Science Greta Thunberg Megathread - Dax Herrera says he wouldn't have a day ago (I somewhat doubt that)

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? How can a 16-year-old girl in plaits, who has dedicated herself to the not-exactly sinister, authoritarian plot of trying to save the planet from extinction, inspire such incandescent rage?

Last week, she tweeted that she had arrived into New York after her two week transatlantic voyage: “Finally here. Thank you everyone who came to see me off in Plymouth, and everyone who welcomed me in New York! Now I’m going to rest for a few days, and on Friday I’m going to participate in the strike outside the UN”, before promptly giving a press conference in English. Yes, her second language.

Her remarks were immediately greeted with a barrage of jibes about virtue signalling, and snide remarks about the three crew members who will have to fly out to take the yacht home.

This shouldn’t need to be spelled out, but as some people don’t seem to have grasped it yet, we’ll give it a lash: Thunberg’s trip was an act of protest, not a sacred commandment or an instruction manual for the rest of us. Like all acts of protest, it was designed to be symbolic and provocative. For those who missed the point – and oh, how they missed the point – she retweeted someone else’s “friendly reminder” that: “You don’t need to spend two weeks on a boat to do your part to avert our climate emergency. You just need to do everything you can, with everyone you can, to change everything you can.”

Part of the reason she inspires such rage, of course, is blindingly obvious. Climate change is terrifying. The Amazon is burning. So too is the Savannah. Parts of the Arctic are on fire. Sea levels are rising. There are more vicious storms and wildfires and droughts and floods. Denial is easier than confronting the terrifying truth.

Then there’s the fact that we don’t like being made to feel bad about our life choices. That’s human nature. It’s why we sneer at vegans. It’s why we’re suspicious of sober people at parties. And if anything is likely to make you feel bad about your life choices -- as you jet back home after your third Ryanair European minibreak this season – it’ll be the sight of small-boned child subjecting herself to a fortnight being tossed about on the Atlantic, with only a bucket bearing a “Poo Only Please” sign by way of luxury, in order to make a point about climate change.

But that’s not virtue signalling, which anyone can indulge in. As Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and their-four-private-jets-in-11-days found recently, virtue practising is a lot harder.

Even for someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, some of the criticism levelled at Thunberg is astonishing. It is, simultaneously, the most vicious and the most fatuous kind of playground bullying. The Australian conservative climate change denier Andrew Bolt called her “deeply disturbed” and “freakishly influential” (the use of “freakish”, we can assume, was not incidental.) The former UKIP funder, Arron Banks, tweeted “Freaking yacht accidents do happen in August” (as above.) Brendan O’Neill of Spiked called her a “millenarian weirdo” (nope, still not incidental) in a piece that referred nastily to her “monotone voice” and “the look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes”.

But who’s the real freak – the activist whose determination has single-handedly started a powerful global movement for change, or the middle-aged man taunting a child with Asperger syndrome from behind the safety of their computer screens?

And that, of course, is the real reason why Greta Thunberg is so triggering. They can’t admit it even to themselves, so they ridicule her instead. But the truth is that they’re afraid of her. The poor dears are terrified of her as an individual, and of what she stands for – youth, determination, change.

She is part of a generation who won’t be cowed. She isn’t about to be shamed into submission by trolls. That’s not actually a look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. It’s a look that says “you’re not relevant”.

The reason they taunt her with childish insults is because that’s all they’ve got. They’re out of ideas. They can’t dismantle her arguments, because she has science – and David Attenborough – on her side. They can’t win the debate with the persuasive force of their arguments, because these bargain bin cranks trade in jaded cynicism, not youthful passion. They can harangue her with snide tweets and hot take blogposts, but they won’t get a reaction because, frankly, she has bigger worries on her mind.

That’s not to say that we should accept everything Thunberg says without question. She is an idealist who is young enough to see the world in black and white. We need voices like hers. We should listen to what she has to say, without tuning the more moderate voices of dissent out.

