Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

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Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Forever_Peace posted:

I haven't mentioned this here, but I recently went to a coffee hour for my local state representative and I was literally the only person there. We nerded out for a solid hour about climate policy, urban design and zoning ordinance (with a 10-minute sidebar on "bus queue jumps"), and immigration / police issues. She has been in regular email contact with me since and is staking out strong positions on a number of bills that could make a big difference in our state.

Like, the bar to clear for getting involved is surprisingly low. Take a shower, don't be an rear end, know your poo poo, and start showing the hell up.

Also, I get happy every time I see a Shrike post get blocked. The ignore list is a beautiful thing. =)

This, but I'm represented by John Lewis :3:

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:21

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# ? May 23, 2024 23:08

shrike82: Jun 11, 2005

Did the #scienceisgreat march actually have any concrete goals? Because it feels like another aimless protest that shows white middle class folk pat themselves on the back for "doing something".

Crowing about stuff like this in the Trump era with the EPA crumbling is kinda bizarre.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:22

Accretionist: Nov 7, 2012; I BELIEVE IN STUPID CONSPIRACY THEORIES

enraged_camel posted:

I agree that nonviolent resistance won't fix this issue but it would be great if we don't advocate forming underground cells and literally killing people for their beliefs. This isn't LF.

Not to mention, how do you even start a domestic terror group without an activist base for recruitment and a large-scale peaceful movement for cover and sympathizers?

Not even their, "gently caress everything but terrorism, assassinations and Stalinist purges of fat people and materialists," schtick rationalizes the hatin'

poo poo, there're reasons DoD considers 'protesting' to be 'low-level terrorism.'

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:22

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

Minge Binge posted:

although I make the suggestion that nothing you do really matters, there are things you can and should do. I spend most of my free time volunteering and finding better ways to strengthen my local community. My philosophy is that anything on a national level is pretty much a lost cause, but you can still make a big impact on the way the future unfolds for the people directly around you. A strong community will be much more resilient to the effects of climate change.

Two-thirds of the US economy reside in the counties Hillary won. Aggregate local change is national change.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:21

Kindest Forums User: Mar 25, 2008; Let me tell you about my opinion about Bernie Sanders and why Donald Trump is his true successor.

You cannot vote Hillary Clinton because she is worse than Trump.

enraged_camel posted:

I agree that nonviolent resistance won't fix this issue but it would be great if we don't advocate forming underground cells and literally killing people for their beliefs. This isn't LF.

thanks mom

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:21

Squalid: Nov 4, 2008

Forever_Peace posted:

That's certainly fair!

Poking around a bit, it looks like the best data set on 20th century protest movements at the moment is Chenworth & Stephen 2011, who kindly host their raw data here (warning: direct download link). It contains extensive data on 323 resistance movements since 1900 (seriously this must have taken for-goddamned-ever to put together). I could summarize their findings, but I can't resist a new data set, so let's poke around. I do want to note, though, that this data only goes from 1900 to 2006, so the failures of the Arab Spring aren't incorporated here.

You can follow along in R as well, but folks in these sorts of fields always seem to use STATA for everything (god knows why), so that's how the files come. Grab the "haven" package in R and you can load it in no problem.

So it looks like their primary outcome for movements is coded as "failure", "success", and "partial success". To me, that sounds a lot like an ordinal variable (where success > partial success > failure), so we can start with an ordinal logistic regression. For now I'll just start with whether or not the resistance was violent (where the success of nonviolent protest is the question under discussion). Here's the output:

The coefficient for "nonviolent protest" (vs violent resistance) is in the right direction - a nonviolent protest increases the log-odds of obtaining a partially successful or fully successful outcome. And it's almost certainly significant in a frequentist sense (any t-statistic over 3 is almost definitely significant given the sample size we're working with).

Of course, it's possible that "partially successful" isn't really "in between" success and failure, but is instead a dump category for weird compromise outcomes that wasn't really inside the protest's goals. Instead of looking at the odds of "jumping up the outcome order", we can model the odds that nonviolent resistance increases the likelihood of a "partial success" vs a failure separately from the likelihood of success vs failure, each as their own category. This is called "multinomial regression". We're still modeling log-odds of outcomes, but our assumptions of what those outcomes mean is a little different. Here's the output:

(note: for some reason they coded "failure = 3, partial success = 4, success = 5". I don't know why. But I manually turned them into categories, so the coefficients for "4" tell you whether the predictor is changing log-odds of getting a partial success instead of a failure, while the the coefficients for "5" tell you whether the predictor is changing log-odds of full success vs failure).

