Climate Change: Why aren't more people concerned about it?

Search
Go

Discussion Topic

Return to Forum List
This thread has been locked
Messages 741 - 760 of total 2200 in this topic << First  |  < Previous  |  Show All  |  Next >  |  Last >>
pud

climber
Sportbikeville & Yucca brevifolia
Dec 24, 2016 - 01:41pm PT
Brother Ed,

It's party time at our house!
Lots of kids running around, good tunes, good food and great friends.

Happy holidays!
Ksolem

Trad climber
Monrovia, California
Dec 24, 2016 - 01:41pm PT
Regarding safety advances in nuclear power, one of the more significant one's is convection cooling. Relying on the principle that hot water rises and cold water falls to cool the reactor core eliminates the need to rely on circulating pumps. With convection cooling Fukushima could have been controlled. The sh*t hit the fan when the circulating pumps lost power.
AP

Trad climber
Calgary
Dec 24, 2016 - 03:23pm PT
Here is another point that may not have been covered.
One piece at the root of denialism is that many people do not understand the concept of possible outcomes and probabilities associated with these outcomes.
They think answers should be 100% right or 100% wrong and if some result or prediction has some hair on it, it must be useless for guiding our actions.
Climate modelling and prediction will never give you the correct answer for our future. Even if the models were complete and totally correct the nature of non linear dynamical systems means that model predictions are statistical.
What we can get are guidelines and ranges for the most probable outcomes.
Ken M

Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
Dec 24, 2016 - 05:11pm PT
Malemute, that is an interesting article.

It demonstrates what happens when Rick's friends are allowed to do what they want. If it were not illegal, they would bring in truckloads of waste to be dumped in Yosemite Valley.

And then would scream "SHOW ME THE STUDIES! I WANT TO SEE THE STUDIES THAT DEMONSTRATES HARM! WHO PAID FOR THE STUDIES?? LIBERAL GARBAGE SCIENCE!!
tuolumne_tradster

Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
Dec 29, 2016 - 05:40pm PT
^^^
Speaking of money, power and material interests...

According to Exxon's "Energy and Carbon -- Managing the Risks" report, Rex Tillerson & Co will not be committing to the "low carbon scenario" that would stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere at ~450 ppm & average global temp increase <3C
because the costs and the damaging impact to accessible, reliable and affordable energy resulting from the policy changes such a scenario would produce are beyond those that societies, especially the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, would be willing to bear, in our estimation.

That's a self-serving statement IMO. Seems to me that these same poor and vulnerable societies stand the most to suffer from global warming.

https://www.coursehero.com/file/14810174/Report-Energy-and-Carbon-Managing-the-Riskspdf/

Exxon estimates that,
the average American household would face an added CO2 cost of almost $2,350 per year for energy, amounting to about 5 percent of total before-tax median income. These costs would need to escalate steeply over time, and be more than double the 2030 level by mid-century. Further, in order to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations, these CO2 costs would have to be applied across both developed and developing countries.

Rex & Co are betting that the "worst case" climate modeling scenarios will never be realized. There is no "corporate" advantage to hedging their bets with a proactive CO2 reduction policy that would keep the planet from warming ~3C.
tuolumne_tradster

Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
Dec 29, 2016 - 07:04pm PT
As much as I like www.democracynow.org, I wouldn't lump Rex Tillerson in the same Climate Science denier gang with Trump or Rick Perry as Nermeen Shaikh does in the opening statement. In any case, there is a large scale effort underway to archive decades of climate science data before the Trump administration comes to power, including "a guerrilla archiving event" on servers outside the US.

So, what we’re doing in the Data Refuge effort, it’s a really large collaborative effort, with—including the Internet Archive and, as you mentioned, the folks in Toronto, as well as researchers, scholars, librarians, citizen scientists from many different places, basically creating safe channels for data that is currently stored and made accessible through federal websites and through the federal government to move to new locations so that it can—we can continue to ensure access to these facts for research. It’s also an effort to raise awareness of the value of this data and of how data is preserved and shared today.

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/29/scientists_scramble_to_protect_decades_of
tuolumne_tradster

Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
Jan 2, 2017 - 05:29pm PT
Interesting Rolling Stone interview with James Hansen...
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/will-we-miss-our-last-chance-to-survive-climate-change-w456917

...including a ~ 4 min video at the end.

Trump's Cabinet nominees are virtually all climate deniers, including the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt. Are Trump's appointments a sign that climate denialism has gone mainstream?

Climate denialism never died. My climate program at NASA was zeroed out in 1981 when the [Reagan] administration appointed a hatchet man [James Edwards] to manage the program at Department of Energy. Denialism was still very strong in 2005-2006 when the White House ordered NASA to curtail my speaking. When I objected to this censorship, using the first line of the NASA Mission Statement ["to understand and protect our home planet"], the NASA administrator, who was an adamant climate denier, eliminated that line from the NASA Mission Statement. Denialism is no more mainstream today than it was in those years.

If President-elect Trump called you and asked for advice on climate policy, what would you tell him?

What we need is a policy that honestly addresses the fundamentals. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest by including a carbon fee – that is, a straightforward tax on fossil fuels when they come out of the ground, and which is returned directly to people as a kind of yearly dividend or payment. Perhaps someone will explain to President-elect Trump that a carbon fee brings back jobs to the U.S. much more effectively than jawboning manufacturers – it will also drive the U.S. to become a leader in clean-energy technology, which also helps our exports. The rest of the world believes in climate change, even if the Trump administration doesn't.

