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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.
Nobody has to be trampled by the jackboots of your authoritarian scientific "facts" anymore, Bill Gates! People are free to choose their own facts in Trump's America!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I presume that 'climate change' in this case refers to 'catastrophic anthropogenic climate change'.
The fact that it is often repeated does not actually make it true. I am all for making fun of mr. Gates or mr. Balmer aka Developers Developers Developers, but perpetuating this particular quote that is almost 100% false AFAIK is not the way to do it...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I have no problem with Bill Gate's wealth but I am annoyed that a guy that lives in a huge house and travels by private jet needs to lecture anyone about climate change. Don't be a virtue signaling hypocrite.
Two hypocrite billionaires who's carbon footprint is more than dozens of families combined living their lavish lifestyles lecturing people who just want to work their shitty job so they can earn their check and try to live a decent lifestyle. When they tone down the way they live by several orders of magnitude, then maybe I'll listen. Until then, they and the climate religion zealots can go fuck themselves.
"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.
Well, he is a billionaire after all. Aren't Americans supposed to listen to what billionaires and movie stars say?
#DeleteFacebook
I don't remember people saying that he said '640KB ought to be enough for anyone' until the '90s, but in the '80s I remember him being quoted as saying '64KB ought to be enough for anyone'. The latter quote made more sense, because this was a hard-coded limitation in Microsoft BASIC and was integral to the design, whereas the 640KB limitation came from from Intel.
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An interesting article on the Gates/Buffet adventure. They are investing in a start-up that is trying to build transportable burner nuclear reactors, IFR lite IIRC
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Disagree? Oh no, you can disagree all you want!
But stay on your beautiful beach real estate. After all, since there is no climate change, why would you want to leave it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The whole debate about climate change is because of three specific groups:
Those who want to suppress the science because it might interfere with them making a profit, those who don't want to admit climate change because they believe having to change will interfere with their way of life, and those who think being ignorant and ignoring the facts is the way to go.
This was summed up quite nicely by Asimov:
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism. Listening to criticism from non-climatologists about climate change would be like having a hospital janitor criticize a team of heart surgeons during surgery. While there is no guarantee the surgeons would never make a mistake, the janitor's opinion is still irrelevant.
Scientists will continue to debate the impact and magnitude of climate change forever. Public discourse should be about how much to invest in fixing the problem, not whether the problem exists in the first place.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
es, electric cars are "greener" than the old gas guzzler I drive but ... guess what, the gas guzzler costs 10k, the electric equivalent 40k.
You are comparing a used gasoline powered car with a new electric vehicle. The average NEW car in the US is $33,560. You can purchase a new Chevy Volt for $33,220. A Tesla Model 3 is supposed to be $35,000. A Chevy Bolt costs around $36,000. And these are MSRP prices, not what would actually be paid. Furthermore electric/hybrid vehicles will be available for steep discounts on the used marker as well going forward.
If you want people to "go green", you have to make it affordable.
Ok, done. What are you waiting for?
Steam roll over them.
That is precisely how we ended up with Trump as president with Republican majorities in the House, Senate and most state legislatures and Governorships despite Democrats having a lead in voter registration.
Skipping the consensus building phase will cause backlash.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Yeh, and while Trump is denying basic science, you're not looking at what he's actually doing. It's the magicians trick of distraction. When you see him do some big shouty thing that you're supposed to look at, look at the *other* stuff.
So the anti EPA stuff co-incided with his CIA visit. The one, he stuffed the meeting with spotters, to watch the faces of the CIA staff to see who would swallow the pee he was spraying. And the one that resulted in two American spies getting arrested by Putin (but Putin says he arrested people who might have hacked the US election...... (!!)). Gee I wonder which traitor gave Putin the names? Nobody asks because Trump is busy signing every anti-environment contract he can find and you're paying attention to that instead.
Currently it's "ban everyone from these Muslim countries", but you're missing the fact he's written a law here, something Congress does, The Federal Court has already said it wouldn't likely stand at trial, and yet there are some border officials are following Trump and not the law. In effect he's faced down the Republican congress and won. He writes the laws, they have their meetings. He doesn't need them to write laws, he does it, they pretend to follow it in order to pretend to have a role.
What happened to the calls for him to divest his businesses and stop accepting foreign money? Lost in all the other stuff he's done.
What about his tax returns? The fake numbers he gave in the election filing? Forgotten.
You see how he sets the agenda by doing something really extreme, and what you miss is what he's doing at the same time. Really important stuff like blocking the head of Defence from security meetings, banning the US Director of National Intelligence from security meetings.... i.e. removing Congregational approved roles from basic government, so that Congress doesn't appoint anyone who has any role.
By investing in Nuclear.
He's friggen rich, no commitees, no government oversight, little respect for the common idiot.
DO NUCLEAR RIGHT. Even if it's just pebble bed or another of the safe ones it's still miles ahead of renewables.
And it creates GOOD jobs. Not manufacturing installation maintenance crap jobs but real jobs for 2nd tier geniuses.
It's frikken cheap, it's clean, it doesn't use a whole lot of scarce resources. What's the hold up Bill? Why invest in something that's already popular and being done by private companies and government. INNOVATE with your stupid foundation. INNOVATE.
You OWE US MORE THAN THIS for the companies you crushed and the open source you held back. INNOVATE YOU STUPID DONKEY CODE WRITING BUSINESS MONKEY!
The problem is global warming being used as an excuse for wealth transfer from rich nations to poor ones.
Work to make our use of energy more efficient. Work to find cleaner sources of energy. Quit using it as an excuse to advance the "one world government" agenda.
Because when a topic is really, really complicated the most important thing is not to be uncertain about it.
