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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!”
Since the solution promoted by politicians is to raise taxes and raise costs of energy, I suggest that we levy a tax on every word spoken by politicians. They spew so much hot air that it easily competes with the effects of all the CO2.
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!
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
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.
He also promotes using nuclear energy as part of the solution.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Climate Terrorism"
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.
10. "Global climate engineering"
9. "Atmospheric carbon dioxide deficit reduction"
8. "Carbon gifting"
7. "Meteorological redistricting"
6. "No Cloud Left Behind"
5. "The Hurricane Insurance Investment Initiative of 2024"
4. "The Global War on Terra"
3. "Operation Desert Planet"
2. "Great Flood II: Our Glorious Return to Biblical Times"
And the number 1 future euphemism for Global Warming is...
1. "Occupy Everest"
Koans and fables for the software engineer
And that "Climate Change" is often met with "The climate has ALWAYS changed".
When losing an argument, change the rules and the terms so it looks like you're not losing.
He also promotes using nuclear energy as part of the solution.
Well, it is.
As much as we would all really love solar and wind to scale to a level necessary for global needs that is not going to happen with current technology. Its many decades off. Lots of science and engineering are needed to get solar there. We need something to bridge the gap between today and that future date where solar scales.
If not nuclear then its natural gas, oil and coal.
Even environmentalists are starting to realize this, including a co-founder of GreenPeace.
"Moore says that his views have changed since founding Greenpeace, and he now believes that using nuclear energy can help counteract catastrophic climate change from burning fossil fuels. Says Moore, "The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2 annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles." Moore also cites reports from the Clean Air Council that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. "Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2 emissions annually," says Moore. "Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely." Moore points out that the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. He predicts that advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future. According to Moore, British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, also believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Concerns about past accidents in the nuclear industry were also mentioned, as he claims the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as example, calling it "an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up". He also recognized the difficulty of dealing with nuclear waste."
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Gr...
Regarding nuclear waste from current reactors. 4th generation reactors can use this waste as fuel. And the waste from 4th gen is short lived. Hundred of years rather than tens of thousands.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...
NASA also thinks nuclear has greatly improved the environment.
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...
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.
Ah, so the conversation has degenerated to the "controversy" over whether burning fossil fuels could be altering the earth's climate. Look, Carbon Dioxide IS a greenhouse gas. No scientist disputes that if we just keep shoving the stuff in the atmosphere forever, eventually things will warm up. The only question is whether or not we are putting enough up there right now to have this effect. So lets do some simple math: 1 gallon of gasoline requires about 100 tons of biomass. 1 barrel of oil makes 20 gallons of gasoline. The world uses 85,000,000 barrels of oil per day. Doing the simple math, we use the equivalent of 170,000,000,000 tons of biomass per day. The earth's current biomass is estimated at 560,000,000,000 tons. So we burn the equivalent of 1/3 of all the earth's current biomass every single day. I find this pretty compelling.... And don't forget the methane, which we're also pumping up there (both directly by co-release with oil drilling and fracking, and as a side-effect of arctic climate change), and which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.
If you're going to mindlessly regurgitate debunked climate myth #11, at least get the decade right with respect to the canon...
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.
It turns out that as things get studied more, scientists understand them better. Over a few decades of study, our understanding of climate change has improved, and it has been suggested that some terminologies be changed to best reflect the state of the art understanding of what is happening. This seems entirely reasonable to me.
After all, this is what happens in every other area of science. I mean, physics hardly uses the same terminology that it did a century ago. As our understanding of that field changed, so did certain terminologies. Its not because physicists are running some scam on you, its because our understanding of the details of the science can change slightly as a function of time (something that creationists and global warming deniers can never seem to grasp), which might lead to changes in terminology.
Of course, the core idea of climate change has remained the same over time - the average temperature of the planet will likely increase in the intermediate term due to greenhouse gases from humans - but there are so many other details involved that "global warming" doesn't really cover it all. For example, the variance in temperatures is also expected to increase (essentially, there will be more extreme cold spells and more extreme hot spells), but explaining a prediction of more cold spells under a theory called "global warming" got old, so it seemed like it was a time for a terminology change. Once again, this seems entirely reasonable to me.