A lot of people say you are a great scientist, but when it comes to policy, that's a whole other thing – and something you should leave to politicians.

Bullshit. What scientists do is analyze problems, including energy aspects of the problem. I got started thinking about energy way back in 1981, when I published a paper that concluded that you can't burn all the coal, otherwise you end up with a different planet. There's nothing wrong with scientists thinking about energy policy, in my opinion. In fact, if you have some scientific insights into the implications of different policies, you should say them. It's the politicians who try to stop you. And that includes people who ran NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where I worked for 33 years. Before I would go to Washington to testify, I'd sometimes get a call from the director of the center – somebody who I respect a lot and is a very good scientist and engineer. But he would tell me, "Just be sure to only talk about science, not policy."
Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Jan 3, 2017 - 08:54am PT
an interesting piece in the NYTimes raises many questions about the assertion that people can "just move" to the more climatically advantageous place...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/science/fish-climate-change-northeast.html

first question: where would that be?
second question: will the people there accept new people competing for resources?

interestingly, there seems to be no debate regarding the climate change, the oceans are getting warmer and the fish migrate where the temps are right for them... and while you can ignore as impractical and irrelevant for the current fisheries just why the oceans are warming, it would behove us to understand it and be able to plan on it...

the best science we have, and it is considerably good science, places the cause on human activity increasing atmospheric CO2. That science provides reliable predictions for the future, given various scenarios of human activity.
pyro

Big Wall climber
Calabasas
Jan 3, 2017 - 11:29am PT
first question: where would that be?
second question: will the people there accept new people competing for resources?

climate hoax will end this month!
tuolumne_tradster

Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
Jan 3, 2017 - 01:47pm PT
Trump will end climate change with a Tweet ;-(

Then he'll nominate this idiot


as his Science Adviser :-0





On the other hand, someone could convince Trump that there's $$$ to be made from Global Warming and he could become a huge supporter of Climate Science but I rather doubt this.
monolith

climber
state of being
Jan 4, 2017 - 06:41am PT
pyro

Big Wall climber
Calabasas
Jan 5, 2017 - 07:29am PT
http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/04/craziness-of-the-global-warming-debate-drives-prominent-skeptic-from-academia/?utm_campaign=TrumpPence&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social#ixzz4UooJWP2L

Climate hoax so scientist can get paid to B.S. with a calculator..
pud

climber
Sportbikeville & Yucca brevifolia
Jan 5, 2017 - 07:40am PT
Fear does strange things to people.
tuolumne_tradster

Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
Jan 5, 2017 - 08:53am PT
^^^Daily Caller^^^...Tucker Carlsen's bastion of journalistic integrity. Here's what John Stewart thinks of Tucker on Crossfire...

[Click to View YouTube Video]

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Jan 5, 2017 - 08:56am PT
I never got what Curry's issues were, on the face of it one can be critical of predictions in a constructive manner, even if those criticisms are not "popular" among your colleagues. But then I'm not in that field of science, I do know people who are...

As for what seems to be her criticism of "predictability" of the models, certainly this is something that can be quantified. To say the models are "uncertain" isn't a very big criticism, of course they are, the question is to what degree are they uncertain. And everyone here as the access to take a look... I've done it in the past, here I plot the temperature anomaly on top of the then model predictions:


the model runs where made several years ago, and represent a "prediction" which the anomaly data seem to agree with.

The range of the bands give an indication of the uncertainty of the prediction, and increase as they are projected into the future. The measurements are within the bands, and seem to track with one of three sets of models that you can see are grouped at long time trends, though this may also reflect different scenarios of CO2 increases in the atmosphere.

The bright green line is the updated data... while "the pause" was a big topic a few years ago, it doesn't seem to be a pause after all, and the increases in the temperature is tracking the expectation.

rick sumner

Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
Jan 5, 2017 - 10:14am PT
Classic cherry picking Ed.

What model runs are used? Is it all or just a selection of those in the lower band?

Why isn't RSS/UAH represented?
tuolumne_tradster

Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
Jan 5, 2017 - 01:35pm PT
That Daily Caller article^^^ is a partisan hack job. For a better understanding of Judith Curry's position, read this recent interview with her...

http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060047798

e.g.,

My way of looking at it is that the evidence that we do have [RE future climate] leads me to think that things are not as bad as what they're [Climate Models] predicting. However, if they are right — and they could be, I acknowledge that — if they are right, the policies we've put into place are woefully inadequate.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Jan 5, 2017 - 03:54pm PT
A key problem is to separate climate science from political correctness. A great many Americans in Middle America see the former as an aspect of the latter.
Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Jan 5, 2017 - 05:25pm PT
Classic cherry picking Ed.

What model runs are used? Is it all or just a selection of those in the lower band?

Why isn't RSS/UAH represented?


I put all the model runs in the plot... everyone of them from the data site... you don't have to trust me, rick, you could do it yourself.

As for the RSS data, once again, you could make your own chart... here's mine:


note that these data are normalized to the RSS data time...

I will tell you these are not cherry picked... you can confirm that by making the plots yourself from the available data. Given that you could do that, why would I cherry pick?

I don't have to...
monolith

climber
state of being
Jan 5, 2017 - 05:27pm PT
How you like your RSS now, Sumner?

Messages 741 - 760 of total 2200 in this topic << First  |  < Previous  |  Show All  |  Next >  |  Last >>
Return to Forum List
 
Our Guidebooks
spacerCheck 'em out!
SuperTopo Guidebooks

guidebook icon
Try a free sample topo!

 
SuperTopo on the Web

Recent Route Beta