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Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

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Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#31

Post by jimrandomh »

dzdt wrote: post #18

If you are serious about fighting climate change, what is the single most effective place to spend money? My guess is: education for girls in Africa. Why? Carbon emmissions per year come down to (energy use per person per year) (carbon emitted per unit energy) (number of people). In developed nations, all of these terms are stable or declining. In many developing nations, and Africa in particular, population growth i…

This depends heavily on technological forecasting. There's a decent chance that, by the time those countries reach the level of development where their carbon footprint is a serious concern, they'll have skipped over fossil fuels and gone to solar, similar to how they skipped wired telephony and went to cell phones.

(Of course, education in poor countries is beneficial and worthwhile regardless. But if you have to decide between investments in education or public health in a poor country, I've gotten the impression there's lower-hanging fruit in public health.)

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#32

Post by LeifCarrotson »

the_gastropod wrote: post #20
orthecreedence wrote: post #2

If the scientists don't convince people, I hope the massive droughts in some places, flooding in others, superstorms, and other massive weather pattern shifts will. In the US, there's still a large group of people (or maybe just a vocal group) that cover their ears and won't listen to anything climate-change related, even in the highest places of our government. I hope a healthy dose of "this is what climate change l…

Convincing people this is real is only the tiniest first step. Even amongst über-liberals who fully acknowledge climate change is real—and that we're causing it—they're still eating their steak dinners, driving their cars, drinking bottled water, and flying to vacation in far-away lands. Until we each do our tiny parts of reducing our consumption, Earth's temperature will continue its steady march upward. Getting pol…

The causes of the problem are not evenly distributed. I could eat steak dinners for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and not contribute 1% of some awful industrial-scale disasters.

If I have the personal will to devote an hour a week or $20 of my budget to sustainability, that energy is inordinately more effective when spent pressuring my boss to upgrade our fleet of derelict 4 mpg coal-rollers that do hundreds of miles a week, or writing a letter to my congressman to tryto convince him that global warming isn't a scam, rather than enduring the inconvenience of carpooling so that between my wife's 25mpg and my 30 mpg cars we can save 30 miles a week.

I can contribute a tiny part through personal life changes, or a big part through advocacy, with the same effort.

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#33

Post by jamez1 »

dzdt wrote: post #18

If you are serious about fighting climate change, what is the single most effective place to spend money? My guess is: education for girls in Africa. Why? Carbon emmissions per year come down to (energy use per person per year) (carbon emitted per unit energy) (number of people). In developed nations, all of these terms are stable or declining. In many developing nations, and Africa in particular, population growth i…

It's a great theory but how do you know that education causes lower fertility, and isn't just correlated to lower fertility?

I'd wager getting out poverty causes both education and fertility to improve and that is the real driver in this study.

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#34

Post by trumbitta2 »

dzdt wrote: post #18

If you are serious about fighting climate change, what is the single most effective place to spend money? My guess is: education for girls in Africa. Why? Carbon emmissions per year come down to (energy use per person per year) (carbon emitted per unit energy) (number of people). In developed nations, all of these terms are stable or declining. In many developing nations, and Africa in particular, population growth i…

Is everyone seriously discussing how to lower the fertility rate in african girls as a way to fight climate change?

I previously wrote "racist". This is worse. I don't know the word for what this is.

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#35

Post by javajosh »

powertower wrote: post #27
orthecreedence wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical exchange: "Climate change is bullshit! I demand to see evidence of it actually occurring!" "I don't recognize these sources! These were payed for by liberal media! I demand to see real data!" Rinse and repeat.

If you want to be correct, its more like "we've looked at your model and talked to the people that created it, and everyone that worked on it agrees that the debate is being driven by politics rather than science. We've found that emissions of the sun are responsible for 98% of the current climate change, that carbon is the smallest factor in the other 2%, and you are being set up for a global taxation system that is…

That's a (much) better argument than the "God wouldn't let this happen" straw-man often argued against by climate change activists. The "Climategate" emails make it particularly compelling. The air of corruption and decay around academia and academic publishing in particular have legitimately eroded trust in those institutions, and thanks to the nature of climate change the data is highly indirect and difficult to independently verify (compare the discovery of climate change to the discovery of Saturn's moons, or the ideal gas law!)

Truth is, although I strongly tend to believe climate change claims, I still feel some strong skepticism. I know my way around math, statistics, chemistry, and physics, but I couldn't tell you what measurements you actually can do to support climate change assertions. How do you measure the average temperature of a region, let alone the world, over a long period of time?! I've always felt uneasy about archeologists drawing conclusions from a single bone fragment, or even cosmologists drawing enormously long chains of conclusions from star spectra, but in those cases a) the measurement itself is obvious, b) the reasoning is obvious (even if you disagree with it) and c) it doesn't really matter all that much. Climate change, though, suffers from a) measurements that aren't obvious, b)reasoning that isn't obvious, and c) is incredibly important and we can't get it wrong. And moreover, if you express these doubts, the vast majority of climate change activists will just get angry with you and either stop talking to you at all, or point to letters with lots of eminent signatories saying, "it all makes sense to us, the evidence is overwhelming, we're really smart, so trust us."

