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Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

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Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#121

Post by wbsss4412 »

criddell wrote: post #118
wbsss4412 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can is a matter of a small handful of people making a decision. Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility. The point is we aren’t powerless, we just love acting like we are.

The small handful of people have to answer to their constituents and voters are hostile to anything that will raise taxes or lower their quality of life today. That might change if things get bad enough, but by then it's probably too late for anything but a technological miracle. Non-democratic countries (like China and Russia) have a better chance of making the changes because there it truly is the case that a small…

Explicitly raising taxes would be very unpopular, but there were plenty of things I listed that would get minimal pushback from the public at large.

No one cares if UPS delivery trucks are electric. Very few people are policy wonks and will pay attention to changes in FHA bureaucracy.

Voters have very limited bandwidth and attention. Most of what the federal government does, it does on its own initiative, with opposition from select special interests.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#122

Post by [deleted] »

_skel wrote: post #106
throwaway5752 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 clima…

[deleted]

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#123

Post by acdha »

twblalock wrote: post #110
acdha wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc. Almost all of the things in that list were solved by technological solutions which…

Anyone who grew up in the 80s heard a TON of whining about how seatbelts & DUI laws were destroying freedom and having to a less-polluting car burning unleaded fuel was expensive and no fun. Phasing out CFCs, dealing with acid rain, EnergyStar appliances, etc. were all decried as devastating the economy but that didn't happen and very few people want to go back. If you weren't around back then, all of this was portrayed by some people as a massive quality of life sacrifice and most of them were not industry shills.

My main point was that very little of this happened in a vacuum: government policy pushed R&D on most of those technologies, pushed people to adopt them, used taxes to compensate for externalities, etc.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#124

Post by RappingBoomer »

one huge problem is that the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted climate change as an official narrative. (it used to be called 'global warming' and then it was changed to 'climate change' after detractors started pointing out that we still had lots of cold weather just like before).

And once the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted something as an official narrative, virtually no dissent will be brooked. Everyone must adopt the official line. That means that I cannot trust what the monolith says about anything related to that official narrative. If there is good science that shows that the official narrative is wrong, then the scientists' careers will be ruined and that dissenting science will never come to light.

Also, even more scary is the fact that once scientists see that the media will treat with positive press all science that supports any official narrative, most scientists will start fudging their science to support the narrative.

Doubleplusungood!

Plus, the earth is an ice planet. We are actually overdue for an ice age. Plus, we have no power over "less developed" nations, which by the way, happen to be the vast majority of the population of this planet.

So I just disregard anything at all about climate change/global warming.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#125

Post by blurker »

JamesBarney wrote: post #62
blurker wrote: post #7

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…

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…

> People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.

Exactly my concern. The pandering appeals to us not wanting to change.

> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?

That's not what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting we cut the excesses, which there are plenty of. Maybe it's not enough and so we should explore all avenues, for sure.

I often think of the "giant meatball" graphic that visualised all humans on the planet as a giant schmooshed ball sitting in Central Park, New York. To me this is a very powerful visualisation akin to the "pale blue dot" that shows just how few humans are on the planet despite how drastically we are altering it.

I think there are a lot of excesses that we can easily cut. And we should, until we come up with something better that provably will work.

I would like to see our species get off this planet and I hope that we can survive far into the future. I see the first step towards that being us learning how to sustainably live on the planet we have now. It's probably better to scale back our consumption now such that we can have a long time to develop whatever technologies we need instead of going full steam ahead with unsustainable consumption, banking on technological progress bailing us out in some way that we can't possibly count on in a short amount of time.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#126

Post by acdha »

philipkglass wrote: post #112
acdha wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not sure if you are agreeing with the point you are responding to or contesting it. These positive developments have a large technological component to them. Adopting new and improved technologies didn't make people worse off. People got the same amount of light from LED bulbs while reducing the consumption of electricity by 75%. A purely behavioral approach to the lighting problem would mean something more like…

Both: most of these technologies had substantial R&D investments by the government and significant encouragement for adoptions. A lot of people think things like CFCs or acid rain were overblown because the major governments of the world acted promptly, and I think that's a message we'll need a lot this century.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#127

Post by seiferteric »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #111
seiferteric wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just listed a bunch of wishes, not things that can actually pass today… that’s the problem I’m pointing out.

Can is a matter of a small handful of people making a decision. Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility. The point is we aren’t powerless, we just love acting like we are.

I am really not trying to discourage anyone, and agree policy solutions should be tried, just trying to point out that actually getting this things done, especially globally will be really really hard, possibly as hard or harder than technological solutions, which is why I find accusations of techno-optimism a bit rich/naive.

> Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility.

It is not abdicating responsibly if you think other technological solutions will be more likely to succeed just a difference of opinion. On the contrary, I think people who believe we "just need to do this or that political thing" abdicating responsibility because they have not considered how to do it or why it has not happened yet. They can just hold these "correct" opinions and blame others and absolve themselves of responsibility.

I guess I just don't see how these things can be done without some sort of force. Denying people the choice to begin with is the only way to get people to make choices that will harm their standard of living on average. This would require governments being far more authoritarian than we are used to or will likely accept. Also many of the suggested policy solutions I think are far to tame even, it will take a lot more than that to avoid disaster I think. Literately going back a century or two in standard of living probably at this point.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#128

Post by diordiderot »

Stupulous wrote: post #76
diordiderot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense linguistically. Can you provide a falsifiable definition of "turtles"?

"Turtles are all animals with shells" is falsifiable in the sense that you can say an animal without a shell is falsely called a turtle, and that an example of an animal with a shell that is not a turtle disproves the definition. Not clear which sense is being asked for here, but it does parse.

I feel like what you'd actually be falsifying is.

"That thing is a turtle"

Rather than it's definition. Honestly not trying to be pedantic.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#129

Post by twblalock »

badRNG wrote: post #119
_skel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

So where's the line? How much scientific evidence must we suppress to avoid offending reactionary sensibilities? The fact that climate change is human caused is deeply political in the US. Should the IPCC suppress this fact too to cater to a tiny minority of science deniers?

The line is where the expertise of scientists ends. They need to stay in their lane. They are no more qualified to talk about colonialism than anyone else, and attempts to do so are definitely taking a political side and will be perceived as such.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#130

Post by wbsss4412 »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #120
wbsss4412 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can is a matter of a small handful of people making a decision. Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility. The point is we aren’t powerless, we just love acting like we are.

I love how well you made that argument, although I am as disillusioned as your other respondent. Another problem is that countries are also in a global economic competition. The legislative frameworks still do not keep the costs of destroying the planet from being so low that doing so is an economic imperative.

There are challenges with every policy option and you bring up an important one.

However, that is not a universal obstacle to all policy solutions. Getting people to electrify their homes has minimal impact on global economic competition. Changing urban planning regimes has little (direct) impact on global economic competition.

I’m not trying to imply it is easy. But it is still a choice that we can make is we can coordinate ourselves. I think the biggest challenge is simply the degree to which hyper individualism has taken over American culture and its effect on our collective psyche.

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