Forum: Author Hangout

The term has always been 'climate change'. No one 'changed it'. No one is claiming it 'all goes one way'. Those are bad strawman arguments.

Back around 1991 I watched a visualization done by NCSA on 'climate change' (mostly as a demo of their visualization systems). Yes, that was the term used. The visualization made it obvious that significant parts of the world would be both more cold and more hot (it was temperature over time, so you'd see the same spot in a deep blue - colder - and a bright red - hotter). The presenter made a point of noting that cooling was expected along with warming.

'Global warming' was popularized because, overall, the world is trending towards being warmer. There's pretty much no room for doubt that the world is ~1-1.5C hotter now on average than it was not long ago. But almost as noteworthy is that the standard deviation is going up considerably. Periods of cold will be more common, but periods of heat will be even more common.

That 1991 visualization looks a whole lot like what we're seeing now. However you feel about causation, it's extremely hard to argue that 1) we've known this was coming for decades and 2) it's real and it's happening and it will have major impacts on human civilization.

Even if climate change is 100% non-anthropogenic (which seems exceptionally unlikely) or if we do nothing significant (which seems more likely), at the current rate we're looking at major swaths of the world becoming functionally uninhabitable within the next hundred years. That will trigger famine, mass migration, war, etc.

Yes, the world has been this hot (and hotter) before. However, it didn't have significant numbers of humans trying to maintain anything like modern civilization.

My suspicion was and is that we'll dither and do very little effective for long periods of time, then try a 'hail Mary', likely in the form of one of the schemes to mass-deploy reflective material in orbit to diminish incoming sunlight. At best a flip of a coin if that'll do any good (or any harm). Might work, might be an utter disaster.

Once we're at 2-2.5C warming and mass unrest is picking up, though, someone will 'do something', even if it's high-risk. That's what we always do.

Of course, if we start a nuclear war, the problem mostly goes away, between all of the churned-up material in the atmosphere and the drastic drop in the human population...

I'll rephrase. The term in the academic community has pretty much always been 'climate change'. Some of the media used the term 'global warming', because it's slightly easier to capture and conveys the point that the average temperature is rising, which is pretty much beyond dispute at this point.

The argument that 'they' 'changed the name' from 'global warming' to 'climate change' because sometimes places are colder is false. That's the real point. Nearly a decade before the concept was popularized, the term used was 'climate change'. 'Climate change' predates 'global warming'.

Way back when, 'they' were clear that change was not all 'one way'. That has not significantly deviated within the academic community. The average change is pretty much 'one way', though. Day-to-day weather is sometimes colder, slightly more often hotter, exactly as predicted.

This whole argument is similar to someone throwing a fit with an investment advisor because 'You said the market averaged an X% return but my investments are down this year!' The advisor (based on that statement) told the truth. No one expects the markets to go up X% every single day or even every single year without fail. The statement that the trend is for an X% return is not proven false when there's a recession.

Never once heard one of them call it climate change, it was always global warming.

Global warming is now big business, and the rebranding exercise to climate change (which I well remember) was to thwart sceptics on the basis that climate change happens.

Greenhouse gases act as insulation, tending to level out planetary temperatures rather than make them more extreme. Evidence of this has been found by wind farms producing less power than predicted because average global wind speeds have dropped as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations have risen.

AJ

Again, I first heard the term 'climate change' being used within the academic community in 1990 or 1991. I can place it within a year based on where I was living at the time.

The 'rebranding' that I saw was far more from the media, who wanted a more concrete term.

There were a lot of predicted dates for certain catastrophic events caused by Global Warming due to fall in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When they didn't happen and the temperature changes had slowed the panic merchants got worried and started calling it Climate Change an not Global Warming.

Mind you, both terms have a long history of use and what we're really talking about here is the heavy propaganda campaign in the media by a group of activists and politicians pushing it for their own personal gains.

Scientists used 'climate' originally, but there were so few of them and the subject was of such little significance that the general population were unaware.

The term 'Global Warming' came in when activists realised the Earth might be getting warmer, and that became the dominant term in the media until after the turn of the century.

To counter the sceptics, 'Climate Change' was progressively used to supplant it. Although there were several proponents, perhaps the crucial one was Bush who declared it the preferred term for governmental use.

AJ

Scientists used 'climate' originally, but there were so few of them and the subject was of such little significance that the general population were unaware.

True, that's why I said the terms had been around for a long time as the dozen or so scientists who were actually involved in Global Climate and Global Weather research for decades had often used the term 'global climate' in their papers. Sadly, what got pushed by the activists and the media never included the reports by the long term researchers who knew what they were talking about. And that is still the case. The few scientists who know what they're talking about in regards to global climate and weather are ignored and shouted down by the many activists and the many fringe scientists working the edges screaming the panic slogans to get more funds for their own work and higher pay scales for themselves.

Let's not forget the publish or perish mentality among them.

What's worse is the 'Asking for a grant for what's the flavour of the day can get you a grant with up to triple your money' issue.

Remember those dates you just mentioned.
Now go and find the doctorate program for "Climate scientist" or "Climatology."

I still have a compendium of UK university courses for the late 1970s. 'Climate' was not a degree subject at that time.

AJ

Who are the people being quoted as being in concensus?

Many years ago someone did a survey of a few thousand people on the mailing lists of a number of the scientific journals. The survey was, like all surveys, worded to give the results the survey taker wanted. However, the real problem was that of the people who responded 97% of them said they believed in Human Caused Climate Change, the sad part was none of the respondents who said that were involved in climate research as the list of people surveyed covered the full range of scientific research and the few actual climate researchers asked were all part of the 3% who said NO. Since then a lot of people like Obama have claimed all of the respondents were climate researchers when they were not.

