Pentagon Unveils Plan For Military's Response To Climate Change 228
An anonymous reader writes Rising sea levels and other effects of climate change will create major problems for America's military, including more and worse natural disasters and food and water shortages that could fuel disputes around the world, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday. From the article: "The Pentagon's 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap (PDF) describes how global warming will bring new demands on the military. Among the report's conclusions: Coastal military installations that are vulnerable to flooding will need to be altered; humanitarian assistance missions will be more frequent in the face of more intense natural disasters; weapons and other critical military equipment will need to work under more severe weather conditions. 'This road map shows how we are identifying — with tangible and specific metrics, and using the best available science — the effects of climate change on the department's missions and responsibilities,' Hagel said. 'Drawing on these assessments, we will integrate climate change considerations into our planning, operations, and training.'"
Climate change is degrading the military (Score:2)
Now please raise the defense budget 12% per year, so that we may relocate naval bases to higher ground and do more maintenance on equipment damaged by severe weather.
Signed,
Colonel Trout
Re:Climate change is degrading the military (Score:4, Informative)
Here in the real world, the Secretary of Defense is proposing budget cuts.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/defense-secretary-chuck-hagel-to-recommend-deep-budget-cuts-targeting-pay-benefits/
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Here in the real world, the Secretary of Defense is proposing budget cuts.
The DoD has two problems:
1. The sequester
2. Wildly over-budget acquisition programs for the F-35, the Littoral Combat Ship, IT efforts, and a bunch of other stuff
There's also the issue of the Navy buying a large number of submarines it doesn't have the money to pay for, despite the submarines coming in under budget.
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Those golf courses are maintained by greens fees, not taxpayer money.
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Congrats. This is the dumbest comment I've seen all week. And there are a lot of really dumb comments on this site.
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You mean where top officials meet and golf aren't published? gee, shocking.
Almost like they don't want people to be attacked while in an open field playing golf.
If they are classified, then how the fuck do you know it's over 100?
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I think you're confusing the US with China, the latter of which did increase its defense budget by 12% (and has for about the last 12 years) [ibtimes.com], and is on track to exceed US defense spending by 2020-2025 [economist.com].
Long story short ... (Score:2)
... we'll need more money.
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:3, Insightful)
US Military Uses Oil Like a Smaller Country (Score:3)
US Military could count as it's own country in oil usage. They also do a fair bit with reusable energy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
And I know several other projects. But for Military readiness, it would be nice if they put a few billion more into supporting something like algae biodiesel or fusion and a few billion less into one more aircraft carrier (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the current fleet has around 11, more than the rest of the world combined?)
Off the top of my head, America's strategic reserve can cover fuel use for 60 days. However, since the biggest threat to America isn't any type of invasion force (no viable one exists), it would likely be economic and since the days of Hurricane Katrina, we've been shown to be unable to cope with peoples' extended needs.
So the Leadership's strategy should be to wean the country off of it's most dire dependencies. It should almost be the military's strategy as it would only positively effect them, but that runs counter to global force projection and stamping out the latest fires around the world.
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Oh, you mean the opposite of that.
But seriously, as the other response said, the glut
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Funny to see (Score:4, Insightful)
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Reality? How do you figure?
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Sea level rise due to human caused climate change. Of course the rest of the economy is still blindly buying underwater front. This contrast is going to grow more and more interesting as time goes by. Rabid right wingers denying climate change and sea level rise whilst their beach front properties go under water and they demand government assistance.
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I don't think you will find many denying "climate change". The climate is always changing. It the old "man made" global warming/global cooling claims that many will deny.
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Funny to see a branch of the US government that actually has to deal with reality.
They also have a plan for invading Canada. So, that tells you how realistic they have to keep it.
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Yep, and I'll bet that gets updated yearly since it was produced long ago. In fact, the Canada section of the U.S. Military is right now planning for Total Snow Control to take the Canadian Maple Syrup Harvest to prevent Quebec separatists from taking it and waging sugar war on the U.S. There's just nothing the U.S. Military isn't prepared for.
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Yep, and I'll bet that gets updated yearly since it was produced long ago.
Last I heard it was updated in the 90s
so the military has a new plan (Score:2)
and is not going to shoot at eclipses any more, to try and kill the dragons? excellent.
Simple solution (Score:2)
coincidentally, we'll have to replace everything (Score:2)
To me this just looks like a way to get defense contractors' snouts into the rich green money trough.
Sorry, there is no climate change (Score:2)
Military response to climate change (Score:4, Funny)
Of course! Just bomb climate change into submission. Why didn't we think of this sooner?
'Murrica.
