Paris Climate Deal Adopted 292
jones_supa writes: 195 countries have adopted the first global pact to fight climate change by reducing emissions. Countries will have to publish greenhouse gas reduction targets and revise them upward every 5 years, while striving to drive down their carbon output as soon as possible, under the ambitious climate-change pact announced Saturday morning at UN talks in Paris. The agreement commits countries to keeping global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and hopes to limit it to 1.5 C, with the goal of a carbon-neutral world sometime after 2050. The 31-page text called the Paris Agreement (PDF) was distributed to countries for them to assess, then agreed to at a plenary session.
Conspicuously missing from TFA... (Score:2, Interesting)
...a list of the countries that have signed it.
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http://www.carbonbrief.org/paris-2015-tracking-country-climate-pledges
http://www.carbonbrief.org/category/policy/paris-2015
more Conspicuously missing from TFA... (Score:2)
psst (Score:2)
Re:Conspicuously missing from TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
Conspicuously missing from TFA... a list of the countries that have signed it.
Oh, it'll probably be most but it is roughly as harmless as signing the UN declaration on human rights. There's no mandatory national goals, no incentives or penalties. It "notes" on point 17 that they're not going to actually reach the global goal of the agreement. It's a pot luck lunch agreement, each country sets their own goals and how they want to reach them and the only harm if they don't set very ambitious goals or fail to reach them is a bit of political egg on their face. The environmentalists of course tout this as a massive victory, but it's really just taking existing national initiatives and calling it a global effort.
This was not very surprising, after Kyoto I and II it was clear they wouldn't get anything with binding targets from the US, China, India or any of the other big polluting nations - only Europe and Australia have binding goals now. So instead of aiming for an agreement that would fail, create a toothless agreement and call it a victory. It's certainly working in the local press here in Norway, now they're talking like we've committed to saving the world. Truth is, nobody got committed to anything and that's why it's going to pass.
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Worst, there is no "education for women must be provided". Why that? It is the only known (working) way to decrease number of child per female (and decrease human aspect to warming).
Actually, three things are well understood as decreasing the number of children per female:
(1) Better economy. More wealthy people have fewer children than less-wealthy people.
(2) access to birth control. Doesn't have to be compulsory-- just has to be available.
(3) education. Educating women, yes, but, also education in general.
Re: TFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
Communism. Fascism is inherently a national movement, communism - or socialism in general - international. Furthermore, there's no clear charismatic leader but faceless bureaucracy associated with this deal, although I suppose that's also compatible with the Illuminati. Then there's the religious possibilities to consider - which you should had considered beyond a vague reference to "sky fairy" - perhaps the Vatican is trying to cause hardship in hopes people will seek salvation? Or you could simply blame this on lizard men from Regulus trying to de-industrialize the world in preparation for their occupation.
Seriously, put some effort into your conspiracy theories. Don't just post the first buzzword that comes to your mind. That's neither a good smokescreen nor entertaining.
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...a list of the countries that have signed it.
... because their leaders needed some good press. The parliaments of some of these countries will refuse to ratify it once the lobbyists have done their work, the list of such countries being led by the USA. The rest like China and Russia will simply falsify their emission data.
This is just another worthless piece of paper.
satellite-based measuement [Re:Conspicuously ...] (Score:2)
the list of such countries being led by the USA. The rest like China and Russia will simply falsify their emission data.
With satellite-based carbon dioxide measurement, this is going to be more difficult than it used to be.
http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/
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According to OCO2, China accounts for more than 40%, and possibly 50%, of current CO2 emissions.
2 C is a fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
Global warming at this point is inevitable [blogspot.com]. Even probably 5 C warming. Some are arguing 8 C [eurekalert.org] by the end of the century. However, its not the end of the world. Just a radically different one.
(yeah I've been following this very closely for over a decade)
Amusingly, coccolithophores, the calcium shelled plankton, everyone has been really worried would be seriously impacted by the rise in carbon dioxide causing oceanic acidification actually grow MORE [blogspot.com] in raised CO2 environments.
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Between the impervious consume-it-alls and frantic your-ecological-footprint-is-too-big-at-every-step I'd like to know what I can do about it besides solarpanels & minimal car use. Because I and surely many people like me want to leave at least something to our children's children but are more or less bound by the wheel
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Based on the signatories' examples, I'd say taking frequent Jet-trips to conferences is definitely well within the allowable activities.
