71–80 of 85 posts
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If your life is about in engaging in culture wars then you need enemies.
Is Bill Gate's life really all about engaging in culture wars? I could see that argument moreso for Al Gore as he's a politician by trade but Gate's really? And even then, where do you personally draw the line between "engaging in culture wars" and "advocating for something you believe in"
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I get the sense that they are trying very carefully not to sound like climate change denialists, so that they won't get conflated with people much further from the scientific consensus. If they just said "the IPCC models are BS," they would likely be dismissed out of hand, at least in the scientific community.
Pielke Jr is a climate-action "denialist" from a long way back, no? (claims to accept the science but then concludes there's nothing we can do about it for the foreseeable future other than adapt. This article seems to be saying "well ok some of the changes we've made are making a difference to emissions, but now there's no real need to make any more...").
Roger A. Pielke Jr. is an American political scientist and professor, and was the director of the Sports Governance Center within the Department of Athletics at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.
He got that from his father who was also an AGW denialist (a climate change believer, but a denier that humans play any meaningful role), albeit one with more relevant credentuals:
Roger A. Pielke Sr. is an American meteorologist with interests in climate variability and climate change, environmental vulnerability, numerical modeling, atmospheric dynamics, land/ocean – atmosphere interactions, and large eddy/turbulent boundary layer modeling.
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Thank you. This seemed like it was written by a student who was saying the same thing over and over in order to satisfy a 4,500-word target, and I was wondering what I was missing.
Unfortunately I feel like submissions on the site, as well as general content online, of the same type for significantly less academic subjects (this new cool web framework I'll spend 6000 words writing about) are the norm now. And before anyone says so, no it has nothing to do with the supposed lessened attention span smartphones have caused. I'm not wasting 15 minutes of my life reading about social media recommend…
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Thank you. This seemed like it was written by a student who was saying the same thing over and over in order to satisfy a 4,500-word target, and I was wondering what I was missing.
Unfortunately I feel like submissions on the site, as well as general content online, of the same type for significantly less academic subjects (this new cool web framework I'll spend 6000 words writing about) are the norm now. And before anyone says so, no it has nothing to do with the supposed lessened attention span smartphones have caused. I'm not wasting 15 minutes of my life reading about social media recommend…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately I feel like submissions on the site, as well as general content online, of the same type for significantly less academic subjects (this new cool web framework I'll spend 6000 words writing about) are the norm now. And before anyone says so, no it has nothing to do with the supposed lessened attention span smartphones have caused. I'm not wasting 15 minutes of my life reading about social media recommend…
Ever since I saw a comment on HN about low information density on the internet, I haven’t been able to unsee it. They were commenting on a YouTube video that had an 8-second bit of content but was nearly 2 minutes long. But it’s so much worse than that. Recipes tell you how their great grandmother moved to the Americas and made the first apple pie ever. And then detail the entire history of apples and how to make the…
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We're probably using more carbon now, then in the 90s. You have to look at the total carbon output of the world.
Not the point. We use less carbon today than the scenarios looking forward to today did. Such that our path forward does not start from where many models assume. Yes, you have to look at the whole picture. But you also have to look from where you are. Not where someone else thought you could be. Right?
But also: if we take drastic action “wrongly” and the end result is a healthier plant? I’m good with that.
Eeh. Misguided article. The article itself starts by recognizing the challenge of making scenarios because of the feedback loop they embody. Then seemingly forgets about all that and basically says "coal has likely peaked already, why are assuming it will grow in the future?" Well, because of that feedback loop. Coal is still a cheap way of making energy, as it is in the business-as-usual economics of the scenarios.…
The IPCC report made some really questionable assumptions, reached conclusions based on those, which were then exacerbated by the journalists treating the worst case scenarios as absolute certainties. Creating fear and panic around stuff usually works and has worked well for a long time. It's true that we reduced the usage of coal in last few years. It's a big assumption that it happened because of a worst case scena…
What made it a culture war was the fossil fuel companies pumping billions of dollars into politics for decades. The Republicans didn’t used to be the anti-science party – that took years of investment building think tanks, the media bubble, etc. which turned that into a litmus test for candidates and making any sort of consensus off limits (a Republican lobbyist I know socially used to represent the fishing & hunting interests. Around the Obama era, those old coalitions fell apart as politicians would tell him that he was right but there was no way they could support environmental protections and survive the primary media cycle).
It’s very easy to look at coal declining and say it was inevitable but that ignores how it was hard won at each step. As you had countries like China booming it’s really not hard to see how deniers having a little more clout could have lead to locking in decades of elevated emissions.
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Not the point. We use less carbon today than the scenarios looking forward to today did. Such that our path forward does not start from where many models assume. Yes, you have to look at the whole picture. But you also have to look from where you are. Not where someone else thought you could be. Right?
I mean, yes it’s important to base science on reality. But also: if we take drastic action “wrongly” and the end result is a healthier plant? I’m good with that.
I'm reminded of folks that were against LED lightbulbs because folks could just turn off their lights a few hours earlier. Not only would that have been a drastic change in behavior, it is comically incomparable in impact. To get the same impact, you would have to turn off your lights basically all day to get close to the same change. Such that sometimes we do have much better levers than previous drastic changes could have even dreamed of achieving.
As such, it really depends on the drastic action. For the most part, I don't see how aggressive goals for electric vehicles is harming folks. So if that is what we are looking at, fully back on board with you.
With a major caveat of not liking fear mongering. Honesty of where we are is important for its own reasons. Trust in future plans, at the least.
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Only because I don't believe he's ever denied climate change was happening or that if it is it's not our fault, which are the usual first two phases of denialism.
I don’t follow. You’re responding to a point about the author not being a climate change denialist by saying that he doesn’t think action against climate change is justified. What point are you actually trying to make? It seems like you’re trying to equate one with the other, especially given your novel use of the word “denialism”. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m still unclear on what exactly you are…
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I don’t follow. You’re responding to a point about the author not being a climate change denialist by saying that he doesn’t think action against climate change is justified. What point are you actually trying to make? It seems like you’re trying to equate one with the other, especially given your novel use of the word “denialism”. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m still unclear on what exactly you are…
I just got the impression the OP wasn't aware of Pielke Jr's background. Actually he's probably better described as a contrarian than a denialist, though he's been called out by no less than Michael Mann as belonging to the latter camp.