How To Get To Net Zero Carbon Emissions: Cut Short-Lived Superpollutants (thebulletin.org) 184
Dan Drollette writes: We absolutely, positively, must tackle climate change speedily. Or as the authors of this article put it: 'By 'speed,' we mean measures — including regulatory ones — that can begin within two-to-three years, be substantially implemented in five-to-10 years, and produce a climate response within the next decade or two.' (Quick aside: one of the authors, Mario Molina, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995, for his work on holes in the ozone layer.)
From the article: Rapid warming over the near term threatens to accelerate self-reinforcing feedbacks in which the planet starts to warm itself in a Hothouse Earth scenario — vicious cycles which could lead to uncontrollable warming as these feedback mechanisms become the dominant force regulating the climate system. These feedbacks would then set off a domino-like cascade that triggers tipping points in the Arctic and elsewhere, many of them irreversible and potentially catastrophic.
From the article: Rapid warming over the near term threatens to accelerate self-reinforcing feedbacks in which the planet starts to warm itself in a Hothouse Earth scenario — vicious cycles which could lead to uncontrollable warming as these feedback mechanisms become the dominant force regulating the climate system. These feedbacks would then set off a domino-like cascade that triggers tipping points in the Arctic and elsewhere, many of them irreversible and potentially catastrophic.
exponential increase is a bitch sometimes (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm leading by example. I haven't had any kids. That's the only change needed, no need to kill anyone.
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So get back to work and let Coronavirus do its thing then?
And by the way... population reduction policies is stupid and population bomb theories have never been proven to show any merit.
Logistics confronted by greedy people... that is the problem.
We will solve overpopulation when we all stop viewing things with perceived value and look at them from the prospect of actual value. Food has a low value during most time... now it has high value... so does toilet paper. But until we get rid of "perceived" valu
Re: exponential increase is a bitch sometimes (Score:2)
All value is inherently perceived/subjective. If you don't understand that, you certainly don't know enough to be giving advice.
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Most value is subjective, as "I think this is of value to me." However, some things are objectively valuable because they're necessary to your life, such as food, water, and air. Closely related, some things have objective value because they improve your life, such as sleeping on a bed in a house in comparison to sleeping in a gravel pit. If you live your life well, the subjective category tends to align with the objective category.
Value is a floating concept. It must be nailed down if it's to be meaningful
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Sure, let's start by offering free birth control, sterilization, and first trimester abortions. Nobody needs to die despite what unimaginative people would have you believe.
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Reduce the population:
"Any Volunteers" ??
We're not going to do anything about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Bernie Sanders had the right idea, which is a massive federal jobs program to address climate change. That hits two birds with one stone, e.g. it makes sure workers have economic stability while fighting climate change.
Anything else is just pissing into the wind by trashy Neo-liberals.
Re:We're not going to do anything about it (Score:4, Insightful)
If you really want to fight climate change create economic incentive to do so. Give companies tax breaks for lowering energy use or for any inventions which result in less pollution or fewer emissions. Implement a market-based system for pollutants so that inefficient industries and processes are replaced faster, just like we did with sulfur dioxide to reduce acid rain.
I think it really says something about how bad Bernie's policies are when the Democrats would rather get behind someone with dementia or some other form of severe cognitive decline. I'll gladly take the trashy neo-liberals pissing into the wind over the Marxists huffing their own farts.
Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)
And no, these would _not_ be make work jobs. Do you have any bloody idea how much work it's going to take in order to get America off fossil fuels as our primary source of energy and onto renewables? It's not just building out wind and solar + batteries. We've got to transform our buildings to be more energy efficient. Same for our cars. And we're gonna screw it up because it's complicated. Meaning yes, a lot of money is going to be wasted and we're going to have to change gears a lot. This is bigger than WWI & II combined for God's sake. It's _hard_.
Tax breaks do nothing for the reasons I gave above. Voters won't push to have them actually enforced out of fear of losing their jobs if they are. The phrase "Job Killing Regulations" is powerful to somebody with $400 in the bank.
As for why the DNC is fighting Bernie they're corrupt. They've been bought out by billionaires. Go look into the election. 7 hour waits at the polls. Biden won every district in Texas where there isn't a paper trail. And the exit polls were off 8-11%. They cheated.
Bernie let them cheat because he will do anything to prevent Trump from being re-elected. Trump's DOJ is going to bring a challenge to the ACA that will strike it down and it is clear Trump has no plan to replace it. Hope you or your family don't have any pre-existing conditions....
One last thing (Score:2)
When you get a chance go look into how our food supply is run. Using subsidies, tax breaks and general government arm twisting it's basically a centrally planned economy. We don't talk about it because it's not polite, but this is how we prevent farmers from crap like overplanting or using shoddy methods.
