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duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

My little sister was a climate researcher at DOLA , and a stint at the CSIRO,in australia, specializing in ground water modelling re climate change. She left because she felt there was too much pressure on her to report positive happy outcomes when all the data and modelling kept basically shouting DOOM DOOM DOOM out of the maths. Her take was that it only requires a very small, tens of centimeters, broad change in ocean levels to utterly saline the gently caress out of ground water supplies due to, uh, some sort of funky salt equilibrium fluid mechanical dinglewidgety thing I dont understand. I think the salt water in the ground water wants to have some sort of equilibrium with the ocean or something, and if it rises it seeps into the fresh water pockets and uh something bad.

But everytime her team went to publish she'd get blowback from non-scientific admistrator types who'd want to drown the research in committees and poo poo. This , by the way was during the conservative howard regime, so it might have improved somewhat during labor. It got too much for her, she felt we have a tiny window of opportunity to do something about it before australia basically loving loses its water supply and renders the continent extremely hostile to food security, and she noted that already much australian farmland had been lost to salinity and there was a growing feeling the old explainations of "Well, it was bad farming practice" didn't match the data well at all, whilst climate change during the periods from early industrial expansion onwards seemed to better match it , somehow which again I dont really understand.

Needless to say, she quit, and took a cushy job in the UK as a consultant to companies looking to go "green", since she felt the political climate is better there and in her words "The UK is already hosed, we can only make it better, Australia isn't completely hosed yet, and its depressing as gently caress watching it get hosed". Oh add to that crank death threats, columnists writing news stories about her collegues just making fabricated poo poo up about them, fuckwit right wingers protesting at her office. She's a loving scientist, a dorky pocket-calculator girl, not a frigging rough-as-nuts politician. She never signed on to be literal hitler IRL to half the loon population.

Plus she privately thinks we're hosed no matter what we do, all thats a variable now is divining the specific nature of the mess ahead.

I'll add she goes loving feral when people claim climate scientists report bad news because its politically expedient. The actual experience of climate scientists is actually a total nightmare of uncovering a slowly evolving disaster amidst a slickly funded political climate that wants their very research field dead, dead and dead.

gently caress denialists. Failed human oxygen theives each and every one of them.

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duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

SGRaaize posted:

This thread is making me depressed, but it really sounds unbelievable that people are suggesting catastrophic scenarios in the next 20 years and literally no one is thinking about it, which does give me some doubt to these claims.
I'm not saying Climate Change doesn't exist, I'm just asking if its gonna really get apocalyptic-level

The thing that makes it a bit hard to visualise for most people is that none (Well most ) of the scientists are not suggesting that in 20 years from now we go to bed in happy valley and wake up in mad max hosed world. Its a process. The weather slowly gets wierder, the droughts get longer, fishermen get shittier catches, and more and more you'll hear of floods and hurricanes that are just a bit worse than a few years before and it all happens inch by inch.

The thinking now is that this process actually started quite a while back, starting with the industrial era. Remember the ethiopian famine of the 80s (Some of you might be too young). Well a lot of that might well have been the the early warning signs of trouble ahead, as with the banglidesh floods.

The problem with slow incremental negative changes , is that they are hard to percieve since we are conditioned to percieve catastrophe as a punch in the face. As a result its easy to look around and go "Eh... its not so bad" and think maybe the scientists are just hollering alarmingly or worse doing it for some mysterious nefarious reason.

On the other hand I don't quite know what sort of timeframe the run-away CO2 scenario operates on, but perhaps THAT might actually be a pretty alarming thing to witness.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

eh4 posted:

The energy controversy of the moment in Australia is coal seam gas exploration and frakking. Now, it wouldn't even rate as an issue if the demand for natural gas wasn't worth the commercial risk despite the process being a terrible idea. Not even the NIMB factor is having sufficient leverage to slow the sector down, the last map of proposed CSG sites I saw is incredible, it's all over the place. Without getting into the irony of requiring supertankers to transport this all over the globe, you've got a set of processes that not even state governments feel able to deny.

Part of the problem here is that in Australia, mining changes everything. Australians seem obsessed with the idea that mining is the only reason we're not a third world hell-hole, when in reality it contributes maybe 10-15% at best to the economy at best. You could eliminate all mining in the country and the economic hit would be barely noticable to most people. But the old idea that Australia is rich because we "rode the sheeps back" and now ride the excavators back is so strong even people opposed to mining believe it.

