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September was the most anomalously hot month ever

scientificamerican.com

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Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#161
post #81
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the portion of the US populace that wants to maintain/increase fossil fuel usage because they think it's the best option they have? Is that not a valid viewpoint?

I think it's an uneducated viewpoint that is supported by the deliberate misinformation of the oil and gas lobby. There are alternatives, there have always been alternatives. Better ones, cheaper ones.

I posit that any deliberate misinformation by the oil and gas lobby can and will be equally matched by deliberate misinformation by the wind and solar lobby. There's no reason to believe that the former is composed of evil people who mislead for the sake of profit, and the latter of good people who just want the best for everybody.

If there are "better and cheaper" alternatives available right now, market forces will assure their dominance. The oil and gas lobby is not so omnipotent that millions of people looking out for their own best interests, despite the imperfection of their knowledge, will stick to an obviously inferior means of achieving their goals.

In other words, very few people will actually "maintain/increase fossil fuel usage just to stick it to their perceived enemies", as the GP said, if it hurts their pocketbooks to do so.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#162
post #4

Can someone help me understand why when there’s a record cold month, there’s a convo like this > non-believer: “see global warming doesn’t exist” > believer: “you can’t measure this on a monthly scale, it’s too slow of a process” But often when the case is reversed, it’s used as evidence of global warming? I know global warming is real and I am a firm believer in it but this duality seems to cause a lot of issues whe…

Global warming is not a belief. It’s just a theory, like gravity

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Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Post-modernism is kind of silly when it tries to deny reality. Good luck deconstructing narratives or whatever when you're starving due to crop failures from climate change.

AFAICS mc42 is arguing that we need more watertight arguments for why we need climate change mitigation, so that deniers can't use the holes in our arguments to deny climate change is happening (or anthropogenic)

From their other comment:

> The poster was asking why certain things are omitted and only things the support an argument are surfaced

That's just not a helpful comment. It's like someone barging into a murder investigation and saying "Why are aliens being omitted? The narrative is omitting them!"

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that…

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high. Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 em…

It doesn't necessarily have to be done through further government intervention. Simply removing government protections and subsidies for industry would go a long way.

That's definitely not a complete solution (if one exists), but that could be implemented over night if we wanted to do it.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

> We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target. We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products. We could stop subsidizing massive industrial farms and instead focus on eating locally and growing some of your own food. Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less develop…

The economic model is going to change one way or another. A model designed around perpetual growth will always fail, and there are already plenty of cracks showing.

A major economic change sounds impossible, but we've done it in the US at least three times in the last century.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#169
My experience with climate change fearmongering. 'Most ever' turns out to be 'the last few decades'. Lets see shall we?

Headline: "September Was the Most Anomalously Hot Month Ever"

In the article: "September was the most anomalously warm month ever recorded."

So september was the most anomalously hot month ever 'recorded'? So what? The last 50 years? 100 years? Which isn't saying a lot. They always misrepresent and lie and fearmonger. But why?

Since the 90s, 'global warming' ( now climate change ) was supposed to have ended the earth and humanity a dozen times already. Yet we are all still here. Just like the same peak oil nonsense. Remember when oil was supposed to run out and civilization was supposed to collapse?

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that…

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