The problem with China & the USSR is they didn't listen to multiple experts [youtu.be] and instead did a risky experiment on their entire food supply based on 1 (not th
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Using subsidies, tax breaks and general government arm twisting it's basically a centrally planned economy.
So fscking stop stop subsidizing and tax breaking oil. https://www.fuelfreedom.org/oi... [fuelfreedom.org]
Again, that won't work (Score:2)
The only way we're going to dig ourselves out of this is by getting off fossil fuel as our main source of energy (and doing it fast). Private industry won't do that because private industry follows short term profits.
Think about how many trillions and trillions of dollars in assets there are in fossil fuel. Now ask yourself what those assets would be worth if we
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the simplest solution is making cleaner energy cheaper or easier. People pay more for easy, companies make decisions based on cost. This is the oldest law of physics, as well as taoism there is. Everything flows toward the path of least resistance. Right now, facing about $3T in proposed bailouts, in just the US alone, nobody is going to vote for yet another increase in taxes, you havent even seen the fallout of how much this is going to eat your taxes and you already want to spend more. Your fiscal respons
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Biden won every district in Texas where there isn't a paper trail. And the exit polls were off 8-11%. They cheated.
Oh bullshit they cheated. Bernie lost to Hillary in 2016 and he's losing to Biden in 2020. He's actually polling worse against Biden than he did against Hillary, which really shouldn't be unexpected at all. In head-to-head polls against Trump, Bernie ties him, while Biden clearly wins. There's no cheating. Bernie just isn't as popular as his supporters think he is.
Here's the thing about exit polls: you expect some of them to be off. I've seen nothing that shows any systematic cheating or any exit polls bein
Well it's not broken windows (Score:2)
And we did more capitalism in Africa and Asia. China is the world's biggest polluter, and that pollution is having global effects. Capitalism just seeks the maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. It's very good at that, but that won't cut it here.
No, what we have here is a classic tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org]. Only the "commons" is the whole bloody
Re: Well it's not broken windows (Score:2)
Capitalism just seeks the maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. It's very good at that, but that won't cut it here.
That's what commies always say. "Capitalism just maximizes profit; we need to control the economy to take care of the poor!". Then they roll out their "solution" and just end up making everything worse. I see no reason to believe that "this time will be different".
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Your giving Bernie way to much credit. His only stick is "I'll make X free if you elect me!!"
Yea it pulls in the dumb college kids by the droves and a few who can't think through the issue but that's about it.
But for anyone who thinks about it he's a long term 1%'er capitalist (4 McMansion's) shouting nonsense.
That's the real reason he's now lost two democratic primaries.
stop eating now (Score:2)
>short-lived so-called “super-pollutants”—black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons
Sources of bad stuff:
black carbon - mostly from cooking and heating
methane - mostly natural sources
tropospheric ozone - mostly methane and transportation
hydrofluorocarbons - mostly from cooling
Obviously we all need to stop cooking, stop driving to the store, and unplug the fridge. If we could all just sustainably forage native plants from our own property for food then we could en
Sulphur hexaflouride (Score:2)
https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com]
"Cheap and non-flammable, SF6 is a colourless, odourless, synthetic gas. It makes a hugely effective insulating material for medium and high-voltage electrical installations. It is widely used across the industry, from large power stations to wind turbines to electrical sub-stations in towns and cities. It prevents electrical accidents and fires.
However, the significant downside to using the gas is that it has the highest global warming potential of any known substance. It
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I don't think you understand how powerful the effect of some trace gasses can be on the climate at very low concentrations.
Please explain it to me, because I don't understand.
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The planet was in balance before humankind started polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases coming from fossil fuels.
No it wasn't. It was coming out of an Ice Age and warming fairly rapidly on its own, by geological timescales. The last glacial period ended just 11,700 years ago. Yes, that recently. Humans had been recognizable as humans for at least the previous 100,000 years. Humans watched ice that had completely covered Canada and the northern US retreat. Humans watched ice that had mostly covered Germany, Poland, and western Russia retreat. Each year, any of those humans who might have been paying attention wo
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Humans produce orders of magnitude more co2 than volcanism.
Your idea is dumb
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Your whole argument is fundamentally idiotic because it doesn't matter whether nature or man creates more CO2, period. What matters is whether too much CO2 is produced.
But my point was that we already know that CO2 from volcanism affects climate, and we produce way more.
Either way, you're wrong.
