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Climate Change

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by ItsMyFault, Nov 9, 2016.

  1. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Cali is a bureaucratic mess with territorial NIMBYists, and like the rest of the nation, it won't bend for things like nuclear or homeless until a crisis becomes unavoidable.

    I don't think they can't continue eating their corporations while pretending everything is great, but with multibillion dollar surpluses Newsom and Co wants to fritter away, we're still a good 3-5 years away from that.
     
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  2. Amiga

    Amiga I get vaunted sacred revelations from social media
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    Cali does it their own way. They are the leader in the transition to green energy away from fossil fuels. Disagreeing with their approach doesn't mean they aren't serious about climate change. It means you have assumed that nuclear power is a must to seriously fight climate change and refuse to consider that you could be wrong.

    As for nuclear energy, we took a big step forward with the Inflation Reduction Act.

    The Inflation Reduction Act Will Spawn Nuclear Energy’s Growth (forbes.com)
     
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  3. dmoneybangbang

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    And that’s great for France. My point is that some climate skeptics have been using nuclear energy as some sort of climate purity metric when they have been pretty steadfast against climate spending or regulation.
     
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  4. tinman

    tinman Contributing Member
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    Cali has a really bad drought, it's really going to look like the Dre / Snoop Dogg , California love video soon
    [​IMG]
    @Os Trigonum [​IMG]
     
  5. rimrocker

    rimrocker Contributing Member

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    Bleak indeed. Here's a graph showing the changes in heat stress between 2020 and 2045 for global agriculture. There's a lot of misery in these bubbles, including migration, starvation, food riots, and political uncertainty. In addition to reduced crop yields and reduced nutritional value of those crops, we have a great chance of drought across multiple continents--as we have seen this year. This is one of the reasons I don't think the current state of Economics is up to the task since most if not all of their models are based on assumptions that come out of a stable climate. It's certain food will continue to see inflationary pressures due to the basic math of less food available and more competition for it--no fiscal policy can alter that fact. Also notable, I would bet this is one of the reasons Putin went to war as the Ukrainian grain production added to Russia's would be enough to control markets worldwide in a few years. It won't be the last climate war. Change is happening fast and coming faster whether we like it or not. The only option we have is to try to steer it a bit or just give up. It's a 10,000 year decision only we can make.
    [​IMG]
     
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  6. Commodore

    Commodore Contributing Member

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  7. LondonCalling

    LondonCalling Member

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  8. Reeko

    Reeko Member

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  9. AleksandarN

    AleksandarN Member

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    So glad you take advice from a scientist that studies climate and not a self professed bit coin expert oh wait…
     
  10. Amiga

    Amiga I get vaunted sacred revelations from social media
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  11. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Cradle to grave impacts for nuclear is just as bad short term with the mining and supply uranium as it is with lithium and rare earths. As for long term, math and geological life cycles Post Jesus(+\- 5000 years) is not humanity's forte. Ultimately, the end audience isn't us, the end user, rather governments who are asked to foot tens of billions in subsidies and upfront capital investment.

    I think we should expand and pursue development on existing research posted over the past decades (modular thorium pebble bed reactors, breeder tech that reduces waste without producing weapons grade plutonium, etc) but I fear we're jumping into another lark because the existing alternatives like wind and solar have challenges without proper guidance for large scale transitioning.

    Cons pushed Carbon Credits in the 90s. That's been mostly a scam and boondoggle on all fronts.

    Liberals without a markets backed alternative swallowed that mud baby much like they swallowed a mostly unsustainable recycling model pushed by plastics and oil majors in the 70s. It has mostly been proven unsustainable and unprofitable once China decided rejecting our unsorted garbage at their ports.

    Complex solutions to complex problems merit more than a meme brought forth by single disciplined experts or gurus and require multidisciplinary collaborations like what's going on with climate change research.

    Maybe there isn't a clear consensus for a magic bullet answer, but at least the risk discovery is more rigorous
     
  12. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    Most climate scientists I’ve heard have said that no single event can be attributed solely or primarily to climate change but that if you look at the trend of events those match predictions.

