[Wokko]

Yep, have to silence all opposition, no heresy allowed. Absolutely pathetic.