In other words, we are completely fucked (Score:2)
There was no real activity besides window dressing in the 30 or so years this has been known and solid science said it will be catastrophic. There is no way anything even remotely approaching what will be needed will happen in the next decade or two. Instead, the people accelerating this catastrophe will continue to make mountains of money and will not care at all about the damage they cause. And the general public will wake up when the catastrophe becomes personal, i.e. 50-100 years too late to really do a
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Humans have survived multiple catastrophic climate events before- including a full blown ice age, a mini-ice age, and a decade of darkness caused by the eruption of a super-volcano which resulted in world-wide famine and killed huge swaths of the population.
There is zero chance that even in the worst of the worst case scenarios of global warming that it wipes out human civilization.
Alarmist language with no basis in reality like what you use here are one reason so many people are dismissive about the *real*
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Humans have survived multiple catastrophic climate events before-
All with very slow changes and a non-tech society to begin with. This time is different.
Re: In other words, we are completely fucked (Score:2)
Ah yes. The eruption of a super-volcano is very slow indeed, and I'm sure the lack of technology helped our ancestors greatly in dealing with it.
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There is zero chance that even in the worst of the worst case scenarios of global warming that it wipes out human civilization.
The scientifically understood climate change phenomenon? No, of course not.
The apocalyptic climate change religion? Predictions need not follow physical rules, nor match the geological climate record, nor be consistent with biological or anthropological understanding. Zealous belief is enough. They're saving the planet. You know they, personally, are the heroes of the planet, don't you? You should learn to be more obedient and reverential.
"We must" is bullsh*t (Score:2)
When anyone says "We must do X now or Y will happen ten years from now" and that "must" involves government, I snort in derision.
If there is one good thing (Score:2)
about this pandemic, it puts the word "crisis" into much better perspective. Climate change activists have been going on for decades about how millions are gonna die, someday, eventually. Well guess what, now we get to see what a scenario really looks like when millions of people may actually die. Verifiable rather than theoretical deaths.
When (if) life gets back to some semblance of normal and people start screaming about the climate crisis again, at least everyone will be able to give it a more appropr
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You can have a slow moving crisis. All it takes is a tipping point.
Guess what? Climate can work that way.
HTH, HAND
Exactly HOW 2C (Score:2)
When you have this ROADMAP that shows WHAT, WHERE, WHEN and precisely HOW to get to 2C, HOW is that not LAW already?
What person in their right mind doesn't elevate, project and enforce such a 2C ROADMAP.
I've waited for AGW science to get a handle on 2C and now that we have it...IT IS TIME TO ACT. Failure to act on 2C is the equivalent to ignoring SARS-nCOV-2.
https://www.americanprogress.o... [americanprogress.org]
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You know, those with power do not care or do not understand. The others cheer them onward because they do not care or do not understand.
As a group, humanity is exceptionally stupid and cannot really look beyond the next meal. The minority that can does not have the power to change anything.
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Judging from America's response to Corona virus, I suspect we'll see some action when we reach 3 or 4 C.
The only plus I see of the current pandemic is that the same idiots which dismiss our current climate experts are likely also dismissing our current situation as "just another flu".
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Anti-science atomic scientists (Score:2)
These are people that are adamantly opposed to any form of nuclear power as they claim any nuclear power reactor is a risk for proliferation of weapon grade material. Tell me something, "scientists", what do you propose we do with the existing stockpile of weapon grade material? If you do in fact know your nuclear science then you know that there's only two ways for such material to be destroyed. We can wait it out, which can take millions of years, or we can destroy this material by fission.
We can do th
Alarmist BS (Score:2)
"Rapid warming over the near term threatens to accelerate self-reinforcing feedbacks"
This is the problem with the alarmists: they insist on spouting BS.
Is the planet warming? Yes. Is spouting massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere a good idea? No. Are there dangerous positive-feedback cycles waiting to create runaway warming and turn the planet into Venus? Um...no. There aren't. No one seriously even supposes that there are, except people desperate to get headlines. Even the IPCC reports, as politically
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There definitely are positive feedback cycles. Will they turn Earth into Venus? Of course not, we're not close enough to the sun for that. Could it increase average temperature enough to melt a significant portion of the icecaps and permafrost areas? Definitely.
Will those events cause additional warming? Sure, ice reflects heat much better than land or oceans, melting tundra will release additional green house gasses on scales that may even dwarf our own contributions. Expanding deserts and oceans wil
We've already solved it (Score:2)
One thing that has not been widely reported on, is that we have dropped CO2 levels to an unthinkable low because of the lockdown. Why do we have to expend further effort and expense on a solved problem when we are going to ned every resource civilization has to essentially reboot the world?