There used to be a very good YouTube video on this, but YouTube pulled it down as it didn't agree with the Climate Panic Activist Propaganda the YouTube management supports. There's a good website on the climate change issue you should check out:

climatediscussionnexus.com

edit to add: The real problem with the 97% claim is the belief that a geologist and a medical research scientist are valid experts on climate matters.

Never once heard one of them call it climate change, it was always global warming.

IIRC in the early 2000s Bush and other climate deniers began to call it "climate change" because somehow that fuzzed the issue and they could continue to argue it wasn't established, there are snowballs in August, blah blah blah.

~ JBB

there are snowballs in August

Is that a result of August being fed his own cum?

AJ

Quite possibly. Who did the feeding might make a good story, right?
~ JBB

What makes one a "climate denier"?

Not agreeing with everything the climate alarmists and politicians claim makes you a denier.

What makes one a "climate denier"?

Note that the term was deliberately chosen to parallel 'Holocaust denier', with the intention of inheriting similar nuances.

AJ

My recollection is that alarmists (if we are going to use perforating, dichotomous labels) switched to "climate change" when prediction after prediction of disastrous warming consequences failed to materialize and evidence mounted of a long pause in the rise of average surface temperatures.

The climate panic pushers switched to 'Climate Change' from 'Global Warming' in 2016, after an 18-year-long pause in the rise of the global temperature.

During those 18 years, the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubled without a corresponding rise in temperature, so their position needed to adjust. Now it's climate change crisis and the need to avoid 'Extreme Weather events'.

I don't know how people believe that crap. Since when is warmth bad and cold good? There are way more cold events affecting human food than heat events doing the same. When the earth got warmer in medieval times, humanity flourished and got to Iceland and green land. Humans never flourished when it was colder.

So how the hell did they convince the masses that warmer is bad?

So how the hell did they convince the masses that warmer is bad?

Because the masses haven't been taught how to think critically. The dramatic change in the education process from my time in HS (late 70s, early 80s) to when my kids were in HS (mid 00s to mid 10s) is astounding, and not in a good way.

So how the hell did they convince the masses that warmer is bad?

lots of propaganda by their mates in the US media.

So how the hell did they convince the masses that warmer is bad?

Considering the geologic history of the planet, warmer is more of a fluke part of the cycle.

You're entitled to your own opinions as to whether the climate is changing (though the facts are overwhelming that it is) and to what extent mankind is causing it. However, you're not entitled to your own facts. The term 'climate change' was not 'switched to' in 2016, period.

Repeating myself ad nauseum: 'climate change' was in heavy use back in 1991. It's hardly something that was 'switched to' in 2016.

The single most high-profile body studying this is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was formed in 1988, not 2016.

Nor are you entitled to your own facts as to a 'pause'. One can cherry-pick two years and come up with a similar number; however, that's like saying oil prices 'paused' between 1999 and 2020. Curve fitting makes it clear that the average temperature did indeed rise during that period, just as oil prices, overall, rose significantly, even though the low points in 1999 and 2020 are very similar.

Back in 1980 the prediction was that the world's temperature would rise about 0.2C per decade. Fast-forward to 2020 and the world's temperature is 0.8C warmer.

Back in 1980 the prediction was that the world's temperature would rise about 0.2C per decade. Fast-forward to 2020 and the world's temperature is 0.8C warmer.

We're in religious territory with climate change pushers, deniers, fake data, doom and gloom predictions.

According to 80s, 90s, and 00s predictions we should all be under water now, no ice caps, no polar bears, no glaciers anywhere and dry deserts everywhere. None have come to pass.

Polar ice has expanded in the last couple of years. No polar bear extinction, no acid oceans devoid of fish. The world is greener than ever.

I didn't say the world isn't warming up. I said how did they convince the masses that colder is better than warmer?

There are a lot of political will behind the current narrative of fear and despair. You choose to believe some people (they can't prove any of their predictions) and I choose to believe others.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/04/the-pause-lengthens-yet-again/

According to 80s, 90s, and 00s predictions we should all be under water now, no ice caps, no polar bears

I remember a documentary series by David Attenborough from last century. In it he included 'statistics' on global warming and polar bear nutrition. Based on those statistics, it was a simple back-of-an-envelope calculation to show that no polar bears could exist within the arctic circle beyond the turn of the century.

My opinion of David Attenborough is less than most people's.

AJ

UK activists seem to love wind power at the moment, despite wind turbine blades having to go to landfill (recycling them is about ten times as expensive as making them from scratch) and the appalling toll on wildlife.

Many activists wrongly advocate more wind turbines on the false premise that average wind speeds are actually increasing.

AJ

I'm perfectly fine with nuclear power. I do wish that we'd move away from LWR reactors and towards CANDU, pebble bed, etc designs. Thorium looks promising but there's a ton of engineering issues to solve. SMRs also look promising.

One worry that doesn't get a lot of play is the extent to which a nuclear plant is a top-tier terrorist target, compared to any other form of power generation (purely in terms of contamination, not fuel theft or service denial). On the other hand, some designs are very hard to attack simply because they're tough enough to withstand most plausible attack vectors.

I agree that there's too much opposition to nuclear power. Part of that is that the nuclear industry has spent most of the last fifty years shooting itself in the foot again and again. They're an easy target.

I agree that there's too much opposition to nuclear power.

Most of that is the fear and hate the anti-nuclear people promote due to what they saw happens with and after the bombs to end WW2. They see the estimated 129,000 to 226,00 killed in the bombings as too horrible to contemplate and thus fight everything of a nuclear matter. However, those same people never think about the fact an normal style invasion would have seen estimated death tolls of over 6,000,000 Allied troops and over 35,000,000 Japanese in Operation Downfall; nor do they think about estimated 200,000 to 400,000 civilians murdered by the Japanese at Nanjing, nor do they care about the other estimated 3,800,000 to 10,600,00 (mostly civilians) Chinese killed by the Japanese between 1937 and 1945.