Mind if I tag along when you move over to your spare Earth?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ohhh that's a tough choice. Lets run with asshattery as that is where the global whateverwewillcallitnow terrorists have their heads.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
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.
You missed the global cooling scare of the 80s, don't forget that one. Back then we were headed for another ice age.
That was never actually a thing, except in the media:
Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. (source)
Peer-reviewed scientific literature overwhelmingly referred to warming, even back then:
A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). (source)
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
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.
Actually, it's the other way around-- the tactics used to spread confusion about climate science are ones that they learned from the tobacco industry's fight against health science, when the cigarette companies were trying to discredit the science that showed that cigarettes were bad for health.
It's not merely the same strategy that is being used for spreading the illusion of doubt, it's many of the same people doing it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Devil's Advocate here: Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor.
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't relevant in any way. It is only the climate change deniers that are interested in Al Gore-- but they seem to be completely obsessed with him. He's not a scientist, he hasn't written or contributed to any of the papers laying out the science behind anthropogenic climate change, he is not part of the scientific literature. If he didn't exist, the climate models, the analysis of climate data, and the conclusions would be unchanged.
If you're talking about Al Gore, you're really not talking about science. At best, he's a popularizer.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Get back to lost habitat (rain forest, coral reefs). Maybe if we preserved more forests, they'd suck up more CO. The "climate" is established science but it's also boring as hell, there will be winners (Greenlanders) and losers (African Sahel). I don't see that 350.org is motivating as many young people as Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey did. People care about habitats and animals more than they care about weather vocabulary.
Gently reply
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.
Big Tobacco could have learned a trick or two from these guys.
This is completely backwards. The funded part of the denialist movement directly copied the methods of the tobacco lobby, and in many cases employed the same lobbyists.
Nobody competent ever believed in global cooling except for a small handful of scientists, it was almost entirely a puff-piece spread by a large number of scientifically ignorant journalists looking for a sensational headline.
The reality is that yes, at one point there was some doubt as to whether CO2-fueld global warming or particulate pollution-fueled global cooling would have the stronger effect. Once the temperature trend data was collected and analyzed over the course of a couple decades the answer was clear - the warming was winning hands-down.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
The only loss is the general American public being too stupid and too lazy to read the scientific research
That and every article is two paragraphs long, with the second being "Subscribe to this journal to read this article's full text".
Actually these guys learned a trick or two from Big Tobacco and some of them are the same guys (like Fred Singer).
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.
Then, either you had some spectacularly ignorant teachers or, more likely IMHO, you sat there stupidly jumping to inane conclusions that had nothing to do with what they were teaching.
1) Ozone depletion was very real. It had only progressed to the vicinity of antarctica, which is why you couldn't see the vidence of it in East Podunk.
2) It had precisely nothing whatever to do with climate and everything to do with ultraviolet penetration to the surface, imperiling plants, and promoting carcinogenic damage to your worthless skin.
If the science behind global warming is so fake, why don't you expose it and convince everyone it's fake? I see people thinking they're doing that all the time, but I haven't seen one good argument to suggest that our carbon dioxide emissions are not causing significant warming.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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?
Depends on the government. Currently the American government is in thrall to the banking industry whereas the previous government was in thrall to the oil industry. The banking industry will make money no matter what and see climate change as a chance to build a new bubble so it is kind of true that the American government has an interest in supporting the climate change science as there is money to be made by the bankers but the bankers will make money no matter what.
Here in Canada the government is definitely in thrall to the oil industry and only exists to make sure they make maximum profits. When it comes to science, all they've been able to do is shut it down. Most all climate science stopped in the name of saving money when what they'd really like is science that says man made climate change is bullshit. Seems the scientists would rather be unemployed rather then make up science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Very inexpensive? Cost of electricity in France is 19 cents/kWh. Russia is 11 cents and the US is 12 cents. China and India are both 8 cents.
