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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 think everyone does in fact believe it - of course belief is irrelevent when AGW is a fact.
There is so much inertia with the World's economy and the fact that people do not want to change their lifestyles and others want an overconsumption Western lifestyle.
The only way humanity is going to change is when there is a catastrophic climate change. When crops fail en mass. When coastal cities are flooded.
A person is smart. People are stupid.
So, I agree; it doesn't matter.
I am doing what I can. Lowering one's environmental and consumptive footprint saves A LOT of money. And I feel a part of the solution instead of an entitled bald ape.
Nobody cares about the climate, aside from the opportunities each disaster presents. In business, profit is the prime, if not the only, motive to be in business at all. Just make it more profitable to be clean.
This will only happen by appropriately regulating businesses. 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 instead they give us bullshit arguments about how regulation hurts our freedoms and nothing is done.
soylentnews.org
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 he's right....which you seem to accept since you offered no counter arguments.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
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.
While in "free market" Russia and China, the rising tide is lifting all boats, from the oligarch to the oil worker? Say what you like about excessive regulation in the US (which clearly exists and we should work on minimizing it), letting businessmen have free reign is anything but a panacea.
In fact, it's fucking disaster.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
> So far the big reductions, such as the switch from coal to gas, LED lights, variable speed DC motors, more efficient HVAC, better insulation, have all been driven by the market, not "government regulation".
Look again, and look more carefully, please. The restrictions on building new coal fired plants with less pollution, coupled with many other factors, have raised electricity prices: that is one of the market forces" involved. Government support of the switch and numerous projects at every level of government have encouraged every one of those changes, including tax breaks on more energy efficient homes, the forced publication of fuel efficiency on home appliances to better _inform_ consumers of the efficiencies, and regulation on government funded construction.
"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.
Why not rename it 'Climatedot' and have done with it?
There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', .... There has been no warming for 18 years!
I keep seeing that same response posted as AC to climate stories - here on "stuff that matters". Complete with a link for further info:
http://www.climatedepot.com...
Which is partially funded by the ExxonMobil foundation http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
Maybe this would be a lot easier if we went back to a dialogue on "pollution", which more folks could easily see value in limiting.
'Appropriately regulating businesses' is a concept diametrically opposed to the way capitalism works, though, and the organism of the genus capitalism,
Capitalism, like democracy, is not a single thing. There are different ways we can structure capitalism just like there are different ways we can structure democracies. The capitalism we have ended up with is is virulent, but it doesn't need to be that way. You don't need to resort to "communism" to achieve this. The cries of "communism" that we hear from right wingers is just a way of diverting the discussion.
soylentnews.org
negotiators plan to propose will only be part of non-legally-binding pledgesâ"and they represent only what is achievable without too much difficulty.
^ This right here is the key point to take away from all this...
For all the hot air our "leaders" are giving this issue, the reality is they don't intend to do anything about it. Notice the "without too much difficulty" part of that.
Non-binding, not too hard, not too expensive...
To actually stop the rise of CO2, we need to take drastic measures, and the fact is, while people SAY they care about global warming, what they really mean is "I care about global warming so long as it doesn't impact my lifestyle".
There is so much inertia with the World's economy and the fact that people do not want to change their lifestyles and others want an overconsumption Western lifestyle.
People love to say "I care about the environment and global warming".
But what they really mean is, "I care about the environment and global warming so long as it doesn't impact my way of life".
The fact is, world leaders aren't stupid, they are aware that we can't stop this without drastic change that will be unacceptable to the population as a whole. Not at least until "bad things" happen. Then people will accept change.
Actually, the average Chinese guy is far wealthier today than he was before economic liberalization. It's come at a cost to the environment in China, to be sure, but that's sort of the natural progression developing countries go through. There used to be rivers in the US that would actually burn, and even as late as the mid '60s when you got up to go to work in Pittsburgh there would be a layer of coal dust on your car.
The older Chinese people still remember when the government ran everything. That's when 30 million of them starved to death.