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? Because of what she represents. In an age when democracy is under assault, she hints at the emergency of new kind of power, a convergence of youth, popular protest and irrefutable science. And for her loudest detractors, she also represents something else: the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.

joconnell@irishtimes.com
https://twitter.com/jenoconnell

https://web.archive.org/web/2019090...certain-men-1.4002264?localLinksEnabled=false
Found this thought-provoking indeed.

 

[TowinKarz]

Roll on fusion power, that's what I say.

Fusion power is a theoretical that has been "almost here" for the last 50 years

Nuclear (fission) power has been possible, practical AND in-service for longer......

Unless you weren't being serious to start with, uh, are you high on heavy water fumes?

 

[Cyclonus]

It's still technically possible though, that's what makes it so fucking infuriating. Clean safe power with clean plentiful fuel and harmless byproducts that as far as we know can only be sustained at the heart of a fucking star. It would be less annoying if it was just flat out impossible. God is a fucking troll.

 

[AnOminous]

It surprises me how the Scandinavians continue to run the Nobel awards into the ground. At the start of the century I thought they were pretty alright. Now after Al Gore, Obama, and this, even if it’s just a nomination. They are kind of turning the awards into a joke.
Like the Oscars.

Any tard can nominate. There are always dumb nominations by weirdos of weirdos just so the nominated weirdos can then claim to be a "Nobel Prize nominee" forever.

Sure, but they're stuck in an efficiency doldrum alongside antecedant environmental harm from the rare earth element extraction needed to make the panels in the first place.

And never mind that the process is ridiculously expensive without taking minor little shortcuts. . .like using fucking children as slaves.

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

Oi, cock-mocking eunuch! Greta Thunberg approves of you hiding your wanton privates with a word salad!

Do you have an air-cooled brain?

I explained very clearly that green tech is not able to match fossil fuels for energy production and that nuclear fission is the only option for "carbon-free" power at a scale that matters. You're proving my point that Greens will reject facts in favor of ideology like the helmet-wearing tards that they are.

Eco-autism is a hell of a drug.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Raging kiwifarmers are a joy to behold.

Yes, yes you are.

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

Oh I've two brains to spare for you mindless skullcap. Maybe what I actually said won't go over your head next time.

I'd said on here before that I do not condone Greta's stances inasmuch as I admire her zeal, and that when confronted with unflinching interests one might as well get a radical like her to move things at all. Nowhere did I discuss the feasibilities of nuclear fission, nor have I ever disclosed my stance on such.

Raging kiwifarmers are a joy to behold.

Zeal is well and good until it mobilizes a group of useful idiots to pressure the complete abandonment of fossil fuel technologies overnight. Flicking the switch on fossil fuel use will lead to hundreds of millions of deaths in very short order. Is burning coal bad? Of course it is, we don't need that lecture for the umpteenth time, but the only alternative that works is greatly demonized. The people Greta's handlers cleverly avoid steering her attacks against are the Chinese, Brazilians, and Indians. Those three nations pollute far worse than most Western nations will in a given year. But no, whypipo bad, Orange Man Bad, blah, blah, blah.

I mentioned nuclear because when asked about it, Greta outright denies that it has any place in her eco-autist paradise. She calls it too dangerous to be of any use despite being a miracle of non-carbon energy density.

 

[Coldgrip]

That's all fine and dandy dude, but you're barking at the wrong tree. I'm just here to laugh my ass off at the ad hominems leveled against Greta Thunberg.

youmustbenewhere.jpeg

Several people here have pointed out the flaws with her arguments and stance on the environment with many lamenting that she's only being used by her scummy parents. The fact that you take umbrage with people mocking her for looking like a sped comes across as you taking it personally.

So tell me, does it hit close to home for you when we point out she looks like an autistic goblin?

 

[AnOminous]

That's all fine and dandy dude, but you're barking at the wrong tree. I'm just here to laugh my ass off at the ad hominems leveled against Greta Thunberg.

What you're doing is white knighting like a complete faggot. She's not going to blow you Sir Galahad.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

No, the guy picked up a tranny and gets super pissed.



