The greatest novelists in their newest books all seem to be saying the same thing. Scientists and philosophers, with the doomsday arguments and scenarios, and assessments of likelihood, all are pretty much saying this. If you are really an "intellectual" with an interest in the height and breadth of current human knowledge, this is correct.

W the carbon levels where they are now, it's as if a great oven has been turned on and is in the preheating stage.

Realistically, the only hope lies in SAI. And that likely will entail a radical transformation of society that won't be pretty.

Whatever you hope for your kids will be obsolete by the time they get to the point of getting to that goal.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918093)

I always wondered what kind of total fucking mentally ill retarded idiot watches shitty kike Tee-Vee propaganda "shows" like this and is like, "Wow that's such a good and scary point, jeez this is really opening my eyes on this incredibly important issue, this shit is completely terrifying this is world ending stuff good lord we really need to shut it all down (not like me personally but the rest of the world) and try to save the world from this catastrophe ASAP, this is insane holy shit holy shit WOW OK hold on what is this show called again I need to keep watching this and also I need to send a clip of this episode out to a bunch of my friends and family to try to open their eyes about this goddamn holy shit fucking CLIMATE CHANGE wow jesus h. fuckin' christ this is unreal crazy how white people and the evils of capitalism sure have done a number on this planet this is so horrible ugh I mean god what about the WHALES?!".

Thanks for clarifying that for me, Spaceporn.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918101)

Contrast GDP in 2100 being 5% lower against the country being overrun with sub 90 IQ third worlders or 1000 other more important issues

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918205)

To be clear, we have never lived in a setting with CO2 levels as high as they are. People didn't evolve in such a setting, civilization didn't develop in such a setting, human fungal resistance didn't evolve in such a setting. Going forward isn't going to be a "gamble" or a "hey we'll just adapt"--it's going to be dystopian. Pretty soon. At this point I think only advanced tech we haven't dreamt of yet could *save* us, but that may be just my own cognitive biases hanging on to some hope about things.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918257)

It would be one thing if increased carbon didn't necessarily lead to increased temperatures, and the fact that we know what the temp was the last time carbon was so high.

But the bottom line is precisely because of this carbon issue I have no reason to think that the general premise is wrong, nor do most people who read books generally.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918747)

https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/files/tkg/files/keith_et_al._-_2018_-_a_process_for_capturing_co2_from_the_atmosphere.pdf?m=1528729323

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43919836)

We used to be worried that cities would drown in all the horseshit from carriages; and it was a serious major problem; but then cars came along.

We can only hope at this point, that some new tech will save us; realistically. That and try to do some good for our heirs, meaning all humanity.

Drake equation does not seem to support your general hypothesis, fwiw. Modern drake equations I mean.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43919857)

But who knows

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43920443)

If climate change is this apocalyptic, they’d get over their squickiness about nuclear easily.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918461)

What If We Stopped Pretending?

The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

By Jonathan Franzen

September 8, 2019

“There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.

I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.

Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control. Some scientists and policymakers fear that we’re in danger of passing this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius (maybe more, but also maybe less). The I.P.C.C.—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. We need to approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three decades.

This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust the I.P.C.C.’s calculations. New research, described last month in Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature, scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make a “best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. The rise might, in fact, be far higher.

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I draw from the prescriptions of policymakers and activists, share certain necessary conditions.

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new energy and transportation projects already planned or under construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep pumping oil and driving pickup trucks.

The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn farmers.

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.

To judge from recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of Americans (many of them Republican) are pessimistic about the planet’s future, and from the success of a book like David Wallace-Wells’s harrowing “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was released this year, I’m not alone in having reached this conclusion. But there continues to be a reluctance to broadcast it. Some climate activists argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date. The activists who make it remind me of the religious leaders who fear that, without the promise of eternal salvation, people won’t bother to behave well. In my experience, nonbelievers are no less loving of their neighbors than believers. And so I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the truth.

First of all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees of warming, there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for reducing carbon emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no return is passed, the world will become self-transforming. In the shorter term, however, half measures are better than no measures. Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate effects of warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the point of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the speed at which it’s advancing, the almost monthly shattering of temperature records. If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing.