    For example climate change didn’t cause Hurricane Harvey but it matches predicitons
    That warmer ocean temperatures would lead to much wetter hurricanes. In recent years we e seen hurricanes get much wetter including Hurricane Fiona that just hit Puerto Rico.
     
  13. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-b...-ocean-11663618509?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

    Don’t Believe the Hype About Antarctica’s Melting Glaciers
    Two studies carefully explore the factors at play, but the headlines are only meant to raise alarm.
    By Steven Koonin
    Sept. 19, 2022 6:27 pm ET

    Alarming reports that the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking misrepresent the science under way to understand a very complex situation. Antarctica has been ice-covered for at least 30 million years. The ice sheet holds about 26.5 million gigatons of water (a gigaton is a billion metric tons, or about 2.2 trillion pounds). If it were to melt completely, sea levels would rise 190 feet. Such a change is many millennia in the future, if it comes at all.

    Much more modest ice loss is normal in Antarctica. Each year, some 2,200 gigatons (or 0.01%) of the ice is discharged in the form of melt and icebergs, while snowfall adds almost the same amount. The difference between the discharge and addition each year is the ice sheet’s annual loss. That figure has been increasing in recent decades, from 40 gigatons a year in the 1980s to 250 gigatons a year in the 2010s.

    But the increase is a small change in a complex and highly variable process. For example, Greenland’s annual loss has fluctuated significantly over the past century. And while the Antarctic losses seem stupendously large, the recent annual losses amount to 0.001% of the total ice and, if they continued at that rate, would raise sea level by only 3 inches over 100 years.

    Many fear that a warming globe could cause glaciers to retreat rapidly, increasing discharge and causing more rapid sea-level rise. To get beyond that simplistic picture, it is important to understand how glaciers have flowed in the past to predict better whether they might flow faster in the future.

    Two recent studies reported in the media focus on the terminus of glaciers—i.e., where the ice, the ocean and the ground come together. One study used an underwater drone to map the seabed at a depth of 2,000 feet, about 35 miles from the terminus of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Detailed sonar scans showed a washboard pattern of ridges, most less than 8 inches high. The ridges are caused by daily tides and serve as a record of where ice touched the seabed in the past. Researchers could read that record to infer that at some time in the past the glacier retreated for half a year at more than twice the fastest rate observed between 2011 and 2019.

    The cause of the specific event at the Thwaites Glacier remains unknown, in part because the time of the rapid retreat hasn’t yet been determined. It likely happened more than 70 years ago, if not several centuries ago. But the media goes with this angle: “A ‘doomsday glacier’ the size of Florida is disintegrating faster than thought.” A correct headline would read: “Thwaites Glacier retreating less than half as rapidly today as it did in the past.”

    A second study tested the idea that freshwater from the melting of one glacier could be carried by currents along the shore to accelerate the discharge of nearby glaciers. Because global climate models are insufficiently detailed to describe the ocean near the coast, researchers constructed a special model to prove out their idea. If ocean currents can connect the discharges of distant glaciers, that would add to the complexity and variability of changes in the Antarctic ice sheet.

    Under scenarios deemed likely by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a connection between ocean currents and discharge would increase the overall discharge rate in one region of the continent by some 10% by the end of the century. But to emphasize the idea being tested, the modelers used human influences almost three times larger. Even though that fact is stated in the paper, reporters rarely catch such nuance, and the media goes with headlines such as “Antarctic Ice Melting Could Be 40 Percent Faster Than Thought” with the absurd statement that “a massive tsunami would swamp New York City and beyond, killing millions. London, Venice and Mumbai would also become aquariums.” A more accurate headline would read: “Ocean currents connecting antarctic glaciers might accelerate their melting.”

    These two studies illustrate the progress being made in understanding a dauntingly complex mix of ice, ocean, land and weather, with clever methods to infer past conditions and sophisticated computer modeling to show potential future scenarios. These papers describe the science with appropriate precision and caveats, but it is a shame that the media misrepresents the research to raise alarm. That denies the public the right to make informed decisions about “climate action,” as well as the opportunity to marvel at the science itself.

