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Growing up in California in the '80s and '90s, I recall seeing maps showing how rising ocean levels would flood the Sacramento valley with ocean water and turn

Growing up in California in the '80s and '90s, I recall seeing maps showing how rising ocean levels would flood the Sacramento valley with ocean water and turn the California coastline into a chain of islands by 2010 or so. One has to wonder for how long these alarmists will be able to get away with these doomsday predictions which continually fail to materialize before they go back to the basics; let's keep the water and air clean because we gotta drink and breathe that stuff. Maybe you can't get the big research bucks with arguments like that, but I think you'll get far better results in terms of actually changing human activity.

lazyjones 7y ago
Some of the extremely dangerous sources of pollution actually get away with it due to the focus on CO2 and global warming, e.g. shipping - its CO2 emissions contribution is insignificant, but: > Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9% of the sulphur oxides.[2][28] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings Nobody thinks about this anymore when they buy their fancy new PV panels from China, or their organically grown tropical fruit.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  I don't think you appreciate the relative risk from CO2 pollution (or really, warming in general which then brings CH4 and water vapor into the mix). Marine shipping uses the dregs of refining: bunker fuel. The have absolutely enormous two-cycle engines that run on something in the neighborhood of tar and motor oil. It is an inefficient combustion with trash fuel. NO2 and SO2 is bad, but it's nowhere near the danger of global warming, and shipping is otherwise extremely efficient in terms of carbon intensity/kg/km cargo shipped. Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells (ie, building local factories, the cost of time until they are operating, cost of building up upstream supply chains, and then more prosaic PV vs baseline grid carbon intensity per kwh consumed?). I think you'd find there is some nuance in what is optimal. Shipping produce vs local and seasonal is a big waste, agreed. All of that is refrigerated multi-modal, too, and ships are hardly the worst offenders in that logistic chain. I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to get pulled out as a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.
  - Cyberdog 7y ago
    I mean, you just kind of proved our point, here. You immediately started talking about how CO2 will cause warming, and so many people like me are just gonna tune out from there because we're so desensitized from all this warming false alarmism. I'm sorry, maybe there really is some merit to your words, but the boy has cried wolf too many times. Do you have any arguments about how and why we should save the earth that don't involve warming? Let's try one of those.
    - throwaway5752 7y ago
      I'm going to focus on the phrase "false alarmism". It is super foreign to me, since I look at IPCC reports, live temp/precip reports, I look at meta discussions around why reports aren't lining up to observations... everything there is mind-numbingly terrible. You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD. The more you know about this problem, the more and more terrifying and depressing it gets. I don't know that you have an accurate and fair history of the science of global warming, or appreciate the degree of knowledge we have built up - particularly in the last 20 years, as the urgency of the situation has become clearer. I used the analogy of a Ford Pinto (1970s tech) to a Tesla Model 3 (current tech) to drive home the gulf between the knowledge we had 50 years ago and what we have now. I will remind you that Steve Jobs, when faced with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, chose alternative medicine and diet vs conventional medical treatment. I just think that anecdote is instructive.
      - Cyberdog 7y ago
        Okay, perhaps you are seeing predictions that number X will increase by Y by year Z actually come true. I'm talking about the predictions that the Sacramento valley will flood, as I mentioned upthread, and various other doom-and-gloom predictions that clearly haven't come to be. > You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD. The anti-vax movement shows us the danger of correlating things like global warming and PTSD. Do you have more evidence of causation than those people do? Anyway, I'll ask again. Can you give an environmentalist argument that doesn't involve warming scares? I challenge you. One wouldn't think this would be that difficult.
Retric 7y ago
Can you link them? I suspect they where showing 2100’s, but you are recalling them as 2010’s. We are a little above the 1990 IPCC predictions for sea level rise, but 1-2mm per year was never going to produce drastic changes in 30 years. PS: It’s actually CO2 releases that are significantly below projections. Considering this was in many ways an intentional change, it’s hard to call old CO2 predictions wrong, just pessimistic.
- Cyberdog 7y ago
  > Can you link them? I'm afraid I cannot provide links to original material from my childhood 25-30 years ago, no. I do explicitly remember seeing predictions of this sort of doom which were well within my lifetime, though.