Different assumptions, same story. And a slightly better model fit, for that matter. Nonviolent protest increased the odds of a full or partial success (vs. other forms of protest).

Now, it's certainly possible that a third confounding variable is responsible for this effect. Like, maybe nonviolent protests tend to have systematically different goals? Or take place in different regions of the planet?

Luckily, they pulled all that data too. Here we control for the goals of the protest, and can see if nonviolent protest still accounts for increased odds of success even after accounting for the type of protest it is. The types they coded are "fselfdet" for "self determination / anti-occupation", "regchange" for "regime change", "secession" for secession, and "other". Here's the multinomial model:

Yep - even after controlling for goals/type, nonviolent protest was still effective.

Similarly, we can also control for region of the country:

Yep, still checks out.

Here's the code to run this yourself:
code:
library(haven)
df <- read_dta("WCRWreplication.dta")

library(MASS)
library(nnet)

summary(df)

df$outcome <- factor(df$outcome)

#multinomial regression
summary(multinom(outcome~nonviol, data = df))

#Ordinal logistic regression
summary(polr(outcome~nonviol, data = df, Hess=TRUE))

#multinomial regression
summary(multinom(outcome~nonviol+fselfdet+regchange+secession+other, data = df))

summary(multinom(outcome~nonviol+middleeast+americas+asia+fsu+europe+africa, data = df))
I encourage folks to poke around for themselves, control for whatever you like, test out your ideas about what might influence protest outcomes.

Chenworth & Stephen specified a number of interesting findings with this data, but I haven't read their book and don't know their methods and so can't endorse that they actually know what the hell they are doing (I am inherently skeptical of anybody that uses STATA as a default).

Cool post that will be completely ignored by the threads regular defeatists and nihilists because it doesn't fit into their preexisting world view, just as climate science is ignored by deniers.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:32

Kindest Forums User: Mar 25, 2008; Let me tell you about my opinion about Bernie Sanders and why Donald Trump is his true successor.

You cannot vote Hillary Clinton because she is worse than Trump.

Forever_Peace posted:

Two-thirds of the US economy reside in the counties Hillary won. Aggregate local change is national change.

yes. of course. but we literally need a complete restructuring of society to combat climate change. You just won't be productive trying to achieve anything like that. So you have to prioritize your efforts. Helping a local co-op farm will get you a lot farther than marching down the street yelling about how great science is.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:32

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

Potato Salad posted:

This, but I'm represented by John Lewis

Jealous. Dude owns. Finally got around to reading March a few months ago - it's really good.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:41

Oxxidation: Jul 22, 2007

ChairMaster posted:

Jesus Christ what a lot of effort put toward trying to convince people that there is a way to nonviolently dismantle the entirety of capitalism and consumerism in an incredibly short period of time, costing everyone in the world who matters even a little bit billions upon billions of dollars.

I think the problem here is that anyone who thinks this issue is politically solvable within the systems we currently have does not understand the actual severity of the climate issues we face in the next few decades. The utter naivety of it all at least gives the nihilist crowd something to laugh at while the world burns.

I have to admit, all of your points would be a lot more convincing if they weren't coming from an obese retail worker who literally suffered an hours-long panic attack because he made eye contact with a girl once.

For someone who goes on and on about how nothing matters except making your life better, you seem pretty content with wallowing in your lovely life and trying to make everyone else's that little bit worse.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 16:47

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

Oxxidation posted:

I have to admit, all of your points would be a lot more convincing if they weren't coming from an obese retail worker who literally suffered an hours-long panic attack because he made eye contact with a girl once.

For someone who goes on and on about how nothing matters except making your life better, you seem pretty content with wallowing in your lovely life and trying to make everyone else's that little bit worse.

Hey man what's with the ad hominems here? How do you know this isn't also me?

You should be convinced because data is data and the evidence seems to support the conclusion that popular resistance can be effective.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 17:08

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

How many communist revolutions succeeded without violence because realistically central planning with a primary focus on ecological stewardship across the entire industrialized world the only way forward if 2 or 3C is the goal

# ? Apr 23, 2017 17:41

Squalid: Nov 4, 2008

rscott posted:

How many communist revolutions succeeded without violence because realistically central planning with a primary focus on ecological stewardship across the entire industrialized world the only way forward if 2 or 3C is the goal

realistically there's never been a communist revolution with a primary focus on ecological stewardship anyway

Forever_Peace posted:

Hey man what's with the ad hominems here? How do you know this isn't also me?