I think that's overly simplistic. Many people bought into nuclear energy in the 1950s. Remember that 'fallout' wasn't in the conversation for a while (even from a military standpoint), and people thought of them as big boxes that pumped out power without pollution. We even went through a flirtation with nuclear-powered aircraft and spacecraft.

Then fallout entered the conversation, and not too long after, nuclear plants got tarred (fairly, really) with mismanagement, corruption, cost overruns, failed promises, and so forth. A big box that pumps out expensive power and might dump extremely long-lasting contaminants over a large area is much less easy to sell.

It can be swung back, but you have to convince people that - this time - it's not going to cost many times the initial price and the plants are going to be safe and reliable and inherently unable to catastrophically fail (at least unless someone drops a really, really big bomb on them; very little is immune to that).

On the flip side of that, and getting off topic, way back in the day I took a senior-level college course in the history of nuclear warfare (up to the then state of the art and where military doctrine was). One of the observations was that the impact of a nuclear was is, practically speaking, incalculable. There are too many variables and we don't even understand all the permutations.

As one example: hit an airfield full of ready-to-go nuclear armed bombers with a medium-sized nuclear weapon and ... what happens? If the weapon casings fail, you're kicking an enormous amount of plutonium up into the atmosphere. Plutonium is a very nasty chemical pollutant without even getting into radioactivity.

There are dozens of such scenarios. We simply have no real understanding of some of the potential disasters. Flipping back to the discussion, if you hit a plant with a big enough weapon in the right configuration, all bets are off. But, if you've got such a weapon, you can already cause all manner of damage, so it's something that probably doesn't play heavily into the nuclear safety argument.

On the other hand, if a group of well-trained terrorists could get access to a control room and run a Chernobyl scenario intentionally ... that's a different problem, and why plants should be inherently safe even around bad actors at the controls.

I didn't mean literally Chernobyl. It's well within theoretically possible for operators to melt down a Three Mile Island-style design, for instance.

The question is time. Many of the 'inherently safe' designs do require operator intervention to truly safe the reactor, but it's a matter of days, not hours or minutes. If one cannot wreck it within a day or two, one can design for a response profile that allows recapture within that period of time (combined with alternate control facilities, etc).

It's well within theoretically possible for operators to melt down a Three Mile Island-style design, for instance.

Three Mile Island DID melt down, at least partially.

What really caused the most - and completely unnecessary - panic was the misreporting of a reading of radioactivity as being on the ground, as opposed to being from a helicopter monitoring the venting of pressurized radioactive gases. From the perspective of just about any and all industrial accidents - it just wasn't that bad.

Of course, making it SOUND horrendous allowed SNL to allow Dan Aykroyd to portray Jimmy Carter and kiss Garret Morris.

I meant a full-on, core-vessel-destroying, molten-core-hits-ground-water meltdown. TMI was not that, not even close, and reasonably was never going to be; the way you get there is via malicious operators (or operators given horrible instructions, as in Chernobyl).

Lay person, no more. My claims are based on reading numerous articles on 'inherently safe' reactor designs which also include comments such as 'does not require operator intervention for up to three days'.

I personally wouldn't consider a software solution to be 'inherently safe' if there was any way to override the software. 'Inherently safe' is a physics statement, not a software or control system statement. If it's possible to override the software or control systems to create an unsafe condition, it's not 'inherently safe', in my opinion. I say that as a software professional. Bugs happen, but even in the absence of bugs, hackers happen, or destruction of computer systems and abuse of manual controls.

I agree (with much less detailed knowledge) about Fukushima. That tallies with what I've read about it - bad operational decisions (which includes, to some extent, bad initial design).

I know less about TMI, but that also tallies with my knowledge.

Chernobyl is both 'yes, boss' and also a very bad boss. 'Yes, boss' is bad, but it's particularly bad when the boss is telling you to do the worst possible thing. One hopes (fingers crossed) that the Chinese boss's superiors won't let them do anything quite so poorly designed. My guess is that they'll put a lot of guardrails on the system to delay and push back on bad inputs. As I said, bugs happen and software can be overridden, but the difference is between someone with bad intent trying to wreck things and someone with good intent who's an idiot.

Wind energy can be a hell of a lot better than it is. However, the main problem there is the way the idiots in charge are implementing it.

I know of many people who do well surviving off the grid on wind energy. But they use vertical axis wind turbines to produce 6v or 12v electricity to power 6v and 12v systems in their homes. It's the idiots using huge horizontal axis turbines with giant fans to produce high voltage power for the grid than is making the industry and wasted effort and a waste of resources.

Many people bought into nuclear energy in the 1950s. Remember that 'fallout' wasn't in the conversation for a while (even from a military standpoint), and people thought of them as big boxes that pumped out power without pollution. We even went through a flirtation with nuclear-powered aircraft and spacecraft.

This is all true, and while the anti-nuclear movement didn't get started until the 1960s, I suspect it arose out of the cold war and was partly pushed by KGB agents and funding, what I wrote about the anti-nuclear crowd's thinking and justification of their position is true.

On the flip side of that, and getting off topic, way back in the day I took a senior-level college course in the history of nuclear warfare (up to the then state of the art and where military doctrine was). One of the observations was that the impact of a nuclear was is, practically speaking, incalculable. There are too many variables and we don't even understand all the permutations.

Well, way back in the day, nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare studies and dealing with the aftermath was what I used to do for Uncle Sam. The impact of a nuclear war is quite calculable; it's simply, to quote Vizzini, 'Inconceivable!'

It's unfortunate, but that's where the inability of most people to deal with large numbers comes into play. We can easily comprehend one second, one minute, one dollar, one death. A billion seconds is almost 31.7 years, a billion minutes is 1901 years, a billion dollars, the US government spends a billion dollars about every two hours, and a billion deaths is considered an acceptable casualty rate from a nuclear war.

As individuals, we're fairly easy to kill. As a group, we're damned near impossible to wipe out. We inhabit this planet literally from pole to pole.