In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when “end times” was merely an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they’re good—because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me.

More than that, a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If you persist in believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit yourself to tackling a problem so immense that it needs to be everyone’s overriding priority forever. One result, weirdly, is a kind of complacency: by voting for green candidates, riding a bicycle to work, avoiding air travel, you might feel that you’ve done everything you can for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the reality that the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization, there’s a whole lot more you should be doing.

Our resources aren’t infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a longest-shot gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will save us, it’s unwise to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent on high-speed trains, which may or may not be suitable for North America, is a billion not banked for disaster preparedness, reparations to inundated countries, or future humanitarian relief. Every renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem—the “green” energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national parks, the giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms in open spaces, rather than in settled areas—erodes the resilience of a natural world already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion, overuse of pesticides, the devastation of world fisheries—collective will is needed for these problems, too, and, unlike the problem of carbon, they’re within our power to solve. As a bonus, many low-tech conservation actions (restoring forests, preserving grasslands, eating less meat) can reduce our carbon footprint as effectively as massive industrial changes.

All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.

And then there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.

In Santa Cruz, where I live, there’s an organization called the Homeless Garden Project. On a small working farm at the west end of town, it offers employment, training, support, and a sense of community to members of the city’s homeless population. It can’t “solve” the problem of homelessness, but it’s been changing lives, one at a time, for nearly thirty years. Supporting itself in part by selling organic produce, it contributes more broadly to a revolution in how we think about people in need, the land we depend on, and the natural world around us. In the summer, as a member of its C.S.A. program, I enjoy its kale and strawberries, and in the fall, because the soil is alive and uncontaminated, small migratory birds find sustenance in its furrows.

There may come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, when the systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and homeless people outnumber people with homes. At that point, traditional local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal buzzwords. Kindness to neighbors and respect for the land—nurturing healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators—will be essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it. A project like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that the future, while undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways, be better. Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today.

[A previous version of this article mischaracterized the scientific consensus around a “point of no return.”]

Jonathan Franzen is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the author of, most recently, the novel “Purity.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918190)

I realize this place isn’t what it used to be, but there’s still a ton of us here who went to better schools, got better grades, ended up way more successful than you, and are exponentially more wealthy. But to your pea brain, we’re all the dumb ones and you’ve managed to figure it out. And by figuring it out, I mean accepting hook, line and sinker any lib talking point you can get your hands on (oh, except you’re a big racist who thinks blacks are dumb as shit lol).

Isn’t it possible that you have a certain I’ll-informed lib worldview, and you’re too dumb to realize you’re reading propaganda that is preying upon your knee jerk confirmation bias? Or do you truly believe that you’re a genius here despite what everything else in your life is telling you?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918310)

What a terrible description of Reformation theology. Total hack.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918456)

Wow, weird how preventing the imminent climate apocalypse entails implementing every irrelevant left-wing policy goal from taking away your guns to "racial equality"! Let me guess: "humane immigration policy" means mass-importing more third-worlders into every developed country other than Israel, thereby massively increasing their ecological footprint?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918679)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10481075/Scowling-Obama-inspects-new-multi-million-dollar-Hawaii-mansion-controversial-sea-wall.html

==

EXCLUSIVE: Trouble in paradise? Scowling Barack Obama inspects the construction of his new multimillion-dollar Hawaii mansion and controversial sea wall which his neighbors fear will erode the beachline

Construction appears to be well underway on Barack Obama's Hawaii beachfront compound

Obama was pictured speaking to builders and architects from a local island-based building firm

The former President did not look happy in photos snapped of him as he spoke with the construction crew

Obama could be seen with his arms folder and making pointed gestures before turning around to walk inside

His close friend and confidant Marty Nesbitt purchased property for $8.7 million in 2015

Previously, the site was home to the famous mansion from Magnum PI TV series which was torn down

In 2020 it was revealed how the buyer of the three-acre plot of land used a planning loophole to preserve a century-old sea wall on the beachfront, much to the annoyance of neighbors and environmentalists

Experts say such sea walls contribute to beach erosion and can damage the coastal environment

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918219)

Rich Libs: "Sea levels will almost certainly rise at least 20 feet in the next 50 years, it's a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, if we want to save even a fraction of the world at this point then EVERYONE needs to learn to live in pods and eat bugs immediately (OK, like, I mean not us specifically, but almost everyone else) or else we're all gonna die!"