Ebola is better (Score:2)
Is Manhatten being evacuated? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about San Francisco?
Neither?
Then most coastal US military bases are probably fine too. There might be some on a couple pacific islands that are having a hard time... but I believe the last time I checked every single one of them was due to erosion and not the rising of global sea levels.
Furthermore, what are we talking about as of now?... 7 centimeters or something? Any harbor that could be made viable or non-viable by 7 fucking centimeters was an accident waiting to happen in the first place. I'm quite sure that the vast majority of harbors have far more robust tolerances.
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Do assholes begin comments in the subject? (Score:3)
That begs the question, does our failure to evacuate coastal cities prove that our military bases are safe? The answer to that question is no. In fact, the fact that we are not evacuating coastal cities does not prove anything. That's because there's no evidence that we will evacuate cities when we should. In fact, the global pattern is to ignore problems until they become unignorable, with few exceptions.
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Or it is happening over time, and evacuation is premature? How about we try to reduce CO2 so it doesn't happen?
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No. Our military bases are being threatened by this apparently. Which means our civilians are in far more danger. We should evacuate these cities immediately...
Or this another dumb exaggeration.
It is a dumb exaggeration. You know it. I know it. Few people at this point can't spot it at this point.
Move on.
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You tell me solar is cheaper and then solar panel factories never use it.
I point out that... that none of them use their own panels to power their facilities which is something every other power generator factory does... the obvious is right in front of you. Wake up.
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Germany kind of shows you are wrong, don't you think?
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Does it? Do any of those factories self generate? Or are you just saying that all solar factories are automatically using solar if there is solar power on their grid?
If that is all it takes, then the standard is so low that any nation can meet this at any point.
#cuethedeniers (Score:2)
Because #poisoningthewell was already taken.
War On The People (Score:2)
Re:For everything there is a season (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we get through Ebola, first, and then worry about...
The government should be able to multi-task more than one problem at a time, yes?
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The problem is, the government is not doing what it can do, because it is afraid of offending people in a world where Political Correctness is going to kill millions.
Ebola is easy to stop. We have oceans to protect us. All we need to do is stop allowing the 25,000 VISAS from affected countries from being used to gain entry. But t hat is too politically incorrect, so instead we're going to infect our troops by building hospitals there. Don't tell me that it is "low risk", because that is what they said in Da
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Ebola is easy to stop. We have oceans to protect us. All we need to do is stop allowing the 25,000 VISAS from affected countries from being used to gain entry.
1. Person from Ebola Land travels to Europe or some other non-US country, and exposes a person who is not from Ebola Land, who then travels home to the US.
2. US citizen travels to and from Ebola Land.
There are many different ways that Ebola can reach out and touch people who are not from Ebola Land, shutting down foreign visas is not the solution.
Re:For everything there is a season (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many different ways that Ebola can reach out and touch people who are not from Ebola Land, shutting down foreign visas is not the solution.
Exactly. That's why I don't encrypt passwords on any of my machines. Passwords can be brute forced so they're not a solution.
I also have no locks on my doors. Someone can use C4 to blow them up and render them useless. Locks aren't a solution.
Sometimes, even if you can find some way around the proposed idea it doesn't mean the idea isn't good, just that it isn't complete. Nobody said it was. But shutting down travel directly from ebolaland is an obvious first step.
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Fucking moron, go back to masturbating in your "Apocalypse Shelter" to videos of Rand Paul.
"Go back"? I never stopped. I was typing with my other hand.
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1. Person from Ebola Land travels to Europe or some other non-US country, and exposes a person who is not from Ebola Land, who then travels home to the US.
2. US citizen travels to and from Ebola Land.
There are many different ways that Ebola can reach out and touch people who are not from Ebola Land, shutting down foreign visas is not the solution.
This!
Not to bring up Fox News, but I'll bring up Fox News. The Day before this Dallas shit hit the fan, they were all agog that Obama failed us in yet another bout of cluelessness, and didn't stop all flights from Africa, like the Europeans smartly and effectively did.
And now, Ebola is in Europe too, despite that.
No, you can't completely stop something like this - humans are too clever at going places, and we can't stop the world.
On the other hand, the response in Dallas was criminal. Doctors are su
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The man lied to medical professionals.
"African guy shows up with disturbing symptoms."
No. A guy sowed up with an illness. Ebola symptoms look just like a cold at the beginning.
"What? a few questions might have been nice. "
They did ask him questions, he lied.
"Since it's in Texas, the nursing team and Doctors who worked on the guy should be executed in th eGrand Texas tradition."
You're a fucking idiot.
"Either that, or forced to room with the Ebola patients."
