demagogue on 26/3/2015 at 16:41
I did legal research for Michael Oppenheimer at Princeton, one of the lead authors of the IPCC Reports. FWIW, the smoking gun study for him were the Antarctic ice core studies, since they could get both the average temperature of a season by how packed the layers were, and the atmospheric carbon content from trapped bubbles in the same layer.
He said when they first correlated the two, the plot was ridiculously linear, the kind you rarely see in science. So you double and triple and quadruple check to see if it's a real relationship, and the results held up under some heavy scrutiny.
Chimpy Chompy on 26/3/2015 at 17:03
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
For starters, the quote in question wasn't about being "triggered" by a memory of rape, it was about being "triggered" by exposure to others who "challenged my deeply held beliefs".
The person you quoted was a victim who might be a bit delicate around this sort of topic. I don't see the problem people in that sort of situation them having some sort of chill-out room at a debate. Even if their views on a cultural issue are wrong (and I'm not getting into whether they are or not) I can bet it's difficult to separate intellectually thinking about a topic, from personal experience.
Basically you're picking a bad place to do battle against progressive over-sensitivity.
bjack on 26/3/2015 at 17:54
Gryzemius,
Thank you for your opinions. I share most of them. At least you are not completely denying the existence of controversy. At least you are open minded enough to ponder the question of why they felt they needed to do what they did.
We too have a political team that is dead set on "fixing" the issue with questionable tactics with very inequitable application.
BTW - most of the V8's in the USA are over 5L. You would be surprised though. I had a V8 Corvette that would get 30 MPG (or about 7.84 L/100Km). While not a Twingo or Punto, that is not too bad. I agree though that driving around in large trucks that get 13 MPG is not too smart. Unless you are a laborer that needs the hauling capacity, get something more efficient.
At home we have Cap and Trade - probably the same scheme as your carbon trading. Lots of people hate it, except for the little companies that don't need the credits and sell them to huge corporations. It is what used to be called a shake down. It is artificial scarcity.
We do not have VAT (yet), but forms of it are creeping in year by year. We have sales tax on gasoline that is calculated on the gas + federal road tax + state road tax. Yes, we calculate the sales tax on the other taxes too.
We too have phased out most incandescent bulbs. Compact fluorescents are being phased out little by little too, mostly due to the concern of the mercury. Lot's of $20 LED bulbs though.
Lastly though, if AGW is truly mostly man made, it is possible for man to build CO2 scrubbers (already being done). Could they be effective in time? We'll see. There are much worse things to deal with anyway. Mass plankton die offs are one of my concerns - not at the poles though, but at our coastlines. H2S anyone?
froghawk on 26/3/2015 at 22:00
For the record, the author of that article on safe spaces on the last page has no idea what a safe space is. The patronizing playground it described is not a normal safe space. In a normal space, anyone is allowed to say anything they want, but everyone will get called out for their shit. Not in a silencing way, just in an honest 'hey, I find this hurtful' kind of way. There's no conspiracy there, and for the most part, it's not about being 'sheltered from harmful ideas'. Anyone who says it is is fear mongering.
Gryzemuis on 26/3/2015 at 22:44
Quote Posted by bjack
Gryzemius, Thank you for your opinions. I share most of them.
I am still not in the same camp as you.
In (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=145174&p=2282956&viewfull=1#post2282956) this post you link a few interesting articles. And then you go in full rant-mode.
Quote:
The agenda is to redistribute resources from the 1st world to the 3rd. It is world welfare, if you will. Communists and Socialists love this.
Yeah, sure. It's always the fault of the commies. Too bad we didn't bomb them to hell in the cold war, when we had the chance. With a little luck we can still start WWIII in a few years, because we all care about the Ukraine so much.
I suspect that if scientists have juggled numbers a bit to exaggerate climate change, they did it for much simpler reasons. 1) Their research is funded with grants. If your research is not seen as relevant or hip, you lose grants (and some people might lose their jobs). 2) It's always more fun to work in a field that is in the center of attention. 3) (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) Never attribute to socialism that which is adequately explained by capitalism (selfishness). In any case, I don't believe there are conspiracies at such a large level.