Back in the 90s a bunch of us where involved with trying to stop old growth forrest logging in high value forests. We went full ape on it, digging up roads, setting up tree sits, digging tunnels and all the feral poo poo that goes with that. The conservation council and the city "green-o-crats" (as we dubbed them) did a bunch of lobbying and rallies and stuff. End result , we pretty much shut that poo poo down , more or less (although its not quite, there was still some, and a bunch of fuckery from government redistricting old-growth designations to 'regrowth' designations on account of say, some dude cutting tree down 100 years ago or whatever.

Point is , we fought the law and we won.

Flip forward 4-5 years later to the ludlow forest campaign. This was a huge campaign that on the surface ought to have been a guaranteed win. It was one of only two stands of the "tall tuart" tuart variety in existance, it was a tourism forest that formed a major part of busselton/bunbury tourism, and had a full infrastructure of tourism roads, and even a small town of about 30 people (ludlow) entirely dedicated to servicing it. Plus as the scene of an indigenous massacre, and its role as a traditional meeting place and burial place between the various tribes of the bilbumen Nyungah, Wiping that off the face of the map seemed inconcievable.

Until they found titanium in the sands beneath it. The campaign to stop it was a loving monster. We had *every single person* in ludlow onside and at rallies, huge sections of bunbury and busselton, pretty much every greenie in the state, rock stars like John buttler and peter garret (prior to his sell-out to the labor party), football celebrities, a sympathetic press, pretty much the entire aboriginal movement, and all the old school blockaders setting up tree-sits, and what not. Rallies with thousands and thousands of people. Researchers from all 4 universitys putting out pleading press releases demanding the government not even countenance the idea.

But in WA mining is king, and the government, labor i'll add, not the tories, gave the go ahead, and ludlow was bulldozed and a mine built.

Most greenies will never ever forgive labor for that. We sadly don't know if the remanants of the Tall tuarts will survive. Some scientists now say that as a result of the mine which bulldozed half the remaining area of the tree, disrupting the water supply of the other half, its quite possible the species will go extinct.

There is NO way this would have happened if it was just for logging (Actually all the major logging companies refused to get involved with this operation saying that it was insane to log it. The mining company had to log it, itself.) but it happened because it was logging.

There was no logic to this , except that a mining company, who coincidently had just out of the blue decided to become one of labors biggest donors, wanted to do it, consequences be damned.

Oh, and I believe the mine doesnt operate anymore. The loving thing was only projected to take 4 years. And now they are "rehabilitating:" the land. I dunno if anyones ever seen a "rehabilitated" sand-mine, but another term for it is "cow paddock", since with all the nutrients sucked out of the soil and the water table ruined, all you can really do is plant lawn and drop some cows on top of it. Sand mining is loving evil. Keep that in mind next time you brush your teeth and get a nice sparkly titanium sheen to your chompers.

Whatever the case , it really opened my eye as to the power of mining. This wasn't a multi zillion dollar operation. We where talking about 3-4 hundred mil tops, and amortized over the loss of tourism in the area , its likely a net loss since that unique and wierd looking forest is never coming back.

But oh no if we lose mining everyones going to have to work in a factory :qq:

Australians deep down are very environmentally conscious people. But we have an inbuilt terror of poverty that has been exploited to stop us acting on that instinct. Environmentalists need to work on that and explain that mining really isn't that big a thing in our economy in the scale of things, and whilst it'll never go away, we can work to sensibly keep it at a sustainable level that isn't sabotaging our future.

e: Sad story regarding that. One of the key people in the campaign to save ludlow, Chris, an older british chap, who became famous for his custard pie attack on the CEO of the mining company involved , committed suicide soon after. None of us know quite why but most of us believe the scale of environmental catastrophe losing that fight created might have simply have become too much for the poor man. He really was a nice dude too.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Dec 10, 2011

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

VideoTapir posted:

You can go right to the UN site and see it, it's all right there, you just have to read BETWEEN the lines!

Its all about looking for code words, like "sustainability" which actually means "homocommunist global dictatorship" and uh also secret symbols in logos since for some wierd reason evil doers like putting arcane symbols in the letterheads.

I guess when you send an internal memo that says "TURN UP THE DOOM METER ON THE HAARP" , the guys in the tech department might not really get enough of a sense of DOOM DOOM DOOM unless theres a loving eye in the pyramid in the logo.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

WAFFLEHOUND posted:

There's also some really stupid pseudoscience getting flown under the same banner by people who will latch onto anything that could possibly gain oil companies profit as inherently evil, like Fracking.

Wait slow down. What pseudoscience? Fracking, so far, has had a history nothing short of total environmental vandalism. Or are you saying that fracking itself is pseudoscience?

