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Nov 9, 2016 07:39
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Inglonias posted:Dehumamize yourself and face to trumpshed. The same thing we needed to do if Hillary was elected. Build a coalition mass movement, win local elections, and pressure elected officials to act. The difference is Hillary would have given more lip service to the threat of climate change and probably would have done a bit more to support small (effectively meaningless) changes in energy policy, but remember she would also have been hamstrung by a congressional blockade. Under Trump, the US energy policy will be more of the status quo. Oil and gas production will increase, but production was already expanding before this election. There's going to be a lot of people who are going to resist Trump and the Republicans on a lot of things, and are going to realize they have to get out, protest, and build an alternative. It might be local third parties, it might be based first in anti-racism, or labor, or anti-sexism. Find those people and work with them.
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Nov 9, 2016 16:35
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smoke sumthin bitch posted:The best part about trump winning is that well finally see some opposition to the eco-tyranny being pushed by the U.N. The peoples have spoken we don't want micro apartments we dont want to live in car free cities and we dont want to eat insects. smoke sumthin bitch posted:Carbon taxes are a death sentence for the third world and trump might actually save millions of lives if he manages to sabotage the Paris agreement. This is a huge step forward for humanity. If we're worried about the third world getting more energy to improve their standard of living, we could subsidize carbon-free power. That could mean Americans employed in good paying jobs, spearheading an industry with a lot of potential. If from that, America becomes a leader in carbon-free energy, selling power plants (and the materials to construct them) on the international market would necessitate employing more people. All of this lines up with Trump's promises, but also combat's climate change, which if unchecked, will kill millions of Americans. They aren't mutually exclusive.
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Nov 11, 2016 17:12
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smoke sumthin bitch posted:listen bro based on your own propaganda unless we achieve massive economic degrowth and deindustrialization the world is still gonna turn into a new venus and that itself would kill a huge number of people so since were hosed either way, we might as well try to empower the people who are in the most precarious positions. smoke sumthin bitch posted:all that stuff is cool and good if its being done voluntarily and without subsidies. The problem arises when you force these policies onto the masses. If your problem is with rich elites forcing their policies into effect on the masses, undermining democracy, I agree that is a problem which is why the power of capital needs to be reduced.
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Nov 11, 2016 19:57
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yellowyams posted:I've been in borderline hysterics for a while now and it only seems to be getting worse. Please, can people spread this info around, especially to celebrities and people with a lot of followers? Not just the arctic ice thing but the consequences and how the govt won't withstand it. Nobody I've seen is discussing this and I don't think anyone realizes how dire things are right now, if it became part of the conversation maybe we could take more drastic action. This needs a big loving news story to get people motivated. Xeom posted:So it seems like a societal collapse is inevitable within the next decade or two. I always thought I could make it through any situation, but my girlfriend, possibly soon to be wife, is a type 1 diabetic. She can't make it without insulin, and one day I will probably have to watch her die before her time. Stallion Cabana posted:I desperately want to believe you because this thread has sapped my will to live. For all the people coming in here super depressed/begging for solutions (so not just you all), did you read the OP? Because I made the OP specifically to talk about what kind of actions could be done and to try direct the thread towards solutions, not despair. Do I need to have a section near the top about specific things people can do right now? Reminders on when we can expect the biggest impacts (It's going to take longer than one-two decades for the really bad stuff, for example)? More pictures? Edit: Or is this just like a climate version of White Fragility, where extremely privileged people are completely unable to handle certain things? Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 06:49
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cyphr555 posted:In that vein, could Uranium Phoenix or someone else (with permission) turn the OP (plus maybe some additional wisdom we've gathered from this thread, such as the post I'm quoting) into a shareable post on Medium or something similar? I really want to raise awareness but a) this seems too long for a facebook post, b) I don't want to plagiarize, and c) linking to the SA forums is not gonna capture the hearts and minds of the general public, let's be honest. I don't know what the heck Medium is (nor after googling it how seriously people take it), but feel free to cross-post and share the OP I guess. I've tried to link to some of the articles posted in this thread and some of the insightful posts. The OP was written with the SA forums in mind though, and as a jumping off point for discussion, so it might need some significant edits to make sense as an article that is shared--and certainly if you're going to add any of the major thread contributions. Feel free to do that! I have been pretty busy and exhausted lately so I'm unlikely to do that any time soon. Given the number of people who are asking for concrete things they can do, I was going to add something like this to the end of the OP. Or maybe the start of the OP, since I doubt most people who post in the thread read it all the way through? Anyways, feel free to add suggestions or revisions: More specifically, actions some actions you can take right now are:
Edit: Also, maybe add a bit on Geoengineering to the "Solutions" section so people have an idea of what has been proposed, the fact that it's a huge unknown that has not been studied nearly enough, and is probably going to be done and have really dumb consequences no one predicted. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Nov 18, 2016 |
