It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
It’s one of those topics where there’s a kernel of truth, but most people who insist women or Black people are scientifically different are not doing so out of any interest in science. So the small percentage of people who just want to make a valid point get lumped in with the much larger group, and unfairly tarred.
Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.
I wonder who makes assumptions that these differences are marginal and refuse or deny any studies that conclude otherwise. The left version of climate change if you will.
You make a good point in that there are large, slow-moving, but statistically significant effects in climate change, gender, and race.
You out yourself pretty badly in implying that individuals can be ignored in gender and race in the name of aggregate statistics.
There is similarity, there is not sameness, and like I said… the people who are fascinated with proving statistical differences in gender and race usually have ulterior motives. Just like climate deniers.
What's the veiled motivation of a white person who says that Asians are intellectually superior to whites?
Leftists see racism and sexism everywhere - their ideology focusses on that and they pick up on any excuse they can to label people as that. It's actually a horrible way to treat their fellow humans.
Because the same reasoning behind that statements implies that certain races are innately inferior to others. You chose to write "Asians" and "whites" here - why not make the same statement with "whites" and "blacks?"
Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."
And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.
> Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
This is a pretty weird take. I'm a liberal with a lot of liberal, progressive, and even socialist friends, and basically nobody has a problem with recognizing the statistical differences between men and women.
There's plenty of discussion about how much of those differences are innate biology vs environment, though. And there's discussion about how much overlap there is between men and women - often, there's a lot of overlap, which makes stereotypes not so useful. But the existence of differences? Oh, sure, yes, of course there are differences.
So I'm not sure if you're suggesting something you're not saying ("racial differences in intelligence are innate, not environmental"), or if one of us is out of touch with what 'leftists' think.
ETA: I say "one of us" because ofc I may also be wrong! Most of my friends are well-educated, and both that and selection bias may skew my experiences away from normal
I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups and many people use such measured differences as evidence for pretty deplorable ideas. There’s much more evidence for social determiners than anything biological. Everyone outside of Africa shares a single ancestor 20,000 years ago. There’s far more genetic diversity within Africa than the rest of the world. That alone is often enough to disprove many theories regarding racial differences since our intuitive understanding of “genetic difference” is so flawed.
Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
> I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups
I think we have a lot of clues, but scientists who dare say so get heavily censored by largely left-wing media and academics. Even in this forum my comment above got heavily downvoted and flagged.
> Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
Current bias goes clearly far in the opposite direction, which is bad. There is no "offsetting" with the past which would make an existing bias less bad.
It’s not suppressed though, it’s just that the current evidence points in one way and much less in the other. There are plenty of review papers you can read to see how people weigh the evidence which you can of course disagree with:
https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(95)00678-r
No matter how noble your intentions are, if you reject science then you're anti-science. Leftists need to learn to admit that about themselves instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too.
There are times where lefties will deny science in an effort to avoid mass atrocities, which I think is a fraught situation.
Inversely, righties tend to deny science in order to justify mass atrocities (like industrial-scale animal suffering or cataclysmic extinction events).
The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic.
Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.
TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church.
The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.
That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.
If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:
The Australian Commission wasn't the first effort in a known problem ongoing since first landing, it was the peak response in Australia after many decades of battle ... has there been a national effort of a similar scope in the US ?
Australia has the highest number of solar panels per capita in the world.
Australia has extremely high uptake on EV's given the cheap solar.
Australia is about as serious as you get in terms of climate action without being unreasonable. We need power, you can't switch off coal overnight. We also need the country to remain afloat, we cannot turn off all natural resource exports either.
Is that better than the US response? By the time the Royal Commission started, the total amount the Catholic Church in the US had paid out was approaching a billion dollars (back when a billion dollars could buy you instagram). Dioceses have continued to pay since then and many had to file for bankruptcy protection in the US.
That seems like a more severe response than a single cardinal getting arrested.
There were consequences, but only eventually as the depravity of what was happening became ever more apparent as the list of victims willing to speak out grew.
