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My wife and I visited the Tellus Museum in North Georgia yesterday, and the planetarium presentation we watched did a great job of calling out climate change de

My wife and I visited the Tellus Museum in North Georgia yesterday, and the planetarium presentation we watched did a great job of calling out climate change denial for the absurdity that it is. I'd imagine that the moral of the video flew over the heads of most of the children in attendance, but I'd like to think that it smacked their parents right in the head. Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I hear so many deniers claiming that "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" and I just have to shake my head at their ability to dismiss something that's right in their faces. As the video we watched said, human industrialization pours 100 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the volcanoes on Earth, and the volcano emissions themselves do modify climate patterns in a measurable way. Basically, we're accelerating this planet's transition into something resembling Venus.

happyscrappy 12y ago
Climate doom is as silly a dogma as climate denial. Hyperbole has poisoned the debate on both fringes, the center is much more reasonable but not as exciting as indignant outrage.
- zzalpha 12y ago
  Well, the trouble is, even the "center" positions are pretty scary. Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated. So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that. Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals. But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    You make my point for me, 40% of the people will suffer, no citation necessary. This is not science.
    - zzalpha 12y ago
      I suppose I wasn't disagreeing with you, save that I disagree that the centrist position is "not as exciting". My only point is that even the modest, "non-alarmist" positions are pretty alarming to any reasonable individual. That ain't hyperbole. It's just basic statistics. Unfortunately it's the case that the extreme hyperbole on both ends drowns out the genuine alarm people should be experiencing at the very realistic effects of a warming climate. Basically, by recalibrating everyone's expectations to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE", when you tell them "well, not everyone is gonna die, but a lot of people are gonna get screwed", the response is either "oh, you lied before, I don't believe anything you say now", or "well that doesn't so bad... I'm gonna go rollin' coal."
  - phkahler 12y ago
    >> Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated. The projections for warming over the last 15 years have not panned out. There was no rise. So the earliest projections from the alarmists have proven to be wrong.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      EDIT: Nevermind, I mixed up sea levels and temperature. Are you saying that sea levels in general haven't risen? Or that Florida in particular is somehow immune? If the former, this[¹] seems to contradict you, are you saying it's wrong, or am I reading it in a different way? ¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/File:Trends_in_global_average_absolute_sea_level,_1870-2008_%28US_EPA%29.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/F...
      - zzalpha 12y ago
        No, he's cherrypicking a start date for measuring global temperature rise--selecting 1998, which was an exceptionally strong El Nino year, resulting in an anomalously high yearly average global temperature--and then comparing subsequent yearly average temperatures based on that epoch. In essence he's comparing a trendline to a single outlier, and using that to come to an invalid conclusion. Using that sort of reasoning, it's pretty trivial to show no "warming". But it's nothing more than statistical trickery. When you look at the overall trend, it's pretty clear that global warming has continued apace, right in line with predictions made decades ago. It's actually pretty impressive how closely reality has hewed to those predictions: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-change-model-global-warming http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-c...
    - duwease 12y ago
      The argument that climate scientists claim x% of warming every decade is a straw man.. that is not a claim they have made and then failed at. They have claimed longer-term warming with short-term fluctuations (considering that carbon emissions are only one factor among many), and if you pull out to a 100-year view, that claim has been maintained. In fact, when carbon emissions as a factor is removed from model predictions for the last 15 years or so, they predict cooling.. so the "flatness" in comparison indicates that carbon emissions brought the average temperature up. In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.
  - xrange 12y ago
