Crosswords1 min ago
How Are These Idiots Proposing That We "stop Climate Change" ?
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The climate is controlled by nature, how do they propose we override that?
The climate is controlled by nature, how do they propose we override that?
Answers
All their own hot air won't have helped . Only God can turn the tide, King Canute cannot!
04:51 Mon 30th Nov 2015
I am not really convinced that 'climate change' is really anything other than a bandwagon for people who like causes, and being self-important.
While China builds coal-fired power stations at the rate of one a week, I am not going to be remotely interested in 'reducing my carbon footprint' - who makes up these naff slogans anyway?
The climate has always heated and cooled - if it really does become an issue, then it will be dealt with, but I don't think the evidence is doing anything to convince the world's governments, much less its citizens.
Remember - by the year 2000, 'everyone will know someone who is HIV positive?' What happened - another load of ballyhoo and money wasted for no discernible result.
While China builds coal-fired power stations at the rate of one a week, I am not going to be remotely interested in 'reducing my carbon footprint' - who makes up these naff slogans anyway?
The climate has always heated and cooled - if it really does become an issue, then it will be dealt with, but I don't think the evidence is doing anything to convince the world's governments, much less its citizens.
Remember - by the year 2000, 'everyone will know someone who is HIV positive?' What happened - another load of ballyhoo and money wasted for no discernible result.
What the hell do you mean by "no discernable result"? All of that fuss and hoo-ha around HIV has led to intense amounts of research so that a disease that was once pretty fatal pretty quickly is now something far more manageable, far better-understood and rather a lot easier to avoid. If on the other hand we had ignored the rise of HIV and just let things carry on, the dire predictions might well have come true. Or not -- we may never know, but then that is exactly the point.
Ditto Ebola, more recently, where people were worrying quite seriously about the possibility of the 2014-15 outbreak spreading all over the place and, if it had done, things could have been very nasty indeed (Ebola tends to have a 40%+ fatality rate even with proper care procedure). Again, the response to this crisis out of fear of such horrific possibilities has, eventually, led to the epidemic being all-but over. Shame that the medical community didn't react sooner, as it still ended up costing well over 10,000 lives.
With respect to Climate Change, I'm not expecting many people's minds to change about it on AB. I've run through the arguments before, they've been largely rejected already -- which is a shame, because at its heart the message about Climate Change is simple enough. Human activity on this planet is unsustainable, at best disruptive and at worst horrifically destructive, and we had better start realising this and working to change that. Should you believe the dire warnings about impending catastrophe? Probably not -- even if they do end up coming true, it would be a worst-case scenario of climate prediction models whose accuracy remains not high enough to be trusted with 100% confidence. But it shouldn't really matter. Doesn't take much effort to realise that we have already had a significant effect on the state of the planet and will continue to do so. Sit and twiddle your thumbs if you must, but don't expect the planet to ignore us forever.
Ditto Ebola, more recently, where people were worrying quite seriously about the possibility of the 2014-15 outbreak spreading all over the place and, if it had done, things could have been very nasty indeed (Ebola tends to have a 40%+ fatality rate even with proper care procedure). Again, the response to this crisis out of fear of such horrific possibilities has, eventually, led to the epidemic being all-but over. Shame that the medical community didn't react sooner, as it still ended up costing well over 10,000 lives.
With respect to Climate Change, I'm not expecting many people's minds to change about it on AB. I've run through the arguments before, they've been largely rejected already -- which is a shame, because at its heart the message about Climate Change is simple enough. Human activity on this planet is unsustainable, at best disruptive and at worst horrifically destructive, and we had better start realising this and working to change that. Should you believe the dire warnings about impending catastrophe? Probably not -- even if they do end up coming true, it would be a worst-case scenario of climate prediction models whose accuracy remains not high enough to be trusted with 100% confidence. But it shouldn't really matter. Doesn't take much effort to realise that we have already had a significant effect on the state of the planet and will continue to do so. Sit and twiddle your thumbs if you must, but don't expect the planet to ignore us forever.
//Remember - by the year 2000, 'everyone will know someone who is HIV positive?' What happened - another load of ballyhoo and money wasted for no discernible result.//
and this wasnt written by AOG but Andy Hughes
wow well - the original paper about HIV was in the NEJM 1978 and by 1980 all the original 24 or so were dead. Blimey that was pretty lethal.
An author incredibly named Randy Shilts ( 'And the Band Played on') estimated that the increased cost of Reagan ignoring HIV for political purposes would cost the american economy an extra trillion bucks
( think of a one and lots and lots of trailing zeros = megabucks)
do a bit more reading on HIV andie
and this wasnt written by AOG but Andy Hughes
wow well - the original paper about HIV was in the NEJM 1978 and by 1980 all the original 24 or so were dead. Blimey that was pretty lethal.