But in all the places this was happening, it was an open secret that it was happening for years before any meaningful response occurred. The first victims to speak out were not believed and even punished for how dare they accuse the holy priests of such behavior.
Will we see a similar tipping point for climate change where people on mass begin facing the issue head on? It hasn't happened yet.
Everyone wants someone else to deal with it. It's like we have a live grenade and rather than defusing it or disposing of it we keep passing it around hoping it explodes on someone else.
I see no controversy there, yes we should take some very strong action since we literally crap where we live and we only have 1 self-contained room for it all, the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient, while not ruining the economy albeit some acceptable setback is probably unavoidable.
So no to dumb fuckery EU did with biofuels (for which vast rainforests in ie Borneo had to be cut down forever), no destruction of local automotive industry while rest of the world couldn't care less. And Yes to many other, saner activities, of which some are done, in some places.
You're being downvoted, probably for being abrasive, but I agree with your overall point.
When I was younger and more naive, this
> "the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient") i
is what I thought (american) politics meant. When people talked about things being political or arguments related thereto, this is what I imagined happening.
Then I grew older and saw it was mostly people whining about gays getting married or who was allowed to have an abortion or what activities minorities were allowed to participate in.
Thank you, I don't care about some meaningless points here. Its often tough to be a critically thinking person in a crowd of folks who coast life deep in comfort zone who want quick convenient 'truths' and frequent dopamine kicks and couldn't care less about some higher or deeper concepts.
Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.
Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are.
Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'.
There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices.
Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff.
The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story.
I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars.
But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all? Most cities aren’t even walkable let alone practical for bike transit due to long distance commutes and lack of infrastructure?“hurrr americans are just addicted to cars” is a really reductive take.
Yes, societies have made different choices over the course of 100+ years. How do you suggest a city like say, LA is fixed? What is a commuter from dayton ohio to cincinnati supposed to do?
The gp comment made it sound like something americans just choose, when the reality of the situation is it is a necessary part of life. The people participating in it didn’t make this choice. Literally everyone wants something better and no one wants to be beholden to $6 gas prices.
Actually, American roads are excellent for cycling. Same for public transport.
After Vietnam, many accessibility features for folks in wheelchairs were mandated, this also favours the bicycle.
Grades in America are excellent for cycling. If you a mere mortal, going over an Alp in Europe will take all day and leave you pretty much unable to do much the following day. Meanwhile, in the USA, you can cycle over the major mountain ranges with considerable ease, when compared to the Alps.
Grid patterns are also most welcome on a bicycle. I know suburban McMansion land doesn't have grids, and getting lost in those places is cycling hell because the houses all look the same, however, Big Auto made these absurd developments possible, along with some white flight from cities where the black man dared to move to.
As for long distance commutes, what a waste. And for what? Many service sector jobs just don't warrant people driving two hours each way just to earn a crust. It all comes at a cost to community.
Although there is cradle to grave car dependency in the USA, one true fact about American people is that they are the best when it comes to hospitality. This matters on a bicycle and, sadly, in Europe, there just isn't the same hospitality.
All considered, warts and all, America is excellent for cycling, at least in the nine Westernmost states. The roads generally come with a handy 'edge' which serves as a cycle lane and the people are fab.
Bring back the streetcar, the broadway railways and Main Street. Kick the corporations to the kerb and the job is a good one. The richest country in the world got to the moon many decades ago. The roads already exist, the space for railways exists, what doesn't exist is the mindset, which has been reduced to cradle-to-grave car dependency.
Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service.
Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
I think this misses the mark. The outrage or sadness is not primarily over "I'm going to lose my job", but the harsh reality that much of your country is not that interested in scientific reality and realizing that your country actually is solidly on the decline.
If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
The anti-science right was a lot easier to ignore when they weren't actually ripping apart the US scientific apparatus, yes. How is that remotely demonstrative of a conspiracy?
> Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
Sure, but again, this misses the point. Regardless of how conservatives talk about science, if Congress keeps on broadly funding research, then scientists can fairly focus on actions over words. It's only when Congress cuts funding that we're forced to reckon with the fact that most Americans don't actually prioritize science.
So: yes, it's the funding cuts that cause the frustration and sadness. But not because this results in a personal job loss, but because this shows how our country is going downhill.
Speaking personally, two of my siblings took government buyouts, but still then moved out of the country. You can be ok with your own personal job loss (particularly when it comes with a fat check), but unhappy with the direction the country is going.
It's kinda weird that you keep making this about the impact to personal finances, rather than the impact to principles. Wouldn't you feel frustration and disappointment if your homeland was acting contrary to your principles?
A lot of the people affected are people who want to leave their homelands and be in the US instead. So they were already putting up with their homelands acting contrary to their principles.
> It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.
You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake.
Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans.
> Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before.
Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants.
But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream!
Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth.
The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
> I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
"Climate Change" isn't caused by flying a plane, it's caused by flying thousands of planes every day. This is a real distinction because the individuals you are talking to do not have any meaningful way to affect the 40,000+ flights per day. Just as a random example.
If your next response is going to be "well if everyone stops taking flights that would affect them all", then yes, congratulations, you've discovered what laws are and how democracies work.
Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc.
Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are.
I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them.
All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
Voluntarily opting out of a high-CO2 lifestyle will do exactly nothing. Demanding that anyone recognizing the threat of climate change and demanding a different approach "first change their lifestyles" or using their lifestyles as an indicator of commitment is ludicrous. This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Besides that; all the nice and shiny things you mention - the busses and trains and the cement - can be produced and operated at fraction of their current CO2 cost. Wind mills and PV panels offset their CO2 cost by magnitudes if they are replacing fossil fuel industries.
There's a middle ground between "lets burn it all to the ground" and "let's go back to the savanna".
> This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
There have been many systemic changes since we started to understand the physical mechanism behind climate change and the dire consequences of unmitigated climate change.
Within 20 years Europe has shifted to almost 50% renewables in their electricity production, the US is at 25% and China at 30% (and rapidly growing). Demand has been cut massively through energy efficiency laws. CO2 emissions have been reduced enough that the IPC now sees the RCP8.5 scenario as unrealistic.
We've already changed quite a lot. And this despite you not cutting back on meat or on driving. Think about it.
> There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
You don't do "it" to please some leftist eco-warrior, but because "it" is a unsustainable lifestyle. Whatever shape "it" actually takes.
> I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
So you're saying that no Western leftists espouse degrowth policies that, if carried out, would lower their living standards while enjoying the luxuries our nonzero-carbon world provide them?
This is just a poor strawman/false dilemma: you don't have to be 100% or 0% for something to be effective or true. You're not addressing the actual claim (_why_ climate change is controversial, and particularly why the current structure makes it particularly controversial to corporations, etc.), you're just making a non-sequitur that everyone is affected by it.
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).
It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics.
Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
It's religion - and a strong one. With dogmas, taboos and holy authorities.
If the bible cited even 1/1000th as many studies and experiments as the IPCC Reports, it would be a very different book.
> If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
On the flickering smidgen of a chance that you are making this complaint in good faith, the reason why nobody feels obliged to walk you through the science is because for decades there has been a raging denial-of-service battle where the anti-climate-activist side spams questions under the pretense of "I'm just a curious individual, just asking questions" (JAQing off) when in fact they are exploiting the asymmetry between asking and answering a question. It takes 1x effort to ask and 100x effort to compile a good answer and you can only tell that the question was being asked in bad faith at the end when, after having the question thoroughly and convincingly answered, the JAQ-off completely fails to update their priors and immediately rotates to another misunderstanding that validates their politics. And then another, and another, indefinitely, because the JAQ-off never wanted to learn, they always just wanted to promote their politics.