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Nov 18, 2016 06:12
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Jimbot posted:I've tried to make a case for climate change, even called it climate disruption, but every time I do some people always fall back to the one of the OP arguments. The most prevalent one being "The earth's temperature works in cycles! We can't stop it we can only adapt!" which is a self-defeating argument which I always respond "Well, why is switching to green energy not a form of adapting then?" (green in this case being the usual suspects and better nuclear plants than the garbage we use in the US) they almost always fall back on the fatalist argument of "it doesn't matter" or go on how human effects on the temperature are insignificant. I know some people can be a lost cause but I still bring it up every now and then among the more conservative people in my gaming group in hopes of trying to convince them this poo poo is actually happening. Chances are you're not going to change their mind. Maybe it's because their worldview and therefore identity demands climate change not be real, maybe they just hear it's not real so much from their circle of acquaintances and insular groups that it's easy to dismiss one person, or maybe they just don't care enough to think about it. Chances are, they haven't thought about it, just read a conservative article with [insert talking point], and will just repeat it until the end of time. It also matters where you're doing this. If you're doing it online, they're just going to google a bunch of poo poo and pretend like they know what they're talking about, but really they're just searching for something that will confirm what they already think they know. If you're doing it in person, it's possible to continue to hit them with questions, facts, which might actually lead to a change in schema. First, read the Debunking Handbook. If you are going to change their mind, you need to avoid the backfire effect. Remember, that's something along the lines of:
This is probably going to be most effective online, where you can strictly control the structure of how you debate. In person, you might use this: Bates posted:If someone makes a baseless claim ask for hard data and refuse to move on until they give it. Make the conversation about their claims - don't tell them they are wrong, ask them why they are right. For arguing specifically about "The earth's temperature has changed before" and "well humans can't do anything to the climate anyways" (two different claims, but we can tackle them together), what they're probably referring to with "cycles" is Milankovitch Cycles. Here's how I might approach it: 1. (State claim) Earth is warming because of humans and the carbon dioxide and methane we've emitted. 2. (Myth) The cylces you're probably talking about are Milankovitch cycles, and happen because of changes in how the Earth orbits around the sun. These changes can take thousands of years. Scientists know about these cycles. 3. (Debunk myth) These cycles aren't the cause of climate change. Scientists have looked at all the things that increase temperature and decrease temperature. If it were just natural, global temperature would be falling. Instead, it's rising. 4. (Replace myth) We know it's rising because of human carbon emissions. We can actually look at different isotopes of carbon to figure out where the carbon came from, and we find that most of the carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere came from humans burning fossil fuels. This makes sense, because we had the industrial revolution and are continuing to burn fossil fuels. We know how much, because businesses and governments keep track of how much they use. This lines up with how much carbon we've put in the atmosphere. We know that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared light, or heat because we can measure in labs the properties of carbon-dioxide are. 5. (Restate claim) So the Earth is warming because of humans and the fossil fuels we've used. Climate change is definitely human caused. 6. (This then undermines their next argument) If humans can cause the Earth to warm, we can stop it warming too. 7. (Since your friends are likely conservative, you want to play towards their worldview) How could we do that? Well, we could stop having the government hand out money to the fossil fuel industries so that markets can again be competitive. This will allow other energy industries to thrive which will cause our economy to grow and create good jobs. That will also not make us as dependent on foreign oil, which will keep our country strong and safe. Finally, not burning coal and other fossil fuels will help with a lot of health problems like asthma, lung cancer, so our children and families are healthier. If you're in a conversation, it's not going to be that structured. But you can go through that all, and I think the key is to just keep hammering one point. Don't fall for the gish-gallop, where you let them just keep moving the conversation topic constantly or bringing up related things. Hammer in on the single point. They might concede. Likely, they'll rage-quit, but if it's online or in front of an audience, you might change a bystander's mind, which is always worth it. Edit: Now with pictures! Here's the "natural forcing" vs "human influence" thing I'm talking about. 
Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Nov 22, 2016 |
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Nov 22, 2016 07:17
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Uncle Jam posted:Yeah this is nice and all but this is pretty much bullshit. Governments and industries generally under-report emissions and has been demonstrated time and time again, and is one huge reason why many models run in the 90s and 00s under estimated warming. In the US the extractors generally under report. Other countries under report on a national scale (Which is why your 'foreign oil/keeping country safe' argument is strange given the global context of the problem) I was proposing an argument that would be both simple and appeal to conservatives who might otherwise deny climate change altogether. I'm well aware it's oversimplified and problematic. When you're trying to change the mind of someone who denies the problem even exists, you can't really go into all the nuance. First, you have to get them to even admit there's a problem.
