Anthropogenic Climate Change

"There's a difference between weather and climate". Oh, so he's going the annoying pedantic route. Newsflash! The weather is part of the climate. You can't have a desert climate somewhere where it rains all the time. Believe it or not, the land (that thing you stand on), the air (that stuff you breathe) and the sky (that blue thing above you with the white puffy things floating in it) can have an effect on each other.

edited 8th Jan '14 3:14:45 PM by Zendervai

Not Three Laws compliant.

Unfortunately, it's easier to think of everything with a "dollhouse" or "video game" mental model — i.e. things are just there and they don't affect anything else.

Also, Jim Inhofe has been a massive jerk for years now.

edited 8th Jan '14 3:16:02 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

@Fighteer: The problem with that is that it's an incredibly slow way to go about it at best. We don't really have time for that shit. And it's not helped by the powerful anti-environmental lobby.

What we need is not so much green marketing (which encourages lying anyways), but a sane and powerful government to enforce these changes.

And a giant majority to prod them into action, or else vote them out. A tall order considering how, when the energy companies don't get their way, they hand out pink slips as a stern lesson.

I'm a skeptical squirrel

@Cassidy: And let's say we somehow get a government that is all in on the environmental movement. They enact sweeping legislative changes that piss off every business and a whole bunch of consumers. They get voted out next term and the whole thing falls apart.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Polar Vortex Causes Hundreds of Injuries as People Making Snide Remarks About Climate Change Are Punched in Face.

Joke article, but I want to do this sometimes.

Not Three Laws compliant.

Just browsing though the discussion, and this line got me thinking - technologically speaking, just what can be done to curb or control human industry's environmental impact; and, more importantly, why is the prevalent attitude that such developments would be unprofitable and hence undesirable for the corporate sector? What are the government programs that actually offer direct incentives for the development and implementation of environmentally sound technology, as opposed to those simply pressing new taxation over existing industry?

Do you want the comprehensive answer or the quick answer?

The quick answer is that there is a great deal we could do right now to curb climate-change emissions, but they would require large economic investments as well as a significant component of social change. These are opposed for a variety of reasons: ideology, impact on existing business profits, and simple fear of change.

I don't have time to put together a comprehensive list, but obvious changes we could make include:

• Make investments in mass-transit, including commuter light rail, more of a priority. We're too dependent on cars; getting people out of them and into trains and buses would make a big difference to emissions.
• Require all coal and oil fired power plants to make immediate changes to bring them up to spec with the latest environmental technology.
• Ban by law some of the more environmentally damaging forms of fossil fuel extraction, such as fracking.
• Cut consumer fuel use by increasing the rollout of CFL and LED bulbs, more energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, solar and wind power where it's feasible, and so forth.
• An outright ban on environmentally damaging packaging would be another awesome thing to do, although it wouldn't affect climate change as directly.

In fact, the investments that would be needed to make all this happen would probably drive a brand new economic boom across the developed world. It's just not in the perceived interests of established Big Business.

edited 17th Jan '14 8:05:04 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hell, even sending out inspectors to places that aren't great for the environment would help. Most of the time, when places like that go bad, they haven't been inspected in decades. Bringing everything up to spec would usually cost less than dealing with an exploded factory.

Not Three Laws compliant.

I'd say it's not so much that it's against interests, as much as that even viable alternatives are dismissed as not pleasing everyone. For instance, nuclear power is traditionally considered Big, and has a much better environmental, safety and efficiency record than gas or coal, yet the very mention of building new plants conjures up images of a post-apocalyptic Death World should one of them fail (even though the technology doesn't work like that). Given that China, Russia and India are currently building plants by the dozen (including the new generation Thorium ones), it may very well be not a matter of businesses having no interest to invest, but of other parties' cultural resistance and unwillingness to compromise. Not quite fear of change, but more that the change required goes against years of widely advertised and propagated sentiment. Same goes for picking electrified mass-transit over gas-guzzling V8's - who'da thunk that owning a muscle-car with the MPG of a tank would ever be considered a bad thing?

