4 ms·

I suspect more deniers just think it will be the next generations problem rather than something that entirely doesn't exist, personally

vkou 5y ago
I think denialism has moved on to 'We're fine as we are, this is a problem that developing countries should be solving.'
- eli 5y ago
  I think the more important headline is the numbers of climate change deniers is shrinking and the number of people who want to take action is growing. Half of all voters say it is a "critical threat," up from 40% in 2017 according to https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/paris-agreement-climate-change-threat-poll/ https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/paris-agreement-climat...
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Unfortunately the difficulty increasing that percentage isn't linear. It'll probably look like the vaccine rollout where there's a pretty hard dropoff in increases past a little over 50%.
    - eli 5y ago
      10 points in 4 years is pretty good! And this is from April; I wonder if it'd be different now after this brutal summer. But yeah the real problem is the gains in concern came pretty much entirely from Democrats and Independents.
      - frenchyatwork 5y ago
        Well, if science advances one funeral at a time, an increasingly hostile and less inhabitable planet may give us opportunity for advancement ...
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Or that if we all just bought electric cars that the problem would be solved. Nobody seems to appreciate the scale at which this is operating. The mass of the atmosphere is 5 x 10E15 tons. To heat that up by 1.5 degrees is off my scale of intuitive comprehension by a couple of orders of magnitude.
  - polotics 5y ago
    The sun is doing most of the warming work, we have just tightened our greenhouse! There's the order of magnitude you needed. Also the troposphere, other side of the co2 window-pane, is getting correspondingly colder..
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      > The sun is doing most of the warming work What other heat source would there be other than geothermal or fission? > Also the troposphere, other side of the co2 window-pane, is getting correspondingly colder.. As a result of trapping more heat inside I presume?
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    There is about 10t of atmosphere per square meter. It is the same mass as 10m of water. A lake with 10m of water is very shallow one and can heat up many degrees C even in a single sunny day. And air is no water, it has much less heat capacity. The global warming is not stalled at all by waiting to heat up the atmosphere. The state of atmosphere is a result of balance of huge flows of energy. The atmosphere itself, as immense as it is, holds very little energy and if given chance would heat up to kill us all in couple of days. The balance is influenced by a lot of factors like how much of energy is being absorbed by ground or reflected back to space. By consistently adding a small amount of CO2 to atmosphere we keep a tiny part of energy from reflecting back to space. And by allowing the ice to melt the amount of energy reflected back gets even smaller (as ice reflects more than dirt). These very small differences in albedo are enough to cause all that mayhem. The reason the global warming stalled for a long time is actually our oceans dissolving CO2. Now, the oceans' ability to dissolve more CO2 is reducing and removing CO2 no longer keeps up with us adding more of it.
monocasa 5y ago
That's not my experience, at least for those denying while not in policy positions to do anything about it. They're actually fairly responsive to "let's really make sure we're not making our grand kids lives harder" kind of arguments if phrased in a way that doesn't set off preprogrammed responses. They've just been so inundated with propaganda that they take the terms "act of god" so literally that they don't believe at a base level that humanity has the power to modify climate in ways that'll hurt us in the long term. Sort of that Teddy Roosevelt line of thinking; when he heard that buffalo were going extinct he organized a hunting party to not miss out before they were all gone. The idea is that any problems we cause, we'll be able to fix after the fact or won't really matter. The idea of being shepherds of the earth rather than simply inhabitants is a very new one, at least among western cultures.

vkou 5y ago

I think denialism has moved on to 'We're fine as we are, this is a problem that developing countries should be solving.'

eli 5y ago
I think the more important headline is the numbers of climate change deniers is shrinking and the number of people who want to take action is growing. Half of all voters say it is a "critical threat," up from 40% in 2017 according to https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/paris-agreement-climate-change-threat-poll/ https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/paris-agreement-climat...
- monocasa 5y ago
  Unfortunately the difficulty increasing that percentage isn't linear. It'll probably look like the vaccine rollout where there's a pretty hard dropoff in increases past a little over 50%.
  - eli 5y ago
    10 points in 4 years is pretty good! And this is from April; I wonder if it'd be different now after this brutal summer. But yeah the real problem is the gains in concern came pretty much entirely from Democrats and Independents.
    - frenchyatwork 5y ago
      Well, if science advances one funeral at a time, an increasingly hostile and less inhabitable planet may give us opportunity for advancement ...
jacquesm 5y ago
Or that if we all just bought electric cars that the problem would be solved. Nobody seems to appreciate the scale at which this is operating. The mass of the atmosphere is 5 x 10E15 tons. To heat that up by 1.5 degrees is off my scale of intuitive comprehension by a couple of orders of magnitude.
- polotics 5y ago
  The sun is doing most of the warming work, we have just tightened our greenhouse! There's the order of magnitude you needed. Also the troposphere, other side of the co2 window-pane, is getting correspondingly colder..
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > The sun is doing most of the warming work What other heat source would there be other than geothermal or fission? > Also the troposphere, other side of the co2 window-pane, is getting correspondingly colder.. As a result of trapping more heat inside I presume?
- lmilcin 5y ago
  There is about 10t of atmosphere per square meter. It is the same mass as 10m of water. A lake with 10m of water is very shallow one and can heat up many degrees C even in a single sunny day. And air is no water, it has much less heat capacity. The global warming is not stalled at all by waiting to heat up the atmosphere. The state of atmosphere is a result of balance of huge flows of energy. The atmosphere itself, as immense as it is, holds very little energy and if given chance would heat up to kill us all in couple of days. The balance is influenced by a lot of factors like how much of energy is being absorbed by ground or reflected back to space. By consistently adding a small amount of CO2 to atmosphere we keep a tiny part of energy from reflecting back to space. And by allowing the ice to melt the amount of energy reflected back gets even smaller (as ice reflects more than dirt). These very small differences in albedo are enough to cause all that mayhem. The reason the global warming stalled for a long time is actually our oceans dissolving CO2. Now, the oceans' ability to dissolve more CO2 is reducing and removing CO2 no longer keeps up with us adding more of it.

monocasa 5y ago

That's not my experience, at least for those denying while not in policy positions to do anything about it. They're actually fairly responsive to "let's really make sure we're not making our grand kids lives harder" kind of arguments if phrased in a way that doesn't set off preprogrammed responses. They've just been so inundated with propaganda that they take the terms "act of god" so literally that they don't believe at a base level that humanity has the power to modify climate in ways that'll hurt us in the long term. Sort of that Teddy Roosevelt line of thinking; when he heard that buffalo were going extinct he organized a hunting party to not miss out before they were all gone. The idea is that any problems we cause, we'll be able to fix after the fact or won't really matter. The idea of being shepherds of the earth rather than simply inhabitants is a very new one, at least among western cultures.