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Torka
Jan 5, 2008

HighClassSwankyTime posted:

Big Oil downplays the effects of climate change and on the other side green activists do the exact opposite. If you want a meaningful discussion on this most important issue, get rid of both extremes.

Would you say the truth is somewhere in the middle? :allears:

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Torka
Jan 5, 2008

MickeyFinn posted:

Does this mean we westerners are not as smart as we thought we were?

That's the premise of Guns Germs and Steel IIRC, that people in successful western countries were the beneficiaries of a number of geographical and historical coincidences and strokes of good luck.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

TyroneGoldstein posted:

There are people in this country that just don't care enough..or are so programmed to knee jerk against any kind of sensible resource usage that they will lament the fact that we don't waste more water flushing our own poo poo.

I've often wondered how people living in areas where clean water is scarce feel about the fact that first worlders poo poo into potable water, if they're aware of it.

I mean, I'm normally pretty good at empathy but I honestly have trouble guessing what the reaction for someone in that situation would be to that knowledge. Outrage? Mirth? Despair?

Torka fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jun 1, 2012

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

TACD posted:

:confused: I'm pretty sure society was pretty sustainable when there were ~1 billion people on the planet, aka most of history. Whether it's possible to recapture that sustainability now that there's ~7 billion is debatable but it's kind of silly to say that there's no possible living arrangement for humans that isn't doomed to overflow the planet.

I thought estimates put the global human population pre-agriculture at only around 5 million.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

I don't agree with primivists' solutions to our problems, and I think some of the things they blame on agricultural civilization are just part of the human condition, but as a group they've produced a lot of very interesting and valid criticism of civilization that shouldn't be dismissed merely because the reader disagrees with their proposals for fixing it.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

A major difference that limits my capacity for outrage is that primitivists are a powerless group of kooks with no ability to put their dangerous ideas into practice on any significant scale or to force them on others, much unlike racists and imperialists.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

deptstoremook posted:

In short: there's a reason that "survivalists" are almost always bourgeois western white men whose only disability is a lack of humanity. (Are there any non-white anarcho-primitivist theorists?)

This is a really weird non sequitur dude, survivalists and anarcho-primitivists are very different groups who have almost no views in common. Not least because the former are generally extreme rightists and the latter generally extreme leftists.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Thuryl posted:

To play devil's advocate even harder for a different position, what are we doing when we prescribe psychiatric medications if not trying to change human nature?

Changing human nature may or may not be what psychiatric medications do (I have no idea either way), but we certainly don't frame it that way. Generally we choose to view the medication as correcting an "imbalance", returning the brain to some ill-defined baseline or normal state.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

-Troika- posted:

Your own link proves that there is no way to meet the amount of fuel that the EPA wants. They just picked an arbitary number and expected plants to magically pop into existence.

It seems more like they expected the companies to do something well within their capability to conform to regulations instead of choosing to cynically flout them and treat the fines as a cost of doing business. Stupid of the EPA, probably, but not for the reasons you give.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Is exceptional just being used as a superlative in that chart or is it meant literally in the sense of "this is something that doesn't usually happen"?

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Guigui posted:

I've always been a bit perplexed when I hear statements on how the current warming trend is "Natural". It makes me think the alternative is a "synthetic" cause, and immediately I think of Ur-Quan Dreadnaughts in space using a large warming device attached to their powerful fusion cannons.

In context I assume it's meant as shorthand for "non-anthropogenic".

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

I dunno, I think the psychology behind this kind of counterproductive behaviour is fairly well understood even today.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

The fact that the word geoengineering is used at all outside out of science fiction bothers me since it implies a level of understanding of large scale climate systems that we just don't have.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Xandu posted:

I swear to god I will ban anyone who tries to derail this thread by saying climate change doesn't exist.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

The Experience posted:

Can anyone provide a good refutation of that Economist.com article (http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions/) that has been going around that everyone keeps talking about?

I believe the article quotes a non-peer-reviewed paper that claims something like "Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar."

I have heard that the largest temperature increases have occurred at the bottom of the oceans and further up in the atmosphere. Not sure if that's all there is to it or what.

Hahaha we're really loving backsliding now if it's once more in dispute whether climate change is occuring at all, rather than that being an accepted fact and the debate being about whether humans are causing it.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Clipperton posted:

Everyone just eat bugs already, God drat

Someone always jokes about this but it seems like it ought to be a reality. Like most (e: western) people I'd have trouble eating bugs that looked like bugs, but I'd be okay with eating some kind of processed protein that happened to come from bugs as long as it was unrecognizable by the time it got to me.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Hey Arglebargle this is genuinely intended as a friendly warning, not an attempt to silence you: D&D is monitored by various authorities and posters here have had the police and/or secret service turn up at their door for saying less threatening things than you're saying here.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008


Man, that's disappointing.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Yiggy posted:

Furthermore, we could hugely dent the release of these GHG's merely with a reduction in meat consumption away from a pattern which is really only a problem in the US, Europe and Austrailia. [b]Most of the world already isn't on a meat intensive diet, despite these ridiculous attacks on people pointing this out as somehow wanting developing world children to starve.

Sure, but let's avoid doing that thing where we pretend that the reason poorer countries don't each much meat is because they're so ethical or environmentally conscious or whatever. People in the developing world loving love meat when they can get it. They don't because they can't, not because they don't want to.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Yiggy posted:

Yup, though I'll note the discussion is (usually) going to deteriorate markedly once we make this about veg vs non-veg identities.

It had already started before that with people trying to slip their opinions about healthy diets into a discussion about climate change.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

quote:

You are only short of protein if you literally have kwashiorkor

That's a stupid as gently caress statement. There's a difference between the bare minimum amount required to stave off deficiency and the amount that produces robust health. For almost any given micro- or macro-nutrient the minimum and the optimal are two different numbers. Yeah, the ideal amount of protein is most likely a good deal less than the amount the average American eats but it's more than "just enough to stop your hair falling out".

Torka fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Apr 18, 2014

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

There's no reason insect protein couldn't be processed into something not recognisable as an insect anyway, surely. Insect-based protein powder or something.

Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Makes sense. I just mean I'm sure we can find a way to consume insect protein that doesn't require forcing the squeamish to eat fried grasshopper on a stick or whatever.

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Torka
Jan 5, 2008

Arkane posted:

I think the central thesis is that some scientists & politicians try to convey certainty/consensus towards catastrophe in the future when this is anything but certain. They take the consensus view that much of the warming in the 20th Century was due to humanity, and then stick the nonconsensus view that this will lead to [insert ridiculous prediction], and if you don't believe both well you're just an anti-science denier.

Why are they doing this, in your opinion?

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