Seriously.. they couldn't teleconference this one? Are they trying to send the message that it's all bullshit?
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Hmm, inventing a machine that removes CO2 from the air and converts it to solid form (for burial, or perhaps use as a building material) would be very helpful... especially if the machine can be powered using renewable energy, of course :)
Re:2 C is a fantasy (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it's too late for 2 C, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try reducing CO2. 5 C is better than 8 C.
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Even if it's too late for 2 C, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try reducing CO2. 5 C is better than 8 C.
I agree... I used to be a climate change skeptic, but after review of the information, the risk is just too great that we are moving things along too quickly.
But the OP is right, 2 C has been lost, they just don't want to say it yet. However, you're right, we should do something, and frankly after looking past the headlines, the Paris deal isn't actually that bad.
Re:2 C is a fantasy (Score:4, Informative)
https://xkcd.com/1379/ [xkcd.com]
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They did not put any sanctions into this deal for breaking the agreed upon rules.
So what will be the result of it?
They are currently hyping it as a great breakthrough, but how is it going to enforce its goals?
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Global warming at this point is inevitable. Even probably 5 C warming. Some are arguing 8 C by the end of the century. However, its not the end of the world. Just a radically different one.
How about 1.5-2.5C by 2100 in exchange for giving most of the world a developed world standard of living? Sounds a good trade to me.
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The truth is the predictions are not reliable and the climatic models are flawn. They are overfitting the data, hence this gives the impression they are actually good while they are not so good. Fitting almost perfectly past data doesn't mean the model is sound and good to predict future behavior. That is the main reason the governments are not that hot to actually take costly actions to reduce drastically the greenhouse gas emissions.
Being more alarmist and exagerrating consequences without anything to bac
Re:2 C is a fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
You are seeing the victory of idiocy over common sense. The contribution of CO2, Methane and nitrogen
Nitrogen? Who the fuck mentioned nitrogen? Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, and nobody ever claimed it was a greenhouse gas.
Basically, I stopped reading here, because this shows that you're one more clueless anonymous coward.
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There are nitrogen oxides that arguably contribute to global warming (and some that arguably have a cooling effect.)
As a source, I guess the EPA is no one: http://www3.epa.gov/climatecha... [epa.gov]
While total N2O emissions are much lower than CO2 emissions, N2O is approximately 300 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat in the
atmosphere (IPCC 2007). Since 1750, the global atmospheric concentration of N2O has risen by approximately 20 percent (IPCC 2007 and NOAA/ESRL 2015).
http://www3.epa.gov/climatecha... [epa.gov]
Granted, if we want to be pedantic about what "nitrogen" means then that's not nitrogen gas (N2).
What is nitrogen, anyway? [Re:2 C is a fantasy] (Score:2)
Granted, if we want to be pedantic about what "nitrogen" means then that's not nitrogen gas (N2).
Correct. Hydrogen is not the same as water, and nitrous oxide is not the same as nitrogen.
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These are accounted for as background sources. You are a fucking moron.
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What are you going on about? "non-radiative heat motion"? Are you talking about the lasers moon Nazis are shooting at us?
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Which argument? The one about "non-radiative heat motion"?
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calling someone a shill doesnt do anything but make you look like the dumb one IMO. if what he said was SO out of park, it should be easy to show it instead of resorting to ad hom.
Re:2 C is a fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't matter. The best thing for humanity is to continue advancing technology rapidly. We can less predict the state of life 100 years from now than 1900 could today.
I will happily take higher seas and the very occasional extra hurricane and China and India with the economic societies of the West over slowing their growth (and hampering the west) with idiotic command-and-control solutions.
Year 2100 powered by 6 billion living as the billion in the west do should be pretty amazing.
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Do you think the procession of the Moon has a significant effect on warming? ARe you a fucking retard as well?
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Don't stop him. He's on a roll.
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Thanks for proving my point.
Pillow talk (Score:4, Insightful)
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Real question is "what's the enforcement mechanism?". Without some means of making sure everyone actually does something other than write reports every five years (a quick read shows that obligations under the agreement are to "make promises" and "write reports on progress of the promises"), it means nothing.
I also find it interesting that this agreement requires absolutely nothing before 2020. So Obama isn't on the hook to do anything, and his successor probably isn't on the hook to do anything (his suc
Mostly a photo-op (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Mostly a photo-op (Score:5, Insightful)
We are still a decade or two away from the desired result, but I believe this is continuing to shift the default position from "Climate Change is BS", to "it exists, but nothing we can do", to " We can solve this". These things can take a generation to infiltrate the public conscious enough that politicians are forced to act, so as long as we're moving in the right direction, we'll get there eventually.