The only real way the eco-apocalypse happens is at the end of a barrel of a gun. The people who write Greta's script for her dream of this (I don't believe Greta herself understands the implications of what she is actually saying):

But you are right about the ultra-rich. Identity politics is one way to assure the common folk fight among themselves and never unite against their oppressors, the ultra wealthy. I do think we should dig mass graves and just put them in there. They don't have any understanding of humanity, and can't comprehend how the poor don't spend 10k a month on shopping for bullshit. People always say, "But asshole, you're talking like a socialist pig". Don't care. I'd Khmer Rouge the ultra wealthy. They don't view us as human. Most of their money wasn't even earned, but inherited. Less and less wealth is being created and just passed down, with the ultra wealthy bleeding everyone else dry. Wealth is not infinite. And they drain more and more from the middle-class and lower-classes.

Their biggest fear is that the poors will realize what they're doing and kill them all. There was a documentary about the 2008 crisis that had rich people sweating because they fucking knew if it got bad enough, people would hang them from lamp posts. There was one story about bankers begging to be regulated because of how bad it initially was, but they backed off of that. And I still say the people in charge should be executed for their role in that. Obama was a massive faggot who didn't do shit to them. My family survived only due to the fact we had some money from a family inheritance (not ultra wealthy, well off I'd say) and we drained the entirety of it. When I saw he didn't do shit and occupy wall-street was a bunch of dumb cunts, faggots and progtards not doing shit but beat drums and have the progressive stack, I abandoned my extremely liberal, almost communist ideology. When you see your family devastated by the wealthy and your so-called progressives are whining about the white man and how white people are terrible and not doing shit about it, I left. Its why I hate progressives and I loathe that fake faggot Obama, who didn't do shit to the people in 2008 and focused on healthcare, which is basically going to be totally dismantled at this point. Good fucking job cunt. All of them are fake as fuck and don't care about anything but themselves. In this world, there are only two classes of people: the rich and the poor. Wealth is everything. Nothing else really matters. Not skin color, not gender, not sexual orientation, nothing. Its whether you have money or you don't. Progtards have completely forgotten this. How someone can claim to be socialist or communist and give more of a fuck about the color of your skin rather than the content of your character is beyond the pale.

Greta is going to be tossed aside once she's no longer a child. Like a used rag, just thrown in the trash because another 20-something whining about the environment are a dime a dozen. I do feel bad for her, because these ideas aren't hers. She's being given a script to read and used as a tool by her fucking awful parents and the wealthy. She isn't going to understand when they shift their focus away from her and leave her to the wolves. And then what? She's basically a high-school dropout. I'm sure some fucktarded college will take her anyway though for the prog points, but how in the hell is she going to handle it? I assume they'll just pass her anyway. Still used as a tool. What a sad fucking life. And the only reason they can do it is because she's autistic and doesn't understand the social implications of what is happening to her or how she is being used. Her parents are absolute fucking scum for doing this.

And as far as the eco-apocalypse goes, poor countries will fare well. I think the US would erupt into basically a civil war if this was forced on us. We are so used to comfort, we're not going to give that up for some nebulous goal. Nor do I think corporations would even allow it to happen.

From my personal experience of dealing with very wealthy people, they hit a certain point where the regular normatives of society and social pressures don't really apply to them anymore.

Let me be precise, by this I don't mean people in the middle class, even the upper middle class can have household fortunes of around a million or more, and social mobility means that not everyone will stay in these class structures. The wealthy people are the ones who are entrenched in their wealth, to the point where even where they have severe financial setbacks they are still considered wealthy.

One someone reaches this level of wealth, they are no longer constrained by any of the particular rules of which the majority of the society governs itself by. Now this doesn't mean that they are above the law, though we know from evidence that particular things have a way of cancelling themselves out or mitigating themselves if there is enough wealth and pressure behind them, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being idealistic and blind.

At the same time this level of elite basically removes most national barriers, and ironically these are some of the least racist people that I've met. They're still judgmental, but its attached to a particular set of behaviors and culture rather than an actual judgment on race. It's a meritocracy in this respect tied to wealth, and if you have enough to sit at the table, then your just as welcome as anyone else.

