Primarily posting the article tongue and cheek but surely we can do a little better.
I personally have no problem with new technology overtaking old (electric vs oil) - if it’s done in a free market fashion. When our govt begins to propagate the production of one while artificially handicapping the other it’s a problem for a variety of reasons.
I do have a bit of a conservationist bend, however. Hard to square in principle as I believe in property owner rights and business investment/development, but I recognize that the world over we turn nature in to concrete and while exact rates of impact are contested, this deforestation logically creates an imbalance as our natural air filters are limited.
I’ve always found rooftop landscaping to be a pretty cool idea. Entire cities could simply move displaced landscaping from the ground to a buildings roof. Would be a cool spot to take work breaks too.
I wouldn’t want to legally regulate residential landscaping but surely home builders could be optionally incentivized to plant more. I live in Texas, which is one of the states absorbing significant relocation (and has been for a long time), and new neighborhoods across the state pop up seemingly over night. The current trend for the vast majority of them seems to be to mow everything down, even the old 300 year oak trees, and plant a singular baby tree in the front yard of each house where there’s room for multiple. It looks dumb too. Even as the single tree grows, there’s sort of a bare look if owners don’t supplement. The lower priced neighborhoods are often not even sodded in the backyard. Depending on where in the state you are, this could look like trading 5-10 trees for one, or as many as 20-30+ on a common sized neighborhood lot over miles and miles and miles of new neighborhoods.
Ranching is big here and I have no problem with it (my in-laws are cattle ranchers), but ranchers clear tons of hay fields to support feeding needs. Outside of Texas’ plains region, this means removing trees as well. Not sure what the fix is for this but even rural communities are altering landscape in a big way.
We are always going to pollute. It’s not like we are going revert back to a pre-modern era. And while governing some of that pollution does make sense and is currently happening, believing we can totally eradicate it is nonsense. Trading oil for heavy metal pollution during lithium battery production for example. But we can better preserve our natural defenses and I’m surprised there’s not more focus on this than swapping one pollutant for another.
This is my stance on it as a conservationist too. I’m not naive enough to believe we will free ourselves from oil but a lot of practices that are still ongoing do more harm than good. There is too much data pointing to that fact (I used to a be a big climate change/human impact denier, but there is simply too much data to ignore now).
Rooftop gardens are neat. I have also seen where gardens are placed in almost like a netting structure over the street and tied to the two buildings. Could be a cool aesthetic while also beneficial.
The other major issue is terrible agriculture practices that cause runoff into the waterways causing the cyanobacteria blooms. It’s a huge problem here in Florida. It’s a been a problem even in what used to be the pristine waters of Green Bay, WI.
I can’t get here mentally. The energy oil provides is immense and literally fuels our modern world. Its upside is probably impossible to measure from any purely objective standpoint, and especially when you consider byproducts. I do think refining could be improved, especially punitive action for breaking regulation. I spent a small amount of time early in my career in the industry and covered both upstream and midstream segments. Upstream is actually pretty tightly controlled aside from a handful of accidents. Midstream is too, but things like buying carbon offsets or paying fines smaller than the cost of coming in to compliance sort of negate the reasoning behind compliance to begin with, and are standard practices that could be cleaned up and probably should be from any objective point of view. And vehicle emissions could be more tightly regulated. I have a loud and proud Harley and I like it that way, and a Chevrolet Silverado, but can appreciate that in the grand scheme, across millions of vehicles, tighter emission control could be implemented than we currently see. This is a more practical approach to me than rushing a technology switch with its own set of problems.
Mining creates a lot of runoff too, as does semi-conductor production - in addition to immense water use to the point it can alter flow rates and stream beds. This is one area where I would circle back to swapping one pollutant for another and would suggest a more practical fix is to just do a little better with what we have at this time.
The nets do sound cool. I have noticed cities landscaping more around overpasses and in empty areas not likely to develop and it does help the aesthetic quite a bit. More greenery would be neat to see and could be fun to play with. Maybe land bridges across busy roadways to make practical use of them too or something.
I think we are at the same point here and just got our wires crossed. Oil is not going anywhere - that’s just reality. But to ignore the issues associated with it is also denying reality (which you alluded to).
I’m curious. After 2 1/2 years does the OP @anna_5588 still have the same level of anxiety about this?
Had I the gift of free time and the talent of rhetoric, I could present all of the following with fewer errors and better words, but this will have to do.
The reader need not accept the arguments from me; feel free to discuss what I write with any scientist or engineer you trust, or indeed anyone involved with and perhaps trained in the natural sciences. They’ll probably explain these ideas much better.
None. Not a single one. I also did not personally develop the Schrödinger equation or fast Fourier transform, yet I rely on their validity for my work. I don’t think you actually believe one needs to personally check every single aspect of human knowledge and expertise in order to accept or benefit from them, not least because it’s impossible.
I am not competent in this field, and I would never try to tackle it on an equal footing with an expert. If this involved things at the opposite length and time scale, I could perhaps wade in, but for me, at this level of detail, hic sunt dracones.
