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It's a bit warm/ wet/ cold outside

Started by The Enigmatic Dr X, 24 July, 2019, 09:35:09 AM

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IndigoPrime

Well, quite, but then that's the problem: it's all about short-termism and selfishness. Just the average person dropping their meat intake 50% would be a start. That wouldn't heavily impact on anyone. Or we could all carry water and coffee rather than buying it. (Mrs G bought a new canteen recently, and I took it on the march. The tea brewed at 9am was still burning hot around lunchtime, and still warm when I had some on the way home around 5pm.) But even small things are too much. So asking people to invest in their future is apparently beyond the pale.

Again, I just don't get it.

shaolin_monkey

A full on 15 page report from Harvard, George Mason Uni, and Bristol Uni about how the fossil fuel industry has deliberately sabotaged America's attempts to get on top of the climate crisis!


https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/America_Misled.pdf

shaolin_monkey

An interesting interview from a course I'm on at the mo re the psychology of climate change denial. It seems the fossil fuel industry has tapped into a particular ideology to bolster their obfuscation:

(Apologies for the info dump)

Quote
Oreskes: Climate change denial in the United States is almost entirely motivated by politics. A lot of scientists have thought that it was a problem of science illiteracy, that it was a problem of public understanding, that if we just explained the science better that then we would solve this problem. And that doesn't work because the problem is not being driven by lack of access to information, although that may play a role in some cases, the problem is being driven by people not wanting to believe the science because they don't like its implications.

Lewandowsky: When it comes to the drivers of belief or acceptance of scientific findings, in particular climate change, then what we find is that one of the most important factors is a person's worldview or you can call it a political ideology, their belief in things such as the free market. It turns out, that in particular in the case of climate change, that people who are very enthusiastic about free markets and who think that government should not interfere with free markets, that they tend to reject the findings from climate change, climate science based on that ideology. It's a very strong effect. It's a huge effect.

Oreskes: If you take climate science seriously, it means we need to do something, we need to do something that changes the way we operate. And that something could be very personal.
It could be changing the way you live. It could be becoming a vegetarian, not traveling or building a zero energy home, but it also could be something that the government does.
And a lot of the early attention about climate change particularly focused on governance.
It focused on either the idea of international governance in the form of, say, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or it focused on national governance in the form of a carbon tax or an emission trading system. So these are government interventions in the marketplace.

Scott: In the case of climate change where it's more of a political ideology and/or an economic ideology, the concerns are more along the lines of, "Well, if climate change is true, that means that we're going to have to strengthen central government because we're going to have to have to take steps to curb the carbon production so that we can reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. That means a bigger central government. As political conservatives, we don't want a big central government. It means we're going to have to put some constraints on capitalism. That's socialism." There's a lot of things that political conservatives are going to lose also if climate change is right.

Oreskes: If you don't like the idea of a government intervention in the marketplace because you believe in free market economics or you just worry about government encroachment—you worry about expanding the government—then the kinds of solutions that are being put forward for climate change are things you don't like. That's a major, probably the single major reason why the Americans who reject climate science do it, because if you look at the data on it, what you see is that the strongest correlation between climate-change
denial is with a certain kind of conservative politics that emphasises the free market.
It's not correlated with race. It's not correlated with age or gender or even religious belief, with one exception that's tied to conservative politics, which is a certain sector of the evangelical community, but it's tied to a set of conservative beliefs about governance.

Hayhoe: The main reason why people don't think climate change is real is not because of lack of facts. Most of the people that I meet from day to day—the lady in the grocery store, or the man across the street—they have arguments at the tip of their fingers as to why they don't think climate change is real. They will cite the stolen e-mails.
They will say, "Global warming stopped 17 years ago." They have arguments, factual or semi-factual based arguments about why it's not true. Why is everybody so convinced?
It's because we are all cognitive misers. We don't have the brain power to understand every single issue in the world. I don't know if we ever did, but, especially now, I mean, I don't understand the fundamentals of stem cell research. I don't really understand the pluses and negatives of nuclear power, to be perfectly honest. I certainly don't understand the economic benefits and trade-offs of all the various climate policies that are being considered. You can understand how the average person doesn't understand the climate science, so what do we do? We go to people we trust. In the United States, when we look at people we trust, if you look at the conservative half of the country, with one voice, conservative media, conservative thought leaders, and conservative politicians are telling us that this isn't a real problem.