Of course they still have the same sort of issues that we deal with, if anything they have more issues because they've had the opportunity to experience massive wealth and privilege and realize to their own horror that it doesn't actually add any additional meaning or happiness to life. To the point where they're usually very cynical people. I think that is partly what feeds into their contempt for people who are considered beneath them.

They don't necessarily hate people who are lower class, but it comes with the money and the territory that they've done things to excel over the rest of the people they've interacted with in their lives, and therefore its a sort of ingrained sense of self superiority.

Some have some particular interests, some are patriotic, nationalistic, etc, but not if it gets in the way of their business. They're also very insular, the social circles at the top are something else, everyone seems to know everybody else, and when your a stranger among them, they are gracious but nonetheless your reminded of it. As such they tend to be very isolated and most of them don't tend to think about the bigger picture, or don't start to at least until they get a bit older and get guilt ridden over the fact that they've inevitably had to screw people over to get to that top position, in some way shape or form.

The biggest issue I think we face though is the fact that in the West our social mobility seems to be hitting points where it feels like it's stagnating. That might be down to kids getting useless paper degrees, but it does feel like the "middle class" is getting harder to achieve and maintain from where it was in the 70's, 80's and 90's.

Greta will end up being forgotten, like I said before one of those sort of clickbait article types. If she does get a place at an institution, she will end up being a hyperbolic environmentalist for the rest of her life. The field for climate change scientists seems to be where the majority of easy money seems to be, so if she got herself a job with the UN (if it doesn't go bankrupt beforehand) or some NGO she can happily have a career telling Africans to go vegan or something for climate change and get angry that market forces and not her ranting where what produced actual climate friendly policies.

I agree with you the idea of things that modern Marxist like are completely brain dead. Shit like the progressive stack doesn't even equate with the ideals of communism, since under communism equality should be assured and the SJW/socialist types don't want equality, its the last thing they actually want.

 

[mr.moon1488]

I'm a trained geoscientist and I can tell you, without the shadow of a doubt, that green/alternative energy will not and cannot ever meet the energy demand of modern society. Are there great technologies like photovoltaics? Sure, but they're stuck in an efficiency doldrum alongside antecedant environmental harm from the rare earth element extraction needed to make the panels in the first place. Wind energy is farcical at best on large scale, it's too fickle compared to solar. At worst it's built along migration routes for endemic wildlife and blends birds worse than passenger pigeon hunters.

The only viable alternative (i.e. not combustion) electricity production source is nuclear fission. Fission produces little non-recyclable waste and what waste is produced is dense and easily sequestered compared to gaseous emissions.
Fusion is n+30 years away, don't even bring it up aside from speculation.

Also your name, FTFY

What's your opinion on tidal energy production? It seems promising to me, but there's obviously some limits on its practicality for anywhere that isn't coastal.

 

[AlexJonesGotMePregnant]

You got it all wrong, Joel! Greta Thunberg's brain has the cure to save humanity!

It's because she can see carbon dioxide with her own eyes!

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

What's your opinion on tidal energy production? It seems promising to me, but there's obviously some limits on its practicality for anywhere that isn't coastal.

Tidal is interesting, though it could be a challenge to effectively store reserve power without building an impoundment dam/reservoir that fills each high tide. Interactions among flora, fauna, and the local geomorphology with this new structure would have to be researched and modelled before breaking ground - coastal environments can be rather delicate. Beyond that you'll have to deal with the "Not In My Backyard" folks who may champion Greenie alt. energy projects but when push comes to shove won't support them if they're near their neighborhood. Coastal communities can have very little tolerance of a project if it marrs the beauty of the beach or has potential to. Aside from energy storage, a tidal hydroelectric power station would also have to contend with fouling of the energy generation surface with marine life alongside the much more corrosive marine environment compared to what is encountered by freshwater dams.