Theres a lot of actual-real-no-bullshit boffin science that so far has suggested fracking has some very real negative side effects. (For instance the reason why theres a moratorium here in Australia on it due to all the ground water contamination and well fires and poo poo.)

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

WAFFLEHOUND posted:

There's no groundwater contamination from fracking at all. Every single instance of gas in groundwater and other contamination is in areas that have had a long history of that exact contaminant in the groundwater.

Wrong

quote:

It seems people really only seem to pay attention to contaminants after someone fracks in the area. There was a documentary on fracking in the US which while interesting, completely ignored records from the loving 1800s of gas in drinking water. In fact, the groundwater fracturing isn't even massive enough to cause the kind of contamination people accuse it of.

See previous link

quote:

Ever drank water from a well? Good chance that well was fracked for permeability.

It's become the ultimate boogieman that ignores science for the sake of blind environmentalism while every single loving structural geologist on the planet sits there pointing at old records of the exact same problems going on for a loving century yelling "THIS ISN'T A NEW THING YOU IDIOTS"

Sure as long as you exclude "Science that doesn't agree with your pet industry" from science, then I guess thats true. Problem is , science doesn't work that way.

quote:

Of all the anti-oil company causes, many of which are completely and thoroughly valid, none has less of a basis in reality and yet more traction in society than the anti-fracking movement.

e. To be more specific, the hydrostatic pressure that fracking puts on the rock around the pipe isn't great enough to cause leakage into the groundwater and aquifers that people are saying are getting contaminated. It simply doesn't work that way. You're fracking rock in the first place because it has poor permiability and it's not like areas that get fracked have incredibly nonuniform deposition with surrounding high-permeability rock that would allow contamination in the first place. If it did, you wouldn't need to frack it.

Not enough to damage it, but somehow, according to geologists hired by the actual companies that do this stuff, its enough to cause tremmors.

Of course what would geologists know, this isn't science!

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

The paper was written by scientists working for the company. I can't understand how you can dismiss that. Cognitive bias is a hell of a thing dude.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

I personally think that the names and personal details of the major denialists and their funders, ought be recorded for posterity , so that the next generation knows who needs to be punished for their predicament. This is a ain that will be harshest on generations to come, whilst these rich old bastards will escape it.

And they should be warned by people to expect to be hunted and punished by future generations for it.

If this is as bad as some say it will get, then denialists potentially have our childrens blood on their hands, and our children thus deserve the right to exact revenge for it once it happens.

I honestly believe this.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

MeLKoR posted:

They'll be dead long before your children (more like grandchildren) really start getting it. Would you punish their grandchildren?

Thats not the time table the boffins are talking about at the moment, I'm afraid. Its potentially a bit more dire than that.

But y'know. The sons of israel are still rooting out the old concentration camp guards from their worm holes, which I totally support, and whilst not QUITE comparing the two evils, I think its a handy template.

The people doing this have names and those names should be recorded.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

HighClassSwankyTime posted:

:ughh:

So we should punish the children and/or grandchildren of climate denialists/sceptics because they have a different opinion on climate change? Of course, the vested interests are solely on the side of Big Oil, the green lobby has zero incentive to overly dramatize climate change, no sir none at all... Keep dreaming.

No. I'm talking about the people responsible. The time scale being talked about might not have room to put grandchildren under the worst projections. The consequences are happening right now. Its not theoretical anymore.

And quit calling the scientific community "The green lobby". Most scientists want nothing to do with politics except as much as it might avert a catastrophe. In fact thats part of the whole problem, there really isn't much of a green lobby to speak of, save a handful of die-hard greenies in each city. Meanwhile the oil lobby has a slick multinational network of think-tanks and lobbyist groups. Worried scientists vs the right-wing mega is a very asymmetrical battle.

quote:

Every side of the debate has only one interest: to keep the gravy train of government subsidies and tax credi

Yeah I stopped reading at this point. Its a loving stupid and profoundly incorrect talking point. Being a climate change researcher is not a "gravy train". Its a loving hellworld of harassment both from cranks and a political establishment desparate to debunk it to make it go away. I've witnessed it in my own family with a sister that was systematically threatened and gagged for years over reports about the effect of climate change on australian ground water.

Like many other climate scientists, she quit the field to go work somewhere where she can be a scientist that gets actually paid properly and not a person under crank siege.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Dec 14, 2011

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Karpaw posted:

Sometimes I wonder if global warming and related environmental hazards explain the Fermi paradox. Maybe the reason there aren't von Neumann probes all over is because every planetary civilization is unwilling to halt the inertial force of dirty industrialization before succumbing to it and having a chance to build them, in a cosmic tragedy that keeps playing out over and over.