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Nov 22, 2016 16:14
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spankmeister posted:I don't quite understand what's different about this year. What threshold has been crossed to cause this? I would think that the decline would be a slow thing over many years, not a sudden drop. Can anyone explain this to me? Besides El Nino, there's also the fact that a lot of systems are non-linear. A bunch of different inputs might seem to have no effect, or a small effect, until suddenly there's a much larger change. Think tipping points or phase transitions. For example, the economic crisis of 2008 was a relatively sudden thing, but it was because of a huge number of problems that were allowed to build up over a long period of time. Or, take water. If you have 1 gram of water at 90 degrees and add one calorie of energy, it goes up to 91, then 92, etc. Then at 100 degrees, you can dump 539 calories into the water and see no change, but then when you add 1 more calorie, the water transitions to steam. The system appears linear at first, but is not. Then, the system appears to not be reacting at all, until it suddenly reacts in a major way. This ice level may be just a brief anomaly because of El Nino, but we can expect that many of Earth's systems have tipping points they'll reach where they will suddenly and drastically change. The problem is that these systems are extremely complicated, and predicting when a tipping point will occur is difficult.
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Dec 7, 2016 11:11
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Telephones posted:So it seems like stopping climate change or really even controlling the effects is no longer possible unless we were to almost entirely stop emissions within the next few years - right? Join an activist organization that's trying to do something, and encourage others to do the same. Individuals alone can't do anything, but enough people working together can.
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Dec 9, 2016 06:41
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Notorious R.I.M. posted:Random driveby questions from someone that has been trying to read climate papers recently (and maybe in a bit over my head): Basically, there are a myriad of ways our society is unsustainable. Climate change is just the biggest one. That's why I keep point out its a systemic crisis, so the system needs to be changed. I think any solution must eventually address that. However, since the crisis is so imminent, we also need to take every incremental minor action we can too. Notorious R.I.M. posted:I also understand that massive human migrations will at least be inevitable before we can correct our course, but what is the likelihood of some sort of mass extinction and what sort of uncertainties are around it? Like I get that we're emitting about 100 to 10 times as much carbon per year now than as we did in the permian-triassic mass extinction period, but the sustained carbon release there was also over somewhere around 20,000 to 400,000 years. I guess I'm wondering how far off into uncharted territory are we? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161208152136.htm quote:New research, publishing on December 8th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, shows that local extinctions have already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species studied. Extinctions will continue to occur, and the rate will likely increase.
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Dec 11, 2016 05:35
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Salt Fish posted:Ok come on. Can't you step back see what you're saying? "He didn't do it soon enough" or "It could have been more money" or "We could have just not lived under opressive capitalism in the first place". The fact that the super-rich have a vast overabundance of money--and that a few dozen rich people have more than enough money to pretty much solve climate change--is a key part of the systemic problems causing climate change. Whenever anyone says "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good!!" it's usually in response to some mild criticism. However, critiquing an action, position, or policy, is not actually preventing it. The subtext of the "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" seems to be "please don't criticize people with power/wealth, what if they throw a temper tantrum and stop doing the tiny good thing??" The fact is that the few dozen richest people in this world could completely end world hunger, child poverty, and homelessness, and still have plenty left over. The fact that a few of them toss a small fraction of their wealth towards charity mitigates their immorality, nothing more. The fact that the wealth has all been hoarded in the first place is a great evil that has directly lead to the unnecessary suffering of billions of people.
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Dec 12, 2016 16:52
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The topic of having kids/not having kids, recycling and reducing individual consumption, biking to work, and related stuff has been rehashed a bunch of times in this thread, and was rehashed endlessly in the last thread too. We even got to see the whole "Ah-ha! If people don't have kids, humanity will go extinct!" which I expressly put in the OP as one of the dumbest things I saw in the last thread since it necessarily must involve people talking past each other to an impressive degree. People have also disparaged each other over long-term specifics and future geoengineering projects before, to as little effect. It all falls into two fallacious perspectives: It is either too focused on either individual effort, or trying to predict far enough into the future that all predictions are worthless. Individual actions, as long as you're not literally the chief executive of a county, are almost entirely meaningless. Climate change is a systemic problem, so requires large-scale solutions and changes. Individual actions like wasting less food or installing solar panels are nice, and should not be denigrated, but assessed exactly as what they are: An minuscule change with little effect. To say again though, this is not to denigrate those actions; they should be encouraged and talked about in this thread, with the tacit acceptance that, no, that's not going to solve climate change, and no one has ever even implied that they will. However, individual actions are most meaningful when they are assisting efforts of large scale change, which is to say, political efforts, electoral efforts, movements, and growing environmental organizations or organizations tangentially related to climate change (which, I've claimed, is most progressive or socialist organizations). Predictions of the future either have to be vague enough to be meaningless, or specific enough to be wrong. What we can meaningfully say about the future is what the IPCC reports already say, with a pretty good argument to be made that the worst case IPPC scenarios are not actually the worst case due to the pressure of conservative governments to soften the report and the lack of several feedback factors like methane hydrates being examined. Things will probably go to poo poo quite a few years sooner. There's really no sense arguing about the distant future beyond that; the focus should be on what actions we can take now, or what actions are being taken now that we can learn from. That said, Evil_Greven posted:
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Dec 25, 2016 20:15
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Trabisnikof posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change Fan Fiction He's tired, tired of moving, tired of never having enough, tired of the constant fear, but what can he do? He trudges on down the shattered road, occasionally checking the rusted out cars for anything useful. There never is. Been picked over too many times. He looks up at the sky and squinted, then wiped his brow. Another scorcher. He took a sip from his canteen. And there was that fear again. Fear that the water would run out again before they were able to get more. Wouldn't come from the sky, not here. Wouldn't come from the ground, either. Old pumps, wells so deep you couldn't see the bottom, they were all as dry as the dust storms that would sweep across the plains. "Daddy," comes a voice. "Can we stop for a bit? I'm so tired." He looks back at his little girl. There is his life right here, his reason for carrying on. She deserved better. Of course, there was little he could have done differently. The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare... People had chosen this fate together. They had their reasons of course, but none of that mattered now. No sense thinking about what they could have done differently, not now. A billion, shallow graves too late. Her face is red with the heat of sunburn and whipping of the wind. Her eyes are pleading. She is so strong, but she is also still just a child. "Sure. There's a bit of shade underneath that old tractor. We'll rest there." As they rest, he sees another group of people coming down the road from the opposite direction, wearing the white armbands of refugees. He remembers back when he first started seeing refugees. As a boy, he would watch the people swarm from ships in the new harbor, peaking and dropping like slow waves against the shore as the giant vessels picking their way through the drowned corpse of the old city would dock and unload. "Why do they keep coming?" he would ask, and his parents would shake their heads. "No food where they used to live," they would say sometimes. Other times, "another war." Or, "water's all gone there." Or, "storms swamped another city. Nowhere left for them to go back to." The reasons changed with the seasons, but the tide of people kept coming, until at last, it didn't. Then the starvation started here, the wars started here, and he joined the people on the road. "Why can't we go south? Those nice men were going south. We could have stayed with them. There'd be water there," his daughter says. "You heard that last radio broadcast. The storms are too deadly. If it's not super hurricanes, it's the constant tornadoes, the flash flooding--and there's no warning. No, west is our only hope." He stars at the other refugees approaching from the west. Well, maybe not. She sighs, then grows silent. Sleeping, probably. She is so skinny, all flesh and bones. It makes him want to cry. Then she speaks again. Not sleeping, not yet. "I miss our home." "Me too, sweetie. Me too." But there is little left of it, and the fighting back east is still raging. The other group of refugees is near now. "Mind if we join you?" one of them asks. A man. It's three men, all skinny like him, all sunburned like him. Their packs can't be holding much. "Go ahead." What else could he tell them? "Anything to spare?" another asks. He shakes his head. "Wish I could," he whispers. "Any news out west?" "There was an earthquake out west. The big one finally happened. Few months back. Surprised you haven't heard." No he thinks. One of the last stable places in what was left of this country. "How bad?" "Well," one of the men says. "It's about as bad there now as wherever you came from, probably. Maybe worse. We'll... we'll need your food and water." His heart starts pounding. "You--" All three of the men pull knives. "Sorry," one of them says, and he really looks like he means it. "Desperate times." "It's all we have," he says, and starts to rise. The fight is brutal, but short. In the end, the man has five stab wounds. He wants to keep fighting, but he can't. The blood is leaking out of him now, but his strength left long ago. One of his lungs is punctured, but he curses them, as they drag his daughter away, crawls after them, but he knows the score. As he lies there, dying, he sees another dust storm building on the horizon. Well, they're all probably dead. Those men, too. Everyone. Civilization itself, perhaps. Then he sees a figure approaching. Another man, strutting merrily through the fields of dust and ash. He looks... happy. How could anyone be happy in times like these? "My daughter," he tells the approaching man. "They took her... please..." He's dead, he knows that, but maybe this man can do something. The man is carrying a strange map. He seems to have drawn it himself. He grins, and says: "Have people considered the fact that we could end up in a far superior climate on the other side? Much like a revolution is a time of turmoil, whose intensity might seem scary in the moment but which stops the constant normalized oppression by the ruling class, climate change might be be a shock but eventually place us in a world where we're no longer oppressed by smothering blankets of snow in the winter. The Earth has been much warmer and wetter in the past, where the polar regions had nice and temperate climates and desert regions gave way to scrub and grasslands, or even monsoon and rain forests. Obviously we're going to need decisive action to carry us through this period of transition as painlessly as possible, because the road to the new equilibrium passes through a much less hospitable world, but on the other side awaits a veritable paradise."
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Jan 2, 2017 02:55
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The Ender posted:We're boned.
