211–220 of 247 posts
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Eating beef and pork is tasty but really bad for the environment.
"really" is sort of relative here
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Yes, the US' continued debate over whether or not this is even real is maddening. Climate change has unfortunately been sucked into the great maw of partisan bickering, to loosely quote a different Vox article on the subject; belief or disbelief is not based on facts, but a deeply rooted sense of identity. And so, due to our highly tribal nature and inability to feel sufficient empathy for those in out groups, the US…
> experience the horror of a collapsing civilization. Wait, what? Is there any serious prediction of global warming causing collapsing civilization? How would that happen? Hordes of starving Americans abandoning their jobs and storming Canada? We've had big famines before and they were localized to the countries they happened in. Sea level rise won't swamp many places. We've got Syria wrecked by war and civilization…
Civilization overall will grind on regardless, but you've got to admit that just the Syria refugees alone threw a massive kink in European politics. A lot of the countries that are predicted to suffer the most from climate change already are fairly poor. So the question is how much could climate change contribute to political unrest?
I agree that it does no good to talk about climate change in very strongly apocalyptic terms. That's part of the issue in the US -- the largely politicized hype tends to frame this issue in almost quasi religious terms. Either you believe in an Impending Apocalyptic Doom That Will Kill Us All, or you believe in A Vast Global Conspiracy Scam Designed To Enrich Crooked Elitist Climate Scientists. While I think there's plenty of evidence for concern, I do think the evidence points more towards a slow creeping collection of issues more than any sort of mass apocalypse.
For instance, the state where I live (Florida) is fairly vulnerable to sea level rises. What this means is that any infrastructure with a 50 to 100 year horizon has to now account for the potential that sea level could be much higher in the future if you want to really be safe (see http://www.southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/wp-content/upl...). I don't expect Florida to be wiped out by climate change related sea rise but consider how much of Florida civilization is by the sea, I certainly expect some pain points. For poorer countries with much less resources, the pain points might be a lot harsher.
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I'm not entirely sure the Cold War ever ended, we just don't use that phrase anymore so that people don't think about it or know how to refer to the arms race of continual production of nuclear weaponry around the world.
> I'm not entirely sure the Cold War ever ended The 70% nuclear arms reduction from the late 1980s [1] and the collapse of the Soviet Union are pretty definitive. http://www.nukestrat.com/WorldNuclearStockpiles.jpg
With respect to whether a war has ended or not, I'd rather look at the annual defense budget.
The US defense budget, as a fraction of GDP, has spiked four times, to 12%, 22%, 41%, and 15% for Civil War (does not include CSA spending), WW1, WW2, and Korean War.
Since then, the Vietnam War steadily consumed about 10% of GDP for several years. After it was declared over, spending dropped to 5.5% until the Cold War started. Then it popped back up to almost 7% in 1986 before dropping down to 3.5% in 2001. Then it went up to 5.7% in 2010 before starting to drop again. We're now at about 3.3% again.
Prior to WW2, peacetime defense spending was a consistent low level of 1% to 2% of GDP. The US has never reached such low levels of military spending since.
But the Cold War is a clearly visible bump in the chart around 1986. Similarly, the War on Terror seems to have peaked in 2010. The Cold War, specifically, ended in 2001. But the US has never gone back down to a peacetime economy since the end of WW2.
With my tinfoil hat on, the numbers almost look like the lizard-people are titrating to find the optimal intensity of continual war, to maximize their revenues from military spending.
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Could you substantiate your claim that climate researchers have made hundreds of testable predictions over the past several decades by citing peer-reviewed literature making the kinds of statements you describe? Just to be clear, I am not asking for media reports of the scientific literature, but rather the original sources themselves, demonstrating that it is the climate scientists who have been making the kinds of…
Here is a media report quoting climate scientist Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University that Arctic sea ice may be completely melted as soon as 2015: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarm... Language in the article is quite similar to the language in the OP of this thread: "[L]ast year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin" vs. "N…
Looking online for other media reports I found this [1], which includes the choice quote from the original paper (which you can find here [2]):
"Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3 (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover."
As expected, the paper describes a central estimate, an interval describing the uncertainty, and then provides further hedging ("nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer", and the whole second sentence). I must further emphasise that the paper, and Peter Wadhams, were saying that the Arctic ice would be melted during summer, rather than year-round - I don't feel that the phrase "Arctic sea ice may be completely melted as soon as 2015" captures that important distinction.