Its a variation of the old "all societies will eventually discover the nuclear bomb (or antimatter bomb) and wipe themselves out" self-limiting theory of civilization. Probably a more probable one either since energy use would apparently increase with knowledge and carbon fuels likely to be discovered before renewables in the scheme of things.

Infact heck, maybe climate change tend to wipe out life before sapient life even emerges usually, and we're a bit of a fluke.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

McDowell posted:

Can we just talk about space please?

http://youtu.be/7SECSxUbXTA

We pretty much have to choice but to expand to other planets to consume/trash them, for better or for worse.

Expending intense amounts of energy on a project that will probably fail and kill everyone involved in a crisis that roughly equates to "We are expending too much energy and heating poo poo up" isn't necessarily a wise move.

I mean in a sense it makes a lot of sense. Our animal biology gives us an expansionist instinct to increase our numbers whilst securing freedoms and safety for ourselves and offspring, and in that respect I think eventually we're going to have to get off thia planet and go all star-trek styles. But realistically this is a 500+ year project involve us utterly nailing the laws of physics, and gaining ourselves such a deep knowledge of biology that we can manage a food production cycle that can be sustainable in depths of space.

Heck it could be a thousands-of-years project because it probably involves terraforming some planet, and with the closest suitable candidate we're aware of, some 600 light years away (we think!), thats not going to happen anytime soon.

Or I guess geo-stationary space-station habitats. We can probably do those pretty soon. its the getting on and off the planet thats the problem, and the only feasible way I can see that working without enacting carnage on the atmosphere involves space elevators, an option that might actually be impossible if we dont have some serious advances in material physics.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Dec 15, 2011

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

eh4 posted:

So is Jared Diamond right?

The future is unwritten!

But if we're not careful, quite possibly.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

JBark posted:

Saw this article when reading the news this morning:


I gave up trying to bold important parts, since I was doing pretty much the entire article. Basically, WA is one of the places most likely to feel the effect of climate change first, and surprise! we're warming consistently almost every year, and have been since the 70s.

Febuary was an absolute horror. A month straight of 40C (~104f) days. I ended up going through a good $800 in air consitioner power useage just to stay sane. I can't recall another year qquite like it, and I say that as someone who detests winter, usually.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

VideoTapir posted:

What kind of house do you live in? If you have doors and windows front and back, you can do a lot to keep the house cool with minimal AC use. Open up at night, close the sunward side early, don't close the shaded side until it's cooler inside than out. You can be comfortable and run your AC just a few hours a day. My dad in AZ spends less than 1/6th what you do for electricity (don't know what the difference in rates is) with a ~1400 square foot house, in the hottest months of summer, about as hot as you're talking about.

If you're in an apartment facing north with no windows in back, well, I don't envy you I guess.
\
Old stone house with avg roof height and insulation. And no, keeping the doors open at night wasn't much of an option as it was ridiculously hot outside. Also this suburb is insane and leaving the door open will probably end up with uninvited guests.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

May I humbly suggest that life is a bit less stressful if one tries not to make too many conservative friends. It only encourages them.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

http://theconversation.edu.au/plimers-climate-change-book-for-kids-underestimates-science-education-4803

quote:

Plimer’s climate change book for kids underestimates science education

The forces of climate science denial have geared down a level. Having failed in their attempt to confuse adults and stop the parliament adopting a timid first step in response to climate change, they are now trying to get at schoolkids.

Ian Plimer, a geology professor and expert mineralogist with no background at all in climate science, has published a new book, “How to Get Expelled from School: A Guide to Climate Change for Pupils, Parents and Punters”.

The book is being promoted by the Institute of Public Affairs, a propaganda unit funded by business to promote an extreme free-market ideology. Its web site doesn’t just deny climate science but also the need to return water to the Murray River, even the health risk of tobacco smoke. The IPA has also argued that we should waive the restrictions on admitting “guest workers” because expanding the minerals industry is too important to be slowed by minor considerations about workers speaking English, being healthy and fitting into the community.

Plimer and the IPA have been working together to spread misinformation about climate science for some time. Plimer has an appeal on the IPA web site, soliciting donations to help the cause of muddying the waters.

His 2009 book, “Heaven and Earth”, was an embarrassing collage of half-truths, misinformation and misquotes of respectable scientists. Climate scientist Ian Enting published a detailed rebuttal of its arguments, while there is now even a web site Plimer vs Plimer, exposing the internal contradictions in Plimer’s case.