I hesitate to go here, because I'll be considered a conspiracy theorist. At the same time ... it's rather amazing how MANY conspiracy theories aren't. The biggest issue with nuclear power plants isn't that they're safe - they are. Properly designed, they don't fail unless there's intervention by man. The military found that out when troops blew one up. That's why those bodies are in lead lined coffins, and the whole area is now a radioactive parking lot. The issue comes down to control.

Three Mile Island was such a disaster, the amount of radiation that was leaked and used to push public opinion in the US was only about a thousand times LESS than what you find downwind from ANY coal powered power plant. Was Chernobyl bad? Sure. Did the government reaction make it worse? IMMENSELY!

I think we're perhaps looking at this in different ways. Your comment about humans being unable to deal with large numbers is closer on point.

My professor's comment was based on psychological research that suggests that people can handle three or four independent variables before things break down. Some do better with five or six.

A nuclear war, at the time, was considered to have upwards of twenty-seven independent variables, making it simply beyond the ability for human beings to rationally contemplate. Even computers don't deal well with things like that (or, perhaps, it's better to say that coders do a lousy job giving computers enough information to deal well with them).

And, again, there are far too many 'we don't know' variables. No one has placed a number of nuclear weapons within a nuclear explosion and looked at where the (non-fissioning) plutonium goes. I'm certain that the guys at Lawrence Livermore have modeled it, but I don't know if they have sufficient base data to actually know - in any nuclear test, did we put other weapons within the blast and look at what happened to them?

Even if we did, there's extremely scant information on what happens when large quantities of plutonium are scattered on the wind. We simply don't know. Quite a bit probably depends on whether it settles on the ground and sits there or lands in water - or floats in the atmosphere a while first.

Yes, a lot of 'big picture' interactions are well understood, but quite a few smaller-but-potentially-catastrophic interactions aren't understood much at all.

This is far afield from nuclear power, as I said, but it's an interesting thing to consider. The primary relevance would be if we 1) build fast-breeder reactors, and 2) someone blew one up spectacularly.

I agree about Three Mile Island, though of course the scenario there was much more about what could have happened than what did happen.

Also, note that the release of toxins and radioactivity from solar-cell manufacture (currently being used to push public opinion against solar from those on the anti-solar side) is also thousands of times less than releases from coal-fired plants. This game gets played again and again.

I agree that there's too much opposition to nuclear power.

Much of the anti-nuclear lobby are like the anti-gun lobby - - they're insane about one thing and totally ignore real life or facts. The anti-gun lobby want all guns removed from the society in the USA, yet there are many more times the people killed and injured with knives than guns each year. However, you don't see them lobbying to have all but blunt butter knives banned.

I've never seen or heard of a gun killing someone where a human was not responsible for it happening, even and accidental discharge is due to human actions. So the problem is humans, lets eliminate all humans - that should make the gun lobby happy.

I agree that there's too much opposition to nuclear power.

I agree too. If Germany hadn't got its knickers in a twist after Fukushima, Russia wouldn't have been in a position to threaten World War 3.

Chernobyl was bad but I hear different opinions on Fukushima - some say that was bad too, others say the effects were greatly exaggerated.

The situation in Ukraine is worrying. It wouldn't take much delinquency by the Russians to cause Chernobyl 2.

AJ

It wouldn't take much delinquency by the Russians

Ignorance will work just as well. A bit like how no-one is quite sure how badly the Russian soldiers were poisoned when they dug defensive ditches around the plant. The staff at the plant did point out that that wasn't a good idea at the time, but the generals knew best and told their troops to get on with it. An 'unknown' amount of troops were then subsequently rushed to Belarus for treatment for radiation poisoning... Meanwhile, all the tracked vehicles that had been stirring up the radioactive ground have become, in themselves, radioactive. Not that they have been decontaminated or removed from active service...

From my perspective, Fukushima is much more scary than Chernobyl. Chernobyl is actually a pretty solid design. Indeed, if it hadn't been, the damage would've been far worse.

Chernobyl was a complete failure of training and operation. The test they were running was horrible. If you'd designed a plan to create a disaster, you'd do exactly what they were doing.

Fukushima, on the other hand, was handled properly. People did what they were trained to do, and the safety systems did everything they could. The problem was, no one designed it around a tsunami hitting the plant and disrupting electrical systems.

Design failures are, in theory, easier to fix, but Fukushima is an existence proof that even a utility with extensive nuclear experience can be blind to threats and thus design a plant that will fail catastrophically under a hypothetically predictable scenario.

In an overall 'badness' level, Fukushima isn't as 'bad', but it's still a multi-decade cleanup process, and could still get very bad if there are various screwups during the cleanup. Chernobyl, on the other hand, is a multi-decade cleanup process plus a likely near-permanent exclusion zone.

The situation around Ukraine's other nuclear plants is worrisome. I have no idea how good the design is there, nor whether the operators have shut down and 'safed' them or not. Even if they have, a major assault would be bad, but if they haven't, and Russia disrupts control ... yeah. Chernobyl 2 on a much later scale.

Point taken. I was more referring to the physical design which put backup generators below the water level in a tsunami and had insufficient alternative backup power. I don't think they inherited that from the GE design, though I could be wrong.

CANDU is a boiling-water reactor, but I'm ok with it. It's not a light-water reactor, which is more of the point for me.

I agree about plant size. I also agree with some of the later comments about defensibility, but I think assemblies of smaller units are likely going to be the answer (which is a large plant, in a way, but a very different way, since each subassembly can be hardened and is much easier to build).

It depends on your definition of 'catastrophic'. It's already the case that we're losing quite a bit of high-quality farmland and replacing it with lower-quality farmland. In terms of coastal cities, New Orleans remains viable, but at staggering expense. We will have to make the same decisions for Miami and much of the East Coast over the next few decades.