You should be convinced because data is data and the evidence seems to support the conclusion that popular resistance can be effective.

I agree with you more or less, but I'm just as frustrated with this thread as Oxxidation. It has become dominated by teleological narratives of climate change that have little more basis in science than the worst denialist nonsense. I mean my god we can hardly go a page without someone sincerely recommending homesteading as a rational response to climate disasters, a response wholly lacking any basis in evidence. Apocalyptic narratives of civilization collapse are derived more from popular eschatology than climate science, and I dearly wish this thread didn't talk about it as much.

Squalid fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Apr 23, 2017

# ? Apr 23, 2017 17:44

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Forever_Peace posted:

. And it's almost certainly significant in a frequentist sense (any t-statistic over 3 is almost definitely significant given the sample size we're working with).

This is terrible reasoning fyi. Guessing you aren't a statistician?

# ? Apr 23, 2017 17:51

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

This is terrible reasoning fyi. Guessing you aren't a statistician?

I have a PhD in neuroscience but feel free to enlighten me.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:15

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Homesteading "Ima defend muhself 24/7 with me gun" fantasies haven't come up that recently, has it?

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:14

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Forever_Peace posted:

I have a PhD in neuroscience but feel free to enlighten me.

Its troika, he earned that avatar many, many times over.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:18

Kindest Forums User: Mar 25, 2008; Let me tell you about my opinion about Bernie Sanders and why Donald Trump is his true successor.

You cannot vote Hillary Clinton because she is worse than Trump.

Squalid posted:

It has become dominated by teleological narratives of climate change that have little more basis in science than the worst denialist nonsense.

What are you suggesting here? That we're making it sound worse than it is? Maybe you should follow the thread a little better and check out some recent papers, because it's getting worse. poo poo is Accelerating. I don't think you understand the magnitude of the problem we are facing.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:20

ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

Oxxidation posted:

I have to admit, all of your points would be a lot more convincing if they weren't coming from an obese retail worker who literally suffered an hours-long panic attack because he made eye contact with a girl once.

For someone who goes on and on about how nothing matters except making your life better, you seem pretty content with wallowing in your lovely life and trying to make everyone else's that little bit worse.

Hey I haven't been obese for like 5 years, I'm not even overweight anymore. If you're gonna do the follow people around with old e/n posts thing you can at least keep up to date.

Also the climate change thread was part of what inspired me to quit my retail job and go to school to get a degree so I can move out of Canada to a country that's less likely to be invaded by America when New York and Miami are underwater and California has run out of water entirely. Good things can come out of what you guys call defeatism!

ChairMaster fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Apr 23, 2017

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:39

Squalid: Nov 4, 2008

Potato Salad posted:

Homesteading "Ima defend muhself 24/7 with me gun" fantasies haven't come up that recently, has it?

Perhaps not every page but for example just three pages ago:

Crazycryodude posted:

Yeah the survivalist compound in a remote mountain valley still sounds like the best long-term idea.

I think Crazycryodude is exaggerating intentionally for effect but he's followed by another poster who treats the idea seriously, instead of as utterly ridiculous as it deserves.

Minge Binge posted:

What are you suggesting here? That we're making it sound worse than it is? Maybe you should follow the thread a little better and check out some recent papers, because it's getting worse. poo poo is Accelerating. I don't think you understand the magnitude of the problem we are facing.

I am suggesting that apocalyptic fears are often derived as more from traditional Protestant Eschatology, loose interpretations of Marxist dialectical-materialism and the contradictions of Capitalism, and Cold War era survivalist literature than actual scientific efforts to understand climate change and its effects on society and the economy.

I'm not sure why you believe social change is a lost cause, but looking at the last 100+ years of history I can't say I agree. I don't think anyone is going to fight a revolution to prevent climate change, so I have no choice but to fight for change via other means.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:40

ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

Squalid posted:

I am suggesting that apocalyptic fears are often derived as more from traditional Protestant Eschatology, loose interpretations of Marxist dialectical-materialism and the contradictions of Capitalism, and Cold War era survivalist literature than actual scientific efforts to understand climate change and its effects on society and the economy.

So what is it you think will happen when Pakistan and India run out of food, and when Europe enters an ice age in which nobody can grow food anymore and Coastal regions all over the world are submerged in yearly hurricanes that they're not prepared for and half of Siberia spontaneously erupts in a fountain of Methane that lasts for years and heats up the planet so fast that nobody even knows what hit em and also the whole world smells like rotten eggs for 10 years.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:45

Kindest Forums User: Mar 25, 2008; Let me tell you about my opinion about Bernie Sanders and why Donald Trump is his true successor.