    Mr. Koonin is a professor at New York University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”



     
  14. LondonCalling

    LondonCalling Member

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    https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/05/a-critical-review-of-steven-koonins-unsettled/

    by MARK BOSLOUGHMAY 25, 2021

    I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist promising “the truth about climate science that you aren’t getting elsewhere.” Such language is a red flag. But I’ve known the author of “Unsettled” since I took his quantum mechanics course as a Ph.D. student at Caltech in the 1970s. He’s smart and I like him, so I’m inclined to give his book a chance.

    But smart scientists aren’t always right, and nice guys are still prone to biases – especially if they listen to the wrong people. In an apparent quest for fairness when he led a committee of the American Physical Society (one of my professional organizations) to assess its statement on climate change, he recruited three scientists to represent the 97% consensus, and three contrarians, presumably to speak for the other 3%. The lack of proportionate representation amplified the contrary opinions that he heard, and only in one direction. He completely ignored another, equally unfounded, contrary view. The position sometimes referred to as “doomism” (the belief that the worst-case is inevitable and it is too late to prevent it) was not represented.

    The three contrarians had a long and well-documented history of engaging in ad hominem attacks on mainstream climate scientists and misrepresenting their work. Most of the technical mistakes and misrepresentations in “Unsettled” may simply be attributable to Koonin’s trust of those advisors and lack of rigorous independent verification.

    Some books CAN be told by their cover. This is one of them.
    Unfortunately, “Unsettled” is a book you can accurately judge by its cover. Koonin’s title hints at a logical fallacy called the “strawman” argument. The blurb on the flap confirms this with its opening sentence: “When it comes to climate change, the media, politicians, and other prominent voices have declared that ‘the science is settled.’”

    A bit of fact checking by the author or publisher would have shown that this claim is not true. In fact, Koonin makes use of an old strawman concocted by opponents of climate science in the 1990s to create an illusion of arrogant scientists, biased media, and lying politicians – making them easier to attack.

    The phrase “science is settled” is repeated as Koonin’s target throughout the book, even though it has never been in common use by climate scientists and their supporters. If it were, then Google and LexisNexis searches would surely turn up instances, but the opposite is true. All the examples I found were from critics claiming that advocates of the consensus had said it.

    Bogus ‘science is settled‘ rhetoric dating back 25 years
    The earliest published use I found was a July 11, 1996, letter to the Wall Street Journal from prominent denier Fred Singer, falsely claiming that the IPCC report had been inappropriately tampered with for political purposes and that “politicians and activists” were “anxious to stipulate that the science is settled.

    Singer’s strawman gained traction a year later when William O’Keefe, the chairman of Global Climate Coalition (a lobbying organization opposed to climate action) claimed in a statement to Congress that “the [Clinton] Administration repeatedly quotes that [IPCC] sentiment out of context in its statements that the ‘science is settled.’” It stands to reason that repeated use of the phrase “science is settled” would be found in searches if true.

    Searches do, however, turn up (in the White House archive) what Clinton actually said only two weeks before Singer’s letter. “The science is clear and compelling: We humans are changing the global climate.” Nobody could argue with that at the time, nor can they now.

    There are many examples of physical problems that are difficult to model, have large uncertainties and unpredictable outcomes, put people at risk, and require policy decisions and international treaties. My primary field of planetary defense is one. It’s a clear and compelling fact that the Earth will be hit by another asteroid. We just don’t know where, when, or how bad it will be.

    The recent re-entry of an errant Chinese upper stage provides a more concrete analogy. The fact that its orbit would decay and it was going to come down was not in question, and could rightly be called “a settled fact.” Various models had huge uncertainties, disagreed with one another, and could not predict the reentry location. But those inadequacies cannot be used as evidence for any absurd claim that it was going to stay in orbit. Anyone taking that position would be guilty of the same logical fallacy (called “impossible expectations”) that Koonin directs toward climate science.

