Didn't have the scientists on my mind, rather the political and social or cultural side of the issue.
Mhm, the opposite of denialist would be the apologetic, wouldn't it? So, the non-scientist part of the global warming apologetics — the Al Gores, the activists, companies trading in carbon dioxide limits, companies selling the "ecological" products and all that lot.
The last part in particular is a good example: the traditional light bulbs are more wasteful in use than the halogen ones, but are we sure their, say, production doesn't make up for this? If the halogens turn out to be no better (more expensive in production, and they use materials harmful to the environment), then it's either a honest mistake (so it'll just need to revert the law and fire the lawmaker), or otherwise, we need to ask ourselves a question, cui bono?
And the third part, which just got me interested: if the halogens are more expensive, then people need more cash to get them, and if they need more cash, they need to work more or change jobs or spend less on other things. And since the two former parts mean other sources of greenhouse gasses will likely produce more of them, it begs the question, doesn't it mean we'd do just as well if we left it to the invisible hand?
Sorry for the confusion. If we assume the there's a grand and immediate threat, then obviously we will let it slide if some companies do a little, say, cheating on taxes, while providing a vital service to prevent the danger.
edited 20th Jan '11 1:44:25 PM by lordGacek
![]()
![]()
Anyone trying to make money that way would be a complete idiot. You always make more money by telling people what they want to be true—that is, what's most convenient for them. You make money by saying "This one simple trick will make you lose weight in 5 minutes a day!", not by saying "Lose weight by eating less and exercising more."
It's true that renewables are an expanding market, but they're still really, really small—so small that, in absolute terms, coal and oil still continue to grow faster, even as renewables grow in terms of market share. Thus, Exxon Mobil alone has a $300 billion dollar (annual) stake in global warming being false; less than that was invested in all renewables put together.
edited 20th Jan '11 1:48:39 PM by jewelleddragon
![]()
I suspect you're not referring to halogens, but to compact fluorescent lights (CF Ls).
A CFL lasts about 7000 hours, or 7 times the lifespan of an incandescent bulb. Thus, they'd need to be seven times more expensive, which they aren't, for incandescents to break even, and that's before we account for energy savings (CF Ls use less than 1/3 the energy of incandescents, so incandescents cost three times as much to power).
By the same token, a CFL would need to produce seven times as much pollution in its creation (and disposal, which is actually the larger problem) than an incandescent, plus the pollution equivalent of fourteen times the amount of energy it takes to operate, to create as much pollution as one incandescent bulb. Unlikely, even though they contain mercury.
Your last paragraph (before the edit) is, as far as I can tell, devoid of standard logic. Yes, dealing with climate change requires personal sacrifices. That's why it requires intervention—because people on their own won't make personal sacrifices (hell, we won't even make sacrifices for things that are obviously and immediately beneficial, let alone things that are nonobviously and eventually beneficial) and companies will continue to make more profit off of pandering to that tendency.
edited 20th Jan '11 2:01:44 PM by jewelleddragon
Yeah, the "they're making money, not trying to help people" argument fell flat when looking at the numbers showed how little climate research pays. I think Michael Mann's university spent something like ten times more on defending him from accusation of fraud in his "hockey stick" study and other Climategate-inspired attacks on his credibility than he actually draws in grant money. If that's trying to fleece the public for government money, it's a mighty poor way to go about it.
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.![]()
![]()
Jeweleddragon has hit it on the head. If we assume that the entire debate is financially driven, and discard all elements of objective science, then the financial interests involved in maintaining the status quo far exceed those involved in pushing climate change. Further, many of those pushing climate change are already wealthy without the need to rely on dubious alarmism to make more money.
If climate change really were entirely a matter of who had more money invested in their particular opinion, it would never have arisen in the first place. Discussing it solely in this context betrays a willful ignorance better suited to lemmings.
If simple alarmism, unbacked by science, were enough to fuel an entire political movement, then why don't we have massive political interests trying to get us to defend ourselves against an Earth-shattering asteroid, or maybe space aliens? Then again I maybe shouldn't talk; this is the hallmark of the conservative movement and some other efforts like anti-vaccination. Hmm, maybe it is that people are looking at an activist political movement and assuming that it must be driven by crass interests rather than science.
edited 21st Jan '11 2:36:20 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@jewelleddragon: yeah, it seems I had these in mind, so thanks for the correction.
You know, that's a fine question. There've been people clamoring for things like these already. Supposing such political movements are financially-motivated, then it indeed becomes curious why. Perhaps, in this case, it'd be not as profitable to set up a space watch program and point-blank defense as it'd be, like, to trade CO2 limits. That's a material for fine speculation, but I'd take a guess that's off the topic.
edited 20th Jan '11 2:23:37 PM by lordGacek
Anyhow, as this conversation has revealed, climate change denial is ideologically based. The reasons given are so flimsy, so contrary to evidence, and so rooted in the assumption of the worst possible motives for climate change scientists (and the best possible motives for everyone else), all in support of the thesis that people should just do what they wanted to do anyway, it's clear that deniers had already decided to reject climate change and then went looking for reasons.
I know in my case I don't doubt that some climate change is going on, as I've heard the climate goes through cycles, but as to the extent humanity has played in it's change I have doubts. I suppose humanity has caused some degree of effects, I just think our involvement has been overblown and greatly exaggerated.
