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Let's Call It 'Climate Disruption,' White House Science Adviser Suggests (Again)
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "First there was 'global warming.' Then many researchers suggested 'climate change' was a better term. Now, White House science adviser John Holdren is renewing his call for a new nomenclature to describe the end result of dumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into Earth's atmosphere: 'global climate disruption.'"
Pollution.
The simple goal should be to spew as little as possible, regardless of the potential issues.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Another name change? What are we at now, lets see. First it was global warming, then climate change and now global climate disruption? Did I miss any? Sound like the equivalent of three card monte.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Global warming was always a terrible name because the imagery was all wrong.
Global climate change is more accurate, but still nebulous.
Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening. I personally liked the name "Santa's revenge" from this winter's breakdown of the polar vortex. Melt the north pole, and you'll all get a taste of the cold!
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I'm fine with calling it any of those things. But it would be better to settle on globally unified measures to do something about it like we did with the hole in the Ozone Layer (remember that?), or else we may eventually have to call it a fourth option: Global Suicide.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Seems sensible to me. Replacing coal plants with nuclear has a lot of other benefits, too.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The only scam here is the environmental exploiters funding junk science and junk social engineering so they can continue to profit from fouling the global commons without cost to themselves. Big Tobacco could have learned a trick or two from these guys.
Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening.
Disruption sounds temporary, change sounds more permanent. Change seems a far better word to use.
Climate Terrorism or Fracking: A Love Story. The touching story of the love affair of a society's SUVs and cheap fossil fuels.
Call it double plus ungood weather.
David 'Volk' Mc. Itazura!
with scientists they have this disclaimer thingy
It's called admitting new evidence even if it contradicts previous "settled" conclusions. I know you bible-thumper types seem to view that as a bad thing, that you must instead bull-headedly stick to your original notion no matter what new evidence surfaces against it, but it really isn't.
Pollution? Corporations.
Global climate grant change? Scientists.
How bout we get back to the pollution issue which has been attenuated by climate discussion.
Pollution is not under dispute.
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
Need Mercedes parts ?
Devil's Advocate here:
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor. None of those folks trading in carbon credit are professors. Professional 'Greenwashers' (read: marketing folks who make companies look pretty to the public and environmental orgs) are not professors. The environmental orgs themselves (who often take in some rather healthy donations from corporations, well-heeled individuals, etc).
Also consider that profit does not always mean money. To the average and otherwise-obscure prof or environmental organization, it also means prestige, fame, name recognition, and influence (see also Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's been a while since we've seen debunked denialist argument #1 being brought up around this parts. Guess most of them got smarter than that...
The only loss is the general American public being too stupid and too lazy to read the scientific research. Issues about carbon cap-and-trade and possible solutions are politics, not science. If everyone is so damned convinced that the scienctific data do not support the hypothesis, then get off their lazy butts, learn some damned math, and write some scientific refutations. Nobody would ever have a gardener work on their car, or trust their open-heart surgery to a writer, so why on earth does everyone trust a bunch of idiots who know nothing about science screaming that scientists are wrong?
Nice switch, but nobody said that. You're just trying to drag debunked climate myth #16 into the discussion.
And that "Climate Change" is often met with "The climate has ALWAYS changed".
So because climate has changed before, we should just keep doing what we're doing, indefinitely, without worrying about consequences? Sure, climate has changed before, but not to this degree in this short of a time frame.
When losing an argument, stick your head in the sand so you don't hear the argument
There, fixed that for your side. You're welcome.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A lot of the global warming "solutions" proposed by a politicians may well be exploitative power grabs, but that's true of a lot of *everything* they propose. That doesn't mean the problem isn't real, just that they're power-hungry bastards trying to exploit a very real problem for personal gain.
The way I see it there are two possibilities :
(A) There's a global conspiracy of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of climate researchers to "manufacture" a story of one of the largest crisis our species has ever faced for the benefit of political power grabs.
(B) The problem is real, but a lot of scientifically illiterate politicians and social action groups around the globe are more interested in creating non-solutions that serve their own ends than actually addressing the problem efficiently.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How can you possibly believe that the massive environmental changes we are creating both for living our daily lives and for powering our cities and running our factories, that the chemicals we're synthesizing that had never been seen on planet earth prior to us, are NOT having an effect on the climate? Is it such a stretch that those changes aren't, necessarily, bad for life as we've known it, given that life as we've known it was adapted to the environment that existed prior to us?
You don't need a PhD or hi-falutin intellectual elite pedigrees to see the obvious. The only questions should be "How bad is it?", and I might agree with you that there's enough money on the table for all parties that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and a realization that most of us would rather perish than go back to living in caves.
When losing an argument, change the rules and the terms so it looks like you're not losing.
Except that the denialists are NOT losing the argument. They are winning. By a landslide. Almost everywhere, the number of people who consider it a serious problem has been going down, while the number that consider themselves skeptics has been going up. The problem is that many scientists think that they will automatically "win" just because the facts are are their side. When it comes to politics, that is an incredibly stupid thing to believe.