lazyjones 7y ago

Some of the extremely dangerous sources of pollution actually get away with it due to the focus on CO2 and global warming, e.g. shipping - its CO2 emissions contribution is insignificant, but: > Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9% of the sulphur oxides.[2][28] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings Nobody thinks about this anymore when they buy their fancy new PV panels from China, or their organically grown tropical fruit.

throwaway5752 7y ago
I don't think you appreciate the relative risk from CO2 pollution (or really, warming in general which then brings CH4 and water vapor into the mix). Marine shipping uses the dregs of refining: bunker fuel. The have absolutely enormous two-cycle engines that run on something in the neighborhood of tar and motor oil. It is an inefficient combustion with trash fuel. NO2 and SO2 is bad, but it's nowhere near the danger of global warming, and shipping is otherwise extremely efficient in terms of carbon intensity/kg/km cargo shipped. Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells (ie, building local factories, the cost of time until they are operating, cost of building up upstream supply chains, and then more prosaic PV vs baseline grid carbon intensity per kwh consumed?). I think you'd find there is some nuance in what is optimal. Shipping produce vs local and seasonal is a big waste, agreed. All of that is refrigerated multi-modal, too, and ships are hardly the worst offenders in that logistic chain. I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to get pulled out as a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.
- Cyberdog 7y ago
  I mean, you just kind of proved our point, here. You immediately started talking about how CO2 will cause warming, and so many people like me are just gonna tune out from there because we're so desensitized from all this warming false alarmism. I'm sorry, maybe there really is some merit to your words, but the boy has cried wolf too many times. Do you have any arguments about how and why we should save the earth that don't involve warming? Let's try one of those.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    I'm going to focus on the phrase "false alarmism". It is super foreign to me, since I look at IPCC reports, live temp/precip reports, I look at meta discussions around why reports aren't lining up to observations... everything there is mind-numbingly terrible. You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD. The more you know about this problem, the more and more terrifying and depressing it gets. I don't know that you have an accurate and fair history of the science of global warming, or appreciate the degree of knowledge we have built up - particularly in the last 20 years, as the urgency of the situation has become clearer. I used the analogy of a Ford Pinto (1970s tech) to a Tesla Model 3 (current tech) to drive home the gulf between the knowledge we had 50 years ago and what we have now. I will remind you that Steve Jobs, when faced with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, chose alternative medicine and diet vs conventional medical treatment. I just think that anecdote is instructive.
    - Cyberdog 7y ago
      Okay, perhaps you are seeing predictions that number X will increase by Y by year Z actually come true. I'm talking about the predictions that the Sacramento valley will flood, as I mentioned upthread, and various other doom-and-gloom predictions that clearly haven't come to be. > You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD. The anti-vax movement shows us the danger of correlating things like global warming and PTSD. Do you have more evidence of causation than those people do? Anyway, I'll ask again. Can you give an environmentalist argument that doesn't involve warming scares? I challenge you. One wouldn't think this would be that difficult.

Retric 7y ago

Can you link them? I suspect they where showing 2100’s, but you are recalling them as 2010’s. We are a little above the 1990 IPCC predictions for sea level rise, but 1-2mm per year was never going to produce drastic changes in 30 years. PS: It’s actually CO2 releases that are significantly below projections. Considering this was in many ways an intentional change, it’s hard to call old CO2 predictions wrong, just pessimistic.

Cyberdog 7y ago
> Can you link them? I'm afraid I cannot provide links to original material from my childhood 25-30 years ago, no. I do explicitly remember seeing predictions of this sort of doom which were well within my lifetime, though.