That serious consequences are found to be possible by some predictive model, is something worth paying attention to. Both you and tjic seem to by trying to imply that climate research has produced a range of models that are wildly inconsistent with reality, but that simply isn't the case (and certainly isn't here - yet).
If you have an interest in the subject then read the literature and understand the nuance of the claims being made. The are often large uncertainties involved, both because of difficult dynamics and poor observational coverage, and no-one in the field I have ever met has ever said otherwise.
[0] http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-earth-0...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/d...
[2] http://www.oc.nps.edu/NAME/Maslowski%20et%20al.%202012%20EPS...
edit: I meant to say, I'm afraid I don't have time to look at the second case.
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Could you substantiate your claim that climate researchers have made hundreds of testable predictions over the past several decades by citing peer-reviewed literature making the kinds of statements you describe? Just to be clear, I am not asking for media reports of the scientific literature, but rather the original sources themselves, demonstrating that it is the climate scientists who have been making the kinds of…
Here is a media report quoting climate scientist Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University that Arctic sea ice may be completely melted as soon as 2015: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarm... Language in the article is quite similar to the language in the OP of this thread: "[L]ast year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin" vs. "N…
Global warming is very real, and still happening, and the "climate change" models predict that we will continue get global warming as we have been. You ask for testable predictions, yes, there are testable predictions but climates are notoriously difficult to model accurately, but even with disagreements over models and problems with accuracy global warming still emerges as a clear prediction.
If you want to look for confirmation bias and "rejiggered data", then what you do is you cherry-pick specific time frames and regions where you can find cooling. That's always possible. Pick a hundred regions in the world and pick a hundred spans of time for each, and then take the few combinations that show cooling and you can paint a picture that hides the truth.
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China has 22 nuclear reactors under construction, they are also collaborating with nuclear power innovators, and building renewables. India is also building more nuclear and solar. Honestly, I wouldn't be worried about them, they are the superpowers of 21st century and will understand negative consequences of climate change to their era. I would be more worried about US & Europe - Germany is shutting down nuclear pla…
opposition of nuclear is strong everywhere in Europe It'd help if our governments didn't kept screwing up their maintenance, but the news from Belgium and Spain just don't provide much confidence.
Furthermore, if people didn't oppose new reactors as vehemently as they do, there would be less pressure to continue lifetime of the old ones
Slight tangent, but how does one with SWE/product skills get involved in climate work? There seems to be some research every other day indicating how disastrous global warming is going to be, but a dearth of jobs outside of solar installation or academia.
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opposition of nuclear is strong everywhere in Europe It'd help if our governments didn't kept screwing up their maintenance, but the news from Belgium and Spain just don't provide much confidence.
Belgium's reactor is old (1974) and was planned to be shutdown. To my understanding, nothing serious has happened there, the plant is just following normal precautions because of a motor failure. Isn't it rather encouraging sign that safety protocols are followed? Furthermore, if people didn't oppose new reactors as vehemently as they do, there would be less pressure to continue lifetime of the old ones
And considering that the first reactor was designed to work until 2005, it's only natural that more parts will start to fail until 2025.
Furthermore, if people didn't oppose new reactors as vehemently as they do, there would be less pressure to continue lifetime of the old ones.
You're just reinforcing my point. If a government can be pressured into running a nuclear plant beyond its safety limits because it refuses to take the popularity hit of telling its citizens to choose an alternative, then that government can't be trusted to run any nuclear plant at all.
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The other parts of the problem deserve mentioned here, because they are extremely problematic and eclipse present environmental crisis and strategy. Syrias civil war began after billions of dollars where somewhat clandestinely spent on fomenting violent revolution there - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/lawma... Libyas security collapsed after its infrastructure, including its world class irrig…
How dishonest can you get? Would you like to explain why Libya was an issue at that time, and not in the preceding decades?
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> People (well, climate science researchers) have been saying that the changes are decades ahead of us, even now, but that we need to take action now and in the past to prevent these changes. Climate researchers have _not_ been implying that the bad effects are way out in the 21st century: they've made hundreds of testable predictions that catastrophe was at hand in the 80s, 90s, and aughts. We were going to see the…
> We were going to see the end of arctic ice Sea Ice Extent Is Near Record Lows--South as Well as North: https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/sea-ice-extent... > have a perpetual ozone hole necessitating sun screen when venturing outside and decimating wildlife from cataracts Antarctic ozone hole beginning to heal: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-hole-... (as mentioned elsewhere, this…
This is embarrassing.