Re:Mostly a photo-op (Score:4, Interesting)
When you look at things like this in isolation you might think it does nothing, but this is the long fight. Similar to the anti-smoking movement, it took decades of incremental steps to finally get to a tipping point where not smoking became the default accepted point of view. We are still a decade or two away from the desired result, but I believe this is continuing to shift the default position from "Climate Change is BS", to "it exists, but nothing we can do", to " We can solve this". These things can take a generation to infiltrate the public conscious enough that politicians are forced to act, so as long as we're moving in the right direction, we'll get there eventually.
You analogy is wrong on so many levels.
1. Smoking hurts mostly you and to somewhat lesser degree people that live close to you, in contrast global warming impacts everyone who lives on the planed right now as well as several generations down the line.
2. Stopping smoking has immediate effect. Stopping green house gas emissions even if done completely and abruptly will have delayed impact on global warming as the gases currently in the atmosphere will need time to recede. In addition, the green house effect has a self feeding loop, by increasing water vapor, reducing ice cover, etc. Comparing it to smoking is like comparing hitting the brake on a kids bicycle to hitting the break on a freight train at full speed on a downward slope. (Hint : it will take a lot of time before the train stops).
Your suggestion that we can stop global warming by waiting for the reality to trickle down through the brains of the population of planet earth and take gradual measures is simply ridiculous. By the time this happens it will be too late. I have given up on any hope that effective measures against global warming will be taken in time to preserve the climate to anything resembling the current climate. What we can hope is to prevent a complete catastrophe and adapt to the new climate. Rich countries in high latitudes will fare better. I would really hate to be living around the tropics, especially in arid places like the middle east.
Re:Mostly a photo-op (Score:5, Insightful)
When you look at things like this in isolation you might think it does nothing, but this is the long fight. Similar to the anti-smoking movement, it took decades of incremental steps to finally get to a tipping point where not smoking became the default accepted point of view.
Because you managed to convince the smokers it was in their own interest to quit. And if not themselves then to save their family and friends the effect of second hand smoke. Your 1/7 billionth contribution to AGW? Ten bucks for your kid's college fund is probably going to change their life more. Sure those fractions add up but there's a million things you could do on the individual level that would matter more. And that I think will take priority.
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You are wrong in two ways.
The agreement is for governments, not individuals. It only needs governments to act, and many already are. Getting the US and China to at least agree on a reasonable target is a big step forward and at least on the part of China does seem to affect policy.
Secondly, individuals will clean up if helped to. For example, the EU mandated standard testing for vacuum cleaners. Consumers can now compare vacuum cleaners better than they could before, and sales have trended towards efficient
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It only needs governments to act
If you think that the governments can in any way stop global warming then you're living in a fairy land. The governments are powerless here because they aren't the big polluters. The big polluters are you and I, sitting here burning 100W posting on Slashdot while at the same time complaining bitterly against rising electricity prices, taxation being spent on green initiatives instead of welfare (by welfare I mean welfare for me, i.e. tax breaks, or maybe the footpath in front of the house being repaired), a
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Why should they need to all be in one place?
so what? (Score:2)
There's no consequence for not complying with the pact, what's the point of a toothless pact?
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Good luck Chuck (Score:2)
I'm so happy (Score:2)
this will be a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, all nations really need to stop building new coal plants. These are the bane of the emissions.
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You know why China has to build about 1 coal power plant a week?
That's because the US and Europe moved all their manufacturing industry there.
You want to help China stop building new coal power plants? Buy less stuff from there.
That sucks, because I love tech gadgets but I do buy much fewer gadgets since I realized the hidden environmental impact they have.
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That's cute. So when China is finished their 24 new plants nuclear capacity will be less than 1/10th of their CURRENT coal capacity. That's not taking into account the 155 coal power plants currently in various stages of planning / construction.
Well now that that problem is solved what next? (Score:2)
I'm glad we won't have to hear about Climate change anymore and work on things like stopping bombing people.
