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heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
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Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: snarkysparky on August 02, 2023, 04:15:19 pm ---Not burning fossil fuel is an effective measure against CO2 rise.  You on  board ?
How do you get a democratic society to voluntarily accept extra costs and hardship without explaining  ( fearmongering )  the risks.   We don't seem to mind a little fearmongering when war is afoot.
--- End quote ---

I might be a closet optimist, but by offering alternatives and showing how they are superior. This is already happening with electric vehicles. People only need to look at George Bush / Vladimir Putin and they understand fossil fuels come with other costs than this abstract concept of climate change. The ball is rolling very well without fearmongering. On the other hand, we are wasting mental resources in stuff like making a huge deal out of replacing plastic drinking straws, which could have been simply recycled into energy, offsetting other fossil fuel use directly, with paper based alternatives which end up in whatever waste.

Or we make a big deal out of replacing cow milk with plant based substitutes which have been independently shown to produce no less CO2 emissions than the dairy product when the cattle is fed with modern animal feed (Merja Saarinen, Natural Resources Institute Finland). Even if the feed is not optimized, in big picture this is totally insignificant.

Again, we must concentrate our efforts in HVAC of buildings and road transport of people and goods, and this is exactly what many of us are working on.


--- Quote ---Lets review the issue with Mr Clauser.  He is cozying up to a petroleum industry supported group that spreads climate BS.
--- End quote ---

I would rather look at what he is saying than who you think he is friends with; identity politics is dangerous. The excerpts as quoted in this thread seemed completely reasonable to me. Maybe he is wrong on something; it's not the end of the world and he doesn't need to get cancelled for that. For that matter, remember that scaremongers get a lot of facts wrong all the time, too, yet you don't see anyone wanting to cancel them.


--- Quote ---I haven't identified ANYONE on this board in any posting.  How are you imagining who I am targeting?
--- End quote ---

It doesn't matter - you name-called in plural so at least two people, and I did read every message on this thread and I don't think anyone deserved that name calling. Everyone else has been acting civil about this. This is why I wrote my comment. Had I seen truly hostile comments against you, I would have assumed you referred to them, and would have not commented.

I also commented about your behavior because your opening post itself was about your feelings against a certain person, not as much climate change itself.
Siwastaja:
And BTW, fear, fear-induced adrenalin and cortisol are good drivers in acute crisis situations like being chased by a wild boar or something. They are completely counter-productive in long-term situations because cortisol slowly incapacitates, and that "long-term" means something that lasts longer than a few hours or days. Based on how human hormone system and basic psychology works, if we want to solve the "climate crisis" that must happen through positive engineering. Instead, we are incapacitating the whole next generation by telling them they have no hope, and that boycotting education somehow helps.

We need to wake up and understand that we are actually on the right track already, and keep focused on the right things. If you tell people that the hope is already basically lost, what motivation they have to fix things? I can see signs in our societies that we are in the "party until the end" mode. Normal people are now encouraged to take more and more debt, use drugs, sell your body (if you are a woman, instead of educating yourself) for some more partying money. But I admit there might be an observation bias here, maybe this is nothing new, so take this comment with a grain of salt as a discussion opener (i.e., I'm asking if others are seeing this pattern).
nctnico:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on August 02, 2023, 01:11:18 am ---The politics of "climate change" are going to far, just like woke did, and just like covid did. And it's going to end just as badly.

--- End quote ---
True. In the Netherlands there are no middle ground political parties left to vote for. Either you vote for capitalists, leftists /socialists, greenists or ban-islam-ists.
nctnico:

--- Quote from: Siwastaja on August 02, 2023, 05:10:31 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on August 01, 2023, 08:10:35 pm ---scientists as a group will have to come to some sort of consensus on what is the 'truth of the day'.

--- End quote ---

No, I strongly disagree. This is not the job of scientists as a group to do. To decide what to do is politics, and politics can be based on science, but it's still not science.

For science, it's completely OK to say "we don't have truth of the day about this". This is also the job of science. Coming up with some kind of compromise middle ground or consensus is pseudo science.

--- End quote ---
It is not pseudo science, it is a snapshot. A long time ago people thought the earth was flat (snapshot 1), then they realised that based on scientific evidence the earth is a sphere (snapshot 2). After another while due to improvement measurement techniques it turns out the earth is not a perfect sphere, but sphere shaped (snapshot 3). How close to a perfect sphere? Last time I checked nobody seems to know.

It always works like this: scientists do research and publish results. Then commities like IPCC, WHO, national health institutes, SI organisation, etc, etc sift through it to figure out which results have merit or not. From this sifting process, you get reports which are used by governments to base their policies on (which are based on reports from a wide variety of research fields).

You can probably find scientific proof that de best thing to do for the planet is kill 95% of the human population. A less extreme example is from today's paper: a German scientists claims that increasing the fuel price to 100 euro per liter would stop people from using a car. It doesn't take a genious to figure out that doing that would bring the economy to a grinding halt because people need cars to get to their work.

In the end the choice is up to the politicians but they will need decent input to base their decission on.
PlainName:

--- Quote from: Siwastaja on August 02, 2023, 05:04:26 pm ---The ball is rolling very well without fearmongering. On the other hand, we are wasting mental resources in stuff like making a huge deal out of replacing plastic drinking straws, which could have been simply recycled into energy, offsetting other fossil fuel use directly, with paper based alternatives which end up in whatever waste.

--- End quote ---

Plastic is generally made from a finite resource, isn't it? So 'recycling into energy' would be a net loss and we'd have to make more of it. In contrast, paper is pretty much zero sum in that the waste can be used to grow more (or we can 'recycle into energy'). Whatever, the massive garbage patch in the middle of the Pacific doesn't seem to have much paper since it's biodegradable, but there is lots of plastic.

If the root problem is that we're not turning plastic into energy then we surely need to start doing that. Or reusing it instead of creating more.

Elsewhere in the thread someone says:


--- Quote from: Someone else ---My bank sent me a new card, from recycled plastic. Great, all that 10g plastic saved.
--- End quote ---

That seems to be a common mindset, but what's missed is that there are over twenty-two billion cards in circulation, so at 10g apiece that's potentially 2,000,000,000Kg of plastic reused instead of floating around the oceans, and a consequent reduction in raw materials. Halve it because of the chip (though many cards are plain plastic) and it's still 'quite a lot'.

This is how we got into this mess in the first place - some person or family or even town polluting the place has little effect, but industrialise that process and replicate it by a huge amount and it starts to affect even the biggest unmovable things. To counter it, doesn't that suggest a similar effort in the other direction is required?

On the one hand, none of us is going to have any detectable effect on anything, but all of us could make the difference. And this seems to be where we will end up because there cannot be consensus so 'all' will only ever be a tiny subset. Unless something really dramatic turns up, and I think it will be too late then.
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