Quote:
We too have a political team that is dead set on "fixing" the issue with questionable tactics with very inequitable application.
You don't. The USA is one of the reasons why I think that even if attempt to turn back global heating, we will never succeed. And that is with a current Democrat government. With Republicans prospects will be even more hopeless. And no, that is not because Republicans are smarter or more skeptical or anything. It's just because Republicans are even greater douchebags and thiefs and murders than Democrats.
My example about cars was just an example. Americans today are unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifice for the greater good. Especially if the greater good is about something that's bigger than Murica. And they have a huge instruments of companies, marketing and advertisements, lobbyists and politicians to make sure nothing for the greater good will ever happen.
I have no sympathy about americans paying taxes on taxes. Everybody does that. My point was: we pay per liter of gas what Americans pay per gallon. And it always has been that way. If americans would pay the same, I could accept how high gas prices can save the planet. But the current system in my country is just hypocritical. In the US it's hypocritical because you don't care.
Another example that I recall now. We had serious plans to inject CO2 into underground storage. E.g. we pump out natural gas, and put back air with a lot of CO2 in it (or liquid or something, can't remember). The costs would have been gigantic. But "it would be worth it". While China was building a new coal-burning energy plant per week or so. Lucky for us, the 2008 crisis seemed to have killed off these plans.
There is one factor that might save us in the end.
Faetal wrote somewhere this month that a previous period of warming up caused the earth to warm up during only a timeframe of 2000 years. 5C to get to the critical point, then another 5C as a reaction. And we are going 10x faster now. Well, if 5C is the point-of-no-return, and if it takes us a 150-200 years to get there, then we are safe ! Because within a 100 years, we will have ran out of oil and gas. And maybe coal too ? Once we don't have oil and gas anymore, we can't emit CO2 at the speed we have been over the last 200 years. Problem solved. I've read predictions that peak-oil will happen in 2030. Or maybe 2050. But does anyone here not believe that we'll have ran out of oil and gas by 2100 ? I think oil-depletion will be a much bigger problem much sooner than global warming.
bjack on 27/3/2015 at 01:34
Quote Posted by bjack
Gryzemius,
Thank you for your opinions. I share most of them.
Ok, correction, "I share most of the ones you point out in that one particular response." That better? :D
No, it is not all the fault of the commies, but there are open discussions among the Democrats that AGW is a wonderful excuse for wealth redistribution. This is fuel for Republicans to strike back and boy have they. Meanwhile, any truths about man made accelerated climate change are obscured by both sides. The PR campaign for the AGW side in the USA is not doing well.
Nearly 100% agreement is the nastiness of the Democrats and Republicans. They are simply 2 sides of one coin. One wishes to enslave the masses with welfare and the other wants the masses to believe the illusion that they are free. Most Americans are sick and tired of this shit and just stay home on voting day. Meanwhile, contempt for the rule of law is also breaking down. I guess neo-neo-Punk Rock is next, since we had sort of a new-Punk with grunge.
Not all 'Muricans are careless rubes that drive trucks and drink cheap beer, while listening to bad corporate country rock, with a blonde bimbo next to them given them oral pleasures :thumb: A lot of us hate waste, we recycle, we use energy sparingly, we try to use less polluting transportation when available. Some Americans think that the Dutch are whore going, dope smoking, tobacco selling, canal dwelling, broodje eating, blondes. :joke: I know that to be a gross generalization - one of many stereotypes people place on other cultures. I find the Dutch to be very polite, nice, careful, thoughtful, and generally are not that openly judgmental of others. I can't tell you how many times I have been asked about gays in the US military when I visit the Netherlands. Everyone was perplexed why we would ban a man from service just because of his choice of whom he sleeps with. I agree. There are exceptions to the "cool" Dutch, but I find the ratio of cool to douche bag in Holland to be much higher than in the USA. Ok, I admit it, I love the Netherlands, and not just because of the Bull Dog Cafe.