One of the admonitions traditionally given to the recipient of a doctorate is to always know and make known the limits of their expertise. It is a malaise of the current society we live in that anyone with sufficient “clout” will happily jump into a topic they knew nothing about 2 days ago with authority, often with (begging your pardon) questions such as yours. Yet for the most part, elementary questions about method and interpretation are asked and answered well before findings reach peer review, much less the layperson. The number of motivated eyeballs looking at climate change research makes it doubly likely that basic omissions such as the one you suggested will be caught and put on blast. Errors and oversights will happen of course, but the scientific method is self-correcting. The reason no one has yet provided a scientifically rigorous counter to anthropogenic climate change is because there is none. Not within the limits of our current knowledge.
Science is not about certainty. One might even argue from a philosophical perspective that certainty is impossible. What any study does is establish degrees of uncertainty. It may not be obvious to those outside the sciences and statistics, but every statement, figure, or conclusion has a degree of uncertainty baked into it, so when a scientist reads or writes 2 degrees or 40 years, the degree of uncertainty is at least implicit, or far more frequently explicit.
I might even go so far as to say that “precisely what percent impact do humans have on global warming” is a phrase that’s ultimately meaningless. I’m not sure one could explain the difference between 30% and 70% in a meaningful way. But one can say, with some measure of (un)certainty, “this is how the climate would look if human activity were different in this particular way”.
This is a completely valid and necessary question, and the answer depends on what path our species chooses. In fact, it is the only real question here.
Here again is a point I attempted to make earlier in this thread: the way to objective truth is not debate, it is the rigorous collection of data. For too many people, “debate me” is The Way, no matter the topic, and they jump into verbal jousting all too eagerly, but this is often a waste of energy. Discussing what to do and what it will cost is relevant, but debating objective reality is not. This is also why the common argument about scientists freezing out dissenting opinions is largely misdirection.
Whether the rapid injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is causing climate change cannot be determined through debate.
You could just as well leave it to politicians and public figures to determine through debate the diffusion coefficient of hydrogen in a metal lattice.
So it makes sense to follow one’s own principles or listen to politicians and your podcaster of choice when appropriation comes up, but “do your own research” is just as pointless for the facts of climate change as it is for hydrogen diffusion. I leave that to the climate scientists.
On the face of it, this is such a strong argument. “You can’t tell what’s gonna happen next week, and I should believe you know what’s gonna happen in 50 years?!”
It is bunk, however. Here’s an imperfect analogy: if I change the pressure or temperature at which a jet engine is running, an expert could tell me exactly how the fuel consumption will change, how the thrust will change, how the average velocity of the inlet and exhaust gases will change, etc. They couldn’t predict the exact number and location of all the eddies in the flow at every instant of the engine’s operation, nor could they predict the exact curve of the graph of thrust over time to the millisecond. These are different problems, and one is much, much harder than the other. Here’s another: if I exposed a deposited layer of carbon to hydrogen plasma, I could tell you with only a small degree of uncertainty how long it would take to etch the carbon away, depending on the thickness of the carbon, the energy level of the plasma, etc. What I absolutely cannot do is tell you how the carbon layer would look in profile or from above at every single moment of the etching. That is a hard, hard problem, and beyond our ability to model and predict in an economical or efficient manner.
If your claim is that we cannot trust long-term predictions of trends in a large system because we cannot make precise and accurate short-term predictions of its smaller sub-systems, you are going to have to reject a lot of science. Possibly most of it.
Everything we claim to know about any system at all boils down to mathematical representations of the elements and their interactions, i.e. models. What models are they using? The best they can build given the available data. That’s what we all use, everywhere in life, not just in (climate) science. Some models are good, some are great, and some are crap. The crap ones give worse predictions, and they are eventually discarded. That’s it.
The models are not attempting to predict the impact of humans on the entire world, are they? Just on the average temperature of the planet.
This again sounds like a solid argument, but…it really isn’t. Most models in the natural sciences exhibit a property called sloppiness. It’s why we can do any science at all! What this means in simple terms is that systems are often very sensitive to (combinations of) a few key parameters, and rather less sensitive to myriad others. The same happens to be true for greenhouse gases, as has been known since the middle of the 19th century. You could calculate a very good estimate (within 3 degrees) of average global temperature on one sheet of letter size, using a few known values.
Just like you don’t need a complete quantum mechanical description of your ingredients to make soup, you don’t need a whole-world model to meaningfully predict the average temperature of the earth with a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Arrhenius did that over 120 years ago, and the results will be incompatible with our current level of comfort on the planet.
Nice post!
It motivated me to ask Google “are we in an ice age?” It turns out we are, and everyone from the Utah Geological Survey to Wikipedia agrees!
Like you said, with so much talk about this topic you’d think info would be more widely known.
Great fun fact @Andrewgen_Receptors.
I like to play the odds. When Profectorist Poopypants has been wrong about everything for as long as anyone can remember, I’m not going to base decisions on his predictions. That doesn’t mean he will definitely never be correct, but I don’t have enough confidence in his guesses to change anything.
Again, for the benefit of anyone reading this: the above statement is, unequivocally, untrue.
Even the oldest models, running on hardware weaker than a treadmill’s, are sufficiently accurate.