You cannot vote Hillary Clinton because she is worse than Trump.

Squalid posted:

I am suggesting that apocalyptic fears are often derived as more from traditional Protestant Eschatology, loose interpretations of Marxist dialectical-materialism and the contradictions of Capitalism, and Cold War era survivalist literature than actual scientific efforts to understand climate change and its effects on society and the economy.

uhhh. okay. All the evidence is pointing to catastrophe. a meter sea level rise in a world with 10 billion people sounds pretty bad. but, yeah, maybe I'm exaggerating it. Everything is fine.

Squalid posted:

I'm not sure why you believe social change is a lost cause, but looking at the last 100+ years of history I can't say I agree. I don't think anyone is going to fight a revolution to prevent climate change, so I have no choice but to fight for change via other means.

how are you not getting this. we are in this situation because any attempt to stop climate change has been ineffective. what has changed in the last twenty years that would allow for liberal protest being effective today. We have more emissions, we have a larger population, our governments are still crooked, and we have much less time. The problem keeps on getting bigger and bigger and we keep trying the same old poo poo. it's not working. get that through your head.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 18:59

Squalid: Nov 4, 2008

ChairMaster posted:

So what is it you think will happen when Pakistan and India run out of food, and when Europe enters an ice age in which nobody can grow food anymore and Coastal regions all over the world are submerged in yearly hurricanes that they're not prepared for and half of Siberia spontaneously erupts in a fountain of Methane that lasts for years and heats up the planet so fast that nobody even knows what hit em and also the whole world smells like rotten eggs for 10 years.

I certainly do not know, but I also know for certain that nobody else does either.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:06

Conspiratiorist: Nov 12, 2015; 17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the ~~fifth~~ ~~sixth~~ some day

ChairMaster posted:

So what is it you think will happen when Pakistan and India run out of food, and when Europe enters an ice age in which nobody can grow food anymore and Coastal regions all over the world are submerged in yearly hurricanes that they're not prepared for and half of Siberia spontaneously erupts in a fountain of Methane that lasts for years and heats up the planet so fast that nobody even knows what hit em and also the whole world smells like rotten eggs for 10 years.

Many known unknowns. Not that you even got them right here.

But you're going to die from being poor in poor health before food shortages (that is, increased food prices for developed nations) aren't simply a tech and logistics matter, and before 'climate refugees' is a widespread used term.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:07

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

Never not a good time to repost this.

The Politics of Optimism

quote:

Optimism is a political act.

Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful � cynicism is obedience.

Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics.

Great movements for social change always begin with statements of great optimism.

Recently, though, I�ve been getting asked a lot how it�s possible to remain optimistic when the news is so bad, and progress on problems like climate change or global poverty seems hopelessly slow. These questions started me thinking about why the tone of coverage and debate about the big issues we face is so unrelentingly grim.

Some of that darkness comes, undoubtedly, from deeply felt sorrow: from grief over the loss of beloved parts the natural world or from compassion for the horrible suffering of the millions whom our global economy has left behind, and the millions more who will suffer the consequences of our inaction in the planetary crisis. Some of it is the gloom of disappointed idealists, folks who�ve seen so much of the underside of human nature that they�ve abandoned hope. Some is the narrative lure of collapse. And much, let�s face it, is a rational response to a worsening planetary crisis.

But I�ve come more and more to think that the particular dynamic of cynicism and despair we see in today�s media and political debates, in both North America and Europe, springs also from politics. Its political nature goes largely unrecognized.

Here�s what I see that politics being:
1) An explicit statement that we are incapable of actually solving the planet�s most pressing problems, and that to consider doing so is �unrealistic.�
2) A mostly unstated assumption that the reason embracing bold solutions is unrealistic is because those solutions involve unbearable costs � often with a faux-populist rhetoric about elites imposing those costs on regular people.
3) A rarely voiced belief that �realism� ought best to be defined as �in the interests of those doing well today,� and that �unbearable costs� ought best to be defined as �any meaningful change in circumstances whatsoever.� A realism, one might say, that�s unconcerned with physical reality.
4) A widely practiced stance that, therefore, expressions of concern and extremely modest, almost symbolic, small steps and half measures are the appropriate course of action.
Though often combined with the politics of fear, this political stance might better be thought of as �the politics of despair.� (It�s as if Eeyore were running the public debate.)

