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If we're so good at dealing with things -- which I think it's fairly obvious we aren't -- why don't we just "deal with" carbon emissions and our effects on the
by girzel 8y ago
If we're so good at dealing with things -- which I think it's fairly obvious we aren't -- why don't we just "deal with" carbon emissions and our effects on the environment? Why opt for the more difficult to deal with scenario?
- ThomPete 8y agoThats like saying. If we are fairly good at dealing with a broken leg why don't we just deal with cancer. I don't even know where to start.
- BLKNSLVR 8y agoThat's YOUR argument. Climate Change is cancer, and localised weather-based or natural disasters are broken legs. In fact that's one of the things we've been really good at learning to deal with. Natures tendency to throw us all sorts of unexpected events. Unexpected events within a relatively stable norm that humans have been living within for thousands of years. Climate change has the distinct potential to break out of those norms.
- ThomPete 8y agoNo that's actually your argument. My argument is that we have become better and better at dealing with the potential consequences of climate change.
- baxtr 8y agoThat’s definitely not wrong. But at what cost?
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoCan you provide some examples where you believe we have become better at dealing with the potential consequences of climate change.
- ThomPete 8y agoFlooding, storms, drought, infertile land and so on. Death have gone way down not up
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoYeah, fair enough, those things are certainly true. I guess what some (most?) people mean when they say "the potential consequences of climate change" are those large scale, high impact, changes that we haven't yet seen. Which I guess could be considered a bit of moving the goal posts insofar as we've dealt with everything thrown at us thus far, as we'd otherwise not be here having this conversation. And I do, at times, find myself thinking things like "they've been saying [whatever] is on the brink of collapse for 40 years, and it hasn't happened yet". Yeah, tricky hey.
- girzel 8y agoNo. That's like saying "Why go to the trouble of putting seat belts in cars, since so many people survive car crashes?" Hopefully you'll see where to start.
- ThomPete 8y agoNot really. How does that seatbelt work? This is the problem, you dont know.
- yongjik 8y agoSo let me rephrase: you're saying that increasing carbon tax (for example) is a very dangerous policy because we don't exactly know how it would work out, but at the same time you are confident that our civilization will figure out solution to widespread crop failure, raising sea level, ocean acidification, (possibly) increased amount of superstorms, and a hundred million refugees spread across the world? Of course all mega-large-scale problems look like achievable goals, as long as you don't pay too much attention on who's gonna pay for all that ...
- ThomPete 8y agoWith what? Where have I said anything about carbon tax or that it's dangerous? That's not what I am saying at all.
- BLKNSLVR 8y agoThat's the implication inherent in your commentary. To me (and possibly most people downvoting your comments), it sounds as if you're saying that we should deal with the symptoms and not the cause because we've seen symptoms like this before so I assume we can deal with it. To reduce my position to a couple of cliches: A stitch in time saves nine An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
- ThomPete 8y ago