The Climate Change Discussion Thread

[Black Star]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

You count yourself among the "educated and right minded"?

And this is my point lol. Keep on trying to be relevant. Good luck with your adventure

[milomilo]

What's your highest educational attainment, Black Star? Since you seem to think you have a superior education to ours.

[Black Star]

Originally Posted by milomilo

What's your highest educational attainment, Black Star? Since you seem to think you have a superior education to ours.

My lord....I could be a grade 6 grad and still think circles around this tribe lol. I'm serious.

Im educated in engineering...But that means shit. Use your bloody mind to use critical thinking skills. Common sense and work experience. Listen... Most people in business i work with have more intelligence and focus than any grad in a Masters in business administration. Most of those guys are a waste these days. They are a complete waste of what it takes to succeed.

[WarrenC12]

Originally Posted by Black Star

My lord....I could be a grade 6 grad and still think circles around this tribe lol. I'm serious.

Im educated in engineering...But that means shit. Use your bloody mind to use critical thinking skills. Common sense and work experience. Listen... Most people in business i work with have more intelligence and focus than any grad in a Masters in business administration. Most of those guys are a waste these days. They are a complete waste of what it takes to succeed.

Dropped out of engineering, let me guess, half way through second year?

What part of your common sense and critical thinking makes you a climate change denier?

[milomilo]

Yeah I don't see any degree level thinking there. No one with with that level of science education would use the word facts in the way Black Star did.

[jawagord]

Originally Posted by milomilo

There is no point explaining to you, as you are a flat earther.

I think believing in flat earth has more going for it than believing humans can control climate change. The former at least has practical benefits, the latter is hubris!

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.

https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScie...ityofWrong.htm

[Mikemike]

Originally Posted by jawagord

I think believing in flat earth has more going for it than believing humans can control climate change. The former at least has practical benefits, the latter is hubris!

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.

https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScie...ityofWrong.htm

Very interesting essay.

Unfortunately the absolutist position most closely matches your own affirmation that humans cannot control the climate.

In reality, it is absolutely proven that we can, from deforestation & heat island effects to the known and measured changes in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. The only thing rational people are left to argue is magnitude.

Obviously those claiming that we have 10 years left to cut X% or disaster will come are equally absolutists and I believe that the alarmist messages aren't necessarily helping, but claims that we can go on emitting without limits is wronger.

CO2 has been understood as a greenhouse gas for over 100 years, long before there could be any reason to point to a ridiculous conspiracy to impoverish the middle class. Feedback effects are still not well understood, but some feedbacks like tundra methane release are known to be positive. We are heating the planet, the only question is how much. Maybe it won't be enough to hit a "tipping point", and maybe it will be small enough that it will result in the loss of only a few habitats and species, but... we don't know that, and to imagine that we do is also blind hubris.

The humble & conservative response is to recognize that we don't know, and to stop messing around with shit we don't fully understand - by drastically reducing CO2 emissions.

[milomilo]

Yeah. If you disagree with man's ability to alter the climate you must either disagree that we are producing CO2, but that is very easy to understand with basic chemistry, or that CO2 affects the climate. The second requires a bit more trust in the scientists, but is still pretty easy to understand the concept.

Since we've gone from 260ppm to 415ppm CO2 in an incredibly short period of time, saying that man does not affect the climate requires denial of some sort.

[WarrenC12]

I mean... The guy is defending flat earthers. Saying flat earth is "almost right" since the earth is so big it can be hard to see the curvature.

But we live on a globe. Quite literally the opposite of a flat earth. So when I stop laughing at the absurdity of that argument, I can only assume his next one will be about how we are "almost not influencing the climate" with CO2.

[milomilo]

You can make any number 'small' if you change the way the number is presented We've only increased CO2 by less than 0.02 percentage points. That's nothing!

[Mikemike]

Yet 0.2% total CO2 means reduced cognitive performance and headaches.

Still practically nothing, but enough to mean the end of civilization.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Mikemike

The humble & conservative response is to recognize that we don't know, and to stop messing around with shit we don't fully understand - by drastically reducing CO2 emissions.

