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It's too bad that reality doesn't really care if you have clever accounting tricks to show that "things aren't really as bad as they look!" The only number tha

It's too bad that reality doesn't really care if you have clever accounting tricks to show that "things aren't really as bad as they look!" The only number that matters at all is global green house gas emissions. We need to get that to zero, and it has continued to go up. Imagine you have a drinking problem and your doctor tells you you need to stop drinking alcohol or you will suffer liver failure. You can argue all day about what percentage of your drinks are alcoholic. "Doctor, I drink 3 cans of coke and only 12 G&Ts now, not 1 can of coke and 24 beers like I used to, I went from 4% of my drinks being non-alcoholic to 20%!" If your daily total alcohol consumed keep rising you have a problem. That's the situation we're in with co2 emissions. There are many clever ways to make it look like everything is fine, but reality doesn't care. If our global CO2 emissions continue to rise we have absolutely no hope.

akshatrathi 6y ago
Totally right that what matters is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Tackling them, however, is going to take all our muscles. Many climate deniers have used the 80% of primary energy from fossil fuel figure as a way to claim it's too hard to do anything about the problem or to say there's been little progress. That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative.
- wnevets 6y ago
  >That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative. There is your first mistake, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves in to. There are literally people denying covid is real/serious while they or their love ones drown in their fluids.
  - thinkharderdev 6y ago
    I don't think this is a useful way to think about it: 1. You don't need to convince literally everyone. There are still some people who believe the Earth is flat and probably always will be, but it is not super-relevant to collective actions because they are a tiny minority 2. People do in fact change their minds on things. It usually just happens on larger time scales so while one article isn't moving the needle, the accretion of many articles and arguments can change population-wide beliefs. 3. The population of people with an opinion on any given topic is not static. Even if any individual never changes their mind, the composition of the population can change if new people are forming opinions in one way more often. Science progresses one funeral at a time and all that....
    - wnevets 6y ago
      The harsh reality is a facebook "meme" about how climate change is a hoax created by "globalist" to take away your rights is way more effective than a nuance article from the "lamestream" media trying to explain the energy efficiency of coal power plants. If the goal is to convert science deniers or correct their disinformation this was a complete and utter failure.
lettergram 6y ago
It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc. I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals. CO2 is also far less damaging to the body. Not saying it’s not important, just I think we’d be better off focusing on issues such as pesticide contamination
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing Then explain why China, despite having more than four times as many people as the US, only has twice the CO2 emissions? Can you even link a single study that puts anything but fossil fuel use as the primary contributor (by a wide margin) to atmospheric CO2? Because I couldn't in several minutes of googling. > Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals If that were true, climatologists wouldn't be so concerned about the problem, they'd just be telling us to plant some more trees.
  - briantakita 6y ago
    How do you know China's or the USA's CO2 emissions? Do you have both countries placed into a container with tools to measure the aggregate CO2 output? Science is based on empirical observation. The map is not the territory & models are often wrong. We don't even know how often the models are wrong.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      I am trusting the climate scientists who produced this data because they are the people who've spent their schooling and careers studying this sort of thing and their work has been vetted by the scientific community. If you have a better standard of judgement then by all means present contradictory data.

akshatrathi 6y ago

Totally right that what matters is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Tackling them, however, is going to take all our muscles. Many climate deniers have used the 80% of primary energy from fossil fuel figure as a way to claim it's too hard to do anything about the problem or to say there's been little progress. That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative.

wnevets 6y ago
>That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative. There is your first mistake, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves in to. There are literally people denying covid is real/serious while they or their love ones drown in their fluids.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  I don't think this is a useful way to think about it: 1. You don't need to convince literally everyone. There are still some people who believe the Earth is flat and probably always will be, but it is not super-relevant to collective actions because they are a tiny minority 2. People do in fact change their minds on things. It usually just happens on larger time scales so while one article isn't moving the needle, the accretion of many articles and arguments can change population-wide beliefs. 3. The population of people with an opinion on any given topic is not static. Even if any individual never changes their mind, the composition of the population can change if new people are forming opinions in one way more often. Science progresses one funeral at a time and all that....
  - wnevets 6y ago
    The harsh reality is a facebook "meme" about how climate change is a hoax created by "globalist" to take away your rights is way more effective than a nuance article from the "lamestream" media trying to explain the energy efficiency of coal power plants. If the goal is to convert science deniers or correct their disinformation this was a complete and utter failure.

lettergram 6y ago

It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc. I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals. CO2 is also far less damaging to the body. Not saying it’s not important, just I think we’d be better off focusing on issues such as pesticide contamination

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing Then explain why China, despite having more than four times as many people as the US, only has twice the CO2 emissions? Can you even link a single study that puts anything but fossil fuel use as the primary contributor (by a wide margin) to atmospheric CO2? Because I couldn't in several minutes of googling. > Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals If that were true, climatologists wouldn't be so concerned about the problem, they'd just be telling us to plant some more trees.
- briantakita 6y ago
  How do you know China's or the USA's CO2 emissions? Do you have both countries placed into a container with tools to measure the aggregate CO2 output? Science is based on empirical observation. The map is not the territory & models are often wrong. We don't even know how often the models are wrong.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    I am trusting the climate scientists who produced this data because they are the people who've spent their schooling and careers studying this sort of thing and their work has been vetted by the scientific community. If you have a better standard of judgement then by all means present contradictory data.