Plimer’s new publication purports to be an “anti-warmist manual” that arms children with “101 questions” to challenge their teachers. Plimer claims that his book aims to take politics and ideology out of science teaching. Given that, it’s remarkable the campaign is being promoted by the explicitly ideological IPA.

The book was also launched in Sydney by former Prime Minister John Howard, almost certainly the most ideological Prime Minister in our history. Howard stacked the ABC Board with ideologues and even championed the ridiculous attempts to re-write Australian history, playing down the dispossession of the original Australians.

Howard claimed that “People ought to be worried about what their children are being taught at school”. He said, “It’s a matter of real concern”. He attacked the teaching of climate change science as “one-sided”, presumably advocating the teaching of the uninformed superstition of denial to counter-balance the science.

Plimer said parents write to him saying that their kids are getting “environmental activism at school, rather than the basics of science”. Of course, if they do understand the basics of science, they will know that science proceeds by painstaking analysis of evidence, so they will understand why all the world’s major academies of science accept the evidence of climate change. They will also know that science works by considering the implications of the data they collect, which is why climate scientists are almost universally worried by the rate and scale of the changes they observe.

In my experience, school students do understand the science. I can’t imagine that anyone but a determined adult ideologue would be taken in by the sort of stuff in Plimer’s book. He says that the questions like “Is climate change normal?” will “embarrass poorly prepared teachers”.

They would have to be as poorly prepared as the IPA and Plimer not to know both that climate change has been a factor throughout the Earth’s history and that the scale and rate of change we are now seeing has no parallel in that history.

The irony is that the whole exercise purports to cleanse climate science of ideology and politics. What it is really saying is that the IPA ideology of free markets and unconstrained capitalism should be promoted in schools to counter the scientific evidence that we are straining the capacity of natural systems. Now that would be “a matter of real concern”.

This website is excellent, if you don't mind its australian bent. Its a general news site, written by academics, but not necessarily for an academic audience.

http://theconversation.edu.au/pages/media-and-democracy

Theres a heap there about the way the Murdoch press, who owns 70% of print media in australia has been utterly loving the democratic system here, partly by introducing the same sort of super-hostile tea-bagger nuttery here, and more to the point plain out loving lying on climate change , (and refugees, and mining taxes, and the NBN and whatever project labor has on offer for the torys to sabotage).

The site does largely focus on how the climate change debate has been hosed over, and much of it will be recognizable to brits and americans.

http://theconversation.edu.au/selling-climate-uncertainty-misinformation-and-the-media-2638 is a good read.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Even a few feet could have brutal effects on drinking water supplies :(

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

The boffins really need to hurry the gently caress up and work out a sustainable and cheap way of desalinating water that wont turn a water crisis into an energy crisis.

Actually thats the whole chinese-finger-trap nature of this fucker. A lot of these problems are only solvable by expending more energy, and "more energy" is what got us into this fix in the first place :(

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Claverjoe posted:

Desalinating water is a matter of of either A) reverse osmosis or B) heating the gently caress out of things (flash distillation). Waste heat from nuclear plants is the only thing I can think of offhand as something that might work on a large scale.

Right or wrong though, theres fairly obvious political problems with putting Atomz near drinking water. poo poo, if dipshits can bitch and moan to the point of getting loving fluride taken out of water in some places because of EVIL CHEMICALS, good luck getting political support for allowing nuclear reactors anywhere loving near peoples drinking water.

I mean gently caress, I have a friend in mid-western america terrified she is going to get cancer because of Fukiyama, and nothing I can say to her will convince her otherwise, because she read a scary article on the internet. :(

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

I detest the way governments will allocate loving massive amounts of water to industrial/mining uses while putting water rations on things like watering ones lawn. Well at least they do here.

Some mines here will use staggering amounts of fresh water , enough to supply multiple towns, meanwhile the local towns are being water rationed and people being fined for watering lawns whilst politicians pull their hair out over solutions to drier and drier dams.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

VideoTapir posted:

Lawns are a waste of water, too. Particularly when they're watered during the day.


Its a waste of water, but compared to the volumes used in mining, etc, its also a completely trivial and inconsequential waste too.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

cheese posted:

Forgive me if I'm missing the obvious, but when I think about mechanical or science based ways of physically pulling carbon from the atmosphere vs the hundreds of millions of cars and ships and factories pumping it into the air, I can't help but laugh at the 'spitting in the rain' feeling I get. Creating a bunch of carbon trees just seems so puny compared to the problem - is it realistic at all?