    Interesting factoid. There are the old remains of coral reefs in the middle of Florida, so we know that the entire state was underwater in the past.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  I don't disagree with you; there are a lot of unanswered questions. I lean more towards the hard science, being an amateur weather tracker, but I try to ignore extremism on any front. That said, I will take the word of a consensus of climatologists and meteorologists over that of politicians and religious leaders with a populist agenda, on principle alone.
pavel_lishin 12y ago
> Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I don't know that I can actually agree with this. I see a lot of snow, and a lot of cold, and a winter that started really late. But I've only lived in this part of the states for a few years. Who am I to know whether these weather patterns are normal or not? This isn't the Little Ice Age[1] - our crops aren't dying. I do believe that our climate is changing, but I believe that because there is a scientific consensus that this is so, not from any personal observations which wouldn't be rigorous anyway, and would (and should) hold about as much sway as an idiot in Congress bringing a snowball for his show-and-tell. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
- sp332 12y ago
  I'm guessing you're in one of these little blue spots? https://ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-releases-2014-global-climate-report https://ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-releases-2014-global-climate... And this isn't mentioning the awful science that was sometimes brought out as evidence of global warming (mixed in with the good, it was hard to pick them apart). It took me two years after seeing Al Gore's TED talk to consider that global warming might be a real thing.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Not quite, I'm in New York and I visited Boston shortly after their record snowfall. But by the time I got there, there was no snow - plus it was downtown. It all looked pretty much like I would expect that part of the world to look like in March.
    - rimunroe 12y ago
      Looking out my window in downtown Boston right now and there's still a bunch of snow steadily melting everywhere, but it's not nearly as bad as it was even two weeks ago.
btown 12y ago
I sometimes wonder if we did ourselves a disservice by focusing so much on the likelihood that current climate change is (in part) human-induced - it's very easy for people to get defensive when there's a blame game. Perhaps we should have marketed it as "human-mitigable climate change" - regardless of who or what is responsible, there are concrete things we can do to slow it down and prepare for it.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Perhaps we could blame it on the prehistoric life forms that turned into fossil fuels. Then we can sell it as DGW using CGI of battling against rotting zombie Utahraptors that are coming out of the ground to destroy us.
  - kaybe 12y ago
    Or maybe we should find religious reasons why emitting greenhouse gases is evil.
    - bmelton 12y ago
      If a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian can come up with the best justification for legalizing (not decriminalizing, but full-on legalization) of marijuana, I have to believe it's possible. Genesis 2:15 says "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." Note the KEEP it part. Numbers 35:33 says "You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it." Apparently, there's already a fundamental religious case for environmental protections.
    - Jtsummers 12y ago
      This shouldn't be difficult. At least for Christians they're supposed to consider themselves stewards. What good is a steward that's actively destructive towards their charge? Recycling, green (as in more plants and less concrete) development, reducing air and water pollution are all reasonable things from that perspective. Somehow, however, few ever seem to agree with me.
NhanH 12y ago
> "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" Both of them are true, the missing part is whether human is any part of either of those processes. I've been wondering for a while that whether the common slogan of "save the Earth" would have served better had it been "save the Human". Yes, it's just semantic, but it's the same as the change to calling "climate change" rather than "global warming" - human easily get caught up in language, most of the time probably just subconsciously. It also helped with not being on the extreme: it's also bad if the changes wipe out 50% of the human being on earth, which is probably magnitude more likely than wiping out 100% of us. Even if we literally nuke ourselves out of existence, chance are something will still be leftover on the Earth (unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet). Cockroaches are damn resilient.
- masklinn 12y ago