Also Rich Libs: "OMG check out this SICK new seaside multimillion dollar house I just bought right on the Malibu coast sunglassesemoji.jpg!"

See also:

Rich Libs: "DID YOU KNOW THAT 35% OF ALL YOUNG WOMEN IN AMERICAN COLLEGES GET RAPED?! THIS IS A VERY REAL AND TERRIFYING EPIDEMIC, WE MUST ADDRESS TOXIC MASCULINITY IMMEDIATLY HASHTAG ME TOO!"

Also Rich Libs: "Cheryl are you kidding me? Of COURSE Becca is going to go to college, this isn't even a debate! What do you want her to grow up to be, a fucking plumber or something?! I'll talk to Dad and see if he can pull a few strings at Haverford, you know that he has those conne..."

Almost as if...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918267)

But I'm not here to make friends or to argue the subject w anyone. Believe what you want.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918285)

I literally pay the same premium for that house as I would if it were miles inland, and if climate change predictions are correct, it’ll be gone in a few decades. HTH.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918344)

Reminder that desperately insecure striver midwit shitlib useful idiots like Spaceporn who completely buy into the "climate change" fraud that is strategically pushed by the psychopathic liberal elite class -- a laughable lie that none of the shitlib elites actually believe in themselves (as can be easily proven by just considering their own behavior, i.e., how they all continue to fly around on private jets... how they all still choose to spend their money buying insanely expensive oceanfront properties... etc etc etc.) -- not only think that you're a fool for not buying that bullshit, but they consider *themselves* to be member of the liberal elite class *precisely because* they stupidly buy into this obvious hoax (completely oblivious to the fact that the actual liberal elite class is snickering at their idiocy behind the closed doors of their seaside palatial estates).

But you're the dumb and gullible one! It's definitely you, it's definitely not me! I mean, do you *even* hold a single incredibly overpriced graduate degree (wisely purchase using non-dischargable student loans) from a school of middling prestige, bro?! Sure you're a self-employed plumber making twice the money I pull in every year, but what are your *credentials*? (Actual rich liberal elite class members Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg pretending to nod in agreement even as they inwardly chuckle at the idea that having "a degree" matters, since neither of them ever bothered to finish one, but I'm just repeating myself now...)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918380)

The only one fucked around here is your small adopted Asian son, and I choose to believe that action will eventually be taken about that situation.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918422)

The funny thing is libs always have to push their arguments until theyre untenable. Protecting the environment should be one of libs’ cornerstone achievements of the past 50 years. Our water and air are both way cleaner today because of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. More people are driving electric cars than ever, using solar/wind power, etc. whether for virtue signaling or otherwise, the free market is making the world less polluted. That’s a good thing. No one is forced to do it. Whether you’re a histrionic lib climate trigger or just into conservation/hunting, more power to everyone who wants to do that.

Not good enough for libs. We need to impose draconian rules NOW. If we don’t, we’ll be living in Mad Max. There is *zero* support for this thesis. Spaceporn loves repeating it, but there’s no evidence. It’s also the same thesis they’ve been bleating since the early 90s and it was supposed to happen by now. It hasn’t. So instead they discredit themselves.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918427)

I'm saying quite clearly that it's too late. no matter what we do we have fucked it all up with so much free carbon, and dystopia is what we can pretty much expect at this point.

Who will future generations blame? All of us to some degree, probably.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918441)

"We need to stop this acid ra-- er, this global warmi-- ugh, this CLIMATE CHANGE before it's too late! The smart rich man in a suit on the TeeVee screen who I idolize because I am a pathetic striver follower desperate for social validation from those I perceive as being 'elite' told me so, and I am also a smart man and I also own a suit and I believe that I too can be rich one day, and I really really really really REALLY want you all to respect me just like society clearly respects that man on the TeeVee, so therefore I make sure to loudly agree with him on this important issue which he said is very important and which I therefore now genuinely care about a lot, just like him! He and I have a lot in common, actually, when you really stop and think about it! I'll be we would get along very well if we ever met! I hope we do meet one day, that would be cool and the more I think about it the more I think it might just happen, maybe like at a fancy rich person party or at a gala or something or maybe even at a yacht convention or a..."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918448)

