
Climate change: Boiling frog or tipping point panic? - smacktoward
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/07/climate-change-boiling-frog-or-tipping-point-panic
======
moksly
I think a lot of people under 20 view climate change as an immediate and
existential threat. Students have been skipping education to protest this for
most of 2019 all over Europe. I don’t think we’ve seen a movement like this
since the hippies in the 60iea, and it’s only just picking up.

I also think our political climate will react way too late to this because the
majority of voters are older than 40.

~~~
f_allwein
Kudos to the school strikers! Check out Greta Thunberg's book for some clear
and concise summaries of the crisis:
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45450258-no-one-is-
too-s...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45450258-no-one-is-too-small-to-
make-a-difference)

------
hacker_9
Climate change happens over such a large scale space (the earth!) and such a
large amount of time (decades!) that makes it very difficult to really
comprehend. How do you tie a heatwave to CO2 emissions from cars? All that can
be given are handwavey probabilities, even the weatherman gets it wrong and
he's only predicting a week into the future!

I suspect as we move to more energy efficient tech this problem will
eventually solve itself, but I can't see it being hurried up by climate change
itself.

~~~
f_allwein
No, there is broad scientific consensus that the climate is changing at an
unprecedented rate, and that human CO2 emissions are a key cause. See e.g.
[https://www.ipcc.ch/](https://www.ipcc.ch/)

Unfortunately, your optimism regarding energy efficient tech does not seem
warranted either. Look up Climate Lag - apparently, if we stopped emitting CO2
tomorrow, it would still take decades for the effects to show.

------
abledon
I was thinking yesterday how different it would be if we hadn’t invented the
Internet 40 something years ago and had to tackle climate change with the
preexisting forms of communication.... i think it would be much harder to
rally people behind the issue

~~~
r00fus
I'm not so sure. The establishment was slow to grasp the true power the
Internet provides them, but it's quite sure that the Internet is a tool and
it's just as useful to the authoritarians and establishment as it is to grass
roots organizations.

Point in fact: troll farms, fake news (both fake articles as well as the
proclamation by politicians that anything against them is "fake news"),
Facebook/Cambridge Analytica leak by design.

Especially without any way to validate trustworthiness of actors, the Internet
is simply another medium that is polluted by monied interests.

------
southern_cross
A couple of questions which need to be asked and answered: When Anchorage hit
its previous record of 85F back in 1969, was that a "tipping point" and a sign
of impending climate doom? Better yet, when Fort Yukon (which is almost 400
miles NNE of Anchorage, and just a mile from the Arctic Circle) hit its record
(and all-time state high) temperature of 100F (!) way back in 1915 (!!), what
_that_ a "tipping point" and a sign of impending climate doom? Enquiring minds
want to know.

~~~
Oletros
Really? Are you really using some random data points to discredit an
scientific consensus?

~~~
southern_cross
No, I'm using them to discredit some of the thinking in the article. You did
read the article, didn't you? It's pretty simple-minded stuff.

But I do have to ask: If that 100F temperature had occurred recently instead
of over 100 years ago, how many people would be _absolutely freaking out_
about it? And it would be all over the news, wouldn't it, complete with
satellite interviews and talking heads and repeated insistence that "We must
do something about climate change right now!"

As it is, though, it's just a historical footnote isn't it? And it seems that
some folks are now trying to claim that it never really happened. (It appears
to have been truncated out of the HadCRUT temperature data set, for example.)
How inconvenient for them, then, there are other folks out there who have gone
so far as to dig up the actual handwritten log for the weather station
involved, which appears to be in good order.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-E1nQ_W4AEpC7D.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-E1nQ_W4AEpC7D.jpg)

Still other folks have noted that there are other logs out there for other
stations which show equal if not higher temperatures, but Fort Yukon is called
out as the official record high temperature for the state. I can only assume
that investigation showed that those other stations weren't as reliable as
Fort Yukon, but the possibility exists that they did in fact experience
equally high or even higher temperatures.