The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about, and to not be uncertain about things on which the science is pretty clearly not uncertain.
If you actually read some of the review articles summarizing the science-- the IPCC Working Group 1 report, for example-- you will notice that there is extensive discussion of uncertainties: what we know, how well we know it, what we don't know, and what the error bars are.
One interesting thing about the real science: the uncertainty goes in both directions. The denier community says "but look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is on the low side of the range that the best science we currently have is predicting." But the opposite uncertainty is also there: "look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is going to be much higher-- it could be on the high side of the range that the current science predicts."
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism.
Yes, Gates didn't say "your ideas are too good for criticism." What he said was "to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult."
OK, it's difficult. That means you need to do some work to gain a basic understanding.
If people would actually study what we actually do know, and how well we know it before making their "criticism" based on reading one blog post, maybe then they would do criticism on a level that people would pay attention to, rather than continuously re-assert things that are already well studied and known to be false.
Well, although clean energy doesn't necessarily have anything to do with climate change, I still think it's a good idea of Bill to stop polluting our world.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
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.
It's 2017 and we're supposed to be living in an oil-stripped wasteland with flying cars and hoverboards.
Look around, there are hoverboards everywhere. That's what they are called. They might not actually hover, but that's just a science-nerdy detail you should not worry about. What the current hoverboards do is just an alternative-truth version of hovering, which is equally valid as the old notion.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
You're confusing two totally separate issues. There is no problem with people who discuss the politics of how to reply to man-made climate change. It's perfectly consistent to answer that someone else should pay it, or claim that it won't affect me so I don't pay more, or taxes should not be raised and our children should suffer the consequences, and so forth. There are many ways in which the effects could be countered, you could for example propagate massive investments in possible technical solutions, or you could urge for faster development of nuclear fusion reactors. Moreover, there is nothing wrong *at all* with green energy per se and other solutions like substituting certain emissions with others, and it's kind of bizarre to ignore these options for diffuse political reasons.
But the point is that is all politics and has nothing to do with climate science. What's so appalling are the repeated attempts to deny that there is scientific consensus on some facts, and deny this for obvious political reasons. This kind of thinking is fallacious, no matter how you put it, it's just wishful thinking and make-believe, and is a disgrace to all people who do the actual science such as those at NASA. It's also ridiculous to mix up the scientific matter which is pretty much settled by now with political issues about possible responses, and this is embarrassing the political right of the US internationally, since the phenomenon to ignore science for dubious short-term political gain is pretty much limited to the US. Everywhere else people are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the current state of the art in science and political issues that may or may not result from it.
(Do you realize that only once since 1988 has a Republican candidate actually won the popular vote? That's 6 of the last 7 elections. Talk about evidence of a screwed up election system...)
That means the democrats are doing a horrible job of selling their message to half the states and republicans are hated in the cities. News at 11. There has always been (and probably always will be ) a divide between the country and city. There was compromise between those groups just to even start this nation. I think it shows wisdom that that divide is the primary contention we have at the national level. The populated cities can't rule over the country-side in the Congress or the Executive and the more that democrats think they are mandated to do so because 'muh popular vote' will continue to alienate smaller states in the elections.
A democratic nation must have compromise or else it will fail. The government was structured to accommodate the division and needs between rural and urban states which was contentious even during the Constitutional Convention. One cannot rule over the other and both must agree to have a functioning nation of independent free states.
If you think the Senate is a good idea, why would that idea not be good when applied to a different branch of government?
No one has proven that top down economics works either but it is uses as an excuse " to control our behavior, our society, and our politics."
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
I have no problem if you disagree with the proposed solutions. That's fine: propose other solutions, or propose that we should just live with it. That's fine, no problem.
I have problems with people who say the science is wrong because they disagree with one or more of the proposed political solutions.
Guess what: whether the science is right has nothing to do with your opinions about the politics.. Quit criticizing science to score political points.
But here we have a Science which presumes to control our behavior, our society, and our politics.
The science does no such thing. The science says adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the average global temperature by a calculated amount, with calculated error bars, according to a mechanism that's been well known for over a hundred years, using methods that are basic to our understanding of all the planets in the solar system that have atmospheres.
Stop telling me the science is wrong when what you mean is "I disagree with the politics."
Here we have a Science which has been embraced by an ideological group as a tool to implement their agenda.
Whether the science is correct has nothing whatsoever to do with what you think of the ideologies.
The disgrace is that the Climate Science community uses terms like "Consensus" which is not a thing in Science.
Consensus is how all competing models of reality are evaluated. It's not a part of Science so much as a part of how humans collectively interpret sensory data. And in point of fact, there was once a consensus against the theory of CO2-induced warming. It remained scientifically controversial up until the mid-1950s, until various better measures of the oceans and atmosphere were made. Not only did no one lose their jobs when the scientific opinion shifted, but there have been contrarian scientists publishing in respected journals for decades since then. In particular, noted contrarian Dr. Roy Spencer was lead author on sections of the IPCC reports, and he continues to publish criticism.
The other disgrace is that during the political debate, any push back, any question is met with the blunt instrument called, "Denier!".
No, denier is a term used in a very specific context. If you were able to substantiate your objections to scientific consensus with theory or observation you would be a contrarian. As it happens, AGW is a trivial result of the heat properties of atmospheric gases, and Tyndall's work of the mid-19th century was sufficient to establish CO2 as being a major component of atmospheric warming. His apparatus was a little large, but you should be able to verify his findings in your basement. You want to poke holes in the evidence? Go ahead. Tell us what's wrong about the atmospheric window observations, or our radiative transfer equations. Propose a new mechanism to transfer heat to space, or some unknown negative feedback. If your science is good, people will listen to you. Consