One of my concerns as someone who is part of the tech community is the innovation delusion. Many of us are focused on "magic pill" technology solutions to get us out of this. Things like fusion, carbon capture, electric cars, etc... As someone with an engineering background, I've been guilty of this type of thinking too. Whenever I encounter a problem I think about how I could apply technology to solve it. However, I think it's a bad idea to gamble our future on the hope that unproven technologies will save us from this disaster. We consume so much more than we need to have a good life. I believe we should drastically cut back consumption now and then let the technologies that may allow us to consume more prove themselves before we scale back up. But like many things, it's easy to pander with innovating our way out of this problem. It's more convenient for people to not have to change when they can buy into greenwashed technology ideas. The saddest part to me is that much of our excess consumption isn't even making us happier. Seems to be making us unhappy, really.
Not only that, but even the idea itself has become weaponized. Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could <X> then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, sort the trash, eat less meat, use less plastic, be smarter, be more efficient, breed more selectively, vote, drive less, bike more, take transit, read food labels, get educated, etc.}
And this is completely to distract from the reality that only large scale policy is going to have meaningful effect on our climate outcomes. Product and technology leaders like Tesla can help catalyze change, but without meaningful market policy and adjustment in which there will definitely be losers and winners it is all for naught. And the losers are fighting with every weapon at their disposal to prevent being displaced from the status quo, including brainwashing people into believing that if they sort their plastic waste then something will magically happen to help the world.
Individual actions do matter, but not very much, and not usually in the way that people think it does. Individual actions only matter because they affect the future of what policy gets emphasized in governmental decisions.
> Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could <X> then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, [...])
Not just that, ever since the 90s they have actively (and quite successfully) tried to get everybody to forget or ignore the "reuse" and "reduce" (and "repair"!) parts which, of course, would cut into their profits if people actually started consuming less. Reusability and repairability have both gone way down instead during the past 30 years or so.
In one case you are betting on something that is at best hopefully possible, while in the second case, it is quite clearly possible, it’s just not likely to happen.
At the same time, physical reality doesn’t seem to care much about our opinions, thoughts and feelings about any of this subject. We can continue to live our lives with the hope of technology coming to our rescue, we can go on living the way we do without considering making changes, and the natural world around us will continue down the path that it’s on, utterly unconcerned with our desires.
I agree. Telling the world to consume less while the population continues to grow doesnt work. Especially when the majority of pollution comes from corporations who have a financial incentive to continuing operating the same way.
If people don't give things up, the tragedy comes to pass. It's not the fault of engineers and scientists to not cover for the general public's unsustainable lifestyle that they've become accustomed to.
If you are trapped in an area with limited oxygen, you should reduce your breathing and activity to a minimum to buy time for rescue. You should not complain about it impacting your lifestyle, blame lack of progress on the rescuers, and go along with life as normal.
How many of these people “deeply concerned” with climate change are living it in their lifestyle? Very few in my experience. They don’t invest in solar panels for their home, geothermal HVAC, severely curtail their lifetime travel habits, etc. they might buy a prius or a tesla, but a dubiously “green” car is right in line with their actual commitment to the environment.
How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? We can't pass a carbon tax in the US, imagining China or India doing that with much lower standards of livings is insane.
How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactors.
Just as management can underestimate how hard solving technology problems, technologists can wildly underestimate how hard it is to solve people problems.
Climate change is hard people problem. The effects are diffuse and far in the future. People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?
People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc.
Each and every time they've been completely wrong, and this will be even more powerfully so because one very consistent finding has been that the costs of not dealing with climate change are MUCH greater than the mitigation measures, especially because they happen at uncontrollable intervals whereas you can make plans around something like the need to buy an EV instead of an ICE car.
I'm not sure if you are agreeing with the point you are responding to or contesting it. These positive developments have a large technological component to them. Adopting new and improved technologies didn't make people worse off. People got the same amount of light from LED bulbs while reducing the consumption of electricity by 75%. A purely behavioral approach to the lighting problem would mean something more like "everyone still uses incandescent bulbs, but for 75% fewer hours per year." That actually makes people worse off and has much worse prospects for widespread adoption.
Both: most of these technologies had substantial R&D investments by the government and significant encouragement for adoptions. A lot of people think things like CFCs or acid rain were overblown because the major governments of the world acted promptly, and I think that's a message we'll need a lot this century.
> People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc.
Almost all of the things in that list were solved by technological solutions which replaced things people had with better things and made people better off, not by people sacrificing their quality of life.
Anyone who grew up in the 80s heard a TON of whining about how seatbelts & DUI laws were destroying freedom and having to a less-polluting car burning unleaded fuel was expensive and no fun. Phasing out CFCs, dealing with acid rain, EnergyStar appliances, etc. were all decried as devastating the economy but that didn't happen and very few people want to go back. If you weren't around back then, all of this was portrayed by some people as a massive quality of life sacrifice and most of them were not industry shills.
My main point was that very little of this happened in a vacuum: government policy pushed R&D on most of those technologies, pushed people to adopt them, used taxes to compensate for externalities, etc.
> People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.
Exactly my concern. The pandering appeals to us not wanting to change.
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?
That's not what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting we cut the excesses, which there are plenty of. Maybe it's not enough and so we should explore all avenues, for sure.
I often think of the "giant meatball" graphic that visualised all humans on the planet as a giant schmooshed ball sitting in Central Park, New York. To me this is a very powerful visualisation akin to the "pale blue dot" that shows just how few humans are on the planet despite how drastically we are altering it.
I think there are a lot of excesses that we can easily cut. And we should, until we come up with something better that provably will work.
I would like to see our species get off this planet and I hope that we can survive far into the future. I see the first step towards that being us learning how to sustainably live on the planet we have now. It's probably better to scale back our consumption now such that we can have a long time to develop whatever technologies we need instead of going full steam ahead with unsustainable consumption, banking on technological progress bailing us out in some way that we can't possibly count on in a short amount of time.
I don’t understand why this is downvoted. This is exactly my perception as well: techno-optimism is dangerous, and there really is no excuse for the amount of pointless conspicuous consumption that occurs in modern life.
So techno-optimism is dangerous, but social/political optimism is not? At least we somewhat know how to make technology, but I don't think anyone knows how to force this social change on the world.
It’s not optimism, it’s about where the solution lies.
In one case we are wishing for a solution to fall out of some genuis minds. In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over.
Im going to speak to the US as I am American, but most of this could be implemented in other countries. Global action requires diplomacy and global agreements, but these policies could be replicated in other places/it’s not like there isn’t buy in around the world to varying degrees.
In no particular order: institute carbon taxes, tie in climate based criteria for fha loans including weatherization, electrification and neighborhood planning, drive industrial policy towards the expansion of green industries including renewable energy, but also on the demand planning and efficiency side (ex heat pumps in buildings, EVs etc). Shift agricultural policy to focus more heavily on climate impacts and discourage fossil fuel intensive methods. Dramatic shifts in federal fleets away from fossil fuel vehicles, etc.
I’m not an expert on this stuff but these are just obvious things. Actual policy could be crafted to address these things on a number of different levels.
I am really not trying to discourage anyone, and agree policy solutions should be tried, just trying to point out that actually getting this things done, especially globally will be really really hard, possibly as hard or harder than technological solutions, which is why I find accusations of techno-optimism a bit rich/naive.
> Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility.
It is not abdicating responsibly if you think other technological solutions will be more likely to succeed just a difference of opinion. On the contrary, I think people who believe we "just need to do this or that political thing" abdicating responsibility because they have not considered how to do it or why it has not happened yet. They can just hold these "correct" opinions and blame others and absolve themselves of responsibility.
I guess I just don't see how these things can be done without some sort of force. Denying people the choice to begin with is the only way to get people to make choices that will harm their standard of living on average. This would require governments being far more authoritarian than we are used to or will likely accept. Also many of the suggested policy solutions I think are far to tame even, it will take a lot more than that to avoid disaster I think. Literately going back a century or two in standard of living probably at this point.
> Also many of the suggested policy solutions I think are far to tame even, it will take a lot more than that to avoid disaster I think. Literately going back a century or two in standard of living probably at this point.
Why do you believe this to be the case?
It seems like a lot of your pessimism is due to the fact that you think we would have to dramatically cut our standard of living if we don’t find technological solutions. I don’t believe this has basis.
I mean the article we are commenting on is literally about climate change hitting faster than expected. IPCC reports are known to be very conservative.
Think we hit the comment nesting limit so replying here.
From what I know, we can't release any more carbon and in fact might need to go carbon negative, so to do that we would need to essentially shut down everything that emits carbon... Cars, trucks, cargo ships, trains, airplanes, eliminate animal agriculture, no more steel or concrete production, all coal, gas oil power production and many other industries would need to shut down.
So yes, I think it would have quite a drastic effect on our standard of living. Some of these things in some parts of the world may someday become carbon neutral, but it will take a long time.
If you frame the conversation that way then yes, there is zero way to meet that standard. You might as well not even try.
Addressing climate change isn’t about being perfect at this point, it’s about averting ever increasing disaster scenarios, especially since the degree of the effects seems to be exponential with the amount of warming we see.
All I see from so many people is the feeling that we might as well not even try/it’s all a waste of time.
The question is, is there inherently a massive trade off between our living standards and addressing climate, given there is no substantial change in our level of technology (you said we’d need to go backwards 2 centuries).
If we “magically” implemented political solutions with proper urgency, does that necessarily entail a massive drop in living standards in your mind?
The small handful of people have to answer to their constituents and voters are hostile to anything that will raise taxes or lower their quality of life today.
That might change if things get bad enough, but by then it's probably too late for anything but a technological miracle.
Non-democratic countries (like China and Russia) have a better chance of making the changes because there it truly is the case that a small number of people can bring about change.
Explicitly raising taxes would be very unpopular, but there were plenty of things I listed that would get minimal pushback from the public at large.
No one cares if UPS delivery trucks are electric. Very few people are policy wonks and will pay attention to changes in FHA bureaucracy.
Voters have very limited bandwidth and attention. Most of what the federal government does, it does on its own initiative, with opposition from select special interests.
There are challenges with every policy option and you bring up an important one.
However, that is not a universal obstacle to all policy solutions. Getting people to electrify their homes has minimal impact on global economic competition. Changing urban planning regimes has little (direct) impact on global economic competition.
I’m not trying to imply it is easy. But it is still a choice that we can make is we can coordinate ourselves. I think the biggest challenge is simply the degree to which hyper individualism has taken over American culture and its effect on our collective psyche.
The obvious solution is to change one’s self such that other people aspire to be similar.
If our lives and cities appeal to people in other countries, they may adopt our technologies, urban designs, and social policies. Part of it is development. Part of it is marketing.
I don't think there are a lot of excuses being made. Consumption is a problem but solving that is probably more difficult than deploying technological solutions.
I don't think anybody is very optimistic about our chances on either path.
We have to do everything. There's no either/or... we HAVE to reduce consumption, we HAVE to find lower-carbon alternatives for everything we continue to consume, and we HAVE to create technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
It's not gambling or a delusion to say we must create new technologies to have a prayer of solving the problem. And of course there's no "magic pill" - we need to innovate in a thousand different ways, simultaneously.
The scale of the problem is hard to truly wrap ones head around, but it's crystal clear that voluntary sacrifice and curtailing consumption as the primary solution is a non-starter. That's not how humans work.
Also, what about developing countries? Are we going to tell them they have to consume less too? Seems unreasonable. So we're going to ask the developed world to consume less, and some of us might reduce a little bit... nowhere near the scale of emissions reductions that are necessary. Seems more like a rounding error than an actual impact.
FWIW, I am not saying we shouldn't try to innovate and I do very much want us to invest in science and technology that could be helpful.
I don't think we should count on these things such that we don't also take direct steps (cutting consumption where we can) to directly tackle this problem until we have the other options figured out.
You’re not wrong, but hoping people will choose anything other than the default thing is going to result in failure. If you lay out cities for cars, people will use cars. If you build massive urban areas in places that stay in the 90s with high humidity, people are going to blast the AC. If disposable things are cheaper than longer lasting things because there’s no cost to throwing it away, people are going to do it.
People just follow the path of least resistance in a given environment and only an extreme minority are ever going to be persuadable to consciously go against that at all. If we want different behavior, we’d need to bulldoze most of America and start over.
Exactly - it's not a smart bet to make on technology on behalf of billions of humans who stand to suffer or perish if technological progress does not keep up. Sure, the neolib Steven Pinkers of the world have been right so far that we're not sleepwalking into a malthusian trap, but you only have to be wrong once to spell incalculable consequences for humanity and the planet. The greatest challenge of this century will be moving human activity globally to operate within the safe planetary boundaries, of which we are currently exceeding 5. Our global society is certainly playing with some very risky dice right now.
I don't see any alternative, people will not accept lower living standards, except possibly minor inconveniences. There may not be a single magic pill but there are multiple technologies in concert that can be utilized to slow this down and possibly stablize things (e.g. there are multiple alternative energy sources)
People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.
Whats your suggestion exactly, and what's a realistic trade off that you think will have dramatic impacts? Economic nudging I think can do some things, certainly taxes and gov't investments (i.e. build a nuclear power plant, people don't care how they get power largely as long as they get power). We have people recycling a generation later even though it's annoying but now that's supposedly terrible among environmentalists anyway so you can do some things I grant.
But if your plan is decrease global consumption (not even per capita, just absolute consumption cause the environment doesn't care how many people there are) X% it doesn't even matter what that number is you will fail.
You overestimate the number of decisions people make consciously and underestimate how much people are simply responding to their environment and taking the path of least resistance.
“Decreased consumption” only means less resource utilization in this instance, it doesn’t mean that people are necessarily materially worse off.
An obvious and example would be efforts to expand awareness about the longevity and repairability of consumer electronics. Many people don’t want to continually throw things away when they break.
I think it's pretty reasonable to bet on people being incredible stupid and stuck in their ways; concluding that we have a better chance of innovating out of it than changing human behavior is a pretty worthy hedge.
We could just try to subsidize carbon neutral energy and establish a carbon tax.
People could consume more carbon neutral energy than they're consuming carbon-based energy right now.
This is one of those "we've done literally nothing and we're all out of ideas" problems because we refuse to put a finger on the scale and tip the balance economically towards carbon-neutral energy.
The ghost of Adam Smith will apparently punish us in the afterlife if we ever think of doing that.
Scientists have had a pretty good record on this, compared to the general public, industry, and policymakers. I am happy to not throw them under the bus.
I echo this -- since when does "cautious, high-training writers timidly announce massive change" become worse than "cynical, manipulative industry experts conceal worst outcomes" or "distracted, low-skill readers dismiss unpopular warning" ?
Similar to last year, too, the media takes that emphasis, reports it as absolute reality, and then starts the campaign of fear ("red alert") on the public, arguably, to whittle down their critical thinking skills for the sake of political gain.
The whole thing is circuitous to a painstaking degree.
Dr. Pielke's work on climate change effects has been criticized by Dr. Stephen Schneider, who said that with Pielke "one consistent pattern emerges-he is a self-aggrandizer who sets up straw men, knocks them down, and takes credit for being the honest broker to explain the mess-and in fact usually adds little new social science to his analysis"
I will have to live with that, I'm sorry you are disappointed. I can't vet every source and if someone is a known bad source, there are usually many, many alternatives to invest my limited time reading.
Great, but being the ones responsible for informing the public, that's not a justification for the behavior. If that continues (which it's likely to do), you end up with a highly-reactionary population that's going to do anything but solve the problem.
We're crossing the point of no return as the younger kids have no concept of a world where "doing it for the clicks" wasn't a thing. Once they become adults, all hell will break loose because they don't know how to think, only emote.
Comparing what you wrote with the quotes below, I get the sense that you and Pielke Jr., might have different opinions on climate change:
Pielke has also written extensively on climate change policy. He has written that he accepts the IPCC view of the underlying science, stating, "The IPCC has concluded that greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activity are an important driver of changes in climate. And on this basis alone I am personally convinced that it makes sense to take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.”[10] He also states that, "Any conceivable emissions reductions policies, even if successful, cannot have a perceptible impact on the climate for many decades", and from this he concludes that, "In coming decades the only policies that can effectively be used to manage the immediate effects of climate variability and change will be adaptive."[11][12]
No, I agree with those statements (generally speaking). I also believe in investment in proven solutions like nuclear being implemented/invested in now so that, by the end of the century, we're more likely to be in a better position.
What I _don't_ agree with is intentionally distorting the truth to scare people which, despite the claims that it motivates people, accomplishes nothing (objectively, as those "nudges" are rarely backed by concrete steps/plans—just more hyperbole and fearmongering to stoke the political fire).
> The report also references for the first time “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism”
Unfortunately these are not scientists. This just one example, but they are ideologues and activists first who wear science as a skin and bully scientists into submission. We saw how disastrous this was for Covid response with how science was treated as religion ("Believe Science"). The first thing we must do is eject the ideologues and re-establish the scientific method and rigor if we are to have any chance of actually solving climate change.
So what about that? I ignored it. The climate is warming at a dangerous rate for human civilization and focusing non-core one liners is a distraction from the real issue.
1. Be open to making real personal changes ourselves. Not just going with the flow and waiting on policy makers. We have individual choices we can make.
2. Look at all the things having an impact. Including the uncomfortable ones. The food supply chain is the one I've most recently become aware of. Take personal action on areas and support policy makers in pushing for changes. They need support because some things are hard (as in making the change means they won't be re-elected)
3. Learn the details. There is a lot of hogwash being thrown around. We should know the details and be able to speak well with people about them. In a persuasive way.
4. Understand people. For example, the #1 cause of death in the US is heart disease. An overwhelming majority of that is based on lifestyle. Most people just ignore future consequences compared to immediate feelings. Expect people to be this way and work with it.
> So what about that? I ignored it. The climate is warming at a dangerous rate for human civilization and focusing non-core one liners is a distraction from the real issue.
A lot of people won't ignore that statement; they will latch onto it and it will blind them to the rest of what is being said.
Politicians will point to that statement to make climate change look like a fake left-wing issue that is using the climate as a trojan horse for wokeism. That's already happening to some extent; the last thing scientists should do is give more ammo to the people making those arguments.
Science, like religion, seems to generate martyrs, but religions treat their martyrs better. Everyone cheers Ignaz Semmelweis because his viewpoint about hygiene eventually won, but nobody wants to apply the lesson about trying out the experiments of kooks.
Are we really at the point where we are going to claim that the IPCC aren't scientists? This seems to be little more than reactionary backlash at a sound observation of the social impact of climate change on communities (and the report does a great job of elaborating which communities and what impacts.) Must we "eject" every scientist who observes a social impact that someone disagrees with? Should the IPCC stop the discussion the human impact of climate change to avoid offending certain sensibilities?
Do you want people who are not left-wing to listen to scientists?
When you are trying to convince people to believe in something they don’t want to believe in, it’s a bad move to insult them or inject inflammatory political views into the discussion.
This kind of language about colonialism, inequity, etc. is going to alienate a lot of people — just like the smug self-righteousness of “I believe in science” (which implies that anyone who disagrees with the speaker doesn’t believe in science) alienated millions of people and made the anti-vax movement stronger.
This presupposes that scientists are the reason that "not left-wing" people (in reality a small fraction of US conservatives) aren't listening to scientists. The fact that climate change is human caused is political in the states, should that, too, be left out of the IPCC report to make it more palatable?
> This presupposes that scientists are the reason that "not left-wing" people (in reality a small fraction of US conservatives) aren't listening to scientists
No it doesn't. My argument is that if the scientists start bringing more politics into this, they make the political situation even worse than it is now, and they give people even more reasons to resist listening.
So where's the line? How much scientific evidence must we suppress to avoid offending reactionary sensibilities?
The fact that climate change is human caused is deeply political in the US. Should the IPCC suppress this fact too to cater to a tiny minority of science deniers?
The line is where the expertise of scientists ends. They need to stay in their lane. They are no more qualified to talk about colonialism than anyone else, and attempts to do so are definitely taking a political side and will be perceived as such.
Not in the slightest: the difference is that while individual scientists are just as human as the rest of us, the scientific process is built around public review and validation. In the case of climate change, you can look at things like the IPCC reports from the early 90s and see that they hold up quite well 30 years later whereas the various professional deniers have shifted from each spurious claim to another as the previous one becomes nonviable.
When I read specially people from USA complaining that China is now the number one polluter I'm like duh, shouldn't they be? They have in absolute terms most population and they are also taking care of massive cut of manufacturing...
It's not very surprising. They are dealing with an incomplete knowledge of a very complex system, and getting surprises as more knowledge and real world metrics challenge previous assumptions.
Probably it was a surprise that the biggest temperature anomalies happens near the Arctic, with all that permafrost waiting for thaw, that is not something happening evenly all over the globe.
And by now is not just us that worsen the problem now, we already achieved some tipping points and triggered and empowered some positive feedback loops. Reaching net zero (or worse, what was defined as net zero in COP26) is not enough, not even if magically it is achieved now.
We may keep adding pressure to a not so well understood complex system on which we all depend on or try to lower or if possible revert the pressure. So far we are betting really everything that the system will be able to stand much more pressure, and if it blow up, we will be able to fix or mitigate the damage. Maybe we deserve the outcome of that policy.
The Arctic is thawing very rapidly. Thawing permafrost is loaded with organic matter that is generating methane (several factors greater impact than CO2) and spewing it into the atmosphere. As more methane is released the temperature increases faster, spurring an exponential spiral that is greatly outrunning the previous "doomsday" models.
These sea level rising and other global weather impacts are no longer predictions. It is unfolding very fast. The artic circle is literally a giant cow fart from hell right now.
The clathrate gun hypothesis this is referencing has been largely discredited. I'm not familiar with the science, but I trust the researchers who say there are good thermodynamic reasons the clathrate deposits in the arctic will probably not suddenly destabilize. That being said, we should be absolutely be terrified of this because we're not certain clathrate destabilization is off the table. Plus, thawing permafrost is a nearer-term and more realistic methane monster barreling toward humanity.
Please consider laying off the Deep Adaptation doom reading and pick up a phone to bully your representatives and industry leaders into decarbonizing their operations. Even if there is a climate apocalypse the only way any of us survive is through collective and community effort.
Nothing in my comment was in reference to the clathrate hypothesis. My comment was about methane production that is actually occurring due to ancient organic matter that is/was frozen that is now fermenting as the permafrost thaws. In the Arctic circle the land is belching out huge quantities of methane right now. Pockets have formed and exploded, sending bedrock flying a half mile in each direction. Lakes are bubbling out methane profusely. You can poke a hole in the ground and lite a fire.
This weekend I read about how our food supply chain is responsible for a lot of greenhouse gases. As much as automobiles. That changing it could have a massive impact.
But, people don't like change that touches their food and leaders just won't even talk about it. How do we get people to be open to changes in stuff like this?
There's a difference between telling people what to eat and incentivizing things that give off a lot of greenhouse gases.
With automobiles, the governments are trying to incentivize greener solutions. With food, things like subsidies incentivize processes that give off a lot of greenhouse gases. Should the government incentivize differently for food than for cars? By incentives I mean things like subsidies. Tax dollars.
What makes cars different from the food supply chain when tax dollars are being spent on subsidies?
>But, people don't like change that touches their food and leaders just won't even talk about it. How do we get people to be open to changes in stuff like this?
You don't. I don't know where you get the idea that "leaders won't even talk about it", because I've been bombarded with articles about the GHG costs of agriculture for over a decade. It's everywhere.
And frankly, a lot of it is borderline deliberately misleading. Articles will choose to highlight the fact that about a quarter of global emissions are due to agriculture — but if you stick to developed countries, it's a tenth. You'll hear endlessly about how "potent" methane is, even though all climate models and serious scientific advocacy orgs have already taken this fully into account.
It goes on. The "plant-based" lobby is well-funded and manages to insert themselves all over the conversation while other industries like cement/steel/landfill/heating/shipping get little to no political or regulatory attention.
It's awfully convenient for the fossil fuel industry (responsible for three times as much GHG as everyone else combined) that climate change discussions are constantly diverted to the one topic which not only doesn't involve fossil fuels but also alienates practically everyone. I can think of no better way to sink Miami than to let the screeching vegans run the climate advocacy movement.
You bring up some points worth talking about. For example...
> Articles will choose to highlight the fact that about a quarter of global emissions are due to agriculture — but if you stick to developed countries, it's a tenth.
The reason this is discussed in percentages is that developed countries put out more GHG that developing countries. So, the percent from the food supply chain is a smaller percentage but still a large amount.
There are also different GHGs. Those from our food supply chain, outside of CO2, last in the atmosphere less time and have a greater impact. This means that lowering them has a shorter time to seeing the impact.
> The "plant-based" lobby is well-funded and manages to insert themselves all over the conversation while other industries like cement/steel/landfill/heating/shipping get little to no political or regulatory attention.
If you follow the money you'll find that big AG is far more well funded than "plant-based". I recently learned that 60% of cholesterol studies are funded by the egg industry alone. Big AG is massively funded.
Digging into the details rather than the surface discussions is illuminating.
Here's an example from a decade ago showing the opposite is true — there have been a bunch of industry money spent churning out false claims but the actual scientists' predictions have help up quite well:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
In particular, none of those claims from 50 years ago are peer-reviewed scientific literature (and, for that matter, they’re not clearly wrong: for example, air pollution does cause illness and death and left unaddressed would have continued to do so even if it’s hard to precisely attribute causes for things which happen over decades).
The IPCC reports the rest of us were talking about made specific testable predictions which you have chosen not to address, and they represented a broad consensus of the scientific community at the time. If you want to contribute anything, try reading them and reviewing their predictions as the author of the piece I linked did.
one huge problem is that the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted climate change as an official narrative. (it used to be called 'global warming' and then it was changed to 'climate change' after detractors started pointing out that we still had lots of cold weather just like before).
And once the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted something as an official narrative, virtually no dissent will be brooked. Everyone must adopt the official line. That means that I cannot trust what the monolith says about anything related to that official narrative. If there is good science that shows that the official narrative is wrong, then the scientists' careers will be ruined and that dissenting science will never come to light.
Also, even more scary is the fact that once scientists see that the media will treat with positive press all science that supports any official narrative, most scientists will start fudging their science to support the narrative.
Doubleplusungood!
Plus, the earth is an ice planet. We are actually overdue for an ice age. Plus, we have no power over "less developed" nations, which by the way, happen to be the vast majority of the population of this planet.
So I just disregard anything at all about climate change/global warming.
Interesting. Why do you think the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted climate change as an official narrative? Was there a preponderance of scientific evidence preceding this adoption, or some other motive?
From my perspective, the dominant corp-gov-media narrative is that the economy (as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and/or GDP) must always become bigger, faster, and anyone who suggests actions that run contrary to this goal are not taken seriously by the corp-gov-media monolith, including those concerned about climate change.
Yeah but then there are also plenty of less-sexy headlines showing how often the climate change doomsday prophecies were completely wrong.
I tend to be wary of people with a motive shouting things from the rooftops about how we all have to give more control to an ever increasing globalization government(s) or we’re all gonna die.
We’ve seen just how especially bad globalization can screw us over these past couple years, and we’ve also seen data that other countries (who take advantage of us) aren’t pulling their fair share of the responsibility when it comes to the environment - all while the US weakens itself in comparison.
>The report also references for the first time “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism” that contribute to many regions’ vulnerability to climate change.
Because I'm sure these people would somehow be worse off without the exposure to modern technology and civilization from colonialism...
This research should really stick to climate, harder to take it seriously when it comes with a side of woke propaganda.
> Because I'm sure these people would somehow be worse off without the exposure to modern technology and civilization from colonialism...
> This research should really stick to climate, harder to take it seriously when it comes with a side of woke propaganda.
This ignorance is a great example of why this is needed: many of the mitigations are unaffordable for the countries worst affected and a poorer population has less reserve capacity to make cuts — as a simple example, a great way for Americans to reduce their carbon output would be to eat half as much beef, and while there'd be some whining nobody would be going hungry because of that. That's a big contrast to a country where long periods of colonial mismanagement followed by a haphazard return to local government means that most of the population is still highly sensitive to things like droughts, changes in insect / animal population, etc. Yes, plenty of that is due to local corruption and should be recognized as such but that's far from all of it and certainly doesn't mean that we should ignore that a lot of people are going to suffer from pollution our countries emitted.
Latest IPCC climate report warns that rising greenhouse-gas emissions could soon outstrip the ability of many communities to adapt.
...how did the climate alarmist reports fare over the years?
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
I am no seer to say what will happen in the next decades, but many of the cited examples, especially those from 50 years ago, are not to do with climate change, but rather with other pollution issues that, had we not acted strongly 50 years ago to curb pollution via regulation (significant expansion of Clean Air & Water Acts, Endangered Species Act, and others), may well have seen the catastrophic predictions borne to fruition.
So, I would be very wary of taking out-of-context 50-year-old quotes as evidence that the warnings from the scientists of today amount to mere 'climate alarmism'.
There is one distinction between your list and the present situation: there is a difference between the opinions of an individual scientist and scientific consensus.
You're using falsifiability here, I assume, to deliberately invoke the Popperian notion of what is and isn't science, but then applying it to a description of the science process itself.
The short answer is that, no, no one can provide a falsifiable definition of scientific consensus any more than one could devise an experiment that uses the scientific method to validate the scientific method. It's validity would have a circular dependence on its own validity.
Science is not science all the way down in some infinite regress that somehow magically stands up. It is not a self-proving Ouroboros.
Science is a particular social system—a set of rules, culture, artifacts, and participants—for establishing consensus and one particular definition of truth. It happens to have a great track record for producing predictions that correlate with objective reality. But it's still ultimately a social system.
You cleverly avoided the topic "scientific consensus" by changing the discussion to "science" as a broader (oddly undefinable) concept.
Don't you think it's a risky argument to present something as black and white as facts (science is supposed to be based on them almost exclusively in some areas) as merely a concept of group imagination?
Assuming there is no psychological perspective to be argued, surely a factual, provable definition can be at least attempted? In the spirit of science perhaps?
> You cleverly avoided the topic "scientific consensus" by changing the discussion to "science" as a broader (oddly undefinable) concept.
I believe the two are essentially synonymous. "Scentific consensus" is what most scientists agree is true. "Science" is the process people use to define who is a scientist and what that consensus is.
> Don't you think it's a risky argument to present something as black and white as facts (science is supposed to be based on them almost exclusively in some areas) as merely a concept of group imagination?
Absolutely not. While there may be facts "out there" that are black and white, we have no metaphysical direct access to them. Consensus is as close to black and white as facts get. We're all just primate brains full neurons screeching monkey sounds at each other. We are not mathematical machines of pure reason.
> surely a factual, provable definition can be at least attempted?
"Factual" and "provable" are not concepts that apply to definitions. Can you offer a factual falsifiable proof of the definition of "squirrel"? "Green"?
These can be diametrically opposed. So how do you reconcile this potential for conflict? Keeping in mind that there is rift in society right now where groups use both science and consensus as a rhetorical or verbal bludgeon to win arguments.
Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back.
"So you've got to the end of our race-course?" said the Tortoise. "Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or other had proved that the thing couldn't be done?"
"It can be done," said Achilles. "It has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see the distances were constantly diminishing; and so —"
"But if they had been constantly increasing?" the Tortoise interrupted "How then?"
"Then I shouldn't be here," Achilles modestly replied; "and you would have got several times round the world, by this time!"
"You flatter me — flatten, I mean" said the Tortoise; "for you are a heavy weight, and no mistake! Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps, while it really consists of an infinite number of distances, each one longer than the previous one?"
"Very much indeed!" said the Grecian warrior, as he drew from his helmet (few Grecian warriors possessed pockets in those days) an enormous note-book and a pencil. "Proceed! And speak slowly, please! Shorthand isn't invented yet!"
"That beautiful First Proposition of Euclid!" the Tortoise murmured dreamily. "You admire Euclid?"
"Passionately! So far, at least, as one can admire a treatise that won't he published for some centuries to come!"
"Well, now, let's take a little bit of the argument in that First Proposition — just two steps, and the conclusion drawn from them. Kindly enter them in your notebook. And in order to refer to them conveniently, let's call them A, B, and Z: —
(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other.
(B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same.
(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other.
Readers of Euclid will grant, I suppose, that Z follows logically from A and B, so that any one who accepts A and B as true, must accept Z as true?"
"Undoubtedly! The youngest child in a High School — as soon as High Schools are invented, which will not be till some two thousand years later — will grant that."
"And if some reader had not yet accepted A and B as true, he might still accept the sequence as a valid one, I suppose?"
"No doubt such a reader might exist. He might say 'I accept as true the Hypothetical Proposition that, if A and B be true, Z must be true; but, I don't accept A and B as true.' Such a reader would do wisely in abandoning Euclid, and taking to football."
"And might there not also he some reader who would say 'I accept A and B as true, but I don't accept the Hypothetical '?"
"Certainly there might. He, also, had better take to football."
"And neither of these readers," the Tortoise continued, "is as yet under any logical necessity to accept Z as true?"
"Quite so," Achilles assented.
"Well, now, I want you to consider me as a reader of the second kind, and to force me, logically, to accept Z as true."
"A tortoise playing football would be — " Achilles was beginning
"— an anomaly, of course," the Tortoise hastily interrupted. "Don't wander from the point. Let's have Z first, and football afterwards!"
"I'm to force you to accept Z, am I?" Achilles said musingly. "And your present position is that you accept A and B, but you don't accept the Hypothetical —"
"Let's call it C," said the Tortoise.
"— but you don't accept
(C) If A and B are true, Z must be true. "
"That is my present position," said the Tortoise.
"Then I must ask you to accept C."
"I'll do so," said the Tortoise, "as soon as you've entered it in that note-book of yours. What else have you got in it?"
"Only a few memoranda," said Achilles, nervously fluttering the leaves: "a few memoranda of — of the battles in which I have distinguished myself!"
"Plenty of blank leaves, I see!" the Tortoise cheerily remarked. "We shall need them all!" (Achilles shuddered.) "Now write as I dictate: —
(A) Things that arc equal to the same are equal to each other.
(B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same.
(C) If A and B are true, Z must be true.
(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other."
"You should call it D, not Z," said Achilles. "It comes next to the other three. If you accept A and B and C, you must accept Z."
"And why must I?"
"Because it follows logically from them. If A and B and C are true, Z must be true. You don't dispute that, I imagine?"
"If A and B and C are true, Z must he true," the Tortoise thoughtfully repeated. "That's another Hypothetical, isn't it? And, if I failed to see its truth, I might accept A and B and C', and still not accept Z. mightn't I?"
"You might," the candid hero admitted; "though such obtuseness would certainly be phenomenal. Still, the event is possible. So I must ask you to grant one more Hypothetical."
"Very good. I'm quite willing to grant it, as soon as you've written it down. We will call it
(D) If A and B and C are true, Z must be true.
"Have you entered that in your notebook?"
"I have!" Achilles joyfully exclaimed, as he ran the pencil into its sheath. "And at last we've got to the end of this ideal race-course! Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z."
"Do I?" said the Tortoise innocently. "Let's make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refused to accept Z?"
"Then Logic would force you to do it!" Achilles triumphantly replied. "Logic would tell you 'You can't help yourself. Now that you've accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!' So you've no choice, you see."
"Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down," said the Tortoise. "So enter it in your book, please. We will call it
(E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true. Until I've granted that, of course I needn't grant Z. So it's quite a necessary step, you see?"
"I see," said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.