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Jan 7, 2017 02:40
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ChairMaster posted:Those are all things you can do with regard to your own life, which is a small scale situation that any person has the ability to change. It seems like the discussion always goes that way, yeah. I don't think it should be what the thread is about. Occasionally, there's some good posts about actions people are taking in their own lives or working with a group. Often, some article about a small advance in a technology or a good policy action somewhere. Quite a bit, people posting new articles about some aspect of climate change. Those are all good contributions. Inevitably, people latch onto the article about a bad thing and melt down about how all is lost, etc. It's really not interesting to read anymore. Posts not about despair are met with "yeah, but it's not enough to make a difference." Well, of course it isn't, by itself. Climate change is a problem that needs a constant stream of small changes that begin to add up. There is no one solution. I think the thread reaction to "hey here's a thing I or some group did" should be celebrate and add to, not denigrate then shitpost. Seems like goons are too edgy for that, though.
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Jan 11, 2017 16:41
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Star Man posted:I want to meet whoever coined the term "global warming" and stab them in the loving heart. If they're already dead, then I would like to have them revived so I can still do it. It's not an inaccurate term, it's just that adding heat energy to an incredibly complex system doesn't always do what people assume it does.
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Jan 14, 2017 03:25
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Fangz posted:Have people checked out BattleMoose posted:Only seen it now, wish I had known about it sooner. Seems to make sense to me. It's in the OP.
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Feb 14, 2017 04:54
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I came across a climate change-related bit in the Science magazine podcast (starts at 16:10). Here's the article they're referring to, if you have access to it (I don't). In it, they frame climate change as human behavior problem. Here's the summary:
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May 7, 2017 17:28
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yaffle posted:Is there a website/study that details what a carbon neutral humanity would have to look like? If all seven billion people had the same resources/lifestyle and we weren't going to gently caress up the future in any catastrophic way, what would our lives be like? Preferably one that doesn't presume fusion power or asteroid mining or any such other currently only-in-Elon-Musk's-head type tech. This is probably the best thing I've found on the issue: https://www.withouthotair.com/ It's perfectly possible with current technology to use nuclear, wind, and/or solar energy to be carbon neutral. It's a political and economic question of allocating resources for it.
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May 10, 2017 09:19
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Deadulus posted:What are the best sources to get a good in depth knowledge of climate change science? The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report is an excellent source of data, summaries, research, graphs, and again is a jumping off point. Obviously the field has advanced since it was published, and the report was fairly conservative, so basically just assume things are a bit worse in most ways. Science Daily has lots of science news, and I've linked the section specifically about climate. They're great because they give an easily digestible summary of a given paper, then directly link to the paper so you can read whatever full study or research paper the article is based on. This is a good way to find the latest studies on climate and get to the in-depth knowledge. This site lists papers from 1991 to 2011 if you're into looking up and reading the published papers of a decade of climate science. All those links besides Science Daily are also in the OP if you lose them and need to find them again. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jun 4, 2017 |
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Jun 4, 2017 21:33
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I would really appreciate if this thread could gently caress off with the sadbrains as a response to literally everything Pretty much everyone in the thread seems to understand the magnitude of climate change and the difficulty of dealing with it. Not every post needs to be followed by a wailing lamentation or a snarky quip about doom. It's like if someone made thread about global hunger, and someone posted about how an entire community banded together to end hunger in their area, the correct response would be "Wow! I wonder how I can contribute to that happening in my community." It would not be "OH YEAH WELL HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE STILL MALNOURISHED AND DEATH COMES TO US ALL EVENTUALLY SO WHY BOTHER," but the latter kind of response is like a grotesque epidemic infecting this thread. Post about the latest science. Post about cool climate related technology. Post about political happenings, local, state, national, or world. Post about local action in your community. Don't post about your crippling existential dread or lambast anyone who dares come to actually discuss the topic.
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Jun 6, 2017 00:47
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I'm well aware of just how bad climate change is/will be and how many hundreds of millions of people it will kill both directly and indirectly, and I am well aware of the scope of the problem. Earlier I linked a Science podcast (again, starts at 16:10) that focused on the psychology of climate change. One of the key points scaring people can actually backfire in getting them to actually do anything about climate change. It's pretty easy to find articles talking about this, and you can even, if you hate yourself a great deal, read this thread and see people paralyzed into inaction because of fear of climate change. There's quite a bit of research on this that suggests fear is a pretty lovely tool for motivating environmental activism (guilt tripping similarly isn't great iirc). In this paper the abstract points out "Fear-inducing representations of climate change are widely employed in the public domain. However, there is a lack of clarity in the literature about the impacts that fearful messages in climate change communications have on people's senses of engagement with the issue and associated implications for public engagement strategies. Some literature suggests that using fearful representations of climate change may be counterproductive. The authors explore this assertion in the context of two empirical studies that investigated the role of visual, and iconic, representations of climate change for public engagement respectively. Results demonstrate that although such representations have much potential for attracting people's attention to climate change, fear is generally an ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement. Nonthreatening imagery and icons that link to individuals' everyday emotions and concerns in the context of this macro-environmental issue tend to be the most engaging." So yes, you can continue to post about how bad things are, nothing matters, everyone is doomed, etc. etc., but it not only got old 150 pages ago, it actually undermines efforts at stopping climate change. Maybe someone can make an "itt we meltdown about climate change" in C-SPAM for anyone who enjoys trying to find the least pithy and most condescending way to express that climate change is quite bad, and also a big problem.