Consider, instead, the politics of optimism:
1) That realism ought best to be defined as �within our capacity� and �necessary in light of our planetary crisis.�
2) That we have the capacity to create and deploy solutions to the world�s biggest problems, and the magnitude of the consequences of failure (both for ourselves and generations to come) demands that we act immediately.
3) That it is possible to act in such a way that the prospects of most people on the planet are improved. While certain costs will be incurred, the returns on those investments will be quite attractive, not only in ecological stability, international security and human well-being, but in terms of plain old economic prosperity. These solutions will make the future better than the present for the almost everyone, and greatly improve the lots of our children and grandchildren.
4) Therefore, defining our win scenarios, imagining the kind of future we want to create, describing the solutions that will make building that future possible, and publicly committing ourselves to success are the appropriate course of action.

Nothing about the politics of optimism needs to be naive. We can understand that people are fallible, mostly self-motivated and sometimes even mistaken about what�s in their own best interests. We can stress the importance of informed decision-making, demand rigor and note uncertainty. We can recognize the massive differentials in power and wealth in our society and be clear-headed about the difficulty of opposing those whose power and wealth is tied to planetary destruction. We can anticipate setbacks and failures, disappointments and betrayals. We can expect corruption and demand transparency. We can freely admit the profound difficulty of the work yet to be done � even admit the likelihood of massive failures � and still fight on.

We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. When we do that, we liberate ourselves from some of the burden of horror and powerlessness we all feel saddled with at the dawn of the 21st Century.

But when we do it in public � when we stand up and refuse to accept the idea that failure is preordained and action is unrealistic � we strike right down to the heart of the political conflict we really face: the conflict between our party of the future and their party of the past.

I�m more and more convinced that incrementalism in the absence of committed vision almost always serves the politics of despair. The despair lobby is entirely okay with people thinking the crisis is downright apocalyptic, so long as those same people don�t think there�s really anything we can do differently at a systems level. That�s why our best hope lies in a fighting optimism, an optimism that�s willing to confront the despair lobby and its messengers and make very clear that a feeble, halting response is not the rational or responsible response, but a corrupt and morally bankrupt response.

Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible. We show that the range of pathways available to us is actually quite large � and even includes paths that might, for instance, harm the interests of rich old guys who own big chunks of coal companies or the petrochemical industry, but improve the prospects of pretty much everyone else.

We need to accelerate innovation and magnify vision, sure. We need to school ourselves in the possible, share ideas, imagine outcomes, weigh options. We need to figure out how best to transform the systems we�ve built.

Ultimately, though, we need something more than better answers.

We need millions of people who are willing to teach the teachable, comfort the victimized and confront the predators. We need to take our politics public and take on the whole culture of cynical defeatism.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:11

ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

Haha yea, 8 years from now when all the optimistic incrementalists finally get Obama 2.0 in the white house and he or she pretends like they're gonna make a positive change and manage to reduce American Emissions by like 15% that'll save everything.

Another dozen vague "science marches" will surely raise awareness enough to get people to understand whats happening and put an end to endless growth and consumption and world peace will ensue.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:17

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

ChairMaster posted:

Haha yea, 8 years from now when all the optimistic incrementalists finally get Obama 2.0 in the white house and he or she pretends like they're gonna make a positive change and manage to reduce American Emissions by like 15% that'll save everything.

Another dozen vague "science marches" will surely raise awareness enough to get people to understand whats happening and put an end to endless growth and consumption and world peace will ensue.

???

What I posted is an argument against incrementalism. I even bolded those parts.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:19

ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

Forever_Peace posted:

???

What I posted is an argument against incrementalism. I even bolded those parts.

I only read half a line where it said people in despair never change anything.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:21

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

ChairMaster posted:

I only read half a line where it said people in despair never change anything.

OK. IIRC you're usually a decently thoughtful poster. This just an off-day or should I avoid bothering you with effortpost responses ITT?

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:29

Kindest Forums User: Mar 25, 2008; Let me tell you about my opinion about Bernie Sanders and why Donald Trump is his true successor.

You cannot vote Hillary Clinton because she is worse than Trump.

i'm typically a very positive person in real life. I focus on the good in my community. Being a miserable cynic will never recruit anybody to your cause, and it will only bring pain to yourself. My angry posting here is cathartic. I don't want to be the man that yells at clouds in real life, so I have to do it here.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:38

ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

Forever_Peace posted:

OK. IIRC you're usually a decently thoughtful poster. This just an off-day or should I avoid bothering you with effortpost responses ITT?