  Exactly. Carlin (George, not Dan) put it nicely in one of his last standups: > The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doin’ great! It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, and meteors, world-wide floods, tidal waves, world-wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? > The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, Folks, we’re goin’ away. We won’t leave much of a trace either, thank god for that. Maybe a little styrofoam, maybe, little styrofoam. Planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul de sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doin’? Ask those people at Pompeii, who were frozen into position from volcanic ash. How the planet’s doin’. Wanna know if the planet’s alright, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia, or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who built their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room. The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cuz that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us. > unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet We are very, very, very, very much unable to do that. We can fuck up the surface a bit but that's about it. Consider: the Chicxulub impactor delivered an estimated 100 teratons of equivalent TNT. And it didn't come close to blowing up the planet. How To Destroy The Earth[0] estimates that we'd need 25,000 gigatonnes of antimatter to blast the planet to pieces. [0] http://qntm.org/destroy http://qntm.org/destroy
gadders 12y ago
Thank god we have Climate Change as settled science, like the damage that animal fat does to our diets.
- Danieru 12y ago
  Actually some animal fat is good for us. Cutting out all animal fat leads to a poor diet. This is why science is so important. Science is about questioning everything. While we used to think animal fat was bad we've since learned otherwise. Even if we are pretty sure about something it is dangerous to shut out debate. Except that which must not be named. Any questioning of this basic fact of reality is a sure sign you are not a man of science. Only an idiot would be stupid enough to inquiry and debate. True science lovers accept the messages they heard on a video without question.
  - evanspa 12y ago
    gadders was being sarcastic.
    - gadders 12y ago
      I was, sorry Danieru. I'll try and remember the /s in future.
      - Danieru 12y ago
        Haha, don't worry I knew. Your post had fantastic delivery. I wanted to congrat you for the incredible joke. This isn't reddit I figured that comment was the best way to do so. It comes off as innocent yet re-enforces the message. Guess it was too innocent.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  Who said anything was settled? Like any science, we are always learning new things about it, and that was my point. Climate change deniers refuse to even consider the possibility that we're endangering ourselves.
refurb 12y ago
Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility? Climate scientists question it themselves[1,2]. They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change. [1] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html [2] http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2018-is-cloudy-with-record-heat-1.13344 http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...
- morganvachon 12y ago
  We should question it; that's what science is all about. But there's a huge difference between questioning something and flat out denying its existence due to politics or ignorance, or both. Those same scientists you linked to aren't throwing their hands up in the air, declaring that climate science is all a lie. Rather, they continue to study, to innovate, to question their own methods so they can improve their models and understand climate change.
- masklinn 12y ago
  > Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility? Because the vast majority of it (just about all of it outside of actual climate scientists, really) is but one more round of professional doubt-sowing, in the long line of tobacco, leaded gas, CFCs or SO2 (and with very similar people in the roles of professional doubters). > They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change. They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity.
  - refurb 12y ago
    They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity. Whoa there. If their models don't do a good job of predicting climate change, then that has a direct impact on the predicted consequences and the impact on humanity, no?
mjklin 12y ago
In Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything he makes the point that for most of its history the earth has been much colder than at present, including times where the oceans have frozen. We are living in a temporary thaw. For all we know we are helping to perpetuate this thaw rather than slip back into another ice age. Maybe human generated global warming would have had to be implemented anyway to save the species. There's just so much we don't know.