That may be part of it, but the Coal Industries lobbying efforts surely count for something...

We've got trouble, right here in River City. With a capital "T" and that rhymes with "C" and that stands for Coke.

Essentially, manufacturing companies are losing factories all over the third world due to floods and drought.

I'm a skeptical squirrel

@Fighteer: Well, there's also the fact that, for instance, the car industry would not like people to start relying on public transit.

And of course by now, car culture has been part of our society for generations.

Fourteen global trading partners said Friday that they work together to eliminate tariffs on environmental goods such as solar water heaters, wind turbines and catalytic converters.

Good.

edited 25th Jan '14 9:22:32 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016

Yeah, that one doesn't surprise me. The economic impact of climate change is not a fairy tale, and unfortunately it's going to take many more disasters like the ones in India and California for people to get their heads out of their asses.

up until the China part I though "Good".

Seriously, fuck china. all they do is outright steal designs and then go sell cheap as shit knockoffs that break down quickly, and all propped up by their government in what's probably the longest-term attempt to flood other country's markets in a long time.

I'm baaaaaaack

Climate scientist Michael Mann's defamation suit against the National Review advances.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Ban by law some of the more environmentally damaging forms of fossil fuel extraction, such as fracking.

Under current circumstances, this would be counter productive, since it's displacing coal, which is far worse.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

One of the things we should probably remember is that we're living on a finite world. The current economic system assumes that the world is infinite when it's not. Over the past few centuries we've gotten the arrogant assumption that we are masters of Earth's environment, when we really understand almost nothing about it and we don't even know what we're doing most of the time.

"I'll show you all of Paris, I'll take you on a tour, we'll go up and up and up so high they'll long for an encore!"

A useful collection of links for global warming mythbusting.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Quite. The face of modern industry is already a smattering of compromises trying to address both environmental concerns and society's own growing energy needs. I feel that focusing on the companies themselves as some sort of big greedy monolithic entity is counter-productive, both for discounting that these companies ultimately depend on investors and customers - the interests of which are much easier to divert - and for turning an otherwise technological issue into a moral one, thus corrupting the search for effective solutions into a mere hunt for who to blame so as to punish them, usually monetarily. So, when the argument has shifted from "we're changing the climate, here's how to stop" to "you're changing the climate, now give me money" , it's only natural for people to get somewhat defensive about the whole deal.

And speaking of deals, does anyone know of any major financial incentives offered for companies to implement environmentally sound technologies, rather than discentives for those which do not? I know of some small-to-mid-scale programs in the EU for such purposes, but I was wondering how things are like on the other side of the pond. I'm asking this because, if there aren't any such government initiatives, I can't really blame industries for being reluctant to implement environmental regulations. I mean, really - "invest in us, so we can spend your cash on government-mandated, hippie-placating policies which are in no way guaranteed to work" - now that's hardly a winning pitch to any prospective shareholder.

President Obama will pitch a new $1 billion climate change resilience fund during a visit Friday to California.

The U.S. State Department plans to create an Arctic representative position to highlight the growing importance of that region.

edited 14th Feb '14 7:31:57 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016

Shell spends $6 billion on drilling in the Arctic, taking advantage of melting icecaps to exploit newly-revealed minerals.

And other companies are following that example; climate change is poised to make the rich richer (again).

Bill Nye debates Congresswoman/moron Martha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) on Meet the Press

EDIT: Dear Lord, she is like every smug stereotype about Americans that Europeans have. You can imagine her on top of some ride on scooter with a machine gun on her back, eating burgers, ranting about foreigners, and telling about the time she slept with her cousin Billy Bob in his pickup down at the crick.

edited 1st Mar '14 11:01:26 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

This lamp absorbs 150 times more CO2 than a tree

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.