It's an interesting idea, siphoning off some kinetic energy from the tides to generate electricity for seemingly no cost. If done correctly it could work well, mitigating some of the energy demands of major urban centers. If done poorly it'll do more harm than good.

 

[mr.moon1488]

Tidal is interesting, though it could be a challenge to effectively store reserve power without building an impoundment dam/reservoir that fills each high tide. Interactions among flora, fauna, and the local geomorphology with this new structure would have to be researched and modelled before breaking ground - coastal environments can be rather delicate. Beyond that you'll have to deal with the "Not In My Backyard" folks who may champion Greenie alt. energy projects but when push comes to shove won't support them if they're near their neighborhood. Coastal communities can have very little tolerance of a project if it marrs the beauty of the beach or has potential to. Aside from energy storage, a tidal hydroelectric power station would also have to contend with fouling of the energy generation surface with marine life alongside the much more corrosive marine environment compared to what is encountered by freshwater dams.

It's an interesting idea, siphoning off some kinetic energy from the tides to generate electricity for seemingly no cost. If done correctly it could work well, mitigating some of the energy demands of major urban centers. If done poorly it'll do more harm than good.

I wonder if anyone has ever tried using buoyancy to harness tidal forces. What I mean is something like a generator device which would act as an anchor, and then have a tether attached to a buoyant object, which would pull the tether up, and down with the waves. If this could be made to work, you could in theory put the device almost anywhere in the ocean, and it wouldn't effect wildlife, or look stupid.

 

[AnOminous]

I wonder if anyone has ever tried using buoyancy to harness tidal forces. What I mean is something like a generator device which would act as an anchor, and then have a tether attached to a buoyant object, which would pull the tether up, and down with the waves. If this could be made to work, you could in theory put the device almost anywhere in the ocean, and it wouldn't effect wildlife, or look stupid.

Yes. They're called wave energy converters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power#Point_absorber_buoy

You can set up grids of them. I'm not sure how practical it is to deploy them widely but they're doing things along these lines.

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

Have we ever tried converting fat people to biofuel? We would never need petroleum again.

Oddly enough one of my professors in undergrad had that idea.

 

[ditto]

might as well get a radical like her to move things at all.

There is absolutely nothing radical about what Greta is proposing.

 

[AnOminous]

There is absolutely nothing radical about what Greta is proposing.

I don't know, murdering something like 90% of the population isn't exactly middle of the road.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Fusion power is a theoretical that has been "almost here" for the last 50 years

That's because everyone focused on tokamaks after the Russians claimed some success with them, which meant abandoning research into the more promising stellarator designs. Tokamaks have been pretty much abandoned in the last 15 years or so as research moves back to stellerators and other novel designs (The US navy has done extensive research on pollywell fusion since the turn of the century, for instance).

Wendelstein 7-X in Germany, and other stellarator designs elsewhere, are moving into function phases after just a relatively short period of development.

It would, of course, be conspiratorial to suggest that the soviets leaked false information about their tokamaks to cripple western fusion research at a key moment. Regardless, if we had stuck to stellerators, we would probably have had practical fusion power already.

Nuclear (fission) power has been possible, practical AND in-service for longer

Indeed it has. The sensible path would be to build a mass of current generation fission reactors to replace coal and gas generation, then replace them with fusion reactors when the technology becomes viable. And if fusion doesn't become viable, just keep building more advanced fission reactors. If you can figure out a process to extract uranium from sea water, you have an effectively unlimited supply of fuel as well.

 

[AnOminous]

Indeed it has. The sensible path would be to build a mass of current generation fission reactors to replace coal and gas generation, then replace them with fusion reactors when the technology becomes viable. And if fusion doesn't become viable, just keep building more advanced fission reactors. If you can figure out a process to extract uranium from sea water, you have an effectively unlimited supply of fuel as well.

It would seem to be a good idea to come up with a modular design for reactors where the actual core source of energy could be swapped out for some future device that either doesn't exist yet or isn't practical to use.

 

[Cyclonus]

It's easy to be casual about this if you don't live on a fucking island. If the sea level rises, I'm fucked.