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Jun 6, 2017 05:59
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Arglebargle III posted:In lighter news, I found this thread's theme song: Nah that's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUSoR4EdyIo ======= This thread is really great at repeating itself, but I think that a lot of people are talking past each other. For example, three different people might make three different posts along these lines: Person 1: Climate change is a really big problem, and since 90 companies produce 2/3 of emissions, any solution must involve taking on big business. Person 2: Hey, I'm looking to install solar panels on my roof and reduce my personal carbon footprint. Are there any resources on that? Person 3: A more efficient type of solar cell just came out. Also another study on the thawing permafrost. Person 1 then yells at Person 2 for being naive, and maybe yells at Person 3 for the same thing or thinks the permafrost study is backing up their point. Person 2 then yells at Person 1 for being a denialist by virtue of being so hopeless they're trying to stop action from taking place. A bunch of shitposts will also be scattered about, because of course, but the point is that all 3 posts are separate ideas not commenting on each other and each line of thought is worth exploring simultaneously. Pretty much everyone agrees climate change is a big problem that no single solution will get even close at. Everyone agrees the effects already locked in are really bad, though the exact language they'll use varies wildly. Most people will agree we need immediate action now, but also small actions are insufficient. Just imagine everyone tacks on "and yes, I realize this doesn't solve climate change completely" to their posts. Or, when relevant, "and yes, I realize this thing I'm proposing won't be easy." The idea behind the thread, though was 1) Get people to find and build community action against climate change. These, by necessity, must be small steps. Any big organization or action starts off small. 2) Share news about climate change and related politics, as well as informative articles 3) Help people convince idiots they know that climate change is real 4) Talk about how to go from small actions to big changes Small steps don't preclude the kind of systemic changes we need to combat and prepare for climate change; in fact, they are necessary. I really like the arctic sea ice forums because its pretty much all informative posts, genuine questions, and actual discussion. The implicit message underlying the entire forum is "the world's sea ice is hosed, its all gonna melt and gently caress things up," but no one actually says it, because everyone knows it. Instead, they focus on discussing and visualizing data, sharing information, and learning from each other. In the consequences section, they're not talking about global civilization collapse or shitposting; obviously climate change is going to drastically alter people's lives for the worst and kill a lot of people. Instead, they might have a thread talking about concrete and specific ways to help education the public, and when they make a point, they tend to back it up with evidence or an article. I think there's something to be said for emulating that kind of posting culture specifically in some parts of debate and discussion.
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Jul 22, 2017 00:19
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skull mask mcgee posted:That's nice, what's your strategy for getting the public on board? A huge percentage of the population is already on board with nuclear power. In the past two decades, nuclear power favorability has bounced between 44% and 62%. The Fukushima disaster actually did very little to budge public opinion, which Gallup speculates is more influenced by gasoline prices than anything. So, if we see another spike in oil prices, public favorability might spike right back up, no convincing needed. This base of support is despite decades of misinformation on nuclear power and its dangers and no significant effort by anyone in the US to really push for nuclear power. Since low wages, unemployment, and education are still big topics, I think the best way to argue for it is this: 1) Republicans and conservatives are already in overwhelming favor of nuclear power (between 53% and 72%). Arguing for good, American, well paying skilled jobs and all the money such large projects would bring is sure to keep their support. 2) By necessity, this projects are going to involve educating and training skilled labor to operate and build the plants. Grants and scholarships helping more people get college or trade school education would make Democrats and liberals happy, as well increasing wages and decreasing unemployment. 3) While many liberal and left leaning people oppose nuclear power, educating people on its benefits can be effective. I've successfully convinced a good chunk of socialists I know by showing them deaths per energy capita statistics, discussing benefits. Since it aligns with combating climate change (and can align with empowering workers), it already has ideological components that left leaning people agree with. Essentially, it creates good, local jobs, it requires funding education, and it combats climate change. It's also not anything that requires any major or systematic changes, and the rate at which we could drop emissions would be incredible if nuclear power was scaled up and distributed in the US and worldwide.
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Jul 22, 2017 00:38
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The title is a hamfisted reference to Lenin's What Is To Be Done? The implication being the only real way to stop climate change is through some form of revolution. However, the book also outlined the steps that needed to happen before that happened (e.g. a new political party that specifically spread relevant ideas), so also implying that the thread needed to discuss specific actions that will move enough people towards the bigger actions that need to happen. The Greatest Show on Earth is coincidentally the title of a book by Richard "Dick Dorkins" Dawkins briefly discussing various lines of evidence for evolution. I don't really think the thread title is what's causing the hopelessness in the thread, but I don't really care if its changed.