You pay 2000 guys (govt employment program!) to plant 200 trees a day each for 250 days a year, for ten years, and you have 1,000,000,000 trees planted. Thats maybe a million hectares (10,000 km2) of land with brand new trees and a big old rural employment program to go with it.

1 person planting trees aint much, but a whole lot of folks planting trees can amount to alot

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

VideoTapir posted:

edit: nevermind, this was idiotic.

I am not anti-nuclear. I am against the implication that safety requirements are bullshit hysterical obstructionism and an unnecessary cost. I'm also skeptical of his 75% statement without some more detail provided.

Your not thinking enough like a goon. You see because Fukushima (which "only" displaced about 100,000 people, totally nothing at all!) didn't have good safety measures like us here in the west whos reactors are staffed by actual robots instead of humans and are thus imperveous to human failures, we should deduce our safety standards are too strict because apparently people who worry about safety literally run about shouting "ATOMS" at the top of their voices..

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

I cant help starting to despair a bit, right now.

The whole things just getting harder as the problems get more savage.

We wont convince people to use less energy because people are lazy cunts

We cant replace fossil fues with biofuels because sticking food in cars is pretty evil to be honest when theres a billion odd people starving out there.

Nuclear just got a lot harder politically post japan, and if we have one more incident like that, and at the general rate these things happen, I'd give it another ten years, then nuclear will be effectiely over.

And........

we're hosed :suicide:

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

KinkyJohn posted:

I wonder how much impact religion has on the attitude towards climate change, especially since the entire(almost) world is religious.

There seems to be a detachment from the environment due to the belief that we aren't really a part of the Earth - we didn't spring from the Earth like the rest of these organisms, God made us and put us here for a while until we go home to where we REALLY live, so why should I give a gently caress about this temporary planet. So according to religion we are alien to this world.

I would venture that a lot of religious people secretly hope for the apocalypse, so they can fly away in a golden chariot and wave to all the non-believers, and the last thing they see is the bumper sticker that reads: "I TOLD YOU SO!"

I kind of wish it where true. I'd be looting the gently caress out of the saved dudes houses. More free poo poo for me!

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

This might be a pretty interesting one:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/jan/06/why-libertarians-must-deny-climage-change

Since it drags up some fairly interesting points about the problematic issues climate change causes for libertarian ideology.

Related to it:

http://mattbruenig.com/2011/12/21/environmentalism-poses-a-problem-for-libertarian-ideology/

Sort of but not quite:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/19/bastardised-libertarianism-makes-freedom-oppression

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

prick with tenure posted:

That's not it, but that's a good article, thanks. :)

I'm also looking for a good book on climate change to assign in my lower-division philosophy critical thinking classes - something that maybe has some stuff on environmental philosophy in it and not just the science. Discussion on why we find climate change so difficult to grapple with psychologically would be great as well. I would really appreciate some recommendations from the knowledgable goons here.

edit: Also, people interested in religion's role here should read this seminal article: http://www.uvm.edu/~gflomenh/ENV-NGO-PA395/articles/Lynn-White.pdf
For the "stewardship" angle, see Passmore: http://www.briangwilliams.com/environmental-ethics/passmore-john-arthur.html

The IPCC has had some fairly good interdisciplinary stuff looking at the psychology around climate change and denialism, somewhere on that site. Possibly interesting from a philosophical perspective is the problems and debates around defining and representing "risk" and "severity".

The CRU I *thought* had some stuff on this too, but I cant find it. They might have turtled up a little bit due to the retard assault on them.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

The problem is, these companies are in competition to each other. A lumber mill can go "Ok if we reduce the take from an old growth logging we'll preserve the forest for later", but it also means its competition is able to swoop in and grab the business from its reduced output and essentially make the "green" mill redundant.

Its like that bullshit argument about doing a carbon tax that "If we do it, other countries will out compete us because they havent signed it yet". It has the unfortunate property of quite possibly being true, even if in the end, if EVERYONE thinks that everyone loses.

To me it seems like some sort of paradox in rational behavior that as long as people treat the environment as the chess board of a zero sum game, the selfish actor rationality of each individual player ultimately produces a less rational outcome for everyone. The trick to defeating this stupid chess game is to light the loving thing on fire and refuse to play it.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

I have to be honest, if theres any good reason not to have kids, its because if the worst predictions are true, the kids are going to have every moral reason to lynch us by our neckties from whatever oak trees remain standing for the nightmarish mess we're leaving them.

