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Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

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71–80 of 132 posts

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#71
post #5

I imagine this is perfect for climate change deniers. Climate change is very difficult to fight because both undershooting and overshooting your predictions can come back and hurt you.

Repeatedly telling people that the sky is falling in N years, only for it to not happen(perhaps in that time scale), doesn't help at all. I've heard some say that people need to be scared in order to convince them to do something, but clearly it hasn't worked. It just comes off as the doomsday that cried wolf.

How about telling them that Australia is on fire now?

Doomsday for lots of Kangeroos and other animals, no wolves in Oz though.

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#72
post #5

I imagine this is perfect for climate change deniers. Climate change is very difficult to fight because both undershooting and overshooting your predictions can come back and hurt you.

Simple solution: stop making predictions with a degree of claimed accuracy that doesn't exist. There's no good reason to put a deadline such as 2020 on a prediction except as an attempt to imply a degree of certainty that doesn't exist. Climate change skeptics exist for many reasons and these poorly thought out predictions just feed into them.

This x1000. Stop giving them ammunition to further muddy the waters!

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#73

Is there an investment fund that is designed to specifically invest in companies that have solid plans in place for mitigating or taking advantage of climate change, or taking short positions against industries or regions that are at risk and totally unprepared? Examples would be shorting Florida coastal real estate, shorting flood insurance, long on agricultural and real estate investments that depend on moving grow…

There are some clean energy ETFs such as $PZD (INVESCO EXCHANGE TRADED FD TR CLEANTECH ETF) that may be decent investments, but if you have specific environmental predictions, you might want to invest 'as close' to them as possible, e.g. via weather derivatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_derivative or second-order effects, rather than things further down the line of causation

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#74

Was hoping for more detail on the predicted vs actual change beyond what the headline could tell me. Or even if they have a new prediction. Edit: This table is helpful https://www.usgs.gov/data-tools/area-named-glaciers-glacier-...

Note that the percentages in the table are misleading as they show decline from the Little Ice Age, not from recent levels.

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#75
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure in the '70s I read the Earth would be a big ball of ice, but it's OK since if we didn't nuke ourselves the overpopulation will have killed us all off.

It's sad when people underestimate the amount of work that was done both to find a path through the threat of MAD-style militarization and the pressure of human population on the global food supply. Neither of these worst-case-scenarios were avoided by chance. They were avoided by the hard work of decades of politicians and scientists. The world was a single soldier executing a single order away from a superpower-sca…

I was part of securing the world against y2k.

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please stop this absurd idea of "climate change deniers". No one is denying that the climate is changing. It always have and it always will. The discussion is about how much, how big a problem it is, how much of it is because of us and to what extent we can/should do anything about it. That's the actual debate. Calling someone a climate change denier is a cheap and sloppy shot at trying to lump a much more com…

It's changing a lot, it's a big problem, it's almost entirely because of humans, and we should do everything we can. https://xkcd.com/1732/

You don't know what earth's temperature was back then. And you're comparing the "estimated average" 20,000 BCE to 1800 to "the recorded temperatures" of 1800~ with a raw graph? And "coincidentally" earth's temperature changes dramatically after 1850s?

God, no wonder why some people believe strange things.

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#78
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure in the '70s I read the Earth would be a big ball of ice, but it's OK since if we didn't nuke ourselves the overpopulation will have killed us all off.

Yep. The doomsdayers have a pretty impressive track record of being wrong. They're getting better with their marketing, at least.

Indoctrination has always been fairly solid in the US through the public schools systems, its only natural the budgets continue to increase and they get better and better at it.

As a elementary school kid in the late 80's early 90's our school had everything from guest speaks, to posters, to t-shirts for everything from:

-hold in the o-zone layer -D.A.R.E. -AIDs -nuclear bomb test drills

It seemed one day over night the O-zone layer posters went away and now it was global warming. And sure all of that may make sense in terms of maybe a science class, but this was more of a general lets not teach and indoctrinate. Plus the AIDs stuff always seemed weird, teaching about sex/needles to kids as young as 6. I wouldn't be surprised if that all went away as well for the new topic de jure. I think DARE was also finally pulled from schools and had all kinds of other scandals surrounding the programs that were exposed.

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#79

Was hoping for more detail on the predicted vs actual change beyond what the headline could tell me. Or even if they have a new prediction. Edit: This table is helpful https://www.usgs.gov/data-tools/area-named-glaciers-glacier-...

Apparently the new date is 2030: The original estimates of the timing of glacier melt were based on two things: modeled projections of the glaciers’ response to warming, and direct observations of glacial retreat. A 2003 report was based on modeling a scenario of doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels by 2030, which would have melted the park’s major glaciers – and presumably the minor ones, too – by 2030. ht…

Another study from 2010 seems to have given 2080 https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers...

It seems we may have quite a bit of understanding to gain regarding glaciers. I'm not sure if the 2010 study is more reasonable (I'm no expert) but I think enough time has elapsed in the 2003 study to say that the estimations in it didn't pan out based on the observed values in 2015.

Re: Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs

#80

Back in 2004 the Pentagon predicted dooooooooooooooom by 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t... "A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world…

"Yes Mr. President, as you can see from this report, we are clearly going to need a much bigger budget!"
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