A gut feeling, I guess. And mostly because people have a tendency to be alarmist. After the whole Y2K scare and nothing happened, I tend to take these so-called crises with a grain of salt.
I dunno, I'm open to the idea that humanity is in fact royally fucking up the planet, but at the moment I think the effects are exaggerated. I don't doubt that we have messed up the enviroment, we sure have done some damage, but I don't think we've caused as much as some people claim.
So...on the one hand are many scientists who have spent a great deal of time and effort investigating the question and have all reached the same conclusion, and on the other hand we have your gut feeling?
At least have a look at the first picture on this page
. CO 2 levels higher than they've been for 650,000 years—drastically higher in the past 50 years. That isn't what a natural phenomenon looks like.
Yes, but that claim is also in conflict with the available body of evidence. A gut feeling is no more credible support for such a position than for outright climate change denial.
edited 20th Jan '11 10:08:55 PM by Desertopa
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.Also known as Appeal to Ignorance which is a demonstrably flawed way of reaching true knowledge.
Edit: The Y2K scare was legitimate. The reason "nothing happened" was that a lot of people put a lot of effort into fixing all the mission-critical systems far enough in advance that our national infrastructure didn't collapse on 1/1/2000. There's another plateau coming in 2038
, FYI, when certain 32-bit signed integers used to handle date values in Unixy systems will roll over. That one's harder because you can't just turn 32-bit integers into 64-bit ones.
My point is that a properly handled predictable crisis fails to look like a crisis when it arrives... because it's been properly handled. If the levees had been properly constructed in New Orleans and a decent evacuation plan prepared, would we still be talking about the horrors of Katrina? If the government had put the pieces together and foiled the 9/11 attacks (or even gotten lucky), would we have DHS, TSA, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
The only way we're going to know beyond a shadow of a doubt if climate change is a real crisis is when Manhattan sinks beneath the waves and Las Vegas is beachfront property. (Or alternatively, when glaciers roll over California.) I'm really hoping we turn it around before it gets to that point. It's too bad that human beings are far better at retrospective problem solving than anticipatory.
Edit: I would far rather that people 100 years from now wonder what all the fuss their ancestors made over climate change was about, as they commute in their clean vehicles running on renewable energy sources, than that the scattered remnants of humanity curse our ignorance and pride as they scrabble for existence on a planet no longer suitable for human life.
edited 21st Jan '11 8:00:14 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Citing y2k is not a good analogy because corporations spent billions of dollars to prevent any errors from occurring when year 2000 rolled about. It wasn't "nothing is wrong at all, therefore we can do nothing". This is in fact a perfect analogy for pushing humanity to do something about climate change.
What is your gut feeling? It seems you used zero knowledge on the y2k bug, made a snap statement on it and were completely wrong. Ask any computer scientist about the y2k bug and you'll get a nice long earful about how much had to be done to prevent problems from arising and how short-sighted people were when they coded the original date/time systems.
"Citing y2k is not a good analogy because corporations spent billions of dollars to prevent any errors from occurring when year 2000 rolled about." - breadloaf
Would that qualify it as an Analogy Backfire, then?
Yes, it does, but those cycles are generally on the orders of 10000 to 100000 years. We're talking about a significant amount of change within roughly 100 years, in our current situation.
Well, if you're living in a first-world country, it probably isn't much of a crisis yet.
IJBM: People thinking that that problems don't exist when they're solved mostly invisibly by other people.
This is a problem that I still have not figured out the solution to.
The general populace has a tendency to be alarmist. Experts have a tendency to be, well, right. That's why they're experts. So, if normal people are freaking and people who know about the topic are calm, then things are probably fine. If normal people are calm and people who know about the topic are freaking, that's when you start paying attention.
(Not that experts are never wrong, of course. But as more experts with more experience come to agreement, the change that they're right approaches one.)
Returning to Y2K: I definitely remember sober-minded software engineers trying to explain that pacemakers don't even keep track of the date, let alone the year.
edited 21st Jan '11 1:38:51 PM by jewelleddragon
Related to that point, the Y2K problem had a clear and simply defined solution: update all the vulnerable software and/or hardware. It wasn't a pie-in-the sky idea or dependent on massive social reconditioning. It wasn't even a political issue because to most people it really was transparent.
The experts have good reason to be panicking about climate change, not just because of the reality of the issue or its imminence, but because they know that dealing with it effectively will require massive social and political change that cannot help but meet with resistance. Heck, the United States just had two years of a liberal President and one of the most liberal Congresses in recent memory and we managed to get exactly fuck all done about climate change.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"No True Scotsman? It's not like he didn't try to introduce the item in the agenda but given the political climate it was a No-Sell from the start. All of his political capital was spent on healthcare reform and recovery efforts.
edited 21st Jan '11 3:46:07 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I would remind you of all the firmly liberal and progressive things that got done by Obama and the 111th Congress, and that just because he hasn't done everything doesn't mean he sucks, so please stop being a whiny liberal already, but that would be off-topic.
And yeah, between them trying to do healthcare first and taking so long, and Martha Coakley losing that senate race, it was not happening. And then Byrd died—he was a supporter of it, actually, despite being from West Virginia. And this issue is easily as politically controversial as the healthcare overhaul.
edited 21st Jan '11 6:51:41 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

"If we assume global warming to be an immediate threat, then it, at worst, is a Necessary Evil"
Wait... what is the "it" that is a necessary evil?