Yes, many Americans are fat and lazy and love nothing but to sit down, turn on Oprah and eat a 2 Kg bag of chips (crisps). Then again there are many that jog 10 Km a day, eat only organic food, and drive a Prius. I am somewhere in between.
As for your gas prices, most of those are taxes, but those taxes go to improve and maintain roads. We aren't so lucky with our taxes. Our road taxes are frequently confiscated for pet projects elsewhere, or just the general fund. It all just goes into a big pot and is distributed to whomever yells the loudest. Pot holes in roads and lack of public transportation is the result.
CO2 injection? There are many proposals for it in the US. I read about it almost weekly. Many new projects require some sort of sequestration.
Peak oil? We are nowhere near it. There are fields of oil in the US and Canada that rival Saudi Arabia's reserves. Oil Shale. It finally became profitable to process it. We will not be running out of carbon sources any time soon. We got hundred of years of coal, if not more. If we truly need to stop the CO2, we'll have to make some hard choices. We have enough constant wind and great sunshine in the US to power us, but windmills kill animals and solar farms bake birds. Few like the nuke option. Mass extermination is not on the table... yet.
In my area, about 1 in 25 homes have added solar panels. Most larger businesses are covered with solar. We have not added solar to our home because we will move in about 5 years and cannot recover the costs. We do not use that much electricity to begin with. Many spend $400 per month. We use about $60. If we move to a desert like New Mexico, we will definitely try to find an "off the grid" type home. It just makes sense to use what is being beamed down on you for free if you are going to run and air conditioner 24x7.
And speaking of free, the free market is working its magic here. Solar panels are becoming less expensive by the day. Unfortunately is it mostly due to Chinese labor and market manipulation, but the designs are getting so much better. Much better power yields per square meter. A market for sequestration has opened up, so better ways of putting CO2 "to sleep" are on the horizon. If there is a profit to be had, someone will find a way.
You hit the nail on the head with the Chinese building new coal plants. Even if the rest of the world reduces their CO2 output, the Chinese will more than make up the difference. Many in the US feel that they should not have to suffer just so the Chinese can prosper. The old saying, "I've got mine and intend to keep it." They have a point. The BS agreement Obama made just makes a lot of Americans ever madder. We get to reduce and China might if they want to, but they will not. Why make a deal like that?
How about, "Hey China... uh, you hold a lot of dollars, right? Well, those will tank soon anyway, since we ran up the credit card really badly over the past 6 years. We did a bad job before too, but OH MAN, we had a party lately! We (democrats) paid off a lot of our buddies and have almost nothing to show for it but some irrational idea that the DOW is solid. So, if you don't want to go into a terrible depression, you need to keep the dollar "happy" and you also need to reduce your CO2, OK? You bought up a lot of that debt and really cannot afford to lose on that bet." Their response? "Fuck you gwai lo! We are working with Russia to kick your white asses out of the petro dollar game bitch!. World currency? Not on our watch. We'll rape your data banks." We'll see. We have already been attacked. I get notices all the time now that accounts have been compromised. Welcome to the machine. Queue Floyd music.
faetal on 27/3/2015 at 09:23
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
As I've said before, I don't care much about global warming. Because I believe that if it is man-made, there is nothing that humanity can do about it.
Lay opinions on this are kind of meaningless, since you don't understand the mechanisms involved. This is kind of like me saying that I believe that if multiple sclerosis is a disease, then there is nothing we can do about it. I'm not an MS expert, so I'm not qualified to make any definitive statements.
Quote:
But one issue that made me a bit skeptical was that (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy) controversy over hacked emails in 2009. I understand that the whole thing was blown out of proportions by both sides. At the time I've read a few articles about it. Some of them showed in-depth how some statistics were being manipulated. Without proper documentation about what they exactly did with the numbers.
Now my concern was (and still is): if human-made global warming is so obvious, then why did scientists feel the need to mess with those statistics ?
