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Bill Gates Warns Against Denying Climate Change (usatoday.com)
Reader JoshTops shares a USA Today report: Bill Gates warned against denying climate change and pushed for more innovation in clean energy, during an event Friday at Columbia University in New York. The billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder joined friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett for a question-and-answer session with students. "Certain topics are so complicated like climate change that to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult and particularly when people take that complexity and create uncertainty about it," Gates said. The planet needs to find reliable, cheap and clean energy, "the innovations there will be profound," Gates said. In December, Gates announced that he and a group of investors would invest more than $1 billion in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that aims to finance the development of affordable energy that will reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions.
Just because somebody slaps the word 'fact' on something does not make it so. And I'm sick of people trying to tell me what to do and how to live my life. The fact of the matter is, the climate is changing because the climate is never and has never been static. Maybe people are contributing, maybe they aren't. People however are part of nature, so whatever is happening is natural and being an adaptable ecosystem and all we as a planet will be fine. Some species may go extinct, but they always do. 99% of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct. We can sit around and fret about a butterfly in the Catskills that is endangered and may go extinct if another power plant is built, or we can press forward with human innovation, harnessing and taming the forces of nature and universe to advance our knowledge and technology and someday allow us to conquer the entire solar system. It's only natural.
"To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize."
Population explosion is part of the dire fact of global warming. It is an emergency issue and is about to bite us so hard we may not survive.Our military leaders consider it the number one threat to American security. There is wonderful progress on generating energy with less climate disruption yet we are still going to sink ever lower as every single person we add to our national or world population amplifies global warming and all forms of pollution. Every new home and new road and new farm is a blow struck against nature. Yet our politicians are unable to talk about restricting births or rolling back developed areas into natural areas.
In nutrition there's this funny thing where, if you actually add up the calories burned in exercise, it becomes factually silly to think exercise has anything to do with weight loss, and yet, word + dog + medical establishment + science, all keep advising people to exercise more to lose weight. Yet it factually is quite silly to anyone with a calculator who actually thinks to add it up.
I mean, that's just one of those things, where people don't talk facts, they talk on account of what message they think they are sending out. Like, we can't encourage laziness, so we can't mention the calories numbers and the actual implications (that you cannot outrun a bad diet).
And you see a lot of this, unfortunately, in climate change. People insist it is all about science and facts, yet so often, the message is about what ethos people are trying to promote. Because if you are really trying to solve AGW, well, there is nothing to solve, because we are not going to stop catastrophic warming. I mean, years ago they were saying we have just just 3 years to save the planet, and such like, and yet a decade later we are still trying to get the world to agree to some such. Add up the calories, it doesn't matter if you "must do something" or "must make a start" or "head in the right direction"... we will not get there, the warming is locked in, and the amount we can reduce it by is negligible at this point. But people won't say that. Because...
Because... and the reason is telling... because climate change is what is known as a "superordinate goal", in that, the goals transcend the actual issue, and the goals can be fitted to many other issues. You can take climate change and use it to justify many different issues, like global ethics, transnationalism, one world government, as well as, energy schemes, new taxes, various kinds of subsidies, investment in research and education, and so on, and don't get me wrong, a lot of these things are good things, in the right context, and applied in places where they work, and I for one look forward to the day when a child can be born anywhere on the planet and have equal opportunities for health and education, but that day won't be for a long time, unfortunately, and yet, such issues are often gathered up in some catch-all term like "climate justice" and it leaves people wondering if it is some new kind of marxism or some new kind of spiritual awakening for humanity where we all suddenly grow a huge empathetic field of awareness and give up our material greed for the sake of helping the poor.
I remember the environmentalist who told me that it didn't matter if other forms of pollution might be worse than CO2, because, "by reducing CO2 you force a reduction on production and a reduction in consumption" and then she added, "it's about reducing greed." Well, for her it was about reducing greed. But reducing greed isn't going to stop climate change. That's the superordinate issue, the grand narrative to trump all other narratives. The "fertile fantasy" as Soros would put it.
At least people like Gates seem to be using it to drive an agenda for more investment in new technologies which might actually produce large quantities of energy, and not just the piddling wind farms which look nice but don't run much, compared what we actually use, and what the world will need in future.
Various thinkers have said that when you are faced with the problem of how to convince the masses to follow some action which they are not remotely interested in, you use bait-and-switch. I'm kinda hoping the nuclear people will be able to surf this to get more nuclear energy out there, if the new technologies fail to deliver, but I worry that the goals will be swayed too much by the guilt and greed brigade who see humanity as a cancer.
The idea is to stop *further* warming other than what is locked in. And yes we can make a huge difference.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
No, it is an important point. Imagine someone said - we all need to share food better and not eat as much or the world will not be able to support us. But that person eats far more than anyone and has no plans to stop eating. This person wants everyone else to change behaviors when they are not willing. This person wants people who are "harming" society much less than him to make collective reductions so that he can continue his gluttonous behavior. This person wants the common man to reduce his quality of life while living at orders of magnitude above the common man.
It is not a logical fallacy to look at the man arguing and question if his total argument is sound - or if you are just the sucker that allows him to be a glutton with no consequences.
Ultimately - it does matter because the flip side of this is that changes in Bill's behavior could allow the common man to make far fewer changes.
In other words - even if global warming IS real - the argument about *what* needs to change is a big problem. The very people arguing that it is such a big problem are some of the worst offenders. Obama and his massive Hawaiian vacations. Al Gore, the Clintons, Bill, Elon, etc.... need I say more.
If you think it is legitimate that these people are somehow "more important" than me and should be allowed to use private jets but I am not allowed to --- well that is BS. If they think they are so busy they need to use private jets why should I not feel the same about everything in my life. My job "helps" the world in one way or another just like they will claim their job "helps" more than it hurts.
If they can't make the change then it is not reasonable to expect anyone else to. Be the change you want to see in others OR understand that they are not changing for the same fucking reason you aren't.
Generally, polls in the UK find that only half of the population think evolution through natural selection is probably or definitely true. According to some measures, one in five believe in young earth creationism, about one in five believe in intelligent design or evolution with a guided hand; the rest do not know.
Here in the UK we should be a little less certain of our relative intellectual ability.
The photo from the Washington Monument was time stamped 12:01: right at the moment of inauguration. Not "3 hours before". There's also a photo time-stamped 11:49:43, and even a time-lapse photo of the whole event
Out of curiosity, do you think the threat of violent protests had anything to do with suppressing the turnout? Even if that were not the case, it's no surprise that Obama's inauguration crowds were larger, since they were more historic.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.