If the science community opens its arms to this, it gets stabbed in the heart. Ask me how I know. Our response is twofold:
1. Don't assume good faith until someone invests effort to demonstrate it
2. Point to the IPCC reports, which are one of the most monumental assemblies of knowledge, observation, and experimentation in human history.
These days, "the simplified IPCC reports are still too hard for me" isn't even an excuse because LLMs exist and are good at explaining the scientific basis for climate issues. Whichever detail of whichever absorption spectrum you have in mind has almost certainly been studied by a hundred authors across a dozen labs who have also studied and answered 5 more questions about the absorption spectrum that you didn't think to ask. But the information is out there: go get it!
Once you have invested effort in digging into the IPCC report, finding a study, reading it, building a question -- then you can go to a particular researcher and ask a particular question. You will get an answer, because you pass gate #1. But right now you are very far from passing gate #1 because you have put in no work to formulate a good question.
Interestingly, the IPCC reports themselves (not the summaries for policymakers) are quite optimistic. IIRC something like, if we do nothing to abate emissions, climate damages in 2100 will cause damage equivalent to ~3% of GDP per year. (With GDP being many times higher than now per capita). Hardly a catastrophic prediction!
I know, right? They bend over backwards to not be "alarmist," even perhaps a bit more than they should. But of course this wins them zero credit from their political opponents, which is an important lesson about politics: seeking middle ground with someone bent on destroying you is a fool's errand.
The IPCC has been in defensive mode for a few years now. They made claims that absolutely made no sense and haven't answered to obvious criticism for years now. Only now they are very slow in backpedalling. Why should anyone still trust them? You can read IPCC reports all day long - if they still contain obvious flaws - it's not going to impress... If you check related websites you find a lot of propaganda - and very little science. They stopped caring about using arguments years ago. I looked for science there and only found low quality rubbish.
The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
On one hand we have the IPCC with concrete claims, detailed explanations, piles of survey papers expanding the details, and piles of novel and confirming work behind each survey.
On the other we have adornKey, with vague accusations and smack talk that feel like they came from a LLM, still stuck at gate #1. Sad.
> The IPCC has been in defensive mode for a few years now. They made claims that absolutely made no sense and haven't answered to obvious criticism for years now. Only now they are very slow in backpedalling. Why should anyone still trust them? You can read IPCC reports all day long - if they still contain obvious flaws - it's not going to impress... If you check related websites you find a lot of propaganda - and very little science. They stopped caring about using arguments years ago. I looked for science there and only found low quality rubbish.
> The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
Thank goodness honest citizens like "AdornKey" are around to pinpoint the precise reasons why the international community of climate scientists are crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant. I am certainly glad that "AdornKey" made this laser-focused contribution to my understanding.
While I wouldn't argue that academia is "crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant", I would absolutely argue that they are ideologically homogenous. The whole community is rife with political signaling and affinity groups.
> It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics. Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled
Wat
I am just a climate science hobbyist: my graduate work was in another science field, but I follow the field a bit and read some of the hot papers. But even in my day job we still use a fair bit of atmospheric physics.
I have to run into atmospheric physics a fair bit and it's not my area of training. I know that the friends and colleagues who are in research deal with it much, much, much more intimately.
This comment is wildly, and weirdly, off the mark. Atmospheric physics is no more a religion than steel metallurgy or rainforest ecology is. It's grounded in hard experimental data and observations.
Great! But the number of people that actually bother to check some numbers are very small. Even guys that scored well in related tests in university usually don't have the slightest clue how any relevant spectrum looks like, and how the numbers add up.
Not only that but with somewhat less fervor those having fairly strong faith in superstition really add up after a while too.
Combine both and it can be the most bizarre trend in non-cognizance that many have ever seen.
Very often displayed by those who wouldn't recognize the difference between a CO2 spectrum and the brain scan of an accurately diagnosed mentally deficient patient.
Some conditions you just can't fix.
Regardless it makes you wonder what kind of medication some people are on, and if they took too much even if it was to no avail.