I'm done saying the same thing over and over and having you deliberately misstate, attack me personally, defame me, mischaracterize my point, deny the truth on the matters, etc. As I said, I don't care. I'm not here to convince you or anyone else of the truth of the proposition that we are fucked.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918465)

There’s also nothing wrong with not believing in the climate change narrative but wanting to clean up the environment.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918447)

Sorry, the cool elite shitlib class no longer likes or supports nuclear power these days. Not flame. You're self-outing as a dumb poor ignorant prole, better edit this and update your "prestige programming" quick before someone who matters comes along and sees this faux pas!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918515)

Same thing with that gut bacteria innovation that makes cows have less methanous farts - which I believe is not as big a deal as it is made out to be - factory farming itself is the problem in this case, most farms were self contained systems that sequestered carbon very well before factory farming which is raping the land long term.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43918519)

at the end of the day, it doesn't even seem to be something worth thinking about. maybe these predictions will come true or maybe they're exaggerated to spurn people into action. i'm a fag and keep my carbon footprint pretty low. i'm supportive of policies to reduce carbon emissions. but the global elite that actually have the power to do anything don't seem to give a shit and there is very little i can do to move the needle. they set the policy and generate hundreds fold more carbon than i do. so, all any ordinary person can do is sit back and go "haha wow yeah" and see what happens.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43919018)

Even if these alarmist projections are accurate, which hasn't been the case so far with alarmist projections, it's not as if sea levels are going to rise 80' in a matter of minutes; that's what we call a tsunami. They're projected to rise over the course of centuries. Lmao does this dude think people aren't capable of moving inland?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43919732)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43919964)

As for examples, pacific island nations are underwater now. Have you been to Venice lately? St Marks plaza is routinely under two feet of water now. The eastern seaboard is dealing w new sea walls, beach remediation, flooding on a routine basis.

Gloostick you can’t be serious with this schtick which is why I ignored it for a few minutes

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43920550)

I hope that projections are true. Humanity needs this.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43920566)

Once again, the leading experts we were told to rely on were 100 percent wrong. It’s not that they predicted disaster and got half a disaster—it’s that they predicted disaster and got dramatic improvement. Clearly, something was wrong with their thinking and we need to understand what it is because they are once again telling us to stop using the most important energy source in our civilization. And we are listening.

Why did so many predict increasing climate danger when the reality turned out to be increasing climate safety as we used more fossil fuels? Once again, they didn’t think big picture—they seemed to be looking only at potential risks of fossil fuels, not the benefits. Clearly, as the climate-related death data show, there were some major benefits—namely, the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization that is highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on. Why weren’t those mentioned in the discussion when we talked about storms like Sandy and Irene, even though anyone going through those storms was far more protected from them than he or she would have been a century ago?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43920601)

Thus every prediction of drastic future consequences is based on speculative models that have failed to predict the climate trend so far and that speculate a radically different trend than what has actually happened in the last thirty to eighty years of emitting substantial amounts of CO2. And we have not even explored the complete failure to make accurate predictions about climate changes in specific regions, which is what really matters in assessing and adapting to any climate-related threats.

If a climate prediction model can’t predict climate, it is not a valid model—and predictions made on the basis of such a model are not scientific. Those whose models fail but still believe their core hypothesis right still need to acknowledge their failure. If they believe that their hypothesis is right and that complete lack of dramatic warming is just the calm before the storm, they should state all the evidence pro and con.

Unfortunately, many of the scientists, scientific bodies, and especially public intellectuals and media members have not been honest with the public about the failure of their predictions. Like all too many who are attached to a theory that ends up contradicting reality, they have tried to pretend that reality is different from what it is, to the point of extreme and extremely dangerous dishonesty.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43920872)

25. “The Keeling Curve: A Daily Record of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego,” June 8, 2014, http://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu.

26. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index,” GISS Surface Temperature Plots, May 12, 2014, http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43921207)

First of all, this statement itself, even if it were true, is deliberately manipulative. The reason we care about recent global warming or climate change is not simply that human beings are allegedly the main cause. It’s the allegation that man-made warming will be extremely harmful to human life. The 97 percent claim says nothing whatsoever about magnitude or catastrophe. If we’re the main cause of the mild warming of the last century or so, that does not begin to resemble anything that would justify taking away our machine food.

But note how when I quoted John Kerry earlier, he went from “97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible” to “they agree that, if we continue to go down the same path that we are going down today, the world as we know it will change—and it will change dramatically for the worse.”31 Even in the 97 percent studies, which we’ll look at in a moment, there is nothing resembling “97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that . . . the world as we know it will change . . . dramatically for the worse.” Kerry is pulling a bait and switch—using alleged agreement about a noncatastrophic prediction about climate to gain false authority for his catastrophic prediction about climate—and the anti–fossil fuel policies he wants to pass at home and abroad.

Unfortunately, this is very common. On his Twitter account, President Obama tweeted. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”32 There was no “dangerous” in the alleged agreement—and it wasn’t “scientists,” it was “climate scientists.” This sloppy use of “science” as an authority, practiced by politicians of all parties, guarantees that we make bad, unscientific decisions.

On top of that, it turns out that the relatively mild “agreement” of the 97 percent is also a complete fabrication—which almost no one knows, because we’re taught to obey authorities rather than have them advise us with clear explanations.

One of the main papers behind the 97 percent claim is authored by John Cook, who runs the popular Web site SkepticalScience.com, a virtual encyclopedia of arguments trying to defend predictions of catastrophic climate change from all challenges.

Here is Cook’s summary of his paper: “Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”33

This is a fairly clear statement—97 percent of the papers surveyed endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gases were the main cause—main in common usage meaning more than 50 percent.

But even a quick scan of the paper reveals that this is not the case.

Cook is able to demonstrate only that a relative handful endorse “the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” Cook calls this “explicit endorsement with quantification” (quantification meaning 50 percent or more). The problem is, only a small percentage of the papers fall into this category; Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.34

Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man.35 He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it.36 In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.

The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested:

“Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.”

—Dr. Richard Tol37

“That is not an accurate representation of my paper . . .”

—Dr. Craig Idso38

“Nope . . . it is not an accurate representation.”

—Dr. Nir Shaviv39

“Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument . . .”

—Dr. Nicola Scafetta40

Think about how many times you hear that 97 percent or some similar figure thrown around. It’s based on crude manipulation propagated by people whose ideological agenda it serves. It is a license to intimidate.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43920882)

But I. Not here to to convince anyone. The doubters already won.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43922358)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43922542)

Look at the predictions for where we’d be now that we’re made in the 90s. Look at the predictions for fossil fuels too. And food production. There is an inherent inability of scientists and modelers to account for human ingenuity and the ways we can solve problems.

When you account for the fact that many of the predictions for how this will play out are exaggerated for effect, and for the likelihood that, like every other predicted crisis, human ingenuity will help, then it’s kind of silly to sit here and assume we’re destined for Thunderdome.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43923270)

Earth's atmosphere has had much higher concentrations of CO2 over hundreds of millions of years, so obviously more things influence atmospheric CO2 than just human activity, though the run up we have seen in the last couple of centuries is probably mostly due to burning stuff. During the Cambrian, when CO2 levels were very high (4000-6000 ppm), average global temperature is believed to have been around 72 F. vs about 56 F today. Climate change, for whatever reason it occurs, is not in and of itself going to destroy civilization, but how humans adapt to it will determine our fate. During the last glacial peak sea level was about 400 feet lower than it is today. If all ice melted it would raise sea level about 230 feet from where it is today. Without humans the planet has been at both of those extremes more than once. Our ice age ancestors painted pictures on walls of caves that are now under water, yet here we are.