Hell, part of me thinks we ought have done this already to the baby boomers.

Our generation have been total cunts and deserve whatever inter-generational justice comes our way. Look after a bunch of ageing generation X's who wrecked the planet for them? Why ought they.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Ervin K posted:

Thing is, it is completely inevitable that all the fossil fuels in the earth will be used up. There's no stopping that, the developed world is too slow to curb usage, and the developing world is only increasing usage. We have to figure out what to do once the inevitable comes. Plant more trees? Terraform?

Peak fuel , personally would be an ideal scenario if it where to be so simple.

Theres a tonne of coal still in the ground, and a tonne of shale oil. Unfortunately shifting dependence onto those forms will amplify CO2 emissions as both are completely grotty sources of fuel.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

WoodrowSkillson posted:

From what I understand it is La Nina combined with a lack of the normal high pressure system over greenland that shoves the jet stream down into the US. We have had warmer winters on record with less snowfall, and considering last winter was cold and snowy, it's disingenuous to call this an effect of global warming. Winter is going strong in other parts of the northern hemisphere.

When these start coming in rows, it's finally starting.

No whats happening has been occuring for a while now, and doesn't neatly fit the el-nino/la-nina pattern. There has been absolutely absurd things going on weather wise. Last year we had a month of over 40c days which is unheard of, here in perth.

But regardless, the diagnosis that its already happening already accounts for what you mention. Its not predicted anymore. That would imply an event in the future. Its happening right now. At least for the time being, some years will be utterly hosed in the head, and some will be mild and reasuring. Thats to be expected too.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Feb 9, 2012

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Reversal of fortune!

http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-insider-exposes-institute-s-budget-and-strategy

Looks like a "leaker" has dumped a whole bunch of Heartland institute (You know, the old 1980s tobacco harm denialist group who's team of lawyers and PR experts re-tooled their resumes in the late 90s/early 2000s to become "climate scientists" instead of "cancer researchers") strategy and policy documents have been leaked, and now we can play "lets point and laugh at the PR industry!"

These leaks are lots of fun!

quote:

Development of our "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms" project.
Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.


quote:

At present we sponsor the NIPCC to undermine the official United Nation's IPCC reports and paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered. Expenses will be about the same in 2012. NIPCC is currently funded by two gifts a year from two foundations, both of them requesting anonymity.

quote:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

quote:

Our current budget includes funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found.

Other documents in there outline paralell fuckjobs being done on other campaigns such as on unions in wisconsin etc, but yeah, here it is, a peek inside the mind of the PR industry's continuing campaign against science.

e:

Oh: http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/02/19/heartland-institute-sends-legal-notices-publishers-faked-and-stolen-docume

These guys havent really been able to decide if the company line is "These documents are forged do not post" or "These documents are stolen do not post". And like the scientologists, who make those claims simultaneously about their leaked poo poo too, its a contradiction that should not be lost on anyone, but has a "stolen" premise that seems more probable than its "forged"premise. Either way, they want to sue people over it.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Feb 20, 2012

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

I think I have an erection.

quote:

An Open Letter to the Heartland Institute

As scientists who have had their emails stolen, posted online and grossly misrepresented, we can appreciate the difficulties the Heartland Institute is currently experiencing following the online posting of the organization’s internal documents earlier this week. However, we are greatly disappointed by their content, which indicates the organization is continuing its campaign to discredit mainstream climate science and to undermine the teaching of well-established climate science in the classroom.
We know what it feels like to have private information stolen and posted online via illegal hacking. It happened to climate researchers in 2009 and again in 2011. Personal emails were culled through and taken out of context before they were posted online. In 2009, the Heartland Institute was among the groups that spread false allegations about what these stolen emails said. Despite multiple independent investigations, which demonstrated that allegations against scientists were false, the Heartland Institute continued to attack scientists based on the stolen emails. When more stolen emails were posted online in 2011, the Heartland Institute again pointed to their release and spread false claims about scientists.
So although we can agree that stealing documents and posting them online is not an acceptable practice, we would be remiss if we did not point out that the Heartland Institute has had no qualms about utilizing and distorting emails stolen from scientists.
We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to “think about what has happened” and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy. The Heartland Institute has chosen to undermine public understanding of basic scientific facts and personally attack climate researchers rather than engage in a civil debate about climate change policy options.
These are the facts: Climate change is occurring. Human activity is the primary cause of recent climate change. Climate change is already disrupting many human and natural systems. The more heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions that go into the atmosphere, the more severe those disruptions will become. Major scientific assessments from the Royal Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, United States Global Change Research Program and other authoritative sources agree on these points.
What businesses, policymakers, advocacy groups and citizens choose to do in response to those facts should be informed by the science. But those decisions are also necessarily informed by economic, ethical, ideological, and other considerations.While the Heartland Institute is entitled to its views on policy, we object to its practice of spreading misinformation about climate research and personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals.
We hope the Heartland Institute will begin to play a more constructive role in the policy debate. Refraining from misleading attacks on climate science and climate researchers would be a welcome first step toward having an honest, fact-based debate about the policy responses to climate change.