The level of stupidity (Score:2)
in slashdot comment threads on climate-related posts seems to be inversely proportional to the square of the post's age, and exponential in the number of USA citizens participating in the thread. One also notes such phenomena as the denial or neglect of simple laws of nature, the denial of the 119-year old findings of a well-respected scientist [rsc.org], ignorance of the basic tenets of technical, even polite discussion, and a statistically not insignificant tendency to adhere to conspiration theories. Slashdot dis
Re:Global Warming is Awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Gernany is roughly 15 degrees centigrate warmer than it used to be 35 years ago. However that period around 1974 was extraordinary cold, in comparrison to that time it is now nearly 45 degrees warmer .... so I really wonder where this "2 degrees average increase" is aiming for
Bahahahahahaha, 45C warmer.... On an extremely warm summer day in the south maaaaaaybe you can reach 40C, you're saying in the 70s it was -5C and below all year long? And they still easily have freezing temps, so where it's -5C today they had -50C? You don't even pass the giggle test.
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Data here:
Berlin temperature record: http://climatereason.com/Littl... [climatereason.com]
Hohenpeissenberg temperature record: http://climatereason.com/Littl... [climatereason.com]
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No, 15C is NOT 60F. More like 27F.
Re:Global Warming is Awesome! (Score:4, Informative)
No, 15C is NOT 60F. More like 27F.
It seems you're both pretty terrible at communicating this clearly.
15C is 59F.
0C is 32F.
A change (+/-) of 15C equates to a change (+/-) of 27F.
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From what I can see, it's just a convenient way for politicians to talk about it, because let's be honest, 99% of politicians don't really understand radiative forcing anyway. link to get around paywall [google.com].
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Oh fucking jesus. If we move to alternatives and create more carbon sinks, we'll largely stop CO2 emissions. Quit trying to shove your personal obsession into the mix.
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Oh fucking jesus. If we move to alternatives
No one wants nuclear.
create more carbon sinks
How many of those do we have to create?
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No one wants nuclear.
The Chinese do, and so do that Indians. They matter far more than America and Europe.
How many [carbon sinks] do we have to create?
One big one would be enough: Just sprinkle some iron sulfate on the surface of the ocean. The plankton bloom would not only suck up all the excess CO2, but would also cause a surge in fish stocks that could meet the world's need for protein.
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One big one would be enough: Just sprinkle some iron sulfate on the surface of the ocean. The plankton bloom would not only suck up all the excess CO2, but would also cause a surge in fish stocks that could meet the world's need for protein.
Any idea where I can find more information about this? Perhaps a paper that's publicly available?
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One big one would be enough: Just sprinkle some iron sulfate on the surface of the ocean. The plankton bloom would not only suck up all the excess CO2, but would also cause a surge in fish stocks that could meet the world's need for protein.
Any idea where I can find more information about this? Perhaps a paper that's publicly available?
You can look to the large dust storms in Australia that blow iron dust out to sea as a starting point. Iremember that being talked about mainly because the ocean is iron poor and that oceanic metabolisms still use iron for living things to move oxtgen around. Sorry I don't have any more detail than that.
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Thanks. I'll take a gander and see what I come up with.
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They tried that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Killing an entire deep-sea ecology?
Probably not a Good Idea.
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Yes, well, I will hijack this post to say that this is a political/ceremonial agreement, not a scientific one. The good news is that oil is loosing its sheen, down below $40 a barrel. Yes, we have past peak oil, in a much better fashion than anticipated.
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No, we passed Peak Oil because it was a warmed over retread of 1970s shortage scares [juliansimon.com], where physical scientists stick their noses in economics and make literally ignorant predictions about economics.
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FWIW the GS economists (who have a decent record predicting such things) expect it to stabilize around $45 a barrel
OPEC no longer has any control over oil prices. The world's swing producers are now American frackers. The cost per barrel of fracking has gone way down and is continuing to fall. It may temporarily plateau at $45, but then it should continue to creep downward as new innovations are implemented.
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It may temporarily plateau at $45, but then it should continue to creep downward as new innovations are implemented.
That's true, the reason it's plateaued at $45 is because that is the cost of production.
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Obama will never submit it to the Senate. It doesn't have the force of law behind it.
LOL! Obama punked the Environmentalists and the World. They think they have an agreement but all they have is Obama's worthless promises.
Re:In Before (Score:4, Interesting)
..the old libertarian geezers of Slashdot who whine about conspiracy theories on every climate-related post here.
Whatever happened to global warming?
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..the old libertarian geezers of Slashdot who whine about conspiracy theories on every climate-related post here.
Whatever happened to global warming?
It got re-branded in response to the nit-picking skeptics who claimed it was falsified every time there was a cold spell.
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It started testing poorly in focus groups when the globe stopped warming 18.8 years ago.
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No the data does not show that. This is nothing more than a lie by evil men and adopted by simpering retards like you. The data shows the exact opposite, and the fact that the only cites you can produce are immoral and evil denier sites and that champion of Christopher Booker's vile pseudoscience shows you to either be a waste of oxygen and pathetic halfwit, or a monster .
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It show that you know how to cherry-pick facts to deceive people.
1997 and 1998 were unusually warm starting a trend in those years produces deceptive results. Confirmation bias incompetence or malicious intent?
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Actually, ocean temps have been steadily rising this entire time.
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The AC's citations were just as valid as the GP. As in, not at all. "realclimatescience dot com", an op-ed in the Telegraph, and some blog? Please. Those aren't citations, those are jacking off into a sock.
Re:Meanwhile, still no global warming in last 19yr (Score:4, Informative)
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We don't have the "continual rise" in temperature so often modeled and predicted as we have, it appears, flat (or actual declining) temperatures with occasional big events that cause a shift in the baseline. .
That's what you get if you superimpose a cycle on top a continuous rise
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And declining temps are, historically, a bad thing. You can pretty much map periods of peace and prosperity to warmer temps, and periods of war and mass migration to cooler temps. Most crops like it warmer and wetter rather than cooler and drier. Cooler temps equate to famine, with its predictable results.
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Absolutely not. If your citations are carefully chosen to misrepresent, then none would be better.
And none are better than using three opinion pieces to represent anything like a scientific argument, unless your science is the study of propaganda.
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It's been done thousands of times just here on Slashdot, yet you (among others) still pretend ignorance. So why bother? You're either not going to read it, not going to understand, or not going to acknowledge it.
Why should we waste our time explaining yet again why his sources are either deliberately deceptive or shockingly incompetent. Why bother when the people, like you, who lap it up seem incapable of understanding plain english, mathematics or science?
But because I'm an optimist, I'll throw in one r
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Look at this way. They are going to sequester lots and lots of carbon in the form of paper thanks to this!
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You want 'facts'? You want 'informed opinions'? You're not going to find it here. Why? Because nobody here is a scientist specializing in climatology, and while it's possible, I find it highly unlikely that anyone who posts here, myself included, is academically qualified enough to interpret what climate data has been collected, if you could even find such analysis to be scientifically valid in any significant way.
You are begging the question. If you assume that there are no ways to conduct analyses that are scientifically valid, then of course you won't find someone who can do that on Slashdot. However, your premise is false; there are piles of publications with valid mathematics and statistics that have been published in this area. Just go to Google Scholar and start investigating; you'll find lots of values for glacier loss, global mean temperature changes, changes in ocean temperature and acidity, etc.
Now, are
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Re:OMFG, the level of stupidity in threads like th (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not necessary. If Feynman could explain QED well enough that a layman could understand it, then laymen/women can also understand climate science, it's much simpler than QED. The difficult part IMNSHO is actually statistics: figuring out how to accurately average out all the temperature readings collected across the planet, etc.
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You want to hold yourself out as a qualified expert on climatology?
I don't even want you to believe me.
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I'd just like to see the science and economics that tells us that reducing carbon emissions is the optimal strategy. The lack of thought into this astounds me, that nobody is even considering other ideas, never mind conducting research.
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All we get are these suggestions like "you'd better stop doing what you're doing now and enjoying an easy life. We'll ta
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Hadn't quite finished the coffee - I should have added, the above (directly fund carbon sequestration) should be part of the solution, not the only piece. I'd also have policies to reduce the production of new "polluting" activities, but I wouldn't directly tax/ban existing things; they would wear out on their own. That is, I'd use sequestration to mitigate the existing install base and only allow "clean" stuff going forward.
This should be way more politically palatable, when you aren't asking people to gi
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Drive a lot lot less. Fly a whole lot less.
If we stopped flying tomorrow, completely 100% no more flying it'd not make much difference. 9% of oil use in the US is flying. The answer is really simple, just unpalatable. Raise the tax on fuel to $5 per gallon ($0.50 per year for 10 years, indexed on inflation after that). You don't need complex rules against cars and such. Just make the cost direct. You want to use less fuel? Tax it heavily. People will stop driving when they don't need to.
The indirect nudges to people don't work. Make fuel e