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The Earth is getting greener

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111–120 of 180 posts

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#111
post #82

Finally, somebody is telling the truth about CO2. Not all is grim about climate. The things are in the middle, as always. Reality is neither black nor white. https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/

> The things are in the middle, as always. Always? Really? Please, list all the advantages and nuance for leaded gasoline, paint, and other uses of lead. Or maybe all the nuanced advantageous effects that asbestos has on your lungs? And if we move beyond environmental issues things get even more ridiculous, but let's not get too side-tracked.

Oddly enough, optimization theory says that almost always the best policy is as far away from the middle as possible, right at the boundaries, where physical constraints intersect to hold you back from taking any more extreme action.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#112

Potholer54 posts well notated videos on youtube where he explains (among other things) climate science and mostly debunks false information. He is a geologist by degree, but has spent his career in science communication. Videos are infrequent but well done, and he makes no money from them. He sites his sources and does a great job of tracking down primary sources, all of which are linked. One of his oft repeated idea…

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The problem seems to be the opposite. Climate scientists have been too conservative with their models and predictions, and we are hitting points that they thought would be years out.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#113
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and…

How should the environmental movement frame things?

Save ourselves and our children.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#114
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> The apocalyptic climate change visions where we end up like Venus are unscientific It is. It's also a fringe belief that's not held by anyone serious speaking on the subject.

Who do you listen to speaking on the subject? It is brought up constantly. You can have a documentary on TV about climate change without bringing up Venus as a cautionary tale, for example. People who concern themselves with climate change genuinely think it will lead to mass human die offs, in my experience.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#115

The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is something we must be able to see. We get a lot of effects of a larger change, and pick the one that in a partial way, in a particular light, can be painted as positive. There are a lot of "greener" things, the article talks only about a few of them, and some particular consequences. For example, greening in northern regions because losing permafrost is not positive, and lowering albe…

But actually people predicted this positive effect of warming long ago. I believe the specific prediction was that global food production would increase as warming + co2 enrichment increased production in politically and economically stable and responsible nations (at the expense of... Less stable, less responsible nations). You can argue if the aggregate measure of production is more or less important than the distribution, but that prediction was made nonetheless.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Yes, but it's not only climate change this time. We are also massively overusing every natural resource there is. We're in a mass extinction event and we would be in it even if there wasn't a CO2 problem at all.

There are effectively no limits to natural resources, as accessible resources are a function of technology and market price. And the solar system is vast.

Get out of the Malthusian thinking trap.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#117
post #16

England is very green at the moment. At least the areas that aren't flooded are. The issue for humans isn't the "amount of green", it's high quality crop yields. Increasing CO2 increases plant growth, but also lowers nutritional value. https://cupblog.org/2023/04/06/the-truth-about-rising-co2-an...

The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and…

[deleted]

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#118

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> Environmentalism has the attributes of a new secular religion, one in which nature has become the new God, and unmitigated climate change will become the new Apocalypse. Thus, sins against God have been replaced with crimes against nature. And the priests of the new religion? Of course, they are the “97% of experts who agree on the anthropogenic global warming.”

Wow, truly incredible insight from a courageous heretic.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#119
post #36

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Thank you for posting this. I wanted to read a reasonable voice for a while, and I couldn't find anything. Search engines, traditional and LLM-based (ie ChatGPT) will actively censor all dissident voices, and it's just so tiring being unable to have a conversation with someone or read an article that's based on some common ground, some common assumptions between you and the writer.

A "reasonable voice" is a geology professor who works for the fossil fuel industry and has no background in environmental science?

What a giant surprise that someone like that is taking the position of "ignore all the trends in extreme weather events, changing weather patterns, unprecedented ocean warming, and mass extinction. It'll be fine, we just have to adjust to the warming."

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#120

If the world were getting browner, they would panic. It's getting greener, so they have to try a bit harder, but they still manage to panic. Panic --> Clickbait --> Ads --> Money

My 86-year-old grandmother noticed no change in the climate over the course of her life. Meanwhile, we now have 15-year-old kids absolutely panicking over how much the climate has changed in the last 100 years, convinced their grandparents generation has doomed them to a heat death. It's bazar.
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