“That 1990 article quoted Manabe—generally considered the father of modern climate modeling—as saying that, in some early models, “all sorts of crazy things happened … sea ice covered the tropical oceans, for example.” But in a seminal 1970 paper, the first to make a specific projection of future warming, Manabe argued that global temperatures would increase by 0.57 degrees Celsius (1.03 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1970 and 2000. The actual recorded warming was a remarkably close 0.54°C (0.97°F).”
I cannot address everything in your post. No, i don’t think every person needs to individually assess evidence themselves.
What i meant was that according to Oxygen Isotope ratios found in ice core samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet, we are in actually one of the more stable time periods in history - regarding temperature.
To translate into Fahrenheit:
Suddenly, it doesnt seem so doom and gloom anymore right?
So what I’m getting at is that most of those models predicting how much warmer the earth is going to be - only take into account the last 200 years (if we’re being generous in regards to the accuracy of scientific measurement equipment and the data recording thereof). We aren’t well equipped to forecast the future of our planet
Even if we wanted to use the projections based on carbon dioxide emissions or atmospheric measurements, do we really have accurate data on that today? Do we have accurate data from 100 years ago (tongue in cheek)?
Lets say we wanted to just look at the majority of data, there have been over 10,000 studies recalled in the last year alone.
I’m not saying that climate change isn’t happening, I’m saying that we are too confident in this narrative, and the solutions we are presenting are not economically viable.
We’re at a much bigger threat of extinction via asteroid impact. If we put HALF the yearly funding that goes to green energy - into developing an asteroid defense system, we would be able to eliminate a much more likely and pressing existential threat.
Thank God we survived.
The arrogance of man thinking he can control nature
when in essence…its all a money making and controlling of the masses scheme
@ddinante When will we know if the experts have attained enough expertise to trust their predictions about the climate of the future?
I ask because we have had many experts whose expert predictions did not pan out at all. I linked a long list of failed climate predictions from experts upthread. These aren’t fringe lunatics either, but leading scientists of the era being published in prominent newspapers, magazines and network TV. Experts from my childhood predicted everything from global cooling to rising sea levels to global famine, none of which has come to pass. I can still go enjoy Key West in a week because it has not, in fact, been covered by the ocean since 2010.
Luckily we did not choose to listen to the shrieking liberals at the time who held these expert opinions up as the reason we need to dramatically and urgently re-shape our society and economy.
Experts tell us all kinds of things regarding public policy. Experts told us that the covid vaccine would prevent the spread of the virus, for instance. Their expertise was so highly regarded that social media would censor you for questioning their expertise. Facebook actually had it in their terms of service. Many governments and private organizations would fire you if you didn’t trust the experts and get a shot which, like climate predictions, turned out to be a complete load of crap.
Experts also seem to be behind the political push to use government regulations to push electric vehicles on consumers who don’t want them. My state recently postponed a vote on an electric vehicle mandate due to…
wait for it…
widespread power outages in the state.
State Forced to Cancel Electric Vehicle Mandate Vote After Widespread Power Outages (msn.com)
What is easily predictable is the impoverishing effects that government policies like EV mandates will have on normal people. This all seems to dovetail with most modern left-wing policies that also happen to impoverish normal working people.
California is so progressive on climate and other issues that it is losing population because progressives have turned the best geography on the planet into a place that normal people don’t want to live in anymore. You need to listen to a LOT of experts to pull something like that off.
I’m not saying you’re here arguing for more of that, but pointing out that it is completely reasonable to be highly skeptical of any so-called “expert” who insists that radical social, economic or government policies are needed to save human civilization.
Many men in America’s early years felt they could do just this.
Hawthorne’s The Birth-Mark illustrates the problems he saw during his time.
At the time, scientific determinism was the prevailing ideology. If we can measure it and track it’s change - we can use it to predict the future.
To be fair, in 1846 scientists predicted the exact (within 1°) location of where Neptune based on mathematical formulae. Much of their hubris was well earned.
But when looking at the history of The Butterfly Effect…
At a time when Meteorologists used pen and paper to predict weather, one of them got lazy during a calculation and rounded to the 7th(!) decimal place instead of the standard 8th decimal. What came out the other side was a wildly different weather pattern than what was expected.
When trying it again but rounding up vs rounding down, the two still had wildly different predictions.
So when something as small as 0.00000001 change can cause a drastic change in a predictive model, it nonverbally states that measuring equipment will never be accurate enough to rely on predictive models.
Cue Butterfly Effect, and the simultaneous erosion of Scientific Determinism.
is this entire thread parody. climate change.,…
The problem of climate change is its name. You cant convince most people that the climate is changing. Arguments have been given already.
However if you name it ecological problem or polution, then most people will be on board. Heck I even bought a hybrid car, because I care about the bad air in the cities. I hate it when people idle their old engines. I always make note to people to stop idling. And I am a huge climate change denier. I would even go out and pick up trash in the neighbourhood, because I care about the environment. I have cleaned beaches and forests as well.
climate change is bullshit an a subversive political vehicle in the west. While China, India, the Malaysian area, africa along with central and south americas just fucking pollute and destroy the seas and environment.