yeah, that's basically it. I'm just gonna concede this argument to you right now. you win. it's gonna be awful, and people ought to do something about it.
You don't have to concede. The whole point of having a debate isn't for someone to win or lose, but to challenge one another to see new perspectives. You are challenging me, I appreciate that, and I hope I am challenging you.
no worries, it's late and I'm just getting over covid myself as luck would have it. only reason I spent as much time here today as I did is because I couldn't go to work. I'll try to come back to it tomorrow.
Co2 is acidifying oceans and destroying water based biomes critical to humanity (and other ocean life for that matter). It isn't disputed that we are causing it but I'm sure people will and have tried.
Weighing in on Crichton's argument. There is major fallacy in his argument. His argument basically boils down to that because we can't predict the future we shouldn't pay attention or take action on predictions about the future. The fallacy is that yes, no one can actually know the future whether it's the stock market or NCAA Final Four. We are dealing with inherently chaotic systems. The problem with that though is why plan on doing anything then since we don't know what the future will be exactly? Why should I bother going to work, putting money away in savings if tomorrow I might get hit by a bus or win the lottery so all of what I'm doing now will mean very little in the future. We can't accurately predict the future but this is about understanding trends and it is rational to consider trends to prognosticate trends and base actions on how those trends play out. To use my NCAA analogy if I make a bracket where 15 seeds end up in the Final Four, that is within the realm of possibility but not very likely and it would be foolish to put a bunch of money on that. Understanding historic trends and records would say that more likely higher ranked seeds will get to the Final Four for a variety of reasons. While a 15 seed making it could very well happen and with the performance of the Peacocks we can see it is possible for a 15 seed to get very far it's still rare. Given the nature of basketball it's likely due to chaotic factors that happen to play out, such as injuries to opponents. In the case of climate modeling yes there is a lot that is unknowable about it and that can't be accurately modeled. There is no way of knowing exactly in any given point in the future at any given location how much it will rain. Even so climate models aren't that far off. We have seen rises in temperature and increases in sea level that are closet to predictions made decades ago.
the short answer to the bolded part (and this applies to climate policy as well) is prudence: it is prudent to plan for the future but not wise to live entirely in the future and forego living well today. In climate terms that roughly translates into the well-known "no-regrets" approach to policy: do things that make sense to do regardless of what happens in the future (catastrophe vs nothingburger), but to resist the temptation to engage in drastic, draconian measures today that in hindsight later will prove to have been foolish if the nothingburger future is what eventually actually happens.
thanks for the health well wishes guys, I'm almost out of it but now my wife has it. in both cases very mild symptoms, like an annoying cold
Yes this is about being prudent. Prudence would dictate that we take action regarding Climate Change and sea level rise since that is what most of the models are indicating. This isn't a "nothingburger" given that we are already seeing it happen. Just in Houston alone we're seeing more frequent and significant flooding events. what was consider a 100 year flood now happens about every other year.
yeah, but you can't isolate Houston's flooding problems as climate changed-caused from other causes such as overdevelopment, poor development, and lack of appropriate planning. Your description of the 100 year flood also reflect the common misunderstanding of what that concept actually means (the 1 in 100 chance of an event occurring vs the folk idea of one in a hundred years). Not that you necessarily misunderstand that.
I will also add what I've often mentioned in this forum, and that's the observation that if we (the U.S., the world, environmentalists in general, the developed nations, all of us, "we") were really serious about cutting back on fossil fuel use in order to 'save the planet,' we would be building nuclear power plants in huge numbers starting yesterday. Until we do that, I don't believe the climate policy debate is really about climate at all, but instead is a kind of theater for other implicit political concerns.
Plenty of people who take the climate change issue very seriously are pro-nuclear. There is a split among green advocates on it, as I’m sure you’re aware.
That is exactly what it means but it is showing that the frequency of major flood events is happening more often. Yes of course other things might be contributing or exacerbating it but that doesn't rule out that Climate Change is a major contributor. Given that this was one of the specific predictions of climate change models. Again going to back prudence, it would be prudent to consider all the information and act upon what the trends are indicating. So yes HOuston shoudl address overdevelopment and poor planning because Climate Change will make those worse.
then Houston getting its flood control act together would be an excellent example of a "no-regrets" strategy that makes sense apart from the climate issue.
I'm personally ambivalent about nuclear. I agree it could be part of the solution to Climate Change but there are still many questions regarding it. As we saw with Fukushima even relatively modern reactors there are still are risk. Also one reason why more nuclear isn't being built is that they are very expensive and resource intensive to build. At a time when construction prices are already high with long lead times for concrete and steel it's not easy to build a new nuclear plant.
Yes they should and I've made this point several times that even if Climate science was bunk there are still many reasons to move away from fossil fuels. The point is though that none of this disproves anthropogenic Climate Change. If anything it supports that.
some of those concerns are minimized somewhat with so-called "small" nuclear reactors https://www.world-nuclear.org/infor...er-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx
I'm not sure who has said anything about "disproving" anthropogenic climate change. Virtually no one does that. Where there is legitimate disagreement is in other areas: the proportion of anthopogenic causation compared to natural warming (the theme I hit on earlier with the interglacial period stuff); the ability to change policies immediately versus a longer-term policy strategy; the actual science itself, including climate models; the possibility of geoengineering responses; the possible consequences of warming, both negative AND positive; etc etc etc. so "disproves anthropogenic climate change" is a distraction, a red herring and a straw man at the same time