From Wikipedia "Carbon Dioxide in the Earth's Atmosphere":

"There is evidence for high CO2 concentrations between 200 and 150 million years ago of over 3,000 ppm, and between 600 and 400 million years ago of over 6,000 ppm.[23] In more recent times, atmospheric CO2 concentration continued to fall after about 60 million years ago. About 34 million years ago, the time of the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event and when the Antarctic ice sheet started to take its current form, CO2 was about 760 ppm,[34] and there is geochemical evidence that concentrations were less than 300 ppm by about 20 million years ago. Decreasing CO2 concentration, with a tipping point of 600 ppm, was the primary agent forcing Antarctic glaciation.[35] Low CO2 concentrations may have been the stimulus that favored the evolution of C4 plants, which increased greatly in abundance between 7 and 5 million years ago.[32] Based on an analysis of fossil leaves, Wagner et al.[36] argued that atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the last 7,000–10,000 year period were significantly higher than 300 ppm and contained substantial variations that may be correlated to climate variations. Others have disputed such claims, suggesting they are more likely to reflect calibration problems than actual changes in CO2.[37] Relevant to this dispute is the observation that Greenland ice cores often report higher and more variable CO2 values than similar measurements in Antarctica. However, the groups responsible for such measurements (e.g. H.J. Smith et al.[38]) believe the variations in Greenland cores result from in situ decomposition of calcium carbonate dust found in the ice. When dust concentrations in Greenland cores are low, as they nearly always are in Antarctic cores, the researchers report good agreement between measurements of Antarctic and Greenland CO2 concentrations."

Moreover, CO2 is not the only factor in climate. It's a complicated system and the scientific understanding and modeling is still pretty rudimentary. Even without human activity history tells us that climate varies, and not just over geologic time scales but also over much shorter periods.

My bottom line: climate changes. Human activity influences climate change, but we are still uncertain how and by how much. Common sense would seem to indicate it is a bad idea to throw more shit into the air than absolutely necessary, but the key to prospering long run is to be adaptable. A full scale nuclear exchange is a different scenario.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43921337)

Your point is that we will adjust as a species. The problem w all of us who say this is that we won't be the ones doing most of the "adjusting."

And it's pretty clear it won't be just a matter of a few changes in expectation. It's going to be much much worse than that, unfortunately.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43922612)

Spaceporn is right that Carbon levels are catastrophic and that the oceans are getting completely fucked. That the people behind that television show are demonic has nothing to do with it.

If ((libs)) have grabbed onto the environment to use as a political cudgel -- and have had success with it -- its only because "conservatives" have proven themselves worthless at preserving any of the necessary requirements for families and flourishing. Of course we need high-IQ people immersed in western culture and who value free speech and social trust, and an economy to harness their work. But if the soil is toxic from Nitro, the Oceans are fucked by carbon, if biological diversity is plummeting, if our LAND is trash, there's no point.

So-called "conservatives" had better evolve past haha-lib-predictions-were-wrong, fuck-the-spotted-owl shit or we may as well just cede the future to shitlibs

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43922646)

Conservatives have been very good at actual climate protection and conservation. Go join your state hunting and fishing association and see what their perspectives are when it comes to dumping garbage into the lakes or spewing toxic waste into the air. I mean, look at the original founding of the EPA for god's sake.

The reason why it took us till the 60/70s to really start to clamp down on real environmental damage is because a society has a hierarchy of needs. You can't talk to people about cutting out mercury usage when people don't have a reliable source of heating for their homes. You are seeing the same trend in China today. As wealth grows and people get a buffer when it comes to basic needs, then they start to care about the environment (and not in the silly CO2 way, but in the "I don't want the factory dumping toxic sludge into the river that I drink from).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43923123)

ALSO, whatever effects humans do have on the temperature etc are likely swamped by the sun and other natural phenomenon...again why is this not natural?

And why was it that the elites have changed 'global warming' to 'climate change'? Well, because global warming was easily refuted by evidence...and truth is that climate change/global warming etc is just a designed distraction to pull political activism away from economic issues like worker rights, wages, benefits, healthcare, etc...and again, all this SHOULD be obvious

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43923142)

It’s pretty simple. Bold claims require strong evidence. You want to talk about the Earth warming, fine, show me some data and we’re good. You want to talk about CO2 PPM in the atmosphere, fine same deal. You want to say we’re already past the tipping point toward a dystopian, civilization disrupting nightmare? Ok bro now we’re going to need some really strong evidence. And no, the last point doesn’t inexorably flow from the first two in the same way that looking at farm yields in the 1800s to forecast 21st century world hunger doesn’t work.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5025547&forum_id=2#43923520)