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Jul 23, 2017 07:43
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Pollution is responsible for 16% of early deaths globally: Summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171020182513.htm Full Article: http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/pollution-and-health Full Infographic: http://www.thelancet.com/pb-assets/Lancet/stories/commissions/pollution-2017/Pollution_and_Health_Infographic.pdf Obviously, it overwhelmingly affects poorer countries, and is largely the product of coal and dirty fuels. Another study found switching from coal to solar in the US would save 51,000 lives and $2.5 million per life saved. The Lancet study above also notes massive savings that come from pollution control, and benefits to economies. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Oct 27, 2017 |
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Oct 27, 2017 05:15
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Thug Lessons posted:To be honest a lot of this strikes me as rather vain. We live in a world where something like 3 million people starve to death annually. The biggest environmental problem at the moment isn't climate change, it's air pollution, which kills as much as 6.5 million people annually. There are a great deal of real, immediate problems on planet Earth that don't rely on predicted ends of civilization 30 or 60 or 90 years out. But for some (probably selfish, conceited) reason the predicted doom registers far more easily for the average person. Since climate change directly affects the availability of food and coal plants and mining are largely responsible for the pollution that kills so many people (the Lancet article I and another poster linked actually estimates 9 million deaths/year), addressing climate change both addresses immediate, near, and distant problems. In the US, it's the poorest communities (and disproportionately minorities) who are affected directly by pollution. Cleaning that up and switching from coal to carbon-free energy will also obviously require people to work, which is an opportunity to lower unemployment and redistribute wealth from the rich to poor people. That would also be a preventative healthcare measure that in the long term would reduce healthcare costs. None of these problems are disconnected or need to be addressed one at a time in a rank order. On an unrelated note, this article refers to a foundation currently highlighting the link between climate change and refugees. I like the quote from a US General: ""If Europe thinks they have a problem with migration today … wait 20 years," Stephen Cheney, retired US military corps brigadier general told the Guardian. " I think the US military's concern with climate change offers a way to bridge discussions with more conservative people, since it speaks more directly to issues they find concerning. Browsing the Environmental Justice Foundation's site, they have some good articles and media, then small things you can do to support (sadly, those things appear to be subscribe, sign this petition, or buy our t-shirts). Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Nov 4, 2017 |
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Nov 4, 2017 17:19
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Shifty Nipples posted:SciShow made a video that should be in the op If there's anything else people think the OP needs, let me know.
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Nov 16, 2017 03:58
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StabbinHobo posted:we really should collab on some kind of OP update that represents some kind of summary-truce so we can stop going round and round *as* much What I put in the OP is absolutely irrelevant because only two people have ever read it: me, and some guy who found a typo in it. Case and point, I've had the section you just requested in the OP since I first posted it over two years ago: Uranium Phoenix posted:f. Overpopulation People have been spazzing out about child-chat and other asinine bullshit since the thread before this. Short of a mod agreeing to probate/ban anyone who posts those same boring rehashes, the lovely posts in this thread will continue.
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Apr 8, 2018 07:27
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Captain Fargle posted:Just because it's irrelevant on a global scale doesn't mean I'm incapable of doing anything at all. I realise it's not going to solve anything but it would at least provide some peace of mind and encourage positive habits you know? The best thing you can do at this point is get into local politics. Often times, there's a local environmental issue that the community needs to address. If left alone, corporations or pro-capitalist politicians have a tenancy to gently caress over the environment, but with popular pressure or by electing the right politicians, you can make a significant contribution. The more small political pro-environment movements we have, the bigger chance we have of a larger movement taking off that will be able to make real change. Given that, as the above posters mentioned, it's mostly massive, powerful corporations and their bought-off politicians responsible for climate change (100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions), this also means that if there's not an environmental issue locally, tackle an economic one. Fighting for local anti-poverty measures, affordable housing, or the like also helps build movements, and by attacking the power of the rich and building the power of everyday people, you are taking a small step towards combating climate change as well. The example I'll point to is one I worked on. In northern Washington, several large corporations were trying to build a coal export terminal. Doing so would be bad for climate change, and also devastate local air quality, water quality, and risk destructive spills. The major threat wasn't just near the port, but anywhere along the train tracks running from Wyoming to Washington. Activists in the town I was in at the time got together in rallies, marches, city council meetings, and legislative proposals and also started an green/blue environmentalist and union coalition to work out not just a way to stop the terminal, but a way to get good paying, green jobs locally. Activists also talked with other activists along the entire west coast to help organize resistance to other proposed coal terminal spots. The most successful activism came from the Lummi Nation. They used their rights and local power to, after years of work, put a stop to the terminal. In fact, every coal export terminal proposed for the US and Canada was defeated. The Lummi also worked with other American Indian nations all along the route and in Canada. That activism, unity, and social consciousness among American Indians popped again to oppose the Keystone oil pipeline (activists from Washington joined the protests there), which made national headlines. It's something that happened over the course of years, and still needs years more of work, but that's the kind of activism that is going to make a difference. This thread has a major sadbrains issue where many posters look at the impossible scope of addressing climate change as a whole, and concluding because no one action will solve it, no action should be taken. You will not solve climate change, but you might take a step in the right direction locally, and that's worth it.