Alright, alright, a page and a half long quote box causes me to skip over it sometimes. I read it for real and this:

quote:

But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles.

Is still impossible. I simply do not believe in any way shape or form that you or I or anyone else in the world can get the average person to even confront the reality of whats going on in the world, much less consider that their entire way of life if based on horrible exploitation of the environment and the poor all around the globe. People's minds simply don't work that way, they can't accept a change in the fundamentals of the world they've always lived in. It's not only that, but there's so much money and power invested in keeping the status quo at this point that any effort such as this:

quote:

We need millions of people who are willing to teach the teachable, comfort the victimized and confront the predators. We need to take our politics public and take on the whole culture of cynical defeatism.

Would be immediately neutered or co-opted by existing power structures to make it completely worthless. If climate change was an issue that wouldn't become a critical crisis for another 200 years or so I'd be perfectly fine with optimism, but it's just too late. The entire piece relies on the ability of people to take a positive outlook not only in the face of future failures, but also in the face of current actual failures that give nothing but motivation to tone down a message to make it more palatable to the people invested in the status quo and the billions of people too scared to think of anything else. The governments of the world are the only power structures with the ability to even reduce the impact of whats coming in the future, and while I'm not educated on the inner political workings of every country on the planet, I do know the basics of how all the important ones work, and the fact of the matter is that any government beholden to it's people is at the mercy of their comfort, which will be reduced considerably upon any relevant action towards climate change, and any government not beholden to it's people is being run by people who don't give a poo poo what happens to the world and are just in it for the money and power. Not to mention that the most powerful government in the world has devised an incredible method of tricking people into thinking that they have some form of opposition to the current people in charge when in reality both parties are almost identical with regards to the actual outcomes of their policies regarding anything of substance to the future of the world at large.

Optimism can't help us now, the structures that we exist in are immune to it. They've been worked on and refined to such a point as to become invulnerable. And that's fine! Nothing lasts forever, including globalized human civilization. If you focus on your own life and circumstances you really don't need to worry that much about the future anyways if you don't have kids.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 19:58

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

ChairMaster posted:

Alright, alright, a page and a half long quote box causes me to skip over it sometimes. I read it for real and this:

Is still impossible. I simply do not believe in any way shape or form that you or I or anyone else in the world can get the average person to even confront the reality of whats going on in the world, much less consider that their entire way of life if based on horrible exploitation of the environment and the poor all around the globe. People's minds simply don't work that way, they can't accept a change in the fundamentals of the world they've always lived in. It's not only that, but there's so much money and power invested in keeping the status quo at this point that any effort such as this:

Would be immediately neutered or co-opted by existing power structures to make it completely worthless. If climate change was an issue that wouldn't become a critical crisis for another 200 years or so I'd be perfectly fine with optimism, but it's just too late. The entire piece relies on the ability of people to take a positive outlook not only in the face of future failures, but also in the face of current actual failures that give nothing but motivation to tone down a message to make it more palatable to the people invested in the status quo and the billions of people too scared to think of anything else. The governments of the world are the only power structures with the ability to even reduce the impact of whats coming in the future, and while I'm not educated on the inner political workings of every country on the planet, I do know the basics of how all the important ones work, and the fact of the matter is that any government beholden to it's people is at the mercy of their comfort, which will be reduced considerably upon any relevant action towards climate change, and any government not beholden to it's people is being run by people who don't give a poo poo what happens to the world and are just in it for the money and power. Not to mention that the most powerful government in the world has devised an incredible method of tricking people into thinking that they have some form of opposition to the current people in charge when in reality both parties are almost identical with regards to the actual outcomes of their policies regarding anything of substance to the future of the world at large.

Optimism can't help us now, the structures that we exist in are immune to it. They've been worked on and refined to such a point as to become invulnerable. And that's fine! Nothing lasts forever, including globalized human civilization. If you focus on your own life and circumstances you really don't need to worry that much about the future anyways if you don't have kids.

Appreciate you spelling out your thoughts like this. Not going to go point by point but there's a few threads here that are definitely worth pulling.