An author incredibly named Randy Shilts ( 'And the Band Played on') estimated that the increased cost of Reagan ignoring HIV for political purposes would cost the american economy an extra trillion bucks
( think of a one and lots and lots of trailing zeros = megabucks)
do a bit more reading on HIV andie
I think Andy's point was that "by the year 2000, 'everyone will know someone who is HIV positive?" Well they didn't and although that was in part due to research and better treatment, the hysterical statement was farcical to say the least. So it was with the "hole in the ozone layer" - we were all going to die of radiation poisoning. We didn't. "Pig Flu" - half the population would contract it. We didn't. "BSE" - if we didn't stop eating beef we would all contract Mad Cow Disease. We didn't.
The list of such pronouncements is lengthy. All were made by "experts" who had "done all the science". They were wrong and there is no reason to believe that their colleagues now forecasting the extinction of 50% of species, polar bears drowning, the Maldives sinking, and all the hysterical nonsense currently being spouted in the name of "Climate change" will be any more accurate. The trouble this time is that where previously the claptrap was confined largely to good intentioned but harmless cranks, this latest speculative hysteria has grabbed the attention of politicians.
So we move to the latest performances of the three ring circus in Paris. Here, having posed for their photos and scoffed a few agreeable boozy dinners they will instruct their minion to draw up a "agreement" which will profoundly effect the lives of millions, if not billions of people.Targets will be set, billlions of pounds spent in ridiculous pursuit of the impossible and they will pronounce that they have taken measures control a problem which they do not fully understand and which their proposed solutions will not address by one jot.
The list of such pronouncements is lengthy. All were made by "experts" who had "done all the science". They were wrong and there is no reason to believe that their colleagues now forecasting the extinction of 50% of species, polar bears drowning, the Maldives sinking, and all the hysterical nonsense currently being spouted in the name of "Climate change" will be any more accurate. The trouble this time is that where previously the claptrap was confined largely to good intentioned but harmless cranks, this latest speculative hysteria has grabbed the attention of politicians.
So we move to the latest performances of the three ring circus in Paris. Here, having posed for their photos and scoffed a few agreeable boozy dinners they will instruct their minion to draw up a "agreement" which will profoundly effect the lives of millions, if not billions of people.Targets will be set, billlions of pounds spent in ridiculous pursuit of the impossible and they will pronounce that they have taken measures control a problem which they do not fully understand and which their proposed solutions will not address by one jot.
Perhaps part of the reason the Ozone hole didn't kill us was because the "farcical hysteria" prompted people to stop making that hole bigger? Just a thought.
The scientists weren't necessarily wrong just because the dire predictions didn't come true. After all, they were usually prefaced by something along the lines of "at current rates" or "assuming no change in the related activity", or something along those lines. So the change was made, and as a result the dire predictions didn't come true. That's what was supposed to happen!
The scientists weren't necessarily wrong just because the dire predictions didn't come true. After all, they were usually prefaced by something along the lines of "at current rates" or "assuming no change in the related activity", or something along those lines. So the change was made, and as a result the dire predictions didn't come true. That's what was supposed to happen!
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With respect to the precise data and trends, I think I've said before that I would have to do far more thorough research to hold a debate with you on that. On the face of it I think you are making a mistake in interpreting the results because you seem to be seeking a linear trend -- so much C02 in gives such-and-such a temperature rise -- but I don't see why you should expect this to be the case. It's pretty much never true anywhere else, and particularly so in an uncontrollable experiment, which is what the Earth basically is. There are evidently going to be other factors in play that can negate the change due to C02, or shroud it, or act as distractions somehow. The idea that T = A x C for some constant A and some amount of Carbon C in the atmosphere is one that needs to be discarded rather rapidly if you are going to have any kind of sensible debate about this topic, and it seems to me that this sort of idea is floating around in the subtext of your posts on this topic.
That aside, however, what is beyond doubt is that C02 is a greenhouse gas, ie that it absorbs/ emits IR radiation, and so it certainly can have an impact on the temperature of the Earth. One need only look at Venus to see that. What TTT, andy-hughes and NJ appear to be saying is that, absent certainty, we should do nothing about the potential risk. This position is based on ... well, I'm not sure really. It seems to me that Andy is saying that we should have waited until HIV had reached pandemic proportions before trying to counter it, or (NJ) until CFC levels had destroyed the entirety of the ozone layer before caring. Equivalently, perhaps we should wait for the next 100-200 years to see if unsustainable human activity that is destroying long-term natural cycles and wrecking entire ecosystems is going to go un-noticed?
It may very well be the case, after all, that CO2 levels can rise indefinitely with minimal impact on the environment. But I doubt it. There is always the potential for reaching some nasty "tipping point", where, say, the levels directly contributed to only a small rise in temperatures, but this was enough to trigger more significant impact factors, such as locked-away stores in permafrost. It may even be the case that this is already unavoidable, and for that matter through no fault of our own. But, again, I doubt it. It's clear that human activity has had and will continue to have effects on the planet. How large or small those effects will end up being is not nearly so relevant as the fact that they *might* be large, and it seems better to try and avoid that risk if at all possible.