I'll grant you it could be a lot worse. Denmark, the top wind power country in the world (wind is 28% of their consumption), is 41 cents.
(the above are all 2011 figures)
It's not that nuclear power is remarkably cheap; it's that wind power is crazy expensive. Offshore wind plants in particular are just about the most absurdly expensive of all sources of electricity - excluding complete pie in the sky stuff like hydrogen fuel cells and so on.
First it was global warming, then climate change and now global climate disruption?
They're the same thing. People get confused because they expect "warming" to mean "hotter everywhere", when it really means "more energy in the atmosphere". Heat is energy. Energy makes things happen. The atmosphere is a huge, complex, nonlinear system. Adding energy to it is not as simple as putting a pot of water on the stove.
Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect, which leads to global warming. Global warming leads to global climate change. And since we've built our worldwide civilization around assumptions about local climates, it's fair to call that climate disruption.
These are very simple ideas. I'm not sure why people have so much trouble with them.
Visit the
If the science behind global warming is so fake, why don't you expose it and convince everyone it's fake?
He probably didn't get the latest talking points memos.
Even the deniers have stopped claiming that "the increase in CO2 is not human made,"
instead they've pivoted to claiming that it doesn't matter because the predicted consequences won't happen.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Incorrect. The guy stuck his neck out making GW his cause and trying to promote activism to reverse it. I'm big into documentaries and there have been dozens since that have come out that are just as important that barely made a whiff in theaters. It's ludicrous to think that someone would use the documentary genre to get rich. Al Gore's efforts took off and to add to that he turned out to be a damned good businessman with his Current network.
Besides, the way to get rich is to be a scientist on the take from Big Oil who uses is credentials to pretend GW isn't real.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The science is fake? You're right. People like Fourier back in the 1820's just started the whole "Global Warming" thing because he wanted to get rich of green energy. I suppose Ahrennius developing the first global climate model in the late 1890's and quantify the possible anthropogenic effects on global temperature was to further capitalize on the big "Green Energy" cash cow.
Maybe Al Gore invented a time machine and went back in time and had a little chat with some of these famous "scientists" in the 1800's just to help line his pockets. After all, what's developing a time machine compared to creating the internet.
And while your being a complete idiot, HAARP is controlling your brain, the Black Night Satellite is real and was sent from Alpha Centauri to gather Krispy Kreme Donuts, and the Lochness Mosnter isn't really a monster, he just needed the money.
Honestly, you act like global warming is some brand spanking new theory developed out of nothing with no supporting evidence. The theory of global warming was first proposed close to 200 years ago, and scientists from as far back as the early 1900's have been warning that unchecked human activities could result in an altered climate. It existed long before Al Gore and Green Energy, or even before the photovoltaic effect was put down on paper.
You have a brain. Use it. You can verify the effects of greenhouse gases with basic high school math and physics. Fourier did it before the invention of the fucking light bulb, let alone calculators and computers.
~X~
(C) It's real but not nearly the "crisis" that "scientifically illiterate politicians and social action groups around the globe" say it is.
If these people were serious about finding real solutions, they would look at all the scientific research that has been done time and time again related to nuclear energy. And of course, wind energy, solar energy, and many other kinds that reduce pollution and harmful emissions.
Voting for people who have a soap-box that isn't grounded in reality is voting against real solutions.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Well, for 30 or so years. But what then? Then you have a huge pile of radioactive crap sitting there that you can't really get rid of sensibly and that will continue to sit there for a few millennia.
4th gen reactors use waste from previous generation reactors as fuel. The 4th gen waste is only hazardous for a few hundred years.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...
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.
I've never heard anybody claim the increase in CO2 wasn't human made, only that man kind wasn't necessarily responsible for any warming.
These are contradictory. To claim the former and not the latter, you have to be ignorant of the infrared absorption property of carbon dioxide, which has been known for at least a century now.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
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.
Yeah, Michael Moore is a professional filmmaker. He makes his living making films. That's what "professional filmmaker" means.