So you're labelling me a climate alarmist before I have made a single statements about the climate crisis?
I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric.
Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response?
To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
Yes, it's labeling. One of those labels is very accurate, the other is part of a rhetoric that the oil companies are using to drag out the climate response so that they can keep raking in profits.
I'm not here to convince you of climate change. If you're actually dumb enough to deny it, then it's most likely a lost cause. The more likely scenario is that you're a bad faith troll, and then this dialogue shows others a positive example: it's ok to be a dick to climate change deniers.
I asked a simple question. Your conclusions just proove how religious topic it could be for some. You completely ignorong a point and talk about your dogmatic opinion. Insulting others that not even agree/disagree with your pushed opinion does not makes you right.
One example is that whenever patents expire on some refrigerants or related process somehow magically at that same exact moment Dupont or other chemical IP behemoth magically find a new one safe for the ozone, the science magically all aligns at that moment, and congress/EPA finds the time to change the law before one iota of generic industry can squeeze out.
I think the generic idea of the science and global warming is real but there is a whole industry around gaming the conclusions and gamifying what concern pops up when to magically align with whatever the guy with the most influence and self-dealing is hawking at that time.
The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science. But that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post. What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts, and for politicians who push them in other directions should be voted out of office.
>The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
You won't likely "more science" your way into thumbs off the scale, that is going to have to be achieved from largely non-scientific means.
>Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science.
This is a cleverly packed lie, one attempted to paint me as a hypocrite, that you not only not quote but also chose to not address directly. The reason why is obvious -- flood the zone with indirect pointers to supposed lies to wear down the counterparty. But just this once I'll entertain it, though I know this deceit doesn't stop once engaged.
> defending politicians as customers of scientists
I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists. What I am "defending" is not living in a fantasy. Of course you can wax philosophical about "we the people" or whatever but at the end of the day the summation of congress+executive has constructive possession of the purse and executive management of scientific employ.
> ... demanding politically convenient science.
and I used the verbatim word 'retarded' alluding to what I thought of it ... a very strong defense of that particular customer, after which I suggest they might get a new one.
> ut that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post.
There's a genius amount of terse deception to unpack here. The slight of hand is you use 'customers of scientist demanding politically convenient science' but then claim 'exactly what produces' these conclusions are ... the non-scientific output of work of scientists rather than the output of politicians who are customers. If they are producing non-science they are not acting in capacity of scientists yet somehow they escape your damnation here despite being the very people producing it by reading of your statement. Your sentence is one tightly packed logical contradiction that simultaneously guards scientists as providers of facts while simultaneously claiming the scientists themselves are producing non-scientific conclusions by chaining that as the output of the work. If they are scientists of fidelity acting in capacity of such then practically by definition they aren't to be blamed for non-scientific conclusions and are not the "producers" of such regardless of whom their customer is.
> What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts
The scientist who depends on a salary to survive who wants fidelity of facts should look for customers demanding that. Expecting to produce fidelity from someone demanding infidelity means you end up broke or you become corrupted. The demand from government is infidelity. In fact what I'm "defending" is looking elsewhere away from politicians at this time because your aspiration of "should be voted" is at odds with the current reality of "they were not."
> I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists
You can restate the ideology over and over. It doesn't change reality. There are many parties involved. I have agency as well. It's all very pedestrian to be reductive, but it's not compelling.
This is rich considering it's the first time I stated it in this particular sub thread as the person I responded to was both too chickenshit to quote what I said or respond directly where I said it because it would betray that their portrayal was bad faith and full of shit.
The "reality" check, in fact, is coming for the scientists who are still suspending belief that they too were not better than the plebs who could be shit-canned in a millisecond by the whims of the "parties" involved (but muh reductive portroyal! Also science is in chaos!) and have to go on a "pedestrian" and "reductive" mission to use their "agency" to find a new "party."
More noise. Lovely. Do you think how often you say something has any bearing on a base assumption from which all your conclusions are drawn, is not an ideology? Oh boy.
