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The Paris Climate Talks: Negotiating With the Atmosphere
Lasrick writes: The Paris climate change talks are in December, but what negotiators plan to propose will only be part of non-legally-binding pledges—and they represent only what is achievable without too much difficulty. 2009's Copenhagen Accord say 114 countries agree that global temperature increases should be held below 2 degrees Celsius. "Paradoxically, an accord that should have spurred the world to immediate action instead seemed to offer some breathing room. Two degrees was meant to be a ceiling, but repeated references to an internationally agreed-upon “threshold” led many people to believe that nothing really bad could happen below 2 degrees—or worse yet, that the number itself was negotiable." Dawn Stover writes about alternatives to the meaningless numbers and endless talks: 'The very idea that the Paris conference is a negotiation is ridiculous. You can't negotiate with the atmosphere."
I remember when nobody posted politics on Slashdot. You guys have ruined a perfectly good site by trying to turn it into a political evangelism site. Can we stick to technology related issues please? I'm sure a lot of you will vote me down for saying these things but how many people have stopped coming here because Slashdot isn't a great place to see cutting edge information any more. There is far too much political demagoguery here, it is depressing.
And have mommy bring you more Doritos while you play WoW in the basement:
Grownups who actually hold jobs care about the climate. Each disaster represents wasted money, and causes loss of production and resources, especially food, potable land, and arable water. Many grownups and kids who *don't* have someone else paying for their little basement mancave and someone else paying all their bills while they spout Libertarian nonsense also care about the ecological devastation, which has moral ramifications, and its economic effects. The global warming is destroying harvests of foodstuffs, organic manufacturing materials, and medications.
The difficulty is that it's a longer-term economic problem: it's planning for next year or next decade's profits, not this quarter's profits, and that's exactly where the laissez faire "let the market handle it" approach enters the "tragedy of the commons" turf, and the public that used to use "the commons" freely gets very upset when they find a guard making them get licenses to use the limited commons.
Why not rename it 'Climatedot' and have done with it?
There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', so they renamed it 'climate change', which means NOTHING, because the climate is ALWAYS changing. There has been no warming for 18 years!
http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/09/02/a-new-record-pause-length-satellite-data-no-global-warming-for-18-years-8-months/
Umm...more to the point in the United States at least the government doesn't have the right or the authority to "appropriately regulate business".
It does, actually, both through interstate commerce and the treaty clause.
Rick Perry may want to get rid of the EPA, pandering fool that he is, but an honest argument against it? Would never pass through a sane court.
Secondarily you know of course that other nations don't have the restrictions the United States is fortunate to have. What's stopping them from taking those actions you believe they need "the balls" do do?
You must have missed this bit:
Unfortunately our governments at best don't have balls to do it and at worst are in the pockets of the businesses they're supposed to be regulating.
So that would be the things stopping them.
"You're right, doc, I really need to lose weight", someone will say. "I'll start on that tomorrow." Then they never do. It's called 'paying lip service' to something, and that's what most nations are doing. It's like they need glasses, or the prescription on their current glasses updated: They can't see past the end of their own noses. Something that's going to happen 100 years or more from now? Nah, that's too far off to worry about, after all they'll be out of office by then and likely dead, so why should they care? To be fair, while that's the way the average person also thinks, the average person (representing 99% of the population, mind you) really is rather busy making sure they have a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and enough food to eat, and all this high-concept science stuff is way over their heads, and why again should they care about what's happening halfway around the planet? Sadly short-sightedness on everyone's part is what's going to turn the Earth into a clone of what Venus looks like right now: a searing black calm, devoid of life.
I don't know what the hell to do about this any more than I have a solution for, say, the problem that the homeless represent here in the United States. What I do know is that the solutions to these problems has to come from the top, down, to start with, not from the bottom, up, but getting the people at the 'top' to give a damn enough to actually do something about it, while also getting people on down from there to go along with it, is tougher than herding caffeine-enhanced ferrets.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
About 1/3 of all CO2 produced by humans in all of history has occurred in the last 18 years and yet there is no statistical warming during that time. CO2 is logarithmically challenged, as discovered by Arrehnius, the demi-god of the AGW movement who first proposed that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It's funny that the AGW crowd only ever cites his first paper on the subject and its ridiculous sensitivity. It is tragic that after all these years of doom and gloom from the AGW crowd that they are finally bringing down that sensitivity to the levels that Arrehnius determined in his follow up work.
Most so-called deniers only deny that there is a run-away effect, that all feedbacks are positive, that you can retroactively alter the temperature records to compensate for time of day and siting issues, that you can splice one proxy temperature record with another and put it on the cover of an official IPCC document and that you can continue to cite models and studies based on those models when CO2 is following the worst case scenario and the actual temperature is below the best case scenario.
Finally, quoting the 97% consensus is just plain stupid. It's either made up from whole cloth or based on a severely flawed study. You can't scream anti-science at people and ignore the mountains of bad science published in the name of AGW every year.