happyscrappy 12y ago

Climate doom is as silly a dogma as climate denial. Hyperbole has poisoned the debate on both fringes, the center is much more reasonable but not as exciting as indignant outrage.

zzalpha 12y ago
Well, the trouble is, even the "center" positions are pretty scary. Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated. So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that. Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals. But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  You make my point for me, 40% of the people will suffer, no citation necessary. This is not science.
  - zzalpha 12y ago
    I suppose I wasn't disagreeing with you, save that I disagree that the centrist position is "not as exciting". My only point is that even the modest, "non-alarmist" positions are pretty alarming to any reasonable individual. That ain't hyperbole. It's just basic statistics. Unfortunately it's the case that the extreme hyperbole on both ends drowns out the genuine alarm people should be experiencing at the very realistic effects of a warming climate. Basically, by recalibrating everyone's expectations to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE", when you tell them "well, not everyone is gonna die, but a lot of people are gonna get screwed", the response is either "oh, you lied before, I don't believe anything you say now", or "well that doesn't so bad... I'm gonna go rollin' coal."
- phkahler 12y ago
  >> Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated. The projections for warming over the last 15 years have not panned out. There was no rise. So the earliest projections from the alarmists have proven to be wrong.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    EDIT: Nevermind, I mixed up sea levels and temperature. Are you saying that sea levels in general haven't risen? Or that Florida in particular is somehow immune? If the former, this[¹] seems to contradict you, are you saying it's wrong, or am I reading it in a different way? ¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/File:Trends_in_global_average_absolute_sea_level,_1870-2008_%28US_EPA%29.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/F...
    - zzalpha 12y ago
      No, he's cherrypicking a start date for measuring global temperature rise--selecting 1998, which was an exceptionally strong El Nino year, resulting in an anomalously high yearly average global temperature--and then comparing subsequent yearly average temperatures based on that epoch. In essence he's comparing a trendline to a single outlier, and using that to come to an invalid conclusion. Using that sort of reasoning, it's pretty trivial to show no "warming". But it's nothing more than statistical trickery. When you look at the overall trend, it's pretty clear that global warming has continued apace, right in line with predictions made decades ago. It's actually pretty impressive how closely reality has hewed to those predictions: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-change-model-global-warming http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-c...
  - duwease 12y ago
    The argument that climate scientists claim x% of warming every decade is a straw man.. that is not a claim they have made and then failed at. They have claimed longer-term warming with short-term fluctuations (considering that carbon emissions are only one factor among many), and if you pull out to a 100-year view, that claim has been maintained. In fact, when carbon emissions as a factor is removed from model predictions for the last 15 years or so, they predict cooling.. so the "flatness" in comparison indicates that carbon emissions brought the average temperature up. In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.
- xrange 12y ago
  Interesting factoid. There are the old remains of coral reefs in the middle of Florida, so we know that the entire state was underwater in the past.
morganvachon 12y ago
I don't disagree with you; there are a lot of unanswered questions. I lean more towards the hard science, being an amateur weather tracker, but I try to ignore extremism on any front. That said, I will take the word of a consensus of climatologists and meteorologists over that of politicians and religious leaders with a populist agenda, on principle alone.

pavel_lishin 12y ago

> Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I don't know that I can actually agree with this. I see a lot of snow, and a lot of cold, and a winter that started really late. But I've only lived in this part of the states for a few years. Who am I to know whether these weather patterns are normal or not? This isn't the Little Ice Age[1] - our crops aren't dying. I do believe that our climate is changing, but I believe that because there is a scientific consensus that this is so, not from any personal observations which wouldn't be rigorous anyway, and would (and should) hold about as much sway as an idiot in Congress bringing a snowball for his show-and-tell. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

sp332 12y ago
I'm guessing you're in one of these little blue spots? https://ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-releases-2014-global-climate-report https://ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-releases-2014-global-climate... And this isn't mentioning the awful science that was sometimes brought out as evidence of global warming (mixed in with the good, it was hard to pick them apart). It took me two years after seeing Al Gore's TED talk to consider that global warming might be a real thing.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Not quite, I'm in New York and I visited Boston shortly after their record snowfall. But by the time I got there, there was no snow - plus it was downtown. It all looked pretty much like I would expect that part of the world to look like in March.
  - rimunroe 12y ago
    Looking out my window in downtown Boston right now and there's still a bunch of snow steadily melting everywhere, but it's not nearly as bad as it was even two weeks ago.

btown 12y ago

I sometimes wonder if we did ourselves a disservice by focusing so much on the likelihood that current climate change is (in part) human-induced - it's very easy for people to get defensive when there's a blame game. Perhaps we should have marketed it as "human-mitigable climate change" - regardless of who or what is responsible, there are concrete things we can do to slow it down and prepare for it.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
Perhaps we could blame it on the prehistoric life forms that turned into fossil fuels. Then we can sell it as DGW using CGI of battling against rotting zombie Utahraptors that are coming out of the ground to destroy us.
- kaybe 12y ago
  Or maybe we should find religious reasons why emitting greenhouse gases is evil.
  - bmelton 12y ago
    If a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian can come up with the best justification for legalizing (not decriminalizing, but full-on legalization) of marijuana, I have to believe it's possible. Genesis 2:15 says "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." Note the KEEP it part. Numbers 35:33 says "You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it." Apparently, there's already a fundamental religious case for environmental protections.
  - Jtsummers 12y ago
    This shouldn't be difficult. At least for Christians they're supposed to consider themselves stewards. What good is a steward that's actively destructive towards their charge? Recycling, green (as in more plants and less concrete) development, reducing air and water pollution are all reasonable things from that perspective. Somehow, however, few ever seem to agree with me.