Funny thing is that as the years go by most of Moore's documentaries look better and more prescient. I image the current managers of General Motors wish their predecessors had spent a little less money on giant SUVs and a little more on the internally developing the electric car research that they licensed to Toyota instead.
sPh
Precisely, and the summary is still propagating their bullshit. Researches did not change the terms, it was yet another false debate, both terms had been in use for decades, there was (and still is) a journal called "climatic change" that was established in the 70's, around the same time the term "global warming" started appearing in the literature to describe the current direction of change. The term "climatic change" goes way back, it was in the title of a 1950's paper and probably goes back further than that.
The entire "scientists changed the name" meme was the brain fart of a PR advisor to GWB ( Frank Luntz) who suggested in a memo to Bush that the government change the phrase in it's communications to the public in an attempt to "challenge the science" (ie: shameless propaganda)
From the link: In a 2002 memo to President George W. Bush titled "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America", obtained by the Environmental Working Group, Luntz wrote: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.... Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."
They did a similar thing to James Hansen, he gave a talk on his work and was told he couldn't talk about it in public without permission from NASA's political minders. Hansen went to the NYT and the courts to protest and get the censorship lifted, the government complied but then changed the wording of NASA's mission statement, removing the "to understand and protect the home planet" words that justified Hansen's budget.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Maybe. Coal emits a ridiculous amount of radiation... Also, according to the Torch report, 60k people died from Chernobyl, which is a tragedy, but a drop in the bucket compared to coal.
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...
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?
Belial6 wrote: You also need to keep in mind that "Environmentalists" did not call out Al Gore when he spouted complete BS. They implicitly accepted him as their spokes person.
It seems that the climatologists who had viewed the filmed found it to be rather accurate at the time.
The Associated Press contacted more than 100 climate researchers and questioned them about the film's veracity. All 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie said that Gore accurately conveyed the science, with few errors. (source)
But some scientists were concerned about some details.
"I thought the use of imagery from Hurricane Katrina was inappropriate and unnecessary in this regard, as there are plenty of disturbing impacts associated with global warming for which there is much greater scientific consensus," said Brian Soden, professor of meteorology and oceanography at the University of Miami.
Steig disputed Gore's statement that you can visibly see the effect that the United States Clean Air Act has had on ice cores in Antarctica. "One can neither see, nor even detect using sensitive chemical methods any evidence in Antarctica of the Clean Air Act," he said...
John Nielsen-Gammon from Texas A&M University said the "main scientific argument presented in the movie is for the most part consistent with the weight of scientific evidence, but with some of the main points needing updating, correction, or qualification."
Belial6 wrote: When that blew up, they tried to distance themselves.
I don't know that too many climatologists distance themselves from the film because of some alleged "blow up". They likely distance themselves from it because it's become too highly politicized, which takes away from the science itself. Or perhaps it less accurately reflects our current understanding of the issue.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
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. The people doing the majority of this polluting are rich. They are the factory owners, the developers who can't be bothered to install proper sewer systems, other countries that dump their waste on the 3rd world for "recycling" (melting down valuable metals over open fire pits).
If you are poor and you get ill it tends to make you poorer. Medical care is expensive, and lack of insurance of welfare means you get no income when not working. Typically your children look after you until they also become ill.
When not faced with pollution from the rich it seems that the world's poor often are quite environmentally aware. I suppose it is a case of not shitting when you eat. Things like solar power and windmills are your only option when there isn't an electricity grid. The places where it is going wrong, like China, are once again the rich (in China's case the government) imposing dirty coal fired power stations on the poor.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And the EU is dumping 30 billion euros every year through 2020 on explicit climate change related spending. That's a lot of money too.
Nope, sorry:
The EU has agreed that at least 20% of its €960 billion budget for the 2014-2020 period should be spent on climate change-related action. This represents around a threefold increase from the 6-8% share in 2007-2013.
20% of 960GEUR is 192GEUR, not 30GEUR.
But that is spending on "emissions mitigation and climate adaptation actions", not science.
(KeensMustard somewhat overestimates the EU population, it's half a billion, not a billion. Planned spending on climate change relates action is about 384 EUR per capita, ten times his estimate).
Watch this Heartland Institute video