Other nations without the resources we have may simply have to abandon coastal cities, and many island nations will simply cease to exist.

We will spend money on mitigation and remediation, prevention, or both. How much remains to be seen.

So, I agree that it's in dispute, but that we will spend an enormous amount isn't. It's just a question of whether we can afford it.

I'm not an expert, honestly, and I'm somewhat of a pessimist as well. That said, my opinion is that we definitely need to be finding mitigation and remediation strategies, both carbon-oriented and ways of dealing with increased heat / rising water levels / more erratic weather / etc.

In terms of energy production, short-term we're probably stuck with natural gas as the biggest leg of production. I'm not thrilled with that, but there's not much else that'll get us through the next few years. Improving system integrity would make a big difference - the single worst part of natural gas is methane loss prior to combustion.

Longer-term, increased investment in inherently safe nuclear options seems like a good plan (given a magic wand; in the real world, I expect NIMBY will crush it). Centralized solar is going to be a factor, and so will wind. The big players in energy are already heavily invested in solar and wind - profit margins are higher. Local solar (and possibly wind) should be part of the mix (and likely will be - there's too much momentum).

Note that all of that is almost certain to happen even if global warming isn't anthropogenic. There's an enormous profit motive to shifting to non-fossil-fuel energy sources, and much of the oil industry would love it (because they'd much rather use oil for plastics and other products than passenger-car fuel). Sooner or later we're also going to run out of fossil fuels; one can argue when that point will be, but failing to transition in time is another giant problem.

Overall, I tend to be a pessimist. If global warming is anthropogenic (and, given my above comment about methane, I'm of the opinion that there's at least a solid case to be made there), we're unlikely to do enough. If it's not, we cannot do enough. That tends to mean we'll divert increasingly large amounts of resources to remediation.

I'm not all that optimistic either, but it has less to do with politicians' views and more to do with people's ability to ignore even clear and present dangers, much less dangers that take decades to materialize. We can't even stop people from building, and rebuilding, and re-rebuilding in flood plains or immediately adjacent to reservoirs in defined floor relief zones. The odds that, as a species, we're going to actually make sweeping changes before the metaphorical building is actually on fire seems very low. The best way to get that to happen is to make those changes economically advantageous.

Fortuitously, many of them are advantageous already - but there will be winners and losers, and the losers have an enormous budget to spend on influencing things so that their losses are delayed as long as possible.

I am beyond highly skeptical of the 'That's why they admire China' line. In general, when I see that thrown around, it's usually from people who want to create 'guilt by association' by implying an association that isn't even vaguely there. I will admit to being particularly sensitive about it since politicians on the (US definition) left are frequently smeared with 'soft on China' or 'admire China', even as they are generally as tough or tougher on China than those on the (US definition) right.

Comparing recent administrations, there's no correlation (except, I might argue, a negative correlation) between being climate-change activities and being pro-China.

China also is the whipping boy of most climate activists, who are united in saying China needs to do far more and do it faster than the West is acting.

To me, saying 'X admires China' is like those on the right calling X a 'Marxist/Communist/Socialist'. The US pretty much has no Marxists, Communists, nor (true) Socialists in any elected position (I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are extremely few and far between). Neither AOC nor Bernie Sanders, for instance, are even close - both would be somewhat tepid 'socialists' by European standards, and European 'socialism' isn't all that close to true socialism. Calling someone any of those either betrays a lack of education or a knowing intent to smear someone with an undeserved negative label.

I'd be interested in any objective correlation between 'climate change activists' and 'those who admire China'. I pretty much see none.

There is nothing whatsoever in that Teen Vogue article that qualifies as 'admiring China'. China is, functionally, an authoritarian capitalist/semi-fascist society with a strong colonialist bent, full of greenwashing, an utter disregard for 'environmental justice', and so forth. There's literally nothing about Chinese society that would be 'admirable' to someone who would write that article.

Unless, of course, you're making a vague slap at Chinese censorship - but all that says is that people who take a strong view on any issue might love having control of information sources. One could just as easily say that the previous US administration - one vigorously opposed to climate change activism - 'admired China' because they would have loved to have a single unchallenged state media source and full control over social media.

Neither AOC nor Sanders call themselves socialists. They call themselves 'Democratic Socialists', which is much more in line with how the word 'Socialism' is modified by other terms among many European parties.

Using the textbook definition of socialism (e.g. 'true socialist'), socialism involves workers owning the means of production either by decentralized direct ownership or (more likely) state ownership (with the state then being defined as being collectively owned by the workers). That's not European-style socialism, it's not American 'Democratic Socialism', it's not FDR-style 'socialism', etc.

If someone calls AOC or Bernie Sanders a 'Democratic Socialist', with full credit that 'Democratic Socialism' is a capitalist system with more guardrails and safeguards than 'pure capitalism', that's perfectly understandable and honest. If someone calls them a 'socialist' with the implication that they aren't still functionally capitalists, or that they believe in state ownership of the means of production, nationalization, etc, that's either a lack of education (not understanding the difference between 'Democratic Socialism' and 'true socialism') or an attempt to smear.

I very, very seldom see the term used honestly within American politics. In the vast majority of cases, the word 'Socialist' is implied to be identical to 'Marxist' or 'Communist', AOC or Bernie is implied to therefore be a 'Marxist' or a 'Communist', and therefore they are clearly aiming the US to be e.g. the Soviet Union or socialist Venezuela / Cuba / etc.

Particularly dishonest people claim that they're 'Nazis', because Nazis were 'National Socialists', notwithstanding the fact that the Nazis used the word with all of the truth and honesty of the word 'Democratic' within 'The Democratic People's Republic of Korea' (e.g. North Korea).

In terms of 'actions', I don't see either actually pursuing policies of nationalization. Do you? If you're not seeing them pushing for the government to nationalize industries and hand them to the workers, they're not 'socialists' by the definition of the word. 'Marxist' isn't even in the scope of the discussion.

