71–80 of 120 posts
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Were many scientists insisting that global cooling was a problem?
It was very eye opening to see how many groups and individuals who "just want to have a debate" on the reality of climate change are funded by fossil fuel companies[1][2][3][4]. We are being lied to, and it's working. Just see the first few comments in reply to this article. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-d... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-skeptic-idUST... [3] http…
Your first link claims Koch Industries is "a little-known, privately owned US oil company". That's the sort of lie you've got to expect from the Guardian. Quoting Wikipedia: "Koch Industries, Inc. (/ˈkoʊk/) is an American privately held multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill.[2] Its subsidiaries are involved…
The vagueness here is problematic. Not all "particular perspectives" are the same. It matters if the "particular perspectives" were rational and respectful of the science.
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You realise the nuance is in blaming where the methane production is coming from as well as the c02. There's a huge amount of shifting the "who is going to take any responsibility" which has made this pointlessly political and just wastes time and effort. This isn't helped by certain parties "reviewing" scientific data until it's massaged into narratives that they can push. (Again on all sides of whatever political s…
I wonder what it is that people actually want? That's the part I can never figure out, and they never seem to be able to articulate, at least truthfully. Like, I'm fine to say that I'd be OK to see this planet burned to the ground once I've had my fun with it. I mean, I feel a bit sorry for the humans who might come after, but that's a problem I'm not going to contribute to, so whatever. This seems to be the mainstre…
I don't agree with you.
There are many people who do care about future generations.
And maybe there are other people that share my opinion:
1) future generations deserve our attention and our best efforts, but only the efforts that can have an actual impact are worth to be taken. Going back to Stone Age for the others to keep enjoying modern comfort and spoiling my efforts any way? No, thanks! Convincing peoples around the world to formally engage in reducing emissions and then respecting the agreement? Sign me in!
2) despite our best efforts, we know that climate change is here to stay. Let's stop pretending that we can revert it in a couple of years! We are having several droughts, and it's likely they will be back next year: we need to act during this winter to save some water for next summer; we have to stop now to export produce from California. Not in twenty years, not in five years, but now! The ocean level is going up, and it will keep going up: stop building on the coast, stop moving to coastal cities built on flat terrain. Stop it now!
It’s striking to me that Hacker News has a significant audience of flat earthers. Don’t look up, right? Let’s be clear, human caused climate change is very real. Rigorous science confirms this and CO2 + methane levels are now driving very visible and catastrophic weather all over the world.
I believe human released CO2 is more or less inconsequential. We face far bigger problems with industrial chemical pollution. Put your money where your mouth is and quit buy any good made from materials from environmentally hostile countries. Advocate for banning imports from environmental destroyers.
As long as we keep talking about CO2, we're not going to make any progress and we're going to exhaust all of our other precious resources long before we burn to death.
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Your first link claims Koch Industries is "a little-known, privately owned US oil company". That's the sort of lie you've got to expect from the Guardian. Quoting Wikipedia: "Koch Industries, Inc. (/ˈkoʊk/) is an American privately held multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill.[2] Its subsidiaries are involved…
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. When you look at the people who actually study this stuff for a living there is very little disagreement about the nature of the problem and the direction things are headed. Most of the controversy and the oft-regurgitated talking points about "solar cycles", "ice age", "but everyone thought it was global cooling in the 70s", etc seem to originate from the same few sou…
On a final note, while the basic scientific consensus that human caused climate change is a real thing seems quite firmly settled, there are many details and disagreements that no self-respecting scientist can claim don't exist. There are enough of these for plenty of healthy debate, even on major points, to be a good thing, as it almost always is on most topics. There's also no shortage of self-interested politics being mixed into narratives pushing for aggressive climate change responses. This is rarely conducive to completely honest discourse from either side of the table.