That would be a waste of their time. Oh, you think b
Re:For everything there is a season (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Mandatory 21 day Quarantine, solves the issue.
The problem with draconian over reactions like this is that they just make the problem worse. A mandatory 21 day quarantine incentivizes people to lie about where they have traveled, and to lie about their health condition. It is a disincentive for a traveler that slips through the net, and then gets sick, to seek medical help.
Lie about it, get caught, and go to prison for 3-5 years.
So if you lie, because you don't think you are infected, and then get sick the next day, you should keep your mouth shut and avoid medical help, so you don't go to jail.
Life if you spread Ebola after lying and somehow survive.
So if you think you have Ebola, and also think you have infected others, then your primary focus should be to avoid any contact with authorities, and discourage your friends and family from seeking help as well.
Why do we have to have finely nuanced approaches that don't work is beyond me.
Because the "nuanced" approaches are working well, while your draconian approach is idiotic and counter-productive.
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Nothing really works well when a life threatening disease is on the loose, but it is pretty clear that the virus has no room for human sensitivities and an approach to stopping it should not either.
The most pragmatic thing to do (if stopping the disease is the dominant priority) is to immediately impose draconian quarantines:
1. Have you been anywhere outside of the country? Then you get a 21-day quarantine.
2. Have you potentially been in contact with someone who might have ebola? Then you get a 21-day qua
Re:For everything there is a season (Score:4, Informative)
you should be worried.
Not really. Even without any containment measures, an infected person passes the disease to only 1 other person. If there was a disease as deadly as Ebola, where that number was ~20 people (as it is with measles for example), then I would be worried.
The low transmission rate is why the outbreak has fewer than 10,000 people after several months.
Re:For everything there is a season (Score:5, Insightful)
Lie about it, get caught, and go to prison for 3-5 years.
That's not the way things work in the real world. Move along and let the adults discuss the issue.
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1) How Dallas Happened.
2) Mandatory 21 day Quarantine, solves the issue. Lie about it, get caught, and go to prison for 3-5 years. Life if you spread Ebola after lying and somehow survive.
Why do we have to have finely nuanced approaches that don't work is beyond me.
Because your weird draconian sledgehammer method won't work either?
If someone thinks they might go to prison they might just stay at home. I'd rather be dead than in prison. If my life was going to be destroyed, I'll just stay home. Also, are you going to make everyone who gets the sniffles take a month off work? Might be ebola, right? Declare martial law in Dallas?
Your half assed ideas are laughed at by the ebola virus. If they worked, we could have stopped the 1918 flue pandemic in a week.
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So your proposal is that anyone who travels out of the country and tries to return is quarantined for 21 days? And anyone from another country who tries to vacation in the US gets quarantined for 21 days?
There were 69.8million international arrivals in the US in 2013. (Source [ustravel.org]) So far we have a tiny number of Ebola cases from inbound travel. (I wouldn't count the two people specifically flown back to the US for treatment.) Imposing 21 day quarantines on 70 million people is nearly impossible, a gross ove
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I suspect a lot of things are beyond you.
Re:For everything there is a season (Score:4)
Ebola is easy to stop. We have oceans to protect us. All we need to do is stop allowing the 25,000 VISAS from affected countries from being used to gain entry.
Every complex problem has a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. Most epidemiologists consider restrictions like these to be counter productive because they encourage both individuals and governments to be less transparent. The key to fighting outbreaks to catch them early, and to do that we need to convince governments to report them as soon as they are detected. They won't do that if the report is going to lead to economy crushing restrictions on travel and trade.
This particular problem has a far simpler solution that actually works: Use soap and hand sanitizer, and don't touch dead people.
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This particular problem has a far simpler solution that actually works: Use soap and hand sanitizer, and don't touch dead people.
Tell that to the nurse in Dallas who used full biohazard protective gear and still got Ebola.
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Well, obviously she messed up. It can't be the system, or the leaders. Nope. It must be the peons who just don't get it. They are at fault for everything.
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Well, obviously she messed up. It can't be the system, or the leaders. Nope. It must be the peons who just don't get it. They are at fault for everything.
Obviously she held the gear wrong.
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She did. She broke protocol. How is that not her fault?
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The point is not to apportion blame.
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Who says she broke protocol? She denies doing so. Only the people who set the protocol are claiming she was at fault. If they are wrong, the protocol itself is at fault.
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Tell that to the nurse in Dallas who used full biohazard protective gear and still got Ebola.
Ok, if you want to be a pedant:
Use soap and hand sanitizer, and don't touch dead people or bodily fluids which have contaminated your protective equipment.
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I would just tell her not to break protocol.
She teach someone who was sick, and then touched her face. Direct contact with bodily fluid.