As I noted in another reply, neither Bernie nor AOC proclaim they are 'socialists'. They proclaim that they are 'Democratic Socialists', which is quite a different thing. None of them are proposing true Socialism nor Communism nor Marxism, and implying an equivalence is ignorant or insulting.

On your examples - I'll concede the point, with the observation that it's a far more nuanced statement to say 'There is a level of admiration ...' or 'Dictatorship has its drawbacks but also its positives' compared to a simple 'They admire China'. It's facile to say 'A benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government - the problem is finding the benevolent dictator' (or similar to 'X may be horrible, but he had the trains running on time', a phrase that's been used about a number of politicians).

If the initial comment had been 'That's why the admire China's ability to centrally control climate-change policies', I wouldn't have reacted. The problem is that it was phrased as a blanket admiration for China, which no one in the climate-change-activist community would express overall (because, again, China is functionally an authoritarian communist state that is still a far larger polluter than anyone else, is still building highly polluting power plants, and is largely greenwashing their climate-change efforts). Yes, they want to 'own' solar power and electric cars, but that's because they want to 'own' anything that will sell (e.g. capitalism), not because they're 'enlightened' and want to 'save the planet'.

I didn't say that the Trump administration tried to impose "single state media source and full control over social media?" I said they were envious of it. They and Fox News (really, Fox News - Opinion division, not News division) functionally had half of a state media source, and there has been endless complaining by that administration and sympathetic parties about how evil private businesses are for running their businesses as they see fit, and calls for government regulation of social media to control what social media companies are required to publish.

I fail to see 'disagreement on climate and other political thought' banned from social media. I see anti-climate change and pro-right-wing messages on social media literally every day (not that I'm on social media all that much, but both Twitter and Facebook seem to delight in telling me 'You should read ', where is generally someone on the right saying something-or-other). If the American 'left' (I disagree that they're my compatriots, per se, but be that as it may) have 'banned' it, they have done a spectacularly poor job of doing so.

Can someone please tell us what the optimal average global temperature is and how it was determined?

Without trying to sound facetious, I have to ask back, for what species?

Polar bears would flourish with a colder average global temperature. Rattlesnakes would flourish with a higher one. Man is one of the very few animals that adapts his environment to fit himself. (We're not the only ones - go check out a beaver dam, for example.) We are, however, one of the only animals that can live in an assortment of global temperatures.

Sea levels rise and flood out Miami? (Which, with the city sinking, is happening anyway?) Screw it - move the people and abandon the city. We've done it many times over our history.

There really is no optimal average global temperature. I've a client right now that's moved here (Oklahoma) from Oregon. She's having to take extra precautions, because our average temperature is hotter than she's ever experienced in her life. And it's not even summer yet.

These are unprecedented times with respect to the size of human population the planet has to support. The fact that, by and large, it does manage to support that population makes a case that the current global average temperature is a strong candidate.

AJ

climate acolytes

A disturbing number of climate acolytes appear to be claiming that by reducing our carbon emissions, the amount of atmospheric carbon will fall and we will achieve net zero.

(Absent any methods of carbon capture better than reforestation, I would have thought atmospheric carbon would keep on increasing but at a slower rate.)

The latest proponent of the view is His HolierThanThouness Prince Charles, when video-lecturing delegates at a climate junket.

It will be interesting to compare atmospheric carbon levels in 2050 with the current levels, assuming anyone is still alive.

AJ

Reforestation of parts of Africa and South America along with cleaning up the ocean gyres is the only effective means to clean up the excess Co2.

I vaguely remember a study purporting to show that even if every forestable inch of the planet were covered with trees, at our current rate of carbon emissions it still wouldn't achieve net zero.

Elderly trees capture carbon at a slower rate than younger specimens. Perhaps the scenario could be tweaked by felling all the older trees and burying the wood deep underground to make it difficult for the carbon to re-enter the biosphere.

AJ

Age of the tree is irrelevant if it's healthy. Species of tree was definitely relevant.

I don't know whether their findings ever got published but a university team set out to find the optimum UK biomass fuel. Their conclusion was a species of willow, cropped after two years. I guess other climates might furnish other candidates - bamboo might work in China for example.

While thousand year old trees are wonderful and, IMO, should be preserved, their active growing days are over and it's all they can do to push out a few leaves each year.

AJ

Reforestation of parts of Africa and South America along with cleaning up the ocean gyres is the only effective means to clean up the excess Co2.

All of you are discussing this while agreeing on the basics of the 'Climate Crisis' being pushed on you.

You all seem to agree to the basic premise that a certain level of CO2 is ideal (150ppm - pre-industrial levels). That is a faulty assumption. Who can prove that 450ppm or even 1000ppm is bad?

One thing for sure, all the extra CO2 in the air is driving much of the current conditions that make the world more hospitable to this large number of people and any kind of animals that we may raise. Look up 'Air fertilizer'. Plants love CO2. CO2 is plant food. Plants thrive with higher concentration of it. The earth's green cover has increased substantially in the last 30 years because of the 'excess' CO2. I would rather not use the 'excess' as it's a negative label. I would rather use the 'more abundant' CO2 label as it's more accurate.

If it weren't for the abundance of CO2 in the air, human agriculture would require more farm land to produce the same amount of food.

More warmth and more CO2 combine to push a more abundant flora of all kinds on earth, allowing a more abundant fauna (including humans and cattle). CO2 and warmth are the fuel that drive a more vigorous cycle of life.

Colder climate and less abundant CO2 lead to less life on earth.

I fully agree that plastic pollution and other types of pollution (other than CO2) is bad and humans need to clean it up, but CO2 is not a bad element.

Show me where I agreed with it.

Your said:

Reforestation of parts of Africa and South America along with cleaning up the ocean gyres is the only effective means to clean up the excess Co2.

