Slashdot Mirror
UN Climate Change Panel: It's Happening, and It's Almost Entirely Man's Fault
iONiUM writes The UN released a new climate change report which concludes that it is indeed happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault. From the article: "The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made." However, the report isn't entirely dire. It goes on to say: "To get a good chance of staying below 2C, the report's scenarios show that world emissions would have to fall by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050 from current levels and to 'near zero or below in 2100.'" Below zero of course means mining existing CO2 out of the atmopshere somehow.
Whether it's human caused or not. Whether climate change/global warming/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is happening or not. Whether we can actually stop it or not.
Let's just stop pollution for it's own sake!
Men were fine living in caves with one campfire each. We only invented cars and electricity to impress women.
it [ climate change ] is indeed happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault
So let's find this man and ask him if he wouldn't mind stopping, please?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You see, the thing is, that unlike your average slashdot reader the people at the IPCC actually RTFA so are allowed to have an opinion.
And who outsources everything to those countries? Hrm....
Is this the same UN Climate Panel that was predicting 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010, and then silently pulled all mentions of this from their website when 2010 rolled around and they turned out to be off by 50 million?
Science is not a "political decision", but you're right that China and India are great contributors toward the problem. Are you implying that we should stop outsourcing everything to China and India? If so, I agree.
Woman is as much to blame. In fact I see more tiny little blonde women driving Hummer H2's and Escalade XLT's alone than any other vehicle.
Blaming ALL this on men and not pointing the finger at women, the ones that are the real cause of global warming is Sexist.
Women are ALWAYS bitching about how cold it is, it's a fricking conspiracy, they have been trying to raise the temperatures for generations.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I know it's not fashionable to RTFA but the IPCC report does propose actual solutions and costs those solutions (which will have negligible net cost)... they are the well-know solutions of more renewables, nuclear power and carbon sequestration along with a carbon tax.
The problem is that the corporations which have become rich on the current high CO2 emission path control the world's economies and governments so I can safely predict that nothing meaningful will be done and that we are all literally toast.
For more information (and interesting read), Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything"
http://books.simonandschuster....
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Anyone not woowoo anti-science (usually being the theistic types who worship the Invisible Hand) has already established:
1. Climate change is mostly man-made;
2. This doesn't mean the world's about to end, but we aren't doing enough to prevent significant harm.
I believe that you aren't being fair to the "theistic types" in that you aren't being nearly hard enough on those who are taking advantage of them and those who are similarly gullible. Those cocksuckers are, of course, the energy industry. They have a huge interest in not changing things. Their businesses are hugely profitable. Spending money to avoid the erosion of those profits is part of that business. Spending as little as possible in order to preserve as much profit as possible is just good business, and right now, hoodwinking the gullible has the most ROI. I have seen it before....
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a town where every third job was directly related to the forest products industry. All my life, I watched huge swaths of ancient forest fall to clear cutting, knowing that the industry's party line, "Trees are America's Renewable Resource", was just so much cynical corporate bullshit. Planting "four trees for every tree 'harvested'" is not the same thing as growing even one board-foot of timber for every board-foot harvested. But the locals bought it, hook-line-and-sinker, because they wanted to. They needed to believe that their livelihoods were derived from a resource that would always be there. Fast forward forty years, or so. All the old-growth timber is long gone. Countless towns like mine are now ghost towns, "the mill" long closed and most of the forest jobs (fellers, choker setters, etc.) also gone. And the locals are still wondering what happened, while a cynical few, who reaped huge profits from the rape of a resource that can not be replaced in several of our lifetimes, could not give a shit. And the "intellectual elite", those credible experts, including most ironically, a handful of industry foresters, who predicted this can only say, "We told you so."
This same thing is happening now on a global scale WRT climate change. The opinion amongst those most qualified to cast one is overwhelming, dwarfed only by the noise from those whose profit is threatened by that opinion. And those whose livelihood, indeed, those whose very lifestyle depends on the industries that produce those profits, want very badly to believe all the noise. Based on my experience, they will continue to do so until it is far too late to do anything about it.
To worship the Invisible Hand means to believe that the free market always comes up with the best solutions for humanity, i.e. that it is a silver bullet rather than a tool which - like any tool - sometimes is suitable and sometimes is not. This is the same way some people answer every problem with "God!" even though God is just something humans make up for their own benefit and which as a concept has sometimes helped humanity (some of the most productive civilisations have been theistic) and sometimes has not.
We do need to promote economically sustainable solutions, yes. But that's not the same as providing solutions "that work in a free market", which has never existed. Many of the big tech developments of C19 (including in the USA) were based on temporary monopoly rights and public investments and guarantees which made remaining private investment worthwhile, for example. Government contributions, at least initially, are as essential to long-term R&D as they always have been. It's up to the voter whether they want to hand control over to profit-makers or to keep things under public control after that - and the most successful countries tend to choose a combination of public companies and well-regulated private industry, i.e. which suit no freshman idealist but which keep the average man/woman in the best possible living conditions.
In global thermoclimatic war, the only way to win is not to play. No matter which country did the final pollution/greenhouse emission/etc, what matters is that there is only world for all of us, lose it, and lose all.
No, you misunderstand. Increased CO2 results in the Earth building more heat every year. Nature is just responsible for balancing it between ocean and atmosphere. If you make a graph of just the El-Nino years, you see the temperature going up in a consistent trend. The same thing happens for the La-Nina years. It's just that the La-Nina trend line is a bit lower. http://www.bitsofscience.org/w...
Did you know China's having a serious economic crisis because the era of outsourcing is dying? You're fighting last century's battles, my friend. Manufacturing capacity in the US never really fell, it just became more automated (so the jobs went away, but not the output). As technological progress makes it cheaper to make things here with robots than in China with sweatshops, the tail end of manufacturing is coming back - and because of technology, you don't see the air anymore in most US cities.
Meanwhile, China and India are countries in their own right with their own economies. They're not some children whose deeds can be attributed to their parents in the US! They're going through the same technological revolution we did in the 1800s, though much faster and at 10x the scale. Their air pollution is about what ours was once - it's just that we've cleaned up our act so very much since then that even across an ocean their pollution is a significant portion of ours.
Over the course of this century, US and Europe and Japan are likely to fade as the leading economies. India, China, and Brazil (and to some extent Korea, but their population likely will stay small in comparison) will be the ones to watch, because as technology evens out it's all about population, and if you're worried about carbon emission or any other byproduct of economies, fix your attention there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.