So, you're concerned enough about the issue to find the wiki article, but not to read it? Read the responses section. Most of the fuss about that was the media doing what it does. You are doing that very common thing of ignoring a huge pile of evidence to focus on a small inconsistency. I suggest you read the wiki article about the (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change) scientific opinion on global warming, including the references if you think the whole thing is just cooked. The most mind-boggling thing I find about people's continual insistence that the science is exaggerated or made up is that the ONLY way that could work, is if ALL of the relevant groups around the whole world were ALL in on it and had regular meetings to make sure that their stories all matched up. Because otherwise, any kind of de-synchronisation between the data reported and other people's findings would be splashed all over everywhere because the interested parties in dismissing AGW have plenty of money to throw into PR boosting of anything which pushes controversy in to the public minds. From my perspective, the fact that such a huge deal is being made of the media employing creative context to overblow some emails from a hacking is quite comforting, because it illustrates (by being a prominent "worry" people have about the science) just how solid the science is. If it weren't then this email thing would not be news, it'd be a triviality lost in a sea of a wildly heterogeneous pool of conflicting research.
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My other concern is with some of the solutions that have been implemented or are being proposed. Example: people are supposed to bleed through their noses to drive a car. Example: taxes (including VAT) are 200% of the base price of gas in my country (source: wiki.nl). But the tax on kerosine is zero ! Airlines (nor oil companies) don't even pay VAT over the kerosine they use. If find this not fair. And actually it is bad for the environment. Flying is hardly necessary. Remote vacations are the first thing I'd abolish. While people need a car e.g. to get to work. Also, this is a tax-break for the rich (who fly far more often).
Unfortunately, no matter how good the science gets, there is no accounting for how governments respond to advice.
Quote:
The EU forbids me to use an old-fashioned electrical light-bulb. While in the US, nobody cares that half the country drives in 3L V8 trucks and SUVs. I don't mind sacrificing some stuff for the planet. But I hate the inconsistency, hypocrisy and inefficiency of some of the measurements being taken.
This is a stupid argument on a par with "why should I pay for anything when other people steal?". If you can't muster the moral intelligence to lead by example or realise that deducting 1 from a million is still a deduction (more so if it's 100 people doing the same), then more likely is you just don't care enough to sacrifice anything at all. If everyone waits until everyone is doing it, then no one ever will. Feeling like you're losing out on a small luxury while others don't is just petty and selfish. The good thing about leading by example is that when things get worse and we need everyone to stop fucking about and start making changes, Europe will be able to act as consultant to all of the world by having already exacted measures. If you think having incandescent light bulbs (which cost you more over time) is more important though, then so be it.
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And then there is emission (carbon credit) trading. I find the whole concept ludicrous. This will not help against global warming at all. All it does, is add extra overhead (cost) on everything. Nobody will emit less carbondioxide in the end. The only thing that will change is prices. And those extra prices will be paid by the average man in the street. Emission trading is just a useless scam invented to make some people (the people trading in emission rights) richer.
Carbon trading is stupid, but again, not dictated by research. The worst aspect of carbon trading is it allows richer nations to essentially buy the right to pollute more from poorer ones. I think the majority of actual measures taken by governments are just lip service being paid to the idea of change allowing them to continue their real jobs of being the PR department for industry.
faetal on 27/3/2015 at 09:35
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
I suspect that if scientists have juggled numbers a bit to exaggerate climate change, they did it for much simpler reasons.
1) Their research is funded with grants.
Quite. Have you spent much time reading the ones which the fossil fuel industry offers? Hint - they are MUCH more attractive than the research council ones. The main problem is that the research council ones tend to focus on being exploratory - i.e. what is happening? Whereas the industry ones tend to be leading, i.e. what alternatives to climate trends are there than human activity? There is more actual work to be done in the area where there are actual data to be found. The asymmetry between funding levels and actual data return strongly favour AGW being real on basic logical grounds.
Quote:
If your research is not seen as relevant or hip, you lose grants (and some people might lose their jobs).
This is derogatory and not well-defined. If your research is not seen as real, there is also not much a career waiting for you. Take it from someone who actually works in academia. When people get found to be fabricating or exaggerating, things do not go well for them.
Quote:
2) It's always more fun to work in a field that is in the center of attention.