Of course not, go "make noise" about science being in "chaos", say it a lot. The "scientists" seem to have no problem saying the shock of their plight over and over with the hope it will change the "base assumptions" of the "ideologies" influencing their employment. But as you say, it doesn't change reality.
This is saying that "saying something over and over" will change reality. This was ridiculed by the person I was responding to so I decided to play along with it, but I'm open to that being true if we're revising that outlook.
Ozone is an interesting topic. CFCs seem to be very potent climate gases. But I haven't checked any calculations about them, yet. I'd love to see a good analysis of the absorption-spectrum. Adding something new to the atmosphere has a lot of warming potential - but the question always is how fast it reaches a level of saturation. For ozone and CFCs years of media coverage haven't brought any insight. Having 3 different updated versions of Dupont-products in the atmosphere could be good or bad - most likely people haven't bothered to check, yet... But they're all full of furious knowledge. People "know" that banning CFCs "cured" the ozone hole - but they don't ask why it shrunk too early, and why the situation hasn't changed at all for decades now...
I think most likely the banning was good - but the reasons don't really make sense.
Searching "cfc concentration in atmosphere" on scholar.google.com returns 60000 papers. Cruising the first few pages, most of them easily qualify as "bothering to check." Your estimation of the scientific community is five orders of magnitude off.
How about you get 1$ from me for every paper you found there that answers my question - and I get 1$ from you for every paper that is not relevant to my question?
Your original claim was that people haven’t bothered to check. When someone pointed out there are tens of thousands of papers on the subject, you changed the question to find papers that answer my specific question.
Those are not the same claim. You went from arguing that the research doesn’t exist to arguing that you haven’t personally seen research that satisfies you.
This will go too far, but if you want to understand things, maybe HITRAN Database is interesting for you. There've been detailed calculations what is going on with absorption. How the absorption spectrums of relevant gases look like is a start. The next question is to check how much potential a gas has (how much energy is available in that spectrum?). HITRAN is an extensive database for the relevant lines. The results are interesting and a bit surprising...
But all this has been explained and cancelled again and again... It's no good topic in any religious environment where nobody has bothered to get basic knowledge about the physics before.
Your numbers most likely aren't exact. But most interesting is what you mean with "other things" and how much this is expressed in numbers. And have you looked up any numbers about methane?
the experimental framework for finding out absorption spectra goes back like 100 years and is basically high school level science. not only that, we have quantum chemistry models that predict empirical results from atomic configurations that are 20+ years old and match that empirical data to a very high level of accurany. there is plenty of ambiguity to attack in climate modeling, but you chose the most settled and fundamental thing to poke at.
He’s probably a bot or paid to post misinformation to muddy the waters. The topic is highly financially charged despite overwhelming evidence on one side.
US customers have much higher budgets (startup funding) and create much more hassle (wars, tariffs, overall humiliation) than European customers. It's a bold decision but they are apparently seeing a lot of demand and I'd say let the American customers pay for the costs they are causing. Call it symbolic "freedom fee" and they're happy about it.
A function call that's not artificially restricted to return to its caller is equivalent to a goto. See "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO" by Guy Steele.
A continuation is a value that's passed to a function to tell it where to send its result when it's complete.
In imperative programming languages which invariably have restricted function calls, the continuation that every function receives is the address following the function call. This was just a mistake which the earliest programming languages committed, which has been perpetuated ever since, except in functional languages.
The continuations in CPS are closures. Goto basically isn't. GCC's computed goto is, but generally when people say 'goto' they mean the traditional C goto, which involves no closures. The goto analogy is not great for this reason.
A better analogy is that continuations are reified function call return addresses, since return addresses come with a frame pointer (explicit or implicit), and therefore are closure-like.
Especially with how they pick (one of) the most likely word as the next one. And the most likely word is exactly the one with least entropy, the least surprising one and giving the least amount of information you can.
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