First is the emphasis on individual perspective (which is necessary to mobilize democratic change). You certainly might be right that climate change is a hard issue for folks to grapple with, but I think it's important to keep in mind that persuadability is an empirical question. I remember a time when it seemed like gay marriage was a lost cause. I consoled friends who wept when their first time ever voting resulted in a California amendment cementing their status as second-class citizens. And then, bizarrely, seemingly out of nowhere, public opinion changed on a dime. It was just astonishing. I did some poking around a few years after Obergefell to try to find out what had happened, and it turns out that this is really not all that uncommon for movements. Interracial marriage went through a similar sudden transformation. The majority of Americans living in the 60s thought that MLK was hurting the cause of Black Americans and had a dis-favorable view of his organizing. And apparently, there's evidence that the speed of those transformation is increasing.

Maybe it is ultimately impossible for the majority to appropriately understand the risks of climate change. But we don't know enough yet to say. And if history is any guide, when a movement does happen to strike the right chord, sentiment can flip really, really quick. Especially in a crisis. There was a time that you and I didn't care about climate the way we do now! We do know that the tendency of folks is to attribute their own stances to logical reasoning given the facts at hand and everybody's else's behavior to immutable personality characteristics. We call this "the fundamental attribution error". Given that known bias, I think it makes sense to temper our fatalism on the possibility of changing minds. The default is to assume wrongly.

Second is the idea that a) the forces lined up against climate mitigation are tremendously powerful entrenched interests, and b) climate mitigation requires sacrifices a democracy isn't going to tolerate. Again, this might be true! But I don't think it's certain. What is certain is that the status quo works in favor of the extraction industry. Delay is predatory. That alone is reason enough to fight: if we don't, they win. Even a 0.00001% chance of success is an improvement over the status quo.

But personally, I just don't think it's true that mitigation necessarily hurts its citizens. Folks aren't happy living in an atomized suburbia as it is. Life satisfaction is sky high in the Barcelona superblocks that shut down road traffic, increased density and walk-ability, invested in public transportation, and made room for shared green spaces. Effective climate mitigation looks like an unprecedented building boom, a historic investment in high-tech energy generation and storage (from distributed solar networks to gen-five nuclear), a reclamation of the highways that have destroyed our cities and transformation of the economy towards information and service industries. People like all of these things!

As far as I can see, the only certainties here are a) inaction benefits the status quo, and b) the status quo cannot be tolerated. Climate mitigation is hard, but the scientific consensus of what we need to be doing is just as strong as the consensus that the Greenland ice fields are melting. So I do the work.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 20:32

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Minge Binge posted:

uhhh. okay. All the evidence is pointing to catastrophe. a meter sea level rise in a world with 10 billion people sounds pretty bad. but, yeah, maybe I'm exaggerating it. Everything is fine.

There's a pretty large range of outcomes between everything being fine and total societal collapse. It's hard to interpret doomsaying as anything other than total capitulation, because at the end of the day both denialism and defeatism are just excuses to avoid doing anything productive or change anything about your life.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 22:06

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Gay marriage being legal is like a thousandth of the amount of societal change that is absolutely required for the world to avoid disaster and MLK's reputation was rehabilitated only after he died and all the stuff that made well off whites uncomfortable was whitewashed away, making the impact of his legacy a sad shadow of what it ought to be.

You aren't making very persuasive arguments here

# ? Apr 23, 2017 22:16

Rime: Nov 2, 2011; by Games Forum

# ? Apr 23, 2017 23:01

Chadzok: Apr 25, 2002

Nice image but it needs a scale for that color coding, it's junk without it.
Does make me think I should open an ice-cream shop though.

Chadzok fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Apr 23, 2017

# ? Apr 23, 2017 23:16

StabbinHobo: Oct 18, 2002; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

rscott posted:

Gay marriage being legal is like a thousandth of the amount of societal change that is absolutely required for the world to avoid disaster

lol yea thats as far as I got. people just do not understand the size of the problem at all. (really its more like a millionth)

edit: just to contribute something, here's a good article on the math:
https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/recalculating-climate-math

its too many words for some very simple numbers so i'll just excerpt the key parts:

quote:

Those numbers spell out, in simple arithmetic, how much of the fossil fuel in the world�s existing coal mines and oil wells we can burn if we want to prevent global warming from cooking the planet. In other words, if our goal is to keep the Earth�s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius�the upper limit identified by the nations of the world�how much more new digging and drilling can we do?

Here�s the answer: zero.

That�s right: If we�re serious about preventing catastrophic warming, the new study shows, we can�t dig any new coal mines, drill any new fields, build any more pipelines. Not a single one. We�re done expanding the fossil fuel frontier. Our only hope is a swift, managed decline in the production of all carbon-based energy from the fields we�ve already put in production.