Devil's Advocate here: Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor.
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't relevant in any way.
Not directly to the actual debates and studies, no. On the other hand, he managed to make a little movie, do a little activism, and made a metric ton of money off the subject. He also elevated the status and notoriety of quite a few scientists in the process.
The point wasn't that Gore is some kind of scientist. The point is that he, like many others surrounding this whole subject, are busily using it to enrich themselves. They also amplify the message, manipulate it, and happily treat it as unquestioned gospel. The masses who follow the ideology in turn parrot the results - rather hotly, I might add.
Meanwhile, the scientists most associated with the theory are given the aforementioned fame, prestige, recognition, etc.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No matter what you call it the physical changes to the Earth's climate can't be denied. This is like throwing a bone to the contrarians so they can claim we changed the name again.
Pollution is not under dispute.
Agreed, wholeheartedly. I doubt you will find many people who would credibly argue that pollution is a good thing.
On the other hand, pollution seems so pedestrian... no scare factor in it anymore. No alarms to be raised. The corporations have long since either spun their message to convince the world they're perfectly clean, or they outsourced all the dirty stuff to China.
The ideologues? Well, they no longer have craptacular pollution wonders to point at like they did in the '60s and '70s... I mean, back then you had Love Canal, and thousands of similar examples. They had the public's imagination captured by Soylent Green and Silent Spring. What do you have today? Not even a weak simulacrum compared to back then - at least in the Western world.
So, well, what to do?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"How bout we get back to the pollution issue which has been attenuated by climate discussion."
The trouble is, it's possible to have a wealthy and advanced society while keeping pollution to a minimum. And that just wont do. It is necessary that the masses be returned to a dark ages standard of living ASAP, and so we have to demonize a normally occurring substance, like oh dihydrogen oxide, or carbon dioxide.
And as a side benefit, less pressure to clean up profitable but polluting activities. Win - Win right?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If they're supporting nuclear then they aren't environmentalists.
Actually they are. They looked at the science and realize that if we don't use nuclear in the near term then we will continue to be using fossil fuels. That renewables are regrettable not there yet. These people are all for conservation, solar, wind, etc ... they just accept the science that these can't get us as far as we want. Especially with the billions of people in the developing world coming on to the electric grid. In short, that conservation, renewables and nuclear all need to be part of the solution. To say that nuclear does not need to be a part of the fossil fuel solution is to deny reality, much like the climate change deniers. Nuclear and climate deniers are remarkably similar, just calling different ends of the political spectrum their home, both abusing scientific reality.
It's not a rich/poor thing. Don't make it into one.
Environmentalism is for rich people. Poor people have to struggle just to get by. They don't have extra resources to devote to purity-for-purity's-sake. And when they do get enough of a surplus to afford to care for the environment, they need to choose based on what will benefit them -- it's clean drinking water, basic sanitation and air that's healthy to breathe, not "these guys have this scary computer model that predicts problems 100 years from now".
Telling people not to pollute at all is telling people to be poorer. Very rich people can afford to be a little poorer. Most of the rest of the world can't.
Talk about religion! You sound like a regular preacher there.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No, not really. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that comment. Which part sounds religious? Is it because I think poor people shouldn't be made even poorer for the sake of environmental righteousness?
No, global cooling did not come first. Arrhenius predicted warming due to humans burning fossil fuels in the 1800s. The global cooling fad was pushed by a small minority of climatologists for a very short time. There was never any consensus on that idea.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Funny though that you guys never seem to be upset by all the money "big oil" spends on "green" stuff.
Your bigger intellectual problem, however, is that when government funds the stuff you like it does it by stealing money from MY wallet at gunpoint. When "Big Oil" spends money, it takes that money from its own bank accounts. The greenie complaint about "Big Oil" getting subsidies is a scam - oil companies do not get subsidies (money taken, by force, from others and given to them) they just get the same type of tax breaks that other businesses get (i.e. they are not taxed on some of their income because it is acknowledged that this money is being put back into the activity as a cost and is not a profit). Most "green" companies, on the other hand, get ACTUAL subsidies - government takes money from some people and gives it to those "green" companies to fool people into thinking those activities are efficient and cost-effective or cost-competative - ACTUAL subsidies like this should NEVER occur in a "free market" because they encourage sub-optimal economic activity.
Where did he say anything about "the tragedy of the commons"?
He said pollute "as little as possible". That's a quasi-religious purity standard. A non-religious, rational standard for "pollution" would examine tradeoffs: What are the costs and benefits of burning fossil fuels vs. the alternatives? Why can't we use reason to choose what we do rather than environmental dogma?
Pollution makes people ill. You can see it happening a lot in poor countries, where lack of proper waste disposal brings a lot of health problems.
But greenhouse gas pollution doesn't make anyone ill. So people in poor countries should focus on solving pollution problems that are making them ill. They shouldn't waste resources on greenhouse gas "pollution". They should also focus on growing their economies, so they're no longer as poor, so they can afford to solve all the pollution problems that are making them ill.