There is such a wealth of information to dig into here…
First, I ran into Dr. William Happer on YouTube. The man clearly understands how the climate works, but I feel like he deliberately attacks straw men instead of going after what is actually going on (namely the CO2 “sensitivity”). In that video he focuses a lot on the idea that there is no optimum CO2 level… which is true… but there is an optimum range, and I think everyone would agree.
Conversely, I found this document where someone painstakingly went through some of his claims from a 2017 talk, showing how he sometimes picks data that illustrates his point and ignores data that doesn’t, or how he claims that the models are not reliable while outside of short-term discrepancies – around 1910 and 1940 – they fit a line more or less right through the average over 30-year and longer periods.
This is essentially the poster-guy for the movement. Princeton guy with a physics degree. In any case, I think there are glaring holes in his arguments, but we need the dissenting voice too, so I’m posting it here for your dissemination.
* Straw men. In debate, that is when you attack an easier version of the argument rather than the real, more complex one. Attacking the level of CO2, instead of the rate of increase or the sensitivity to such an increase, to me, feels like exactly that.
** In the words of John Lennox, a mathematician from Oxford, nonsense remains nonsense even when talked by world-famous scientists.
And that homework say “get whatever you can out of the asset while it still has value.” So instead of tapering off, they are trying to exploit oil and gas assets even faster. Employing more people, and making the economy even more dependent on their production.
After all, when the oil industry inevitably collapses, they already have their money. It is not their problem to deal with the mass unemployment that results.
For there to be any sort of ‘soft landing’ when oil prices do collapse, there must be a gradual reduction in the oil industry. Which is completely against the interests of the oil industry itself, so they will never do it themselves.
Long term economic planning can pretty much only happen at government level. Industries will only ever look out for themselves an damn the consequences.
Not sure that is true. They shouldn’t, and don’t, produce more than demand. Storing excess production is expensive. And from what I recall they often times produce less than demand, because there’s some price-inelasticity (or whatever the economic concept that you can increase price without affecting demand is called, this was long ago for me).
The oil industry would not be the first industry that become obsolete in the history of civilization. In this particular instance, all the oil fields wouldn’t immediately run dry. It will happen gradually. So supply will gradually decrease, price will gradually increase, and alternatives will gradually become more viable.
Perhaps it is my inability to put much trust in any institution’s ability to do long term economic planning, but if you’ve ever been close to pricing complex financial assets, for example, (which is orders of magnitudes less complex than long term projection of the economy) you might share my skepticism of their ability to do so sufficiently accurately.
When trying to influence/control others’ behaviour, you (or the government) inevitably have to assume that you know the best. When it comes to such complex systems like the economy of the entire world, that assumption is most likely wrong.
Note that I’m not saying we should continue polluting the earth. That wasn’t the point. I’m specifically against the:
In the Netherlands, the government is actually going to be buying and shutting down approximately 3,000 farms in order to “reduce its nitrogen pollution”…
The Dutch government is planning to purchase and then close down up to 3,000 farms in an effort to comply with a European Union environmental mandate to slash emissions, according to reports.
Farmers in the Netherlands will be offered “well over” the worth of their farm in an effort to take up the offer voluntarily, The Telegraph reported. The country is attempting to reduce its nitrogen pollution and will make the purchases if not enough farmers accept buyouts.
“There is no better offer coming,” Christianne van der Wal, nitrogen minister, told the Dutch parliament on Friday.
Two-million-year-old DNA from northern Greenland has revealed that the region was once home to mastodons, lemmings and geese, offering unprecedented insights into how climate change can shape ecosystems. The breakthrough in ancient DNA analysis pushes back the DNA record by 1m years to a time when the Arctic region was 11-19C warmer than the present day. The analysis reveals that the northern peninsula of Greenland, now a polar desert, once featured boreal forests of poplar and birch trees teeming with wildlife. The work offers clues to how species may adapt, or be genetically engineered, to survive the threat of rapid global heating.
Sometimes the source will be pulled to pieces by some, so I rather paste the text that anyone is able to Google themselves, their preferred source.
Or, it is Nat Geo, and their articles are subscriber-only.
Here is the one the Guardian reported on.
“The data suggests that more species can evolve and adapt to wildly varying temperatures than previously thought,” said Dr Mikkel Pedersen, of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen and co-first author.
However, the speed of global heating today means that many species will not have enough time to adapt, meaning that the climate emergency remains a huge threat to biodiversity. Willerslev and colleagues said studying ancient ecosystems could provide clues to how some species were genetically adapted to a warmer climate.
Mmm, some don’t like selected sources of articles. In turn that detracts from the core message.
So when I post just the text it normally means I got it from a source that will raise eyebrows. Once I have Googled it, multiple reports on the same, I post the text.
Circumvents any derailment of the message, because of the “questionable source” see.
I think it is a good habit to link the source. One of our rules of conduct does say you need to “own” the content you post, and I think that basically requires that you link the source to be in the clear, to qualify as a “fair use” exception.
I understand that some people don’t like some sources. For example, articles from “The Daily Wire” (a right-leaning American publication) tends to have a very heavy bias towards denying climate-related results, while something like Wapo (Washington Post) will probably lean the other way. It’s the nature of the beast.
As an analogy: It is often said that history is written by the victors. Which is true, but from that some people deduce that we cannot know anything at all about history. I think that is untrue. You simply need to be aware of the biases, then you can still glean a lot of good info from an account. And the same would be true here.
A supposed news site providing a 15 minute rant in which not one claim is factually correct (well, OK - some facts may be ‘correct’ - but misrepresented to such an extent that it is not recognisable).
When I became aware of that info, it is out in public and some people are reading it or are becoming aware of the idea … so my mind went to what Dr Zol en Gnl Hat did during Covid.
Not today, not tomorrow, but the idea is there, some will grab it, the pot slowly coming to boil, with us inside it.
Or it never happens.
At least we are aware of such an idea that may be “enforced” in due course with the far left supporting it.
I’m with you. I’m not doing it with any malicious nor nefarious intent … if pushed I can produce the links.
As I said, sometimes I want people to Google a sentence from a paragraph, on purpose, as not all our search engines generate the same results. Makes for better “verification” as Justin pointed out on the traffic idea in Oxford.
This stuff makes it difficult to sort the veracity of topics. I’m amazed by (intelligent) people that I assist with backup power. One soul asked me how she could test her system after I had installed it since there was no power outage at the time. It’s a good idea to do this since the panic one lives with when the grid is down is not good for the rational mind/ones sanity.
Then when all works fine they don’t sing your praises but forget about it (believing that the less you think about it the less chance there is for it to rear it’s ugly head again )
I run into the same thing. I see someone quoting something that Bertrand Russell ostensibly said. Alright, but I’d like to know what book or publication that was in, because these days a LOT of things are attributed to people when they never said them. I google it, and then google says “There’s not a great many good hits… here’s what we could find without the quotes…”
The world’s oceans were the hottest ever recorded in 2022, demonstrating the profound and pervasive changes that human-caused emissions have made to the planet’s climate.
More than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed in the oceans. The records, starting in 1958, show an inexorable rise in ocean temperature, with an acceleration in warming after 1990.
Sea surface temperatures are a major influence on the world’s weather. Hotter oceans help supercharge extreme weather, leading to more intense hurricanes and typhoons and more moisture in the air, which brings more intense rains and flooding. Warmer water also expands, pushing up sea levels and endangering coastal cities.
The temperature of the oceans is far less affected by natural climate variability than the temperature of the atmosphere, making the oceans an undeniable indicator of global heating.
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