4 ms·

Did you read those books? Thought so. You did, and you come up with this response? Read them again, but now without those ideologically-tainted glasses. Show

by Ourgon 5y ago

Did you read those books? Thought so. You did, and you come up with this response? Read them again, but now without those ideologically-tainted glasses. Show me where they're totally off-base and I will listen. By the way, if you had read them - which you have not - you would have known that none of these authors claim that the climate does not change, nor do they claim that human activity does not have any influence on climate change. What these authors - and many others - do not share is the conviction, nay, the sheer joy of the "climate apocalypse". This I have in common with them and with many others - but you... seem to differ? Read those books, and others. Think for yourself. Don't just blindly follow the man with the sign "the world is coming to its end, repent!". Don't drink the Kool-Aid.

acdha 5y ago
Well, I don't still have my copy of the Skeptical Environmentalist (moving cross country does that) but I bought the hard-cover when it came out because the ideologically-tainted glasses I was wearing were those of a young libertarian who loved the idea of the experts being wrong but hadn't yet learned to be just as skeptical of the knowledgeable-sounding people who were saying that. One of the big things to look at is track record: the reports by real scientists from the 1980s and 1990s have predictions which include the present and those numbers have been pretty accurate. For example, this is fully a decade old: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... The people saying “no big deal, don't worry about it” have not had the same track record. More importantly, however, is being small-c conservative: if we get rid of high pollution fuel sources it'll definitely mean less profit for the people who fund those authors’ work but for most of us the effects will be better health and living conditions with manageably higher costs in a few areas and savings in others (buying an EV instead of a big ICE SUV is a TCO savings, for example, and ditching my natural gas for a modern heat-pump saved more summer AC than it costs in the winter). In contrast, the approach of doing as little as as the fossil fuel industry wants is guaranteed to produce much greater costs and in many cases the random nature of those makes it much harder to mitigate, especially since a lot of people who primarily hear from deniers will resist any changes until it's their personal basement flooding.

by Ourgon 5y ago

acdha 5y ago

Well, I don't still have my copy of the Skeptical Environmentalist (moving cross country does that) but I bought the hard-cover when it came out because the ideologically-tainted glasses I was wearing were those of a young libertarian who loved the idea of the experts being wrong but hadn't yet learned to be just as skeptical of the knowledgeable-sounding people who were saying that. One of the big things to look at is track record: the reports by real scientists from the 1980s and 1990s have predictions which include the present and those numbers have been pretty accurate. For example, this is fully a decade old: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... The people saying “no big deal, don't worry about it” have not had the same track record. More importantly, however, is being small-c conservative: if we get rid of high pollution fuel sources it'll definitely mean less profit for the people who fund those authors’ work but for most of us the effects will be better health and living conditions with manageably higher costs in a few areas and savings in others (buying an EV instead of a big ICE SUV is a TCO savings, for example, and ditching my natural gas for a modern heat-pump saved more summer AC than it costs in the winter). In contrast, the approach of doing as little as as the fossil fuel industry wants is guaranteed to produce much greater costs and in many cases the random nature of those makes it much harder to mitigate, especially since a lot of people who primarily hear from deniers will resist any changes until it's their personal basement flooding.