When you refer to the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere as 'excess', you're implying that it shouldn't be there, so you agree with it. When you discuss the subject as if CO2 is not good and needs to be 'cleaned up', then you agree with the premise that CO2 is a problem that needs fixing

That is agreeing with it.

To make it clear, no, I do not agree with it. The premise is flawed on a very basic level.

OK, good.

You're reading to much into that.

One of the big problems in my view is how the narrative goes.

The activists are pushing a certain narrative, and part of controlling the narrative and pushing the agenda is control of the language. Whenever you agree about pollution and don't exclude CO2 specifically, you're basically following the narrative's framework laid out by the activists.

When activists control the narrative, if the opposition or moderates use the activists' terms and language, then the opposition and/or moderates lost by definition.

An activist will start by opposing true pollutants (plastics, sulfur compounds, etc) and will include CO2. The fix for pollution without CO2 is completely different from the CO2 "problem" they want to fix. If you don't specifically exclude CO2, then you're simply going down the path that the activists are laying out for you and you can't argue against it later.

IMO, reducing the CO2 level is the wrong way. Just lay back and let Nature do her thing.

Exactly.

Science. I was actually educated while attending school, with only a bit of Indoctrination.

The climate of the earth 🌎 changes. The sun is one of the most important factors, as well as our not quite regular orbit.

Human beings may change our local, and even regional environment. Changing the weather, we might as well Pray.

Human beings are capable of doing quite a bit of mitigate changes in the weather and climate. Unfortunately, most of what self-loathing pseudo environmentalists have implemented and are trying to impose upon us prevent us from doing truly beneficial actions.

Want to reduce Human production of pollution, have most electricity produced by nuclear power.

The climate of the earth 🌎 changes. The sun is one of the most important factors, as well as our not quite regular orbit.

This 2021 analysis of a series of papers on the topic might interest you:

How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate.

TL;DR summary:

Given the many valid dissenting scientific opinions that remain on these issues, we argue that recent attempts to force an apparent scientific consensus (including the IPCC reports) on these scientific debates are premature and ultimately unhelpful for scientific progress. We hope that the analysis in this paper will encourage and stimulate further analysis and discussion. In the meantime, the debate is ongoing.

Another aspect of the 'scientific consensus' that's been an issue for the last 40 years is the number of 'scientist' who know absolutely nothing about what they're talking about to do with climate subjects. I've never understand why the activists and politicians feel that a biologist, or archeologist, or paleontologist, is accepted as being able to talk about the climate with the same authority as someone who's spent their life learning to understand how the ocean current affect the winds above them and that affects the climate. However, let someone with that sort of relevant knowledge disagree with the activists and politicians and it's soon pointed out they don't know what they're talking about.

Air pollution is the number one killer for a long time now

And, yet, at times in the past the air right across the planet was so toxic we would've died within minutes of being exposed to it. So the planet can survive and do things to fix it. However, you're correct in saying we should do all we can to stop the current pollution and to repair what is already polluted.

The sad part is while people push for power over other people I doubt we'll get much of a chance to fix things.

I do find it worrisome that we have so many different activists and politicians all pushing for contra-indicative activities. The same people who push for countries like the US, Canada, and Australia to take in more people from less developed countries they also push to stop the same countries from being as developed and industrialized as they are.

For example, take Australia, they want us to up migration while also cutting back on the 'carbon footprint and green house gases' despite not being able to do that while providing housing, jobs, food, and clothing for the extra migrants which all require all of the things they want cut to help the climate. sheesh.

I'm not a tree hugger, but I do worry about the declining quality of air I breath.

I'm surprised your air quality is declining. Although in the UK there's lots of complaints about air quality, in fact it's been slowly improving as awareness of air pollution and its consequences has led to legislation to reduce it.

AJ

I believe it's improving overall, but there are winners and losers. For example, creating car-free or Ultra Low Emission zones produces winners, but often results in more traffic fumes to less fortunate locations.

AJ

There will always be too much for individual nations to gain by cheating.

This is such a first world view, one doesn't know where to begin. Cheating, like, really?

It shows complete obliviousness to what other people go through in life.

It's nice for the west to want to enforce new policies on the world that makes life much harder for emerging economies. The west had access to low cost/low infrastructure carbon energy to industrialize, build up huge electrical energy infrastructures, and then move beyond industrialization, and now want to move beyond carbon based energy.

Many countries don't have the extensive infrastructure needed to be able to move to renewable energy quickly.

Forcing carbon energy prices sky-high to force a move to renewables puts those countries at risk of losing their progress and going backwards. Places like some parts of Africa, where the electrical grid has minimum reach, cannot handle $5/gallon gas price, and will never be able to deploy sufficient electrical infrastructure. In such places, one can easily ride their bike with a jug and fill it with enough diesel or gas to operate whatever a house needs for a day or two. While a solar panel may enable pollution free (after manufacturing) energy, but to have enough solar panels will have an upfront cost that most people cannot afford in those countries.

Yes, really. Of course that presupposes a "climate agreement" that places equal obligations on all.

So the obligation of, say, Mali or Nigeria, is the same as the obligation on Sweden and China?

Apart from autocrats like Jinping and Putin who can rig elections to ensure they stay in power, most national leaders have about four years to campaign for re-election. And, as the anecdote goes, everyone's a socialist in principle but at elections they vote against tax rises.

But arguably the biggest impediment to cleaning up the planet is the failure of scientists to come up with viable alternatives to our current deleterious technology. To satisfy woke lobbyists, governments often implement improvements which are actually environmentally worse than the technology they're replacing.

AJ

No matter how stupidly some humans try to pollute the planet, especially the atmosphere, Mother Nature easily puts all of humanity to shame.

I'm sure it's just coincidence that the point where the climate alarmists points to the world global temperature rising is just a decade or so after a major drop in global temperature due to a major volcanic eruptions - read up on the Year without Summer.