    Unpacking the ‘strawman’ argument
    Another example of a strawman argument in “Unsettled” is the claim that the term “climate change denial” is intended to invoke Holocaust denial, an assertion that triggers strong emotions. Koonin says, “I find it particularly abhorrent to have a call for open scientific discussion equated with Holocaust denial, especially since the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.” I do not doubt the sincerity of his anger, but it is misdirected.

    First, it’s aimed at a strawman. Climate change deniers are (by definition) not asking for open scientific discussion. The term “denier” is reserved for those who simply deny.

    Second, there is no evidence that the term “climate change denial” is intended to invoke Holocaust denial. Ironically, this connection was first made by the late Hollywood screenwriter Michael Crichton, speaking at a 2003 lecture at Caltech, where Koonin was provost. The word “denier” literally means “one that denies” and the term has been used this way since the 1400s. The term Holocaust denier didn’t come into widespread use until the 1980s. By the early 1990s “denier” was independently being used to describe those who deny the science of climate change.

    Third, it is climate scientists, not deniers, who have been compared to Nazis and perpetrators of genocide. In fact it was Crichton himself, in the appendix to his 2004 book “State of Fear,” who directly equated climate scientists to eugenicists who had a role in “killing of ten million undesirables.” Crichton also explicitly compared climate scientists to Trofim Lysenko, whose work he described as resulting in “famines that killed millions and purges that sent hundreds of dissenting Soviet scientists to the gulags or the firing squads.” Nevertheless, Koonin praises Crichton and cites “State of Fear” as evidence that he was an “outspoken advocate for scientific integrity” who “looked askance at the public presentation of climate science.”

    Whether one thinks it is more abhorrent to be described by the same word as those who deny other things, including the Holocaust, or to be explicitly equated to those who carried out the Holocaust is a matter of personal opinion but may indicate unconscious bias.

    More uncertainty amounts to more risk
    Koonin’s bias became evident in the introduction by his use of biased language. Climate scientists “adjust model results to obfuscate shortcomings.” “Climate alarmism has come to dominate US politics.” By speaking openly about uncertainty, he had “inadvertently broken some code of silence, like the Mafia’s omerta.”

    Koonin implies throughout the book that climate scientists have conspired to downplay uncertainty and exaggerate the risk, apparently unaware of the fact that increased uncertainty means increased risks. Nowhere does he mention that climate sensitivity is described in the scientific literature by a probability density function that is highly skewed, with a long high-sensitivity tail that we cannot discount with certainty. Risk is the integrated product of probability and consequences. It’s hard to argue that the consequences of climate change don’t get worse with sensitivity.

    If a pilot isn’t sure about having enough fuel to get you to your destination, if an astronomer isn’t sure that an incoming asteroid will miss the Earth, if your doctor isn’t sure if you have a terminal disease, if you’re not sure you turned the stove off: In each of these cases, the uncertainty is unsettling. Why does Koonin think that unsettled questions in climate science are any kind of comfort when the consequences of doing nothing can be catastrophic? “Unsettled” should leave serious scientists feeling unsettled.

    Readers would do well to see crankyuncle.com for information about logical fallacies used by climate change deniers.

    Mark Boslough is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has served on the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society Topical Group on the Physics of Climate and created, convened, and for several years chaired American Geophysical Union sessions on “Uncertainty Quantification and its Application to Climate Change.”

     
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  15. Commodore

    Commodore Contributing Member

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  16. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

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    We can't even take care of Hanford, humans aren't responsible enough for nuclear energy.
     
  17. J.R.

    J.R. Member

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    tinman likes this.
  18. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    I hope that guy is getting the medical attention he needs but again these are the type of "Look at me!" stunts that aren't helpfulbut actually end up hurting the causes they are doing. Besides the annoyance caused by their disruption it ends up associating the cause with the stunts rather than the actual issues.
     
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  19. tinman

    tinman Contributing Member
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