Argument from authority isn't good enough, and the intuitive argument isn't good enough, either. Yes, we live in a thin skin of biosphere and we are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a huge rate in absolute terms. But I don't have an intuition about the relative rate, especially when compared to natural processes (which are vast). We cut down forests at a prodigious rate, which hurts capture, but I don't have an intuition about the amount of this either. I would love it if someone took these concerns seriously and wrote a book about it.

(For the record, I think there are other "good enough" reasons to change our behavior. Rampant consumerism isn't good for people or the planet in more obvious, directly measurable ways. Plus, even if the odds are low for a global catastrophe, it is better to be safe than sorry.)

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#36

Post by conanbatt »

dzdt wrote: post #18

If you are serious about fighting climate change, what is the single most effective place to spend money? My guess is: education for girls in Africa. Why? Carbon emmissions per year come down to (energy use per person per year) (carbon emitted per unit energy) (number of people). In developed nations, all of these terms are stable or declining. In many developing nations, and Africa in particular, population growth i…

Malthus lives on. What a tragedy.

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#37

Post by golem14 »

fyrstenberg wrote: post #15
mojomark wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> of the approximate 11 million scientists has signed.... A.) Is there a citation that accompanies your statistic? B.) Does this number account for the type of scientist? Are you lumping non-Earth scientists (say, fiber optic researchers) in with your assesment that 15K is not a large number?

A) Digest of Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables_3.asp#Ch3aSub... (although, the specific table has since been removed, reason unknown). B) I just like to point out the hypocrisy (ref. OISM where 32,000 scientists where considering a "not a very compelling figure, but a tiny minority" ( https://www.skepticalscience.com/OISM-Petition-Project.htm , together will all the left-leaning med…

B) if you follow the links, you can find the supplementary data with the complete list of people who signed:

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/doi/10.1093/bios...

the OSIM data is less informative, would be interesting to compare trustworthiness:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120601110230/http://www.nipccr...

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#38

Post by petre »

dzdt wrote: post #18

If you are serious about fighting climate change, what is the single most effective place to spend money? My guess is: education for girls in Africa. Why? Carbon emmissions per year come down to (energy use per person per year) (carbon emitted per unit energy) (number of people). In developed nations, all of these terms are stable or declining. In many developing nations, and Africa in particular, population growth i…

Africa, really? The place that always gets screwed over. Slavery, colonialism and now artificially limiting population growth? I think tropical diseases like malaria and ebola already already limit population growth in Africa rather too well. Africa does the least per capita CO2. They transport trees by bicycle. They don't burn heating fuel because they don't have to.

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#39

Post by Apes »

jimrandomh wrote: post #31
dzdt wrote: post #18

If you are serious about fighting climate change, what is the single most effective place to spend money? My guess is: education for girls in Africa. Why? Carbon emmissions per year come down to (energy use per person per year) (carbon emitted per unit energy) (number of people). In developed nations, all of these terms are stable or declining. In many developing nations, and Africa in particular, population growth i…

This depends heavily on technological forecasting. There's a decent chance that, by the time those countries reach the level of development where their carbon footprint is a serious concern, they'll have skipped over fossil fuels and gone to solar, similar to how they skipped wired telephony and went to cell phones. (Of course, education in poor countries is beneficial and worthwhile regardless. But if you have to de…

A country with a 3-4% growth rate is doubling its population about every 20 years.

For that country's carbon footprint to just remain stable, they will have to halve the amount of carbon emissions per person every 20 years.

This means that these countries will need to completely replace their infrastructure with technology and processes that are twice as efficient every 20 years, just to keep their carbon emissions stable.

I just don't see any way for technology and infrastructure to outpace population growth that fast.

Most realistically with population growth this high, there is probably going to be an explosion of carbon emissions regardless of how much green technology is rolled out in parallel.

Re: Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction

#40

Post by StavrosK »

trumbitta2 wrote: post #34
dzdt wrote: post #18

If you are serious about fighting climate change, what is the single most effective place to spend money? My guess is: education for girls in Africa. Why? Carbon emmissions per year come down to (energy use per person per year) (carbon emitted per unit energy) (number of people). In developed nations, all of these terms are stable or declining. In many developing nations, and Africa in particular, population growth i…

Is everyone seriously discussing how to lower the fertility rate in african girls as a way to fight climate change? I previously wrote "racist". This is worse. I don't know the word for what this is.

Is telling someone "hey don't have so many kids, it's bad for the environment" bad? I think you're mistakenly throwing a hidden "by force" in there.

Nobody is forcing African girls to have fewer children. If you'd like to discuss, I'd love to hear your argument on why you think that giving African girls more choices than "bear four kids by the time you're eighteen" is bad.

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