NhanH 12y ago

> "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" Both of them are true, the missing part is whether human is any part of either of those processes. I've been wondering for a while that whether the common slogan of "save the Earth" would have served better had it been "save the Human". Yes, it's just semantic, but it's the same as the change to calling "climate change" rather than "global warming" - human easily get caught up in language, most of the time probably just subconsciously. It also helped with not being on the extreme: it's also bad if the changes wipe out 50% of the human being on earth, which is probably magnitude more likely than wiping out 100% of us. Even if we literally nuke ourselves out of existence, chance are something will still be leftover on the Earth (unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet). Cockroaches are damn resilient.

masklinn 12y ago
Exactly. Carlin (George, not Dan) put it nicely in one of his last standups: > The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doin’ great! It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, and meteors, world-wide floods, tidal waves, world-wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? > The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, Folks, we’re goin’ away. We won’t leave much of a trace either, thank god for that. Maybe a little styrofoam, maybe, little styrofoam. Planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul de sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doin’? Ask those people at Pompeii, who were frozen into position from volcanic ash. How the planet’s doin’. Wanna know if the planet’s alright, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia, or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who built their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room. The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cuz that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us. > unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet We are very, very, very, very much unable to do that. We can fuck up the surface a bit but that's about it. Consider: the Chicxulub impactor delivered an estimated 100 teratons of equivalent TNT. And it didn't come close to blowing up the planet. How To Destroy The Earth[0] estimates that we'd need 25,000 gigatonnes of antimatter to blast the planet to pieces. [0] http://qntm.org/destroy http://qntm.org/destroy

gadders 12y ago

Thank god we have Climate Change as settled science, like the damage that animal fat does to our diets.

Danieru 12y ago
Actually some animal fat is good for us. Cutting out all animal fat leads to a poor diet. This is why science is so important. Science is about questioning everything. While we used to think animal fat was bad we've since learned otherwise. Even if we are pretty sure about something it is dangerous to shut out debate. Except that which must not be named. Any questioning of this basic fact of reality is a sure sign you are not a man of science. Only an idiot would be stupid enough to inquiry and debate. True science lovers accept the messages they heard on a video without question.
- evanspa 12y ago
  gadders was being sarcastic.
  - gadders 12y ago
    I was, sorry Danieru. I'll try and remember the /s in future.
    - Danieru 12y ago
      Haha, don't worry I knew. Your post had fantastic delivery. I wanted to congrat you for the incredible joke. This isn't reddit I figured that comment was the best way to do so. It comes off as innocent yet re-enforces the message. Guess it was too innocent.
morganvachon 12y ago
Who said anything was settled? Like any science, we are always learning new things about it, and that was my point. Climate change deniers refuse to even consider the possibility that we're endangering ourselves.

refurb 12y ago

Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility? Climate scientists question it themselves[1,2]. They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change. [1] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html [2] http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2018-is-cloudy-with-record-heat-1.13344 http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...

morganvachon 12y ago
We should question it; that's what science is all about. But there's a huge difference between questioning something and flat out denying its existence due to politics or ignorance, or both. Those same scientists you linked to aren't throwing their hands up in the air, declaring that climate science is all a lie. Rather, they continue to study, to innovate, to question their own methods so they can improve their models and understand climate change.
masklinn 12y ago
> Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility? Because the vast majority of it (just about all of it outside of actual climate scientists, really) is but one more round of professional doubt-sowing, in the long line of tobacco, leaded gas, CFCs or SO2 (and with very similar people in the roles of professional doubters). > They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change. They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity.
- refurb 12y ago
  They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity. Whoa there. If their models don't do a good job of predicting climate change, then that has a direct impact on the predicted consequences and the impact on humanity, no?

mjklin 12y ago

In Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything he makes the point that for most of its history the earth has been much colder than at present, including times where the oceans have frozen. We are living in a temporary thaw. For all we know we are helping to perpetuate this thaw rather than slip back into another ice age. Maybe human generated global warming would have had to be implemented anyway to save the species. There's just so much we don't know.