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Jul 24, 2018 16:47
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Captain Fargle posted:I'm genuinely unsure if there's any opportunity for this at all here in Northern Ireland given the current ridiculous political quagmire we're in, (Northern Ireland hasn't actually had a government for the last year and a half) but maybe there's something in the local council issues I could get involved with. Sometimes it takes some digging to find what it is you can do. The group I joined, Socialist Alternative, ended up being how I connected with other groups and found out about local issues and movements. The amount of politically active people where I was was minuscule, so they were hard to find at first. The British equivalent of SA is the Socialist Party, part of the CWI. I'm a bit out of the loop so I have no idea what they're up to or what kind of presence they have in Northern Ireland. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Jul 24, 2018 |
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Jul 24, 2018 17:09
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Flowers For Algeria posted:All of this is extremely weak and you know it. Come back when you’ve mastered elementary reading comprehension. This will require learning what "likely" means. Deniers tend to get their misinformation from a few sites that pretend like they've disproven (or have reason to doubt the intensity of) climate change, and then act like it's original research they did. This one's interesting to me because the attack on the hurricane aspect of climate change was done by Arkane several years ago, complete with the exact same kind of either lack of reading comprehension or deliberate misreading of things (though he was attacking the OP, rather than Skeptical Science). That link has information from IPCC's AR5 and references two actual studies from Nature and Natural Geosciences in the rebuttal if anyone is interested. If anyone is interested in a breakdown of a given denier claim, always feel free to request it in-thread. Otherwise, it's generally best to ignore deniers as they wallow in their own shitposts.
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Jul 31, 2018 16:02
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StabbinHobo posted:ah yes the "gently caress you pay me" school of solidarity Ah yes, the "blame people with no power for problems caused by people with power throughout several generations" school of solidarity. What a great way to inspire activism and win allies. StabbinHobo, your posts weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Seven pages of worthless shitposts is enough, you may leave now.
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Aug 4, 2018 15:37
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Gortarius posted:Why is sulfur the go-to material for these theoretical geoengineering scenarios? Are there no alternatives? There are a lot of geoengineering possibilities; spreading sulfur aerosols around is probably the cheapest and easiest, which is probably why it gets talked about most. It comes down as acid rain, though, so yeah, definite downsides. As a knock-on effect, if people believe climate change is "solved" by a given geoengineering scheme, it might accidentally lead to inaction on carbon emissions that keep worsening the climate. Other ideas are:
Most of the ideas are massively outweighed by the much cheaper, less risky, and larger effect that would come from shutting down coal plants and replacing them with renewables or nuclear. Geoengineering, at least, the less stupid versions of it, might be useful after we've brought emissions down drastically. We would also want to study the hell out of whatever it is we plan to do so it doesn't bite us in the rear end with some unforseen consequence.
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Aug 4, 2018 20:22
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Gortarius posted:How would this work in practice? Like as far as equipment goes. I Imagine you'd need quite the ship to do this. Some excerpts: quote:Doing so could be a short-term measure to offset global warming in a possible future emergency situation. In the meantime, it could also further understanding of the climate system....One of the biggest uncertainties in climate models is the clouds, which reflect sunlight in unpredictable ways....The proposal is now waiting on funding from government or private donors. For several years, UW researchers have been working with a group of engineers in California’s Bay Area to develop a nozzle that turns saltwater into tiny particles that could be sprayed high into the marine cloud layer.  Gortarius posted:Also while talking about ships (and this is somewhat offtopic), I know no one is going to do anything about the plastic islands because they are too far offshore for anyone to care, BUT is there any plausibility in having some ocean platforms ala oilrigs setup in there to act as a places where the plastic is hauled in for processing/burning? It probably takes a good 100 years to clean that poo poo up however you'd try to do it. I recently saw some borderline scam thing about some guy in the UK (I think?) developing a sort of a oil barrier knockoff that he claimed would gather up all the plastics in a matter of years. Ever since then I've wondered that, okay, you have the plastics gathered, now what? No one wants them and they are in the middle of an ocean. What is step two?
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Aug 4, 2018 21:57
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Shibawanko posted:Can't plastic be gathered and then compressed into transportable cubes and shipped to land or something? Uranium Phoenix posted:.... They use ships to recover debris and bring it back to shore.
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Aug 5, 2018 06:19
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actionjackson posted:So she's saying everything is going to be fine or what The media narrative is that climate change is an inevitability (and they sensationalize it for ratings). When they imply that, people think "So if it's going to happen, why do anything?" This causes inaction, which will only make climate change increasingly worse. Her point is that the degree of climate change we get is a political choice, and if enough people in our society act on it, we can significantly reduce the impact of climate change on the world.
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Aug 10, 2018 21:57
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