Here narrator, having pressing business at the Bank, was obliged to leave the happy pair, and did not again pass the spot until some months afterwards. When he did so, Achilles was still seated on the back of the much-enduring Tortoise, and was writing in his note-book, which appeared to be nearly full. The Tortoise was saying, "Have you got that last step written down? Unless I've lost count, that makes a thousand and one. There are several millions more to come. And would you mind, as a personal favour, considering what a lot of instruction this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the Nineteenth Century — would you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be re-named Taught-Us?"
"As you please!" replied the weary warrior, in the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands. "Provided that you, for your part, will adopt a pun the Mock-Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be re-named A Kill-Ease!"
"Turtles are all animals with shells" is falsifiable in the sense that you can say an animal without a shell is falsely called a turtle, and that an example of an animal with a shell that is not a turtle disproves the definition. Not clear which sense is being asked for here, but it does parse.
The point was that the church of climatology has been making dire predictions since before the 1970's and as soon as yesterday. To date, none of them have come to pass, and there is no reason why they will ever get one right given their history. Their motives are ulterior and that is obvious to the pragmatist.
#11 did in fact happen, and to this day there are hypoxic gyres off the coast of many large rivers. The gyre that results from the Mississippi is particularly notable.
Regardless, even today you can find alarmist idiocy without much difficulty. That doesn't mean there's nothing to be alarmed about. It reflects the reality that knowing there's a problem and being able to predict the future are two different things. There are lots of indicators of the problem, but even the best meteorologists can only accurately predict the future 12 hours out, and even that is sometimes too much to ask.
I too like to copy/paste lists filled with cherry picked 50-year old quotes curated by right-wing think tanks funded by ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers.
>Steven E. Koonin is a theoretical physicist, professor, former Chief Scientist for the BP petroleum company, and former Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration. He's also the author of "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters."
I'm not sure "former Chief Scientist for the BP petroleum company" is the person I would go to for "a balanced take" on climate change.
I wouldn't personally call it "balanced" either (unless "balanced" counts anything between extreme climate change alarmism and extreme climate change denial).
That said, I do think it's a valuable contrarian perspective, and if you haven't heard the steel-manned version of the climate change "skeptic" argument, it's absolutely worth listening to just to add some nuance to your existing views even if it doesn't necessarily change them. There are some really legitimate, strong criticisms that he raises in the episode that I personally plan on doing more research on.
(also: he was Chief Scientist in BP with their alternative and renewable energy strategy)
I don't think that's a fair implication, but a "balanced take" means nothing to me on this topic. I want all sides to argue their position as hard as they can and then let me decide for myself.
Is Joe Rogan a scientist? I might listen if you link to a podcast episode in which Koonin debates other scientists. I'm not going to listen to this episode just to hear Koonin and his views go unchallenged by Joe Rogan.
>I'm not sure "former Chief Scientist for the BP petroleum company" is the person I would go to for "a balanced take" on climate change.
The IPCC is funded and promoted by the UN because their conclusions align with the UN's agenda. It's very hard to distinguish the legitimate environmental concerns from political and ideological ulterior motivations.
Saying person A is biased does not imply that person B is not also biased. I was responding to a statement that said person A was balanced when they clearly have a bias.
I think it's better to align your viewpoints towards the side of overwhelming global scientific consensus than a podcast host who chose to 'treat' a virus with horse dewormer
Don’t kill the messenger, Joe Rogan is just hosting the podcast. As for the horse dewormer, haven’t you heard that it’s primary use is in humans? It also very clearly works for Covid, we could have saved millions of lives had the CDC not lied about ivermectin.
I mean, the world itself will be fine. On the other hand, 11,000 years ago half of the UK was under a permement ice sheet. If we end up at a similar extreme to 11,000 years ago compared to now (probably in the other direction) large amounts of the world will become uninhabitable.
Because dishonest people took every cold spell and said "Ha, scientists said the globe was warming! This proves them wrong." even though anyone with a very basic comprehension would understand that increasing the amount of energy in the system through global mean temperature increases could indeed lead some areas to be occasionally cooler.
In any case, the IPCC has been using "climate change" since at least 1990;
Also "climate change" is a more accurate name to describe the wider issue, imo. Climates around the world are changing in many ways, not just getting warmer everywhere. Some of the effects of climate change will be some areas getting a lot drier or wetter and even some places getting colder.
I'm no climate scientist but a few years ago when I went through some studies they seemed to universally refer to it as anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
IPCC is a political organization so they might be trying to take a more neutral tone?
When they realized they can unite "Global Cooling" from the 1970's with what replaced it: "Global Warming"! That way you are always right. If the world is getting hotter? Climate change! But if you were wrong and it's getting cooler? Still climate change!
Same reason Facebook changed to Meta. When a brand’s reputation has been sullied and mocked and delegitimized as a result, often the only option is a rebrand under a completely different name.
It seems like there is a dogmatic, myopic focus on merely reducing emissions to "solve climate change", based on a completely hypothetical notion that we can control the weather like a thermostat.
We would do well to have a more broad conversation about sustainability, resiliency, and adaptability for the inevitable reality that the climate is going to change drastically no matter what.
The planet has been averaging "civilization ending" climatological catastrophies about once every 10,000 years for the past ~160,000 years or more from a variety of different causes; the last one being around 12,000 years ago...