Hamilton: In the literature, there are some accounts that I consider to be top down in explaining opposition to things like clean air and clean water—that is, there are political elites. There are ideological think tanks. There are large donors. There are media networks that are arguing from the top and telling people that these are the arguments; these are the positions; here are some scientific-sounding rationales or an economic-sounding rationale—that all being top down. Bottom up—I think there are people who are more or less inclined to listen to those arguments and to credit them or to discredit the alternatives. Some of that may be psychological. Some of it may have to do with your social position. We see all kinds of differences in terms of gender and education and age but dominated by differences in ideology, worldview, or political party.

Alley: It's frustrating right because there shouldn't be a serious role for politics in climate science, in my opinion. The science is science. And it was. The first time I ever testified to a subcommittee of the US Senate was 12 years ago. And it was chaired by a Republican who was about to introduce a bill that was going to put a price on changing the climate through carbon emissions and I personally think that he was just a little bit unhappy with me because I was not scarier about the threats. I was being very careful and measured, and this is [snap] that long ago. The idea that somehow your politics that you're on this side or that side means that you or don't believe that believe that C02 is a greenhouse gas. There is a little bit of that now, but it's a very very recent thing. And it's the thing that I think that I hope can disappear again.

Lewandowsky: You have to explain to the majority of people why there is a small but vocal minority that is denying the science. I think it's very important for the public to understand that those people are motivated by factors such as personal ideology.

Oreskes: If I have one message that's what my message has been all along and it still is: this is not a scientific debate; it's a political debate. But it's a political debate being made to look like a scientific debate.


shaolin_monkey

A smaller data dump for you, a conclusion to another lecture I have watched as part of my course.  It's chilling.

Quote
Our climate changes when greenhouse gas levels change. These climate changes can happen very quickly, causing some of the largest mass extinctions in Earth's history.

And now, we have increased levels of greenhouse gases higher than they have been for more than a million years. And as best we can tell, we are increasing levels of greenhouse gases faster than at any time during Earth's history.

Faster even than during those mass extinctions.

shaolin_monkey

Interesting. A report commissioned by General Mark Milley, Trump's new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, basically said the US Military will be screwed due to climate change within about 30 years.

Trump may still be a denier, but the rest of the US is waking up to the crisis.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbmkz8/us-military-could-collapse-within-20-years-due-to-climate-change-report-commissioned-by-pentagon-says

The Legendary Shark

[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




JayzusB.Christ

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Mikey

Quote from: shaolin_monkey on 17 October, 2019, 10:59:34 PM
Here's a great breakdown of where the green house gases are coming from, and therefore what needs altering/reducing/eliminating:




It's from this cracking website about world resources:

https://www.wri.org/

Ooh, that a nice graphic!

Quote from: shaolin_monkey on 24 October, 2019, 10:28:36 PM
...the US Military will be screwed due to climate change within about 30 years.

Trump may still be a denier, but the rest of the US is waking up to the crisis.

The US military has been up on this for a long time, unsurprisingly, since even before bloggers and half wits were good enough to let us know it's all made up.

Anyhoo - you may be interested in this:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190829150747.htm
To tell the truth, you can all get screwed.

shaolin_monkey


shaolin_monkey

Exxon knew damn well 20 years ago that burning fossil fuels would destroy us.

Here are scientists who worked for them confirming this to AOC.


https://youtu.be/EtxgpK5ehNE

shaolin_monkey

This is a scientific paper every literate person on the planet needs to read, immediately. Please read it.


https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806

shaolin_monkey

‪This is a cracking article that highlights the push of responsibility onto individuals and away from multinationals and politicians by bad agents.‬

‪It also discusses why it is ok to push for improvements from within the system you're stuck in.‬


‪ https://blog.usejournal.com/in-defense-of-eco-hypocrisy-b71fb86f2b2f‬

shaolin_monkey

There's a programme on BBC 4 this Thursday at 9pm called 'Climategate: Science of a Scandal'. 

It discusses how covert fossil fuel interests hacked the emails of a two scientists, one in the UK and one in the US (Michael E Mann, who I have studied under), and proceeded to cherry pick quotes to cast doubts on their data and scientific method. 

It promises to be a fascinating look at something climate change deniers are citing TO THIS DAY (either deliberately as bad agents sowing doubt, or just because they are folk who have swallow the crap from the bad agents), despite having been fully debunked way back when.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b8p2



If you want a bit of an oversight into the whole thing, this will get you up to speed quickly:

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/debunking-misinformation-about-stolen-climate-emails


shaolin_monkey

US Coal power plants are beginning to find the cheaper natural gas and renewable energy sources too economically challenging. A big one has shut down this week.

https://qz.com/1749023/two-of-americas-biggest-coal-plants-closed-this-month/

shaolin_monkey

This article is a good overview of what we can expect from the climate crisis over the next decade.

Buckle up folks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-in-the-next-decade-2019-11?r=US&IR=T