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The fact is, we tried your idea with SARS - it didn't help much, and the cost from reduced trade was in the tens of billions of dollars. The present danger just doesn't warrant that kind of drastic action. Moreover, visas don't mean shit - the only people
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SARS is a virus that had a mortality rate of about 9.3% but is disproportionately affected the elderly and those with other respiratory illness much like influenza. The SARS virus itself is not typically the immediate cause of death but instead the patient usually dies from pneumonia caused by a secondary, typically bacterial, infection. Ebola is a virus which has a 70+% mortality rate and it is not disproportionate in who is killed by it. Instead of causing a situation which allows another cause to cause t
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The problem is, the government is not doing what it can do, because it is afraid of offending people in a world where Political Correctness is going to kill millions.
I doubt it is political correctness as much as money. I'd bet a large amount of the traffic going to and from those places is still for business reasons with money on the line. We export and we import from these countries. Flights aren't stopped because the planes flying continent to continent are full of huddled masses, but because they are full of business men.
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Definitely. It's a critical part of our Judeo-Christian heritage to kill people and break things.
We don't have to worry about the Air Force making plans for global warming, because they're all convinced Jesus will come back and save us before that happens.
http://blogs.courant.com/susan... [courant.com]
Personally, I think Jesus is going to be pissed at what his followers have done to the perfectly good planet his dad made for them. And using 'Jesus is coming soon anyway' as an excuse!
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And using 'Jesus is coming soon anyway' as an excuse!
He shot his wad a long time ago.
Re:For everything there is a season (Score:4, Informative)
Airline safety. Interstate highway construction. Moon landing. Mars landing. Social Security. Medicare. OSHA and what they do. NIST and what they do. NiH and what they do. NOAA and what they do. The U.S. Coast Guard. The U. S. Army. The U.S. Navy. Yet not the U.S. Air Force who never met an expensive plane they weren't determined to fly and who announced proudly to the world they were standardizing on Microsoft Malware. EPA and what they do. U.S. Forest Service and what they do. NTSB and what they do.
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The DOD has put a lot of effort into fuel efficiency and renewable energy. You have no idea what you're talking about.
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So who wants to bet against the powers that be choosing to increase military spending rather than spend a fraction as much actually breaking our addiction to fossil fuels? Anybody? Aww, come on, I've got all this money just burning a hole in my pocket, I'll give you good odds..
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So who wants to bet against the powers that be choosing to increase military spending rather than spend a fraction as much actually breaking our addiction to fossil fuels? Anybody? Aww, come on, I've got all this money just burning a hole in my pocket, I'll give you good odds..
I've got $50 that says they will break their oil addiction, at some point. (of course, that point may be only when there's no more oil remaining to be extracted... ;^) )
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The U.S. is now a net exporter of fossil fuels. It isn't as big a problem for the U.S. as your 1990s mind set.
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until price per barrel drops back to 85.
Re:Systems perpetuate themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it's already too late. Even if we stopped CO2 production entirely, today, all of this stuff would still happen. The CO2 we're producing today is just compounding the problem for our grand children. Short of discovering cold fusion tomorrow and mass producing small devices with unlimited power that could change the CO2 back into a solid, we're screwed.
Re:Systems perpetuate themselves (Score:4, Interesting)
There's still some debate as to *how* screwed we are though. Global climate is changing, but if we stopped emitting CO2 within the next couple decades there's still a chance that the change would be short-lived and once the excess carbon has been absorbed, in a century or so, things will be back to "normal" without any further effort on our part. The problem is that the system is bistable, and once we cross the tipping point the positive feedback loops will dump the massive ecological stores of CO2 into the atmosphere, completely dwarfing our own small contributions. Just as has happened in all the previous major warm spells in the planet's history when unrelated events caused warming beyond the tipping point. Once we cross that tipping point then trying to reduce our own CO2 emissions is pointless - the only options are to simply adapt to a much warmer world, or engage in massive, risky geoengineering projects. Getting off fossil fuels would still be a good idea for reasons of pollution and geopolitics, but wouldn't amount to a fart in a hurricane where global warming is concerned.
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But the survivors wouldn't really give a shit, and anyway after civilization collapsed they'd go right back to burning wood and coal.
Civilization runs on energy, and stopping all CO2-producing sources would result in the collapse of civilization.
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Correction - stopping all energy-producing sources would be the end of civilization. Sure, if we're talking about doing this tomorrow we've got a problem - but if we got serious we could do it in a decade without trouble for a lot less than we're spending on the military, (and probably with a much better effect on geopolitical stability) - we already have plenty of alternatives. Complementary renewables wherever possible, and nuclear elsewhere. If we'd just return to reprocessing spent fuel like we did b
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if we got serious we could do it in a decade without trouble
I agree - and actually since the economy is demand constrained, shifting energy sources will be expansionary.
