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We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order

• deleted 4mo ago
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• IsTom 4mo ago
  I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
  • scrollop 4mo ago
    And these same people likely fund "reports" and "news" with misinformation to make it confusing for the average person.
  • gignico 4mo ago
    Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.
    • foxglacier 4mo ago
      Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
    • mothballed 4mo ago
      So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service. Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
      • Windchaser 4mo ago
        I think this misses the mark. The outrage or sadness is not primarily over "I'm going to lose my job", but the harsh reality that much of your country is not that interested in scientific reality and realizing that your country actually is solidly on the decline. If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
        • mothballed 4mo ago
          Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
          • Windchaser 4mo ago
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo ago
    The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic. Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
    • defrost 4mo ago
      In the US, sure. In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial. TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
      • jordanb 4mo ago
        Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church. The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years. That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US. If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturday_Night_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturd...
        • defrost 4mo ago
          The Australian Commission wasn't the first effort in a known problem ongoing since first landing, it was the peak response in Australia after many decades of battle ... has there been a national effort of a similar scope in the US ?
        • deleted 4mo ago
          [deleted]
  • 999900000999 4mo ago
    In theory it can also be beneficial to historical cold countries like Russia and Canada. It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port. Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land. Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects
    • pvaldes 4mo ago
      > It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port. You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake. Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans. > Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land. Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before. Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants. But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream! Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth. The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
      • throw-the-towel 4mo ago
        AFAIK the peat is already releasing gas very quickly.
  • adornKey 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • tovej 4mo ago
      It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.
      • t0bia_s 4mo ago
        By your rethoric, do you consider yourself as climate alarmist? Maybe try to be honest to yourslef first and then you'll understand, why it is really just about opinions that vary. No need to labeling opposition.
        • tovej 4mo ago
          So you're labelling me a climate alarmist before I have made a single statements about the climate crisis? I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric. Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response? To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
          • t0bia_s 4mo ago
            Climate change denialist or alarmist is labeling. You belive in something and other don't. Your arrogance to opposite opinion does not bring anything new to dialogue.
            • tovej 4mo ago
              Yes, it's labeling. One of those labels is very accurate, the other is part of a rhetoric that the oil companies are using to drag out the climate response so that they can keep raking in profits. I'm not here to convince you of climate change. If you're actually dumb enough to deny it, then it's most likely a lost cause. The more likely scenario is that you're a bad faith troll, and then this dialogue shows others a positive example: it's ok to be a dick to climate change deniers.
  • QuantumGood 4mo ago
    It's a propaganda talking point. "Controversy" is generally as much a manufactured product as possible, because it assists propaganda goals.
  • drnick1 4mo ago
    > I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money. If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
    • esarbe 4mo ago
      That's a ludicrous proposal. A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'. This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.
    • anigbrowl 4mo ago
      Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
    • xp84 4mo ago
      Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow." It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc. Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are. I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid. They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them. All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
  • yongjik 4mo ago
    Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.
    • Theodores 4mo ago
      Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are. Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'. There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices. Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff. The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story. I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars. But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
      • JohnMakin 4mo ago
        Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all? Most cities aren’t even walkable let alone practical for bike transit due to long distance commutes and lack of infrastructure?“hurrr americans are just addicted to cars” is a really reductive take.
• KolibriFly 4mo ago
  Even if you leave intent aside, the effect is the same: it teaches researchers that funding is conditional on staying within an invisible and shifting political boundary