Re:Telecommute (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not boomers, it's just hang ups from decades of people needing to be in the office due to lack of technology, and paranoid bosses who think we won't do any work if not constantly under the threat of them happening to walk by. Also a bit of resistance to learning how to use screen sharing and video chat etc.
Re:Telecommute (Score:5, Interesting)
bosses who think we won't do any work if not constantly under the threat of them happening to walk by
Too many bosses are ignorant of "Theory X" vs "Theory Y" management styles. Either they never learned it, or it was one of those things they learned in the classroom that they decided to forget after the final exam because "when will I ever need to know that in real life?"
Douglas McGregor articulated this in the 1960s as a binary approach to managing staff: Under "Theory X" one assumes that all employees will tend to be like Wally in the Dilbert comics, trying to avoid real work as much as possible. Under "Theory Y" one assumes that the majority of employees care about their work and, unless their manager is a jerk, are glad to be part of a team that is producing something useful. Managers that adhere to "Theory X" are almost impossible to shift out of their framework. Some of them are undoubtedly projecting their own inner attitude onto their staff and will not entertain the idea that their sourness isn't universal. To shift someone to "Theory Y" requires that they change a fundamental philosophy about people, and that's hard to do (it's one of those situations where evidence alone is not enough to convince a person to change).
In all of my years of trying to convince senior managers to allow my staff to work from home, even in carefully structured settings, most of the senior managers I encountered simply did not trust staff to do their best work unless there was a risk of a manager physically dropping by to check up on them. Paternalism at its worst, and deflating to morale amongst a team of well educated professionals with a proven track record.
I hope the next few months will bring some re-evaluation, but I think those who are stuck in "Theory X" will not be moved even by whatever data we can capture during this time.
--
.nosig
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Just anecdotal commenting but;
My snow queue had over 30 tickets that were 2 months old. I work at a walk up helpdesk. I am constantly bombarded by walk ups and phone calls interrupting me all day long.Got to do my first week telework last wek, cleared most of those first day, got reassigned tickets, closed out another 53 this week.
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Here is another theory.
There are employees who behave like theory X predicts and some like theory Y predicts. That's just the human nature. In areas where supervision is easy and you are doing it anyway for others reasons (eg, a manufacturing line) the overhead imposed by monitoring doesn't matter. But in places where where you do have to closely monitor someone, you are better off firing all the theory X people as it costs real money to continually supervise them.
That's the cost perspective. Now lets
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It depends on the job and the company. There are jobs which hardly anyone feels motivated to do, and jobs which make almost everyone excited to get to work.
Re: Telecommute (Score:2)
It's more complicated than that. Take a job that's already remote, any kind of call center work. They're the frontlines of customer interaction more and more as business continues to be done more over the internet. I'll even walk that back to any job that involves customer records that is "almost remote" like the receptionist at your doctors office, or anything along those lines, say if someone could answer after office hours.
This is not an insignificant number of jobs, and they are desk-bound, so why ca
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While I am not a boomer, I work with plenty of them who have no issue with work from home and in fact do work from home at every opportunity. How about we stop grouping people and putting labels on them based on attributes that have zero or only loose correlation to the topic at hand?
You're probably right that I shouldn't stoop to their level by marginalizing them but I just can't help being a little angry at them for all the things I've seen them do. Like labelling, they were the generation that invented that form of covert abuse. My generation couldn't even vote whilst they took all of the advantages (like free education and healthcare) that they were blessed with away from all subsequent generations with gaping wide open mouths as they called us slackers.
They then went on to c
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in leadership positions stopping a push to work from home.
Thanks for clearing that up, it's what I was getting at.
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Are you ready for take-out food forever, and getting together for drinks on Zoom?
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It sounds like you're describing the types of jobs that robots do. I'm kidding. . .kind of.
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Re: Telecommute (Score:2)
The youngest boomers are 55 right now.
Re:Positive Feedback (Score:5, Informative)
It will just get hotter and hotter like a perpetual motion machine. That's how things work, right?
Because climate isn't a system that tends toward equilibrium. It's some sort of wacky positive feedback system that's always at extreme cold or extreme hot and swings wildly between the two in short time periods. That's an accurate description, right?
Why do you guys believe this stuff?
We believe it because we understand science better than you.
It's not perpetual motion if energy is constantly being added by the sun. If more energy is trapped, temperatures rise. Remember, Venus is hotter than Mercury, but it's orbit is 0.7AU from the sun to Mercury's 0.2AU.
If temperature rise leads to the release of more energy-trapping gases, then it will feedback, up until a higher equilibrium. This is the case with our climate, because of carbon currently stored in permafrost and methane currently stored in ocean in the form of methyl hydrates. If you don't believe it, fine, just don't assert anything as though you do. Nobody has ever said it will increase forever and produce free energy... these are the most boring strawmen I've met.