Except we're not doing this because the rise of CO2 emissions has gone hand-in-hand with an incredible rise in overall quality of life. The West doesn't become rich in the 19th and 20th Centuries without coal and oil, China doesn't have its economic miracle without coal. There is no easy replacement for 80+% of human energy use.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Except we're not doing this because the rise of CO2 emissions has gone hand-in-hand with an incredible rise in overall quality of life. The West doesn't become rich in the 19th and 20th Centuries without coal and oil, China doesn't have its economic miracle without coal. There is no easy replacement for 80+% of human energy use.

Yes, fossil fuels brought about huge increases in technology and quality of life, but we are now going to need to find new sources of energy or ways to reduce CO2 otherwise. It isn't optional.

[Tete Carre]

Just read a compelling article by an industrial chemist with a PhD claiming carbon dioxide cannot cause global warming. The science is not settled folks.

[Mikemike]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Except we're not doing this because the rise of CO2 emissions has gone hand-in-hand with an incredible rise in overall quality of life. The West doesn't become rich in the 19th and 20th Centuries without coal and oil, China doesn't have its economic miracle without coal. There is no easy replacement for 80+% of human energy use.

Much of our so-called quality of life is really more about quantity and keeping up with the joneses. Big quality of life boosters like refrigeration, telecommunications and modern medicine are a lot less energy intensive than our vacations and oversized cars. China’s economic miracle wouldn’t have suffered if they had restricted cars in their big cities from the beginning and kept all the bicycles around at least until the subways were built.

Coal is only cheap if you ignore the external costs.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by Tete Carre

Just read a compelling article by an industrial chemist with a PhD claiming carbon dioxide cannot cause global warming. The science is not settled folks.

Flat earther alert.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Yes, fossil fuels brought about huge increases in technology and quality of life, but we are now going to need to find new sources of energy or ways to reduce CO2 otherwise. It isn't optional.

It is optional in the sense that there's a range of outcomes that scale with global CO2 emissions. So far the warm-up observed is linear with respect to atmospheric CO2 concentrations (there are predictions that suggest a runaway effect but the observation don't). It's not clear that we were at an optimal global temperature or CO2 concentration to begin with. Higher CO2 concentrations encourage plant growth and most of the temperature increase will affect higher latitudes that are very cold right now.

Global climate change agreements implicitly consider these trade-offs by targeting 1-2 C of warming by 2100 instead of 4 C, 0 C, or -2 C. Maybe giving humanity an extra 50 years of fossil fuel use is worth 1 C.

But most of the rhetoric is still simplistic and all-or-nothing. Environmentalists tend to argue that the value of fossil fuels to humanity is zero or negative (we are subsidizing Big Oil) and any failure to cut emissions to zero will be apocalyptic. At the same time, it's definitely not true that we can burn whatever fossil fuels we want and not worry about it.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by someone123

It is optional in the sense that there's a range of outcomes that scale with global CO2 emissions. So far the warm-up observed is linear with respect to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. And it's not really clear that we were at an optimal global temperature or CO2 concentration to begin with.

Global climate change agreements implicitly consider these trade-offs by targeting 1-2 C of warming by 2100 instead of 4 C, 0 C, or -2 C. Maybe giving humanity an extra 50 years of fossil fuel use is worth 1 C.

But most of the rhetoric is still simplistic and all-or-nothing. Environmentalists tend to argue that the value of fossil fuels to humanity is zero or negative (we are subsidizing Big Oil) and any failure to cut emissions to zero will be apocalyptic.

At the other end of the spectrum though, you have the deniers who are opposed to even the slightest efforts to reduce emissions. The transition ideally would be gradual, but every year where we continue to increase our emissions means that the transition will be necessarily harsher.

And it probably is true that if we continue on the path of increased emissions every year, the result will be apocalyptic. That's basically a mathematical fact. Unless we run out of fossil fuels before we can fry the planet too much - but then we'll still have to find an alternate energy source.

[Tete Carre]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Flat earther alert.

- follows lead of a child

[WarrenC12]

Originally Posted by Tete Carre

Just read a compelling article by an industrial chemist with a PhD claiming carbon dioxide cannot cause global warming. The science is not settled folks.

Not this shit again. Got a link handy there bro?