101–110 of 147 posts
This weekend I read about how our food supply chain is responsible for a lot of greenhouse gases. As much as automobiles. That changing it could have a massive impact. But, people don't like change that touches their food and leaders just won't even talk about it. How do we get people to be open to changes in stuff like this?
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Do you want people who are not left-wing to listen to scientists? When you are trying to convince people to believe in something they don’t want to believe in, it’s a bad move to insult them or inject inflammatory political views into the discussion. This kind of language about colonialism, inequity, etc. is going to alienate a lot of people — just like the smug self-righteousness of “I believe in science” (which imp…
This presupposes that scientists are the reason that "not left-wing" people (in reality a small fraction of US conservatives) aren't listening to scientists. The fact that climate change is human caused is political in the states, should that, too, be left out of the IPCC report to make it more palatable?
No it doesn't. My argument is that if the scientists start bringing more politics into this, they make the political situation even worse than it is now, and they give people even more reasons to resist listening.
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It’s not optimism, it’s about where the solution lies. In one case we are wishing for a solution to fall out of some genuis minds. In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over. That’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism.
> In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over. Okay, propose concrete actions, political, legal even military if needed that you think will help accomplish this and could actually work globally?
In no particular order: institute carbon taxes, tie in climate based criteria for fha loans including weatherization, electrification and neighborhood planning, drive industrial policy towards the expansion of green industries including renewable energy, but also on the demand planning and efficiency side (ex heat pumps in buildings, EVs etc). Shift agricultural policy to focus more heavily on climate impacts and discourage fossil fuel intensive methods. Dramatic shifts in federal fleets away from fossil fuel vehicles, etc.
I’m not an expert on this stuff but these are just obvious things. Actual policy could be crafted to address these things on a number of different levels.
One of my concerns as someone who is part of the tech community is the innovation delusion. Many of us are focused on "magic pill" technology solutions to get us out of this. Things like fusion, carbon capture, electric cars, etc... As someone with an engineering background, I've been guilty of this type of thinking too. Whenever I encounter a problem I think about how I could apply technology to solve it. However, I…
I don’t understand why this is downvoted. This is exactly my perception as well: techno-optimism is dangerous, and there really is no excuse for the amount of pointless conspicuous consumption that occurs in modern life.
I don't think anybody is very optimistic about our chances on either path.
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Can you provide a falsifiable definition of "scientific consensus"?
This is a fascinatingly weird sentence. You're using falsifiability here, I assume, to deliberately invoke the Popperian notion of what is and isn't science, but then applying it to a description of the science process itself. The short answer is that, no, no one can provide a falsifiable definition of scientific consensus any more than one could devise an experiment that uses the scientific method to validate the sc…
Don't you think it's a risky argument to present something as black and white as facts (science is supposed to be based on them almost exclusively in some areas) as merely a concept of group imagination?
Assuming there is no psychological perspective to be argued, surely a factual, provable definition can be at least attempted? In the spirit of science perhaps?
(edit: phrasing)
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> The report also references for the first time “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism” Unfortunately these are not scientists. This just one example, but they are ideologues and activists first who wear science as a skin and bully scientists into submission. We saw how disastrous this was for Covid response with how science was treated as religion ("Believe Science"). The first thing we mus…
So what about that? I ignored it. The climate is warming at a dangerous rate for human civilization and focusing non-core one liners is a distraction from the real issue.
A lot of people won't ignore that statement; they will latch onto it and it will blind them to the rest of what is being said.
Politicians will point to that statement to make climate change look like a fake left-wing issue that is using the climate as a trojan horse for wokeism. That's already happening to some extent; the last thing scientists should do is give more ammo to the people making those arguments.
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That attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy. People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.
Whats your suggestion exactly, and what's a realistic trade off that you think will have dramatic impacts? Economic nudging I think can do some things, certainly taxes and gov't investments (i.e. build a nuclear power plant, people don't care how they get power largely as long as they get power). We have people recycling a generation later even though it's annoying but now that's supposedly terrible among environment…
“Decreased consumption” only means less resource utilization in this instance, it doesn’t mean that people are necessarily materially worse off.
An obvious and example would be efforts to expand awareness about the longevity and repairability of consumer electronics. Many people don’t want to continually throw things away when they break.
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> In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over. Okay, propose concrete actions, political, legal even military if needed that you think will help accomplish this and could actually work globally?
Im going to speak to the US as I am American, but most of this could be implemented in other countries. Global action requires diplomacy and global agreements, but these policies could be replicated in other places/it’s not like there isn’t buy in around the world to varying degrees. In no particular order: institute carbon taxes, tie in climate based criteria for fha loans including weatherization, electrification a…
Probably it was a surprise that the biggest temperature anomalies happens near the Arctic, with all that permafrost waiting for thaw, that is not something happening evenly all over the globe.
And by now is not just us that worsen the problem now, we already achieved some tipping points and triggered and empowered some positive feedback loops. Reaching net zero (or worse, what was defined as net zero in COP26) is not enough, not even if magically it is achieved now.
We may keep adding pressure to a not so well understood complex system on which we all depend on or try to lower or if possible revert the pressure. So far we are betting really everything that the system will be able to stand much more pressure, and if it blow up, we will be able to fix or mitigate the damage. Maybe we deserve the outcome of that policy.
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How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? We can't pass a carbon tax in the US, imagining China or India doing that with much lower standards of livings is insane. How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactor…
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulb…
Almost all of the things in that list were solved by technological solutions which replaced things people had with better things and made people better off, not by people sacrificing their quality of life.