Switching away from a reliance on fossil fuels makes some pragmatic sense anyway, since there is obviously a finite supply (also politics), so we'd have to switch at some point (oddly, this point always seems to be 40 years away or so -- but it will come eventually).
In the long run, it's better to overstate the risk, take action, and never see the full potential for devastation actually occur, than it is to sit back and wait to see if those damned scientists with their crazy visions of apocalypse were right after all.
That aside, however, what is beyond doubt is that C02 is a greenhouse gas, ie that it absorbs/ emits IR radiation, and so it certainly can have an impact on the temperature of the Earth. One need only look at Venus to see that. What TTT, andy-hughes and NJ appear to be saying is that, absent certainty, we should do nothing about the potential risk. This position is based on ... well, I'm not sure really. It seems to me that Andy is saying that we should have waited until HIV had reached pandemic proportions before trying to counter it, or (NJ) until CFC levels had destroyed the entirety of the ozone layer before caring. Equivalently, perhaps we should wait for the next 100-200 years to see if unsustainable human activity that is destroying long-term natural cycles and wrecking entire ecosystems is going to go un-noticed?
It may very well be the case, after all, that CO2 levels can rise indefinitely with minimal impact on the environment. But I doubt it. There is always the potential for reaching some nasty "tipping point", where, say, the levels directly contributed to only a small rise in temperatures, but this was enough to trigger more significant impact factors, such as locked-away stores in permafrost. It may even be the case that this is already unavoidable, and for that matter through no fault of our own. But, again, I doubt it. It's clear that human activity has had and will continue to have effects on the planet. How large or small those effects will end up being is not nearly so relevant as the fact that they *might* be large, and it seems better to try and avoid that risk if at all possible.
Switching away from a reliance on fossil fuels makes some pragmatic sense anyway, since there is obviously a finite supply (also politics), so we'd have to switch at some point (oddly, this point always seems to be 40 years away or so -- but it will come eventually).
In the long run, it's better to overstate the risk, take action, and never see the full potential for devastation actually occur, than it is to sit back and wait to see if those damned scientists with their crazy visions of apocalypse were right after all.
-- answer removed --
I think the last quote is the most telling of all. There is no doubt in my mind that the threat of “global warming” (which conveniently and quietly morphed into “climate change” when it was realised that the globe wasn’t er.. warming after all) has been wildly exaggerated and that short term trends have been extrapolated to provide long term scenarios of catastrophe and Armageddon.
If it is thought desirable to switch from fossil fuels to other sources (which I have to say it probably is in the long term if for no other reason that when they run out a switch will have to be made) then just say so. There is no need to contrive the sort of hysteria we have seen over the last few years. There is certainly no need to make me use light bulbs that don’t work properly to save a few watts of consumption (whilst allowing shops to heat the street in mid-February with their 25kW curtain heaters over their wide open doors). There is certainly no need for the UK to adopt the targets and measures that it has when China is opening a new coal fired power station every week.
This latest jamboree is an expensive and preposterous gathering of self-righteous busybodies who will produce nothing other than bucketloads of waffle. Forty thousand people have converged on Paris, including one R. Mugabe who is, apparently, banned from entering the EU and who unsurprisingly used his three minute slot to blame the problem on European Imperialism. And of course they all arrived by rickshaw or bicycle.
Just be honest. Just say it is time for a change, encourage research and facilities to enable that change, and let individual nations join in with the change or not. Those that do will be best placed to reap the rewards when fossil fuels run out. But to lead young children to believe that they will be unable to breathe if we don’t stop burning coal (which I witnessed a couple of months ago) is beyond the pale.
If it is thought desirable to switch from fossil fuels to other sources (which I have to say it probably is in the long term if for no other reason that when they run out a switch will have to be made) then just say so. There is no need to contrive the sort of hysteria we have seen over the last few years. There is certainly no need to make me use light bulbs that don’t work properly to save a few watts of consumption (whilst allowing shops to heat the street in mid-February with their 25kW curtain heaters over their wide open doors). There is certainly no need for the UK to adopt the targets and measures that it has when China is opening a new coal fired power station every week.
This latest jamboree is an expensive and preposterous gathering of self-righteous busybodies who will produce nothing other than bucketloads of waffle. Forty thousand people have converged on Paris, including one R. Mugabe who is, apparently, banned from entering the EU and who unsurprisingly used his three minute slot to blame the problem on European Imperialism. And of course they all arrived by rickshaw or bicycle.
Just be honest. Just say it is time for a change, encourage research and facilities to enable that change, and let individual nations join in with the change or not. Those that do will be best placed to reap the rewards when fossil fuels run out. But to lead young children to believe that they will be unable to breathe if we don’t stop burning coal (which I witnessed a couple of months ago) is beyond the pale.
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