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Re: Positive Feedback (Score:2)
Where exactly is that equlibrium going to be?
What if it's at 80 ÂC average surface temperature? Thermodynamics doesn't give a shit if you live or die.
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"When was it too hot for our species before? Before all this carbon was fixed in the ground, was it too hot"
In short, yes. The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, it was too hot for us.
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This is not a war. Infrastructure is not destroyed. Most people that know how to operate it will survive. On the scale of what catastrophes are possible, this is a minor glitch. Climate change is a decision point for species survival though.
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You really have not the slightest clue what you are talking about. As usual. Raising sea levels are a minor aspect of the problem.
Re: I Dunno. (Score:2)
And clearly you donâ(TM)t grasp the impact of the current situation.
Re: I Dunno. (Score:2)
Apparently not since the crazies are still going on their rants.
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You sound far more evil than "the economy".
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Oh, no! Another broken sarcasm detector!
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BAReFO0t wasn't being sarcastic. He's really that kind of poster sometimes. He really does believe that "the economy" is a cause of human evil.
Re: Sadly, no. (Score:2)
His username is a reflection of his economic beliefs.
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millions of people will die THIS YEAR worrying about our carbon footprint getting worse,
SOURCE ?
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At first that seems like it would obviously be true.
Millions of people will die THIS YEAR. A substantial fraction (no doubt totalling at least two million) of them worry about our carbon footprint getting worse.
But, on second thought, WHEN THEY DIE they'll probably be worrying about something else, like getting that next breath...
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I do not find something relevant. No one dies from worrying.
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I see you still CAN NOT provide a link.
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No, you use it and post the result, A-hole.
It's the responsibility of the person making or supporting the argument to supply the supporting documentation, not the people he's trying to convince to do this work for him.
Further, with all the claims of how much internet traffic and crunch farm operations are burning energy and causing carbon emissions, it's not just impolite but the pinnacle of hypocrisy to make a post telling a
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You are deluding yourself. People are living in extreme climates, if they had millennia to adapt to it slowly and no real changes are happening after that. This thing will bring massive changes in less than a century.
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This thing will bring massive changes in less than a century.
They've been telling us that for almost half a century already and the changes we've seen so far are barely perceptible despite never-ending hype.
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I sure hope you don't have a drivers license.
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I sure hope you don't have a drivers license.
Would you like to keep those exclusively for the chosen few true believers?
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Barely perceptible in middle latitudes for those living in cities and insulated from things via efficient supply chains, perhaps. Those in the arctic where there is no longer ice and roads have sunk into marshes where there used to be permafrost may have different views on how perceptible changes are, as might a farmer in Africa where the rain no longer falls.
And that guy in the Arctic totally isn't made up. That African farmer where "rain no longer falls" totally isn't fictional.
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Really? It will? All predictions I've seen show tiny changes over centuries. Hyperbole gets you nothing, you know...
Well, you should leave your filter-bubble on occasion...
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You are deluding yourself. People are living in extreme climates, if they had millennia to adapt to it slowly and no real changes are happening after that. This thing will bring massive changes in less than a century.
A century is many generations. Generational change is the norm, not the exception.
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That is a very strange leap of logic. I also think it's odd that you're convinced that people are worried about the changes in our climate that are being accelerated by human activity only because of "social justice" and "economic equality," and then you immediately state that you don't understand what those terms mean. If you don't even understand what those terms mean, how can you ascribe them as motivations for this weird conspiracy you've formulated. Furthermore, if you don't understand what those two t
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... because of "social justice" and "economic equality," and then you immediately state that you don't understand what those terms mean.
"Justice" means we intend to hurt some people and we think we have a good reason. "Social justice" means the reason to hurt people involves some theory about society.
"Economic equality" means people want things because other people have things.
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And freedom is slavery, right?
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And freedom is slavery, right?
No, those are opposites. Get a dictionary if you're that confused about the concepts behind very simple words everyone else understands.
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And besides the earth is flat anyways! Or that is your point, I gather?
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Data is only as good as the person interpreting it. I am not a climate scientist and it is clear that you are not either based on your asinine first sentence. That data does nothing for me, but articles written by actual climate scientists who work with that data are very useful. Actual climate scientists are pretty clear: CO2 functions as a greenhouse gas, thus trapping heat, which therefore affects global temperature.
An appeal to authority is not fallacious when that authority is an expert on the topic an
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Actual climate scientists are pretty clear: CO2 functions as a greenhouse gas, thus trapping heat, which therefore affects global temperature.
If only there were no other variables in the system.