Where Did the Climate Change Debate Go Wrong?

I'm personally not a fan of the whole "THE EARTH'S GOING TO END ON THIS DATE!" bull that people usually associate with climate change. Sure, it's an important topic, but let's be realistic here- the only real changes to date have been higher temperatures. The ice caps have been melting for decades, if not centuries. And probably still would even without the changing temperatures because that's just how Earth is. And even then, temperatures haven't been all that higher either.

So unless I hear that thousands have died in some horrific climate-related disaster. I can't be too worried about something that's been happening for a long time at this point.
 
Oh Long Johnson said:
when I read things about the warming trend stalling for a decade
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The most plausible explanation I've heard for that is that the proliferation of vegetation caused by rising temperatures is helping to slow down CO2 emissions temporarily. I'm not a climatologist or anything though so idk how 'orthodox' that stance is considered.

Absolutego said:
And speaking about alarm, the apocalyptic predictions in the very near future are only contributing to people getting turned off the issue. I recall New York was supposed to be underwater by now if we didn't do something in 2004.
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That DNC staffer who yelled at Brazile about how climate change is going to kill him in 40 years is immensely cringey
 
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DuskEngine said:
The most plausible explanation I've heard for that is that the proliferation of vegetation caused by rising temperatures is helping to slow down CO2 emissions temporarily. I'm not a climatologist or anything though so idk how 'orthodox' that stance is considered.
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The Carboniferous period that we get all our Coal from (fossilized vegetation) had more CO2 as we have now (1500 PM) at the start of the period and at the end of the period it had similar amounts of CO2 that we have now.
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Just my input about that theory.
When I was at a Republican Convention earlier this year someone nominated a plan to plant more trees using State funds instead of raising Carbon Taxes and used this as evidence supporting his plan that got submitted to the State Republican Party who then would mess with it and try to get it on the ballot.
 
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The climate change debate went wrong when it became a game of lobbying. Big oil and coal companies say it's a complete hoax and pay politicians to support them in favour of complete deregulation. Big sustainable energy companies say the earth will end in 50 years if nothing is done and pay politicians to support them in favour of billion dollar deals for solar panel farms while also imposing restrictions on importing cheap solar panels from China because it undercuts their profit. Unfortunately there is a lot of science that gets politicized by lobbying cash and the actual solutions for sustainable energy are lost in the debate because they are simply not ( yet ) profitable.

Another thing to point out is that the whole CO2 craze is a red herring creating a loophole for big corporations. CO2 is virtually harmless unless in extreme concentrations. The real bad stuff is C ( PM ), CO, CH4, NOx and SOx. Things like consumer vehicles with catalysts have become cleaner and cleaner emitting less of the latter, while industry still emits a lot of the real pollutants aside from CO2. With CO2 regulations they are not only pushing the issue away from real ground / water / air pollution but also supporting politicians to create loopholes to export pollution to poor countries because they want to meet their CO2 quotas. Great example of this is the hypocrite Obama saying he cares about the environment and at the same time making it easier for US corporations to place production plants in South-America where there are next to zero regulations. In the end the CO2 production is exported from the first world to the third world so they can celebrate their climate agreement.

There's two real long term solutions that are still being researched. The first is carbon catalysts which have already been proven to be able to turn CO2 into other products, the technology is simply too expensive to utilize on big scale. The second long term solution is nuclear fusion, which has long been researched and the first serious attempt at an efficient version is to be constructed - ITER. If that goes well our energy and environmental issues are a matter of time. Perhaps almost paradoxically it may be more environmentally friendly in the long run if the west focuses more on their economy ( that can support more researchers and technicians ) and less on environmental issues right now.

A lot of the environmental arguments seem to share the same anti-western sentiment. Often arguments are used such as "the average American has 20 times the carbon emission of a 3rd worlder" forgetting that the average American will produce much more in the form of knowledge, technology, resources and human advancement than 20 third worlders.
 
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Absolutego said:
And speaking about alarm, the apocalyptic predictions in the very near future are only contributing to people getting turned off the issue. I recall New York was supposed to be underwater by now if we didn't do something in 2004.
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This, as a former climate skeptic (I was more autistic back then cut me some slack) this definitely hurts the issue. Hell even NASA themselves have said the antarctic ice sheets had made gains in ice last year. While this doesn't change the fact that other glaciers are losing ice, the antarctic gets a lot of coverage.
 
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While I don't think we're doomed, let's be honest here, humans have bounced back from some pretty dire odds. (The Toba event comes to mind) I do think we should cut back on carbon emissions, so we can keep living here without having to geo-engineer some last minute solution.
 