Volcanoes put more crap into the atmosphere than humans due each year. But that does not mean we should so what we can to not put crap into the atmosphere and we should do what we can to clean up all polluted areas as well as clean up the air.

This! THIS!

I'm sure it's just coincidence that the point where the climate alarmists points to the world global temperature rising is just a decade or so after a major drop in global temperature due to a major volcanic eruptions - read up on the Year without Summer.

Volcanoes put more crap into the atmosphere than humans due each year. But that does not mean we should so what we can to not put crap into the atmosphere and we should do what we can to clean up all polluted areas as well as clean up the air.

Absolutely Ernest!

There is a Lot that we can do that is cost effective for the results.

The most shrill advocate policies that cannot, or should not be done, because They make their money, and sense of importance by maintaining an aura of crisis!

a modern disease that almost didn't exist before the industrial revolution

Neither did about 75% of the illnesses diagnosed today. But almost all of them were around for thousands of years before that - they just didn't recognise them with the same names we do today.

A few years back I saw what I'd call a counter-report. Somebody had released a paper on how the records show that there are more tornadoes in the USA in the last 50 years then during the early 1800s. Another person went through the same source records and eliminated all the reports from the last 50 years except for the areas where there was a reasonable population during the early 1800s. They found that there were less tornadoes listed for those areas. The final analysis was that the appearance of more tornadoes today is due solely to better reporting and recording of the events. The same is true for illnesses and deaths.

A good example is to look at the records on deaths due to 'consumption.' A common reason for death 200 years ago and before, but not even measured now.

It's about consolidating wealth and power in the hands of the few. One set on rules for them, different rules for me.

As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun. The modern aristocrats (whatever you want to call them) are no different from those of the past. Rules/laws/etc are for the 'little people' not the elite.

Politicians have known for thousands of years that an existential threat works really well to get people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.

The UK's SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) admitted publicising worst case covid scenarios in order to make the public take the threat more seriously. SAGE is a mixed group covering all spectrums of opinion.

The UN IPCC uses the same technique, publicising the worst case scenarios. However its membership is partisan, made up of people with a vested interest in there being global warming. Sceptics and agnostics are no-platformed.

It's extremely depressing how few people challenge their what are often quite ludicrous claims.

AJ

It's rather hard to buy the idea that life on earth is doomed because of a couple degrees C temperature shift.

That's why the UN IPCC is currently crying wolf about a 3C rise by the end of the century despite no new evidence to justify their change.

ETA - one of the workers in my local supermarket usually goes 'home' during the UK school Summer holidays, where she says the daytime temperature can hit the mid-forties Centigrade.

AJ

No, that's a bad strawman argument. The reality is much more:

Unusual cold spell: Climate scientist: "We told you the average temperature would be higher. We also told you there would be more weather at both extremes - colder and warmer."

Unusual hot spell: Climate scientist: "We told you the average temperature would be higher. We also told you there would be more weather at both extremes - colder and warmer."

Seriously, this is not hard. The dispute over what (if anything) to do about climate change, or how much of it is anthropogenic, is unrelated to the fact that the thesis has been, for over 30 years, that the average temperature was rising and would continue to rise and that, as a result, day-to-day climate would have a higher standard deviation with more weather at both extremes. That prediction has proven to be quite accurate thus far.

Whether or not it's 'logical', models from thirty-plus years ago show more extreme weather in the middle latitudes than at the poles, which - amazingly enough - is pretty much what we're seeing now.

It's almost as if there's been a consistent message, with measurable predictions, which has generally conformed to reality over decades.

I would tend to say that's not 'bullshit', but what do I know?

Not sure it would make much difference, to be honest. Airports are used primarily because the weather is of great interest to them, and they monitor it regularly with 'proper' equipment, unlike the girl next door with her meat thermometer...

Also, airports tend, for some strange reason, to be fairly wide open spaces. Well suited for siting those anemometer thingies. Add on top of that, regular testing and sensible record keeping, you can see why weather types like them. As to being 'hotspots', I don't see that being too much of an issue if the background heat radiation stays the same or is consistent. You just simply deduct the difference off the readings to get the 'background' temperature. I gather what is of most interest to the intelligent types, are the overall temperature history's, which for most airports, are probably in the region of 70 or so years.

The last couple of years has seen an explosion in home weather hobbiest's which coupled with increased accuracy of affordable weather stations and the internet, allows anal levels of data accumulation.

For instance; https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/

That must be a weather analysts wet dream. Obviously there is the caveat that some of these stations are erected and mounted by individuals with nothing but good intentions and absolutely no knowledge of 'North' or even possibly the day of the week. That aside, as the years pass and the data accumulates, scientists- professional and hobbyist alike will start to gain better understanding of just what exactly the planet is doing.

It's also wise to remember, that it just needs one volcano to throw a fit and throw it's caldera out of the pram, to drop global temperatures faster than Will Smiths popularity with the Oscars committee. Wasn't it Krakatoa's eruption that put the UK in a near year long winter?

We know that the sea level is rising

Not according to the Aussie climate experts who've been measuring the average sea level in Sydney harbour for hundreds of years.

There's certainly things that haven't yet been satisfactorily explained. British explorers made ocean depth measurements in the 1800s, and their measurements are reproduced to the inch even today.

AJ

Climate Change is as Fake

Technically, not correct. Climate change is real. It's just it's ALWAYS going to change, pretty much no matter what we as people do. Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about puny men.

A neurosurgeon, a cardiologist and a dermatologist are specialists in different fields of the human body, reading a report from all 3 would give you a much better understanding of your body.

But the ability for them as individuals or collectively to give you a decent prediction of the weather for next week would be non-existent.

A large part of the Climate Change Scientific Consensus problem is the people pushing it say that the three above have as valid a scientific input on the issue as a person who has spent 30 years studying climates - and that is a major falsehood and why the '97% of scientists agree' claim is total BS.