...

Scientists say that to have even a two-thirds chance of staying below a global increase of two degrees Celsius, we can release 800 gigatons more CO2 into the atmosphere. But the Rystad data shows coal mines and oil and gas wells currently in operation worldwide contain 942 gigatons worth of CO2. So the math problem is simple, and it goes like this:

942 > 800

�What we found is that if you burn up all the carbon that�s in the currently operating fields and mines, you�re already above two degrees,�

...

Two degrees Celsius used to be the red line. But scientists now believe the upper limit is much lower. [...] last year, when the world�s leaders met in Paris, they set a new number: Every effort, they said, would be made to keep the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees. And to have even a 50�50 chance of meeting that goal, we can only release about 353 gigatons more CO2. So let�s do the math again:

942 > 353

To have just a break-even chance of meeting that 1.5 degree goal we solemnly set in Paris, we�ll need to close all of the coal mines and some of the oil and gas fields we�re currently operating long before they�re exhausted.

�Absent some incredible breakthrough in mythical carbon-sucking unicorns, the numbers say we�re done with the expansion of the fossil fuel industry,� says Kretzmann. �Living up to the Paris Agreement means we must start a managed decline in the fossil fuel industry immediately�and manage that decline as quickly as possible.�

�Managed decline� means we don�t have to grind everything to a halt tomorrow; we can keep extracting fuel from existing oil wells and gas fields and coal mines. But we can�t go explore for new ones. We can�t even develop the ones we already know about, the ones right next to our current projects.

...

if the U.S. energy industry gets its way and develops all the oil wells and fracking sites that are currently planned [inside the US], that would add another 51 billion tons in carbon emissions. And if we let that happen, America would single-handedly blow almost 40 percent of the world�s carbon budget.

...

Another union official put it most eloquently: �Let�s not turn away and overregulate or just say, �No, keep it in the ground.� It shouldn�t be that simple.�

She�s right�it would be easier for everyone if it weren�t that simple. Union workers have truly relied on those jobs to build middle-class lives, and all of us burn the damned stuff, all day, every day. But the problem is, it is that simple. We have to �turn away.� We have to �keep it in the ground.� The numbers are the numbers. We literally cannot keep doing what we�re doing if we want to have a planet.

...

we will need to pass the �Keep It in the Ground Act,� legislation that would end new mining and drilling for fossil fuels on public land. It�s been called �unrealistic� or �na�ve� by everyone from ExxonMobil to the interior secretary. But as the new math makes clear, keeping fossil fuels in the ground is the only realistic approach. What�s unrealistic is to imagine that we can somehow escape the inexorable calculus of climate change. As the OCI report puts it, �One of the most powerful climate policy levers is also the simplest: stop digging.� That is, after all, the first rule of holes, and we�re in the biggest one ever.

This is literally a math test, and it�s not being graded on a curve. It only has one correct answer.

StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Apr 24, 2017

# ? Apr 23, 2017 23:50

Forever_Peace: May 7, 2007; Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah Shoe do do do do do do do Shoe do do do do do do yeah

I know that swingin' at strawmen is a something of a hobby here, but what I'm getting from that response is that there is clearly still room for me to improve these arguments. I'll keep trying. :unsmith:

# ? Apr 23, 2017 23:59

Conspiratiorist: Nov 12, 2015; 17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the ~~fifth~~ ~~sixth~~ some day

I think fatalism and defeatism is okay if you don't care about the suffering of others, but only what amount of climate change-related ~~inconvenience~~ disasters you'll personally face in your lifetime.

# ? Apr 24, 2017 00:08

shrike82: Jun 11, 2005

This is a really good summary of the #marchforscience protests
https://twitter.com/timmaughan/status/855822463678255105

And if you actually care about the suffering of others, you should probably become a hermit because the psychic damage of the people that are going to suffer from climate change (e.g., refugees in Europe fleeing Syria) are going to wreck your psyche.

# ? Apr 24, 2017 00:55

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# ? May 23, 2024 23:08

Ratoslov: Feb 15, 2012; Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

Conspiratiorist posted:

I think fatalism and defeatism is okay if you don't care about the suffering of others, but only what amount of climate change-related ~~inconvenience~~ disasters you'll personally face in your lifetime.

This criticism only makes sense if you assume that fatalists and defeatists are maliciously lying about their beliefs and secretly agree with your analysis of future trends.

# ? Apr 24, 2017 01:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

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