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Im not suite sure where it went "wrong" because I feel like people who dont believe in it are kind of like the same people who believe the Earth is flat or was created by God. I do wonder however if climate change is not a natural occurrence that just so happens to be occurring in parallel with man-made climate change, which is why it's become exponentially more and more of an issue in the past few years.

The reality of it, I think, is that scientists agree it's gone beyond the point of no return--trying to convince nonbelievers at this point is a waste of time. You can't reduce emissions enough anymore, now I think people should focus on systems and methodologies to adapt what we can, in conjunction with planning for a future with clean energy and reduced emissions.

It's a shame Trump won and doesnt believe in it, because I think in part, "rebuilding America" necessarily includes steps to deal with this. In an economy with robots you kind of have to have a human economy, people doing shit like music and art, building the middle class towns and cities not around capital and acquisition of wealth, but idyllic human experience. Rather than having one cool city, and hundreds of miles of sprawling, wasteful suburbs, and dead communities in between, have them all have a purpose; but Im kind of retarded. But I mean millennials love living "close-in", and if people could live and work on main street, they could all just be hipsters and ride bikes to their jobs, or walk to the store. If you cut work down to 4 10-hour days, you could probably deal with carbon emissions another way, too. Shit like that.
 
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DuckSucker said:
Im not suite sure where it went "wrong" because I feel like people who dont believe in it are kind of like the same people who believe the Earth is flat or was created by God.
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What are you implying about these groups? Keep in mind that "people who believe the Earth was created by God" is every Jew, Christian, and Muslim in the world, or about 50% of the world's population.
 
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Jon-Kacho said:
What are you implying about these groups? Keep in mind that "people who believe the Earth was created by God" is every Jew, Christian, and Muslim in the world, or about 50% of the world's population.
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I said that because I was trying to imply that you arent going to convince them they're wrong, which is fine, they're free to believe that. There are people who believe the Earth is flat, too. It's the whole thing about free will, nobody can tell you what to do or think, you make up your own mind. There are plenty of religious people who dont hang on every word of the Church and have their own views and interpretations of their religion.

Im actually not a fedora tipping atheist. I dont care if people believe in religion, I just dont personally believe, and they arent going to change my mind any more than I would be able to change theirs, and it's kind of pointless to spend time trying. That's what I meant.

You can spend time trying to change someone's mind or you can find another way around. I read somewhere that people, especially in political arguments, are more likely to leave the argument adhering more strictly to their beliefs rather than having them changed. Although it did come from the internet and I could be paraphrasing it.
 
This is a complex issue.

For one, as said before, both sides of the argument are driven by politics and it is the third world countries that are the problem.

Also, the Earth had a lot of climate changes. Ice age, anybody? I'm not saying that things won't get hotter, but I'm saying that it tends to happen naturally and there is a good hope that by the time it gets serious, we will have the technology to deal with it.

There are way greater dangers to Humanity. Runaway plagues and asteroids will do far, far, far more damage. Supervolcanoes could do much worse too. Nuclear winter, check.

Are we setting up a monitoring system to blow asteroids out of the sky? Naaaah.

Mind, coastal towns will be in shit and better get building dams in the next 50 years, but it is not an instant end to the world. Plus New Jersey COULD use a good bath...
 
I think the money involved is the problem, carbon taxes seem like the modern equivalent of a sin tax and at the g20 negotiations it seems to revolve around poor countries demanding richer countries give them money.

And on a societal level the problems don't have any realistic solutions, in first world countries pensioners can't afford high energy bills yet are the ones who need heating in winter the most and everyone else doesn't want to give up their modern luxuries for some vague future risk where they'll probally be dead by the time anything significant happens anyway (Even Al Gore lives in a giant house and takes lots of international flights), in developing countries they aspire to have the things first world countries have like cars and more red meat in their diet and in third world counties they have large families partially because mortality rates are higher and they rely on their offspring to look after them when they get older.
 
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When it stopped being a "debate" and when all skepticism of it was derided as "denial", for one.

It doesn't help that the most prominent promoters of climate change "awareness" individually have the carbon footprints of small African nations and tend to have Malibu beach houses rather than bunkering up in Topeka and living on windfarms themselves. What's that, you want to impact their standard of living? Oh no, no no, that's for the hoi polloi, but they're too important to the world to have to need that.

We really should be limiting the amount of toxic shit we dump in the atmosphere because it's just fucking intelligent to do so since we kind of have to breathe it. We should also be looking at urban development and planning in a world where the climate's going to change over time regardless of whether we like it or not. Instead we get "the end is nigh, we must return to paleolithic culture to survive!" and "burn it all I don't give a fuck I won't be here anyway". Sigh.

In other words, it's the same as a ton of other policy debates: the edges take up all the loudspeakers and the places of agreement and action are drowned out in the dogma.
 
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