Also derogatory - you are betraying a contempt towards researchers here. You tend to study towards a specialisation - you can base this on your interests, or where you feel you can do some good or where there is money. You can't just change specialisation based on what's hip. I'm sure plenty of people people chose climate science because there is money, just be aware that there is far more in industry funding, so the larger part of those people might be the ones doing the tenuous or misinformation-oriented "teach the controversy" stuff, whereas the people working for research councils are likely the ones doing it out of interest or to do some good, or who want a stable job, but don't want to sacrifice their morals.
The simpler explanation (Ockham's razor) is that AGW is a thing which is happening and the people who are researching it see it because it's there. It's like people will do anything but believe the most obvious answer, because it's unpalatable. The evidence is ridiculously comprehensive. This is like people saying "nah, I don't think proteins are made by transcribing DNA via ribosomes, that's just where the money is" or something. It's really weird.
faetal on 27/3/2015 at 09:48
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
There is one factor that might save us in the end.
Faetal wrote somewhere this month that a previous period of warming up caused the earth to warm up during only a timeframe of 2000 years. 5C to get to the critical point, then another 5C as a reaction. And we are going 10x faster now.
There is no clear answer on the Permian mass extinction, but the clearest theory at the moment is that sustained sheet basalt eruptions (on a scale of the approx. size of Canada) created 5 degrees of warming and this led to further release of greenhouse gases from sequestered stores, leading to a further 5 degrees over around
200,000 years. This wiped out ~90% of all life on earth, because 10 degrees of warming in 200,000 years is way too fast for evolutionary adaptation to keep up. I suspect the 10% of stuff that survived was some seriously robust stuff which can handle a LOT of variation. Now humans are pretty robust, but we do rely on everything else being there in order to support ourselves. We can't eat mud. We have achieved nearly 2 degrees of warming in under 200 years (sounds little in terms of "how warm is it out today?", but in global terms, that's huge and unprecedented). Everyone seems to be just carrying on like that's not a concern or something. Others are digging deep into the bit of their brain which deals with denial and finding anything which can make them feel like it's false somehow. Those of us who genuinely want to see our species have some kind of future which isn't resource wars, natural disasters and being consigned to the fossil record, don't get to wrap our heads in quite so much cotton wool.
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Well, if 5C is the point-of-no-return, and if it takes us a 150-200 years to get there, then we are safe ! Because within a 100 years, we will have ran out of oil and gas. And maybe coal too ? Once we don't have oil and gas anymore, we can't emit CO2 at the speed we have been over the last 200 years. Problem solved. I've read predictions that peak-oil will happen in 2030. Or maybe 2050. But does anyone here not believe that we'll have ran out of oil and gas by 2100 ? I think oil-depletion will be a much bigger problem much sooner than global warming.
Oh dear. You really need to read the science a bit more. There is no convincing evidence to suggest that we will have used all of our fossil fuels within any defined amount of time and there seems to be a lot of dishonesty from the producers under-reporting their reserves in order to inflate their unit prices. Even if we do, those aren't the only sources of greenhouse gases. Industrial scale farming produces billions of tonnes of methane and hydrogen sulphides, which have a longer half life and greater warming potency than CO2. Mixing concrete for large scale building projects (including, ironically, wind turbines) releases billions of tonnes of CO2 a year. More than these factors though are the issues of positive feedback mechanisms. Ice loss reduces earth's albedo, which hastens warming, which hastens ice loss. Warming defrosts tundra permafrost which releases sequestered methane and CO2, which hastens warming which hastens thawing etc.. The list goes on - warming increases methane release from sub-oceanic clathrate stores, CO2 dissolving into oceans and rivers lowers pH which dissolves coccolithophore shells which release H2S, which warms etc... Do you really think you just figured it all out and that the many thousands of experts who spend their lives studying it were somehow just not able to think that up?
bjack on 6/4/2015 at 23:45
I was just thinking free today and came up with this one. Enjoy.
"Man is the poster child for Eugenics in other parts of our galaxy."
I miss Douglas Adams :( While he did not say this quote above, it seems like something he would have written in jest.
He would have loved Cadillac's "CUE" infotainment. He left us too soon.