Ray Bradley, PhD, Director of the Climate System Research Center, University of Massachusetts
David Karoly, PhD, ARC Federation Fellow and Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia
Michael Mann, PhD, Director, Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University
Jonathan Overpeck, PhD, Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona
Ben Santer, PhD, Research Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Gavin Schmidt, PhD, Climate Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Kevin Trenberth, ScD, Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research

:iceburn:

I don't know what to highlight. Its all excellent.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Maluco Marinero posted:

Someone has to. Doubt merchants MUST be discredited emphatically, and solidly. Shame PR is often more about who has the cash, than who's right, just like politics.

I'm keeping archives of a lot of these stuff, because I'm convinced in 30-40 years my grandkids are going to want to know who to loving blame, and my strongest hope is they are angry enough to drag the old bastards who orchestrated this denial industry out of their loving old peoples homes and into the dock to face the consequences of what they have wrought. These people who are doing this have names, and I have no intention of those names being forgotten.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

theflyingorc posted:

They claim that one of the documents is forged, the others are likely genuine. The faked document contains most of the quotes that actually make Heartland look like Montgomery Burns.

edit: A good article from the Atlantic on why that document is almost certainly fake:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/

One of the other places I was reading made an interesting observation though that the "forged" document has a claim about watts that hasn't been made anywhere else before that in the midst of watts rambling about it being fake, he conceeded that the particular claim is true.

Which is interesting , because if its forged, its forged by someone who was inside of the heartlands institute and knew these things.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

theflyingorc posted:

Not true, unfortunately. I just checked the budget document and it specifically mentions $88,000 for ”ITWorks/IntelliWeather to create a website...”

This is Anthony Watts' company, and a simple Google search would have clued the forger into this. No piece of information in the strategy document wasn't elsewhere. There is also the error of stating that the contribution from Koch was ear marked for climate change, when it is clearly noted to be for some health advocacy thing elsewhere.

The document is almost certainly faked. You're making the error of assuming every dastardly thing claimed about the bad team is true.

The problem is, the only real evidence pointing to its fakeness is legal threats from a panicking organization that claims its faked , but also seems to claim its stolen , and a blog with some person who seems to think pdf metadata has some sort of magical detective abilities. (Seriously, just opening a PDF on OSX lion can reset the metadata to your machine, due to apples retarded autosaving presumptuousness. It just doesn't prove a loving thing. All we know is the other documents appear to have been shat out from Adobe distiller, and this one was scanned from a physical document using an epson scanner, according to the metadata)

I mean it seems wierd that someone would go to the effort of stealing a bunch of documents, then forge one to add in that features no new allegations about the groups activities other than them talking about stuff they do openly, which is to say coordinate funding of climate denialists. Why would someone own-goal themselves in such a way?

I'm not saying it IS real, but there isn't enough evidence to suggest it ISNT real either.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Feb 21, 2012

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Well, with the leaker now coming forward, I think we can kick back and see what comes of it. Maybe it was forged, but even with that *slightly* better article you linked which at least attempts to put an argument behind why the memo might not be true, I still don't quite understand why someone would do it if it contains no new allegations.

But maybe we'll know soon enough.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

The Entire Universe posted:

Tomorrow's high is supposed to be drat near 50 here in Omaha, which is one of those "gently caress YOU SNOW" days where you simply do not want to step in the grass as the snowmelt turns it into the shittiest goddamn mud ever. I'm talking shoe-stealing stain-the-gently caress-out-of-everything red clay mud.

In not-so-local news, Denver's high on Wednesday is expected to be 66. Mile high short sleeves.

Make that celcius and it drat near feels like that in perth. Well not quite, but you get the drift..

So hot :( My sleep patterns have been horrible.

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duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Locus posted:

Right now they're passing a bill that makes protesting illegal if it's done (either knowingly or unknowingly) within a certain distance of some government officials and important events. Enjoy your 1 to 10 years in jail. :toot:

Is that really going to pass constitutional muster?

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