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The fact is that oil companies have been knowingly sabotaging the discourse and scientific process about this in a similar way that the tobacco companies kept 'having the debate' for as long as possible to not change their business model, externalities be damned. To downplay this is the real historical revisionism and lie
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The 50s and 60s were also full of reports on global cooling. Temperatures started dropping from the 1940s by the data they used back then (these days that fall has been edited out). But there's a deeper problem with the point you're trying to make here. You claim the reports didn't reflect the scientific consensus. Really? Go read those reports. They do claim they were reporting the consensus. To the extent they admi…
This is a big part of the problem. I was a child in the 70's and 80's, and it was a constant drumbeat about how climate change was going to freeze the planet. It was rather hard to take it seriously when the narrative suddenly shifted to how climate change was going to melt the planet. I never hear discussion about the discrepancy, so the whole thing has been quite a head-scratcher!
That means there never was a discrepancy - it was just interesting so the news media reported on it. If you want an explanation of it you should not look with climate science - look at media studies or may be publications about great advertisement campaigns.
To me the whole thing shows parallels to the is smoking bad for your health thing. If doctors are undecided it cannot be too bad - right?
Also I can at least confirm from me being German and of similar age that the whole thing was not a thing in Germany at all. By asking a friend from the UK I can at least suspect that it wasn't prevalent there either (he knows about it but that is from US-sources).
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I'd really like a debate to be possible, but it doesn't seem so. On one side, you have the idiots who don't "believe in science", as if facts were something to believe in rather than acknowledge. On the other side, you have too many people confusing science with politics. Yes, the temperature is going up. Yes, we are guilty. Yes, fossil fuels play a fundamental role. No, the only answer is not "let's reduce fossil fu…
> No, the only answer is not "let's reduce fossil fuel consumption". There's really no other option though, there are pretty solid reasons rooted in basic physics why CO2 capture/scrubbing are not feasible at a large enough scale to really matter, geoengineering proposals are unproven, expensive and high risk, and the cost of attempting to adapt to the sorts of temperature and sea level changes expected to take place…
You are technically correct that reducing emissions is the only way to impact the temperature raising, but why do people think that stopping global warming is the only option? Why do you think that embracing it is not possible?
Whatever we do, we know that global warming is not going to disappear in a matter of years, and global cooling is at least several decades in the future. We must learn anyway to live with the current climate, so we can choose how much we want to give up of the modern way of living for how many fewer degrees.
What is not being posted in news often enough are the options that we have to mitigate the effects. the only thing i read is that we need yo drive down co2. fact is: we are not gonna reach the targets in a reasonable timeframe. hence, we must start preparing to mitigate effects. instead we are caught by climate catastrophies like the current draught in europe, us and china and we are running around like headless chic…
Humanity hasn't been good at multigenerational projects for some time.
We fail to plan even for hurricanes adequately or proportionately.
Hurricane disaster response isn’t simply ineffective, it is subject to outside pressures which should never be a part of the process. Governments which intentionally obscure how many deaths have occurred, how costly the damage, all made worse as preventive actions are deemed too costly.
Prevention needs to include building standards which refactor building codes to survive the conditions of their particular environment.
Zoning, preventing new construction in areas which need to be rebuilt every time hurricane knocks them over.
Insurance companies pressure local governments and organizations to score category 5 hurricanes as 4 to avoid paying out their customers. Governments overly concerned with minimizing the damage in order to hide incompetence and save face.
Developers charm local, state, and federal officials to keep building costs low and keep producing structures which are cheaply made and begin to fall apart the minute they are finished being built.
Developers who discourage or minimize transparency concerning risks.
People have their dream homes built believing they will last longer than a 30 year mortgage when in reality these homes will need significant interventions within 10 years.
Often the dialog prioritizes who is at fault before and above actually fixing or responding to the events and helping the people effected.
There is a time for blame and a time for action. When and directly after a disaster is the time for action, blame must be analyzed during response, post mortem must taken seriously, organizations, governments, and corporations must be held to account once those affected are relieved, stabilized.
Blame however is usually addressed during the crisis this allows the framing to be controlled by private interests.
One problem that must be overcome in the US are inappropriate cabinet departments. We saw many examples of this during the pandemic. Some goals are too important to have leadership that is subject to change every 4-8 years. Some departments must be shielded from administration instability issues.
Reactive approaches to a crisis are expensive, more expensive than adequate planning. Certain areas in Florida are repeatedly rebuilt at great cost, costs which could be much lower when proactive planning is prioritized equally with response.
Bad at response and no planning seem to be accepted as too ingrained to change. This is not of course true.