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I have not. I suspect though that they will be phased in over several years for existing facilities, as is the norm for most any new regulation. And if it stops new coal plants from being constructed, so much the better - INCREASING our dependency on coal by building even more obsolete power plants is exactly the wrong thing to be doing - those resources should be spent on making new renewable or nuclear power plants that actually have a future.
Re:Systems perpetuate themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Though folks are trying to quash debate, much like the catholic church did to Galileo.
Yes, a state Attorney-General conducting an inquisition in an attempt to silence a prominent climate scientist [wikipedia.org] is very much like what the Church did to Galileo.
And debate on the causes...
Seriously?! The causes are fairly well understood. If you can cite anything from the last 5 years which debates the causes please do (it goes without saying, I trust, that "cite" means a citation to a paper published in a recognised scholarly journal).
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And debate on the causes...
The only people who still want to debate the causes are those who are motivated to disbelieve in human causes. The scientific community has largely moved beyond that are of argument.
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http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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Because it's already too late. Even if we stopped CO2 production entirely, today, all of this stuff would still happen.
Got any proof of that? Last I checked, there were metric fucktons of CO2 disappearing into unknown sinks. If "the real climate scientists" can't even tell us where all the CO2 is going, how do you know it's too late for remediation efforts?
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escapist fantasy please!
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birth control is escapist fantasy.
Tell that to basically anywhere in the first world... Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, countries seem to go through a generation or two where modern sanitation and medicine have kicked in; but modern prophylaxis hasn't, which goes really badly; but once you get past that, results have been excellent the world over.
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we don't win against nature on these things.
Tell it to the Dutch.
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Trees are carbon neutral, and have been since after the Carboniferous era. During the Carboniferous trees did not rot because the critters that cause them to rot had not evolved.
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Maybe becasue the people calling the shots are heavily invested in the military-industrial complex and/or the fossil fuel industry? Meanwhile investing in disruptive technologies is far less profitable - you always run the risk of some upstart with an even better idea stealing the market out from under you. Just becasue the threat of anthropogenic climate change is unqustionably real doesn't mean those in power won't just use it as an excuse to further consolidate power. In fact that's one of the biggest
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Apparently you didn't get the memo from the U.S. Navy which intends to be free of non-renewable energy sometime in the 2020s (discounting nuclear). So this is some conspiracy you've manufactured.
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Re:LOL. 'Climate change' indeed. (Score:5, Informative)
There is no such as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', which is why the LIARS renamed it 'climate change', which means something completely different.
You can always tell someone is a climate science denier when they add the adjective "catastrophic" to the front of anthropogenic global warming. The term "climate change" came before "global warming", not after. Gilbert Plass published the peer reviewed paper "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change." in 1956. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988.
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Yep. The term Climate change replaced was "The greenhouse effect" (Which was the term scientists where using when the science community first started sounding the warning about CO2 in the late 1800s). Global warming is the more recent term and was never really popular inside the scientific community.
This meme that this is some sort of new idea is getting a bit stupid.
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What's really happening is climate destabilization. It really doesn't take a lot to destabilize the climate system; plus or minus 2 degrees is enough to bring on the heat or cause an ice age. But the real kicker is you don't even need to cause the whole delta. You only need to push the climate past a tipping point and the positive or negative feedbacks do the rest.
The climate is just like any other thermodynamic system. You add or remove energy from the system, it's going to destabilize until it reaches a n
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"catastrophic" is an apt adjective because the fear around AGW is palpable and relentless.
The public narrative is a steady stream of messages of things getting much getting worse, its accelerating, worse than we thought, all the terrible things it will cause, dangerous tipping points, all sorts of calamities, all this sort of language is the language of impending catastrophe, it is a fair and reasonable description of the nature of the broader discussion.
I find this quite recent strategy of trying to dista
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Why spend money on mathematics research? We should put it all into food and shelter. Why spend money on airline regulation? We should put it all into food and shelter. Why spend money on bank regulation? We should put it all into food and shelter. Why spend money on infection diseases and cancer? We should put it all into food and shelter. Why spend money keeping the Islamo-Fascists from creating their nuclear-armed state (discounting the one they already have in Pakistan)? We should put it all into food an
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no
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So many problems that that statement, but I'll just address 2:
1) Fer that to happens means tundra is melted which means huge releases of methane.
2) Why do you think it will stop warming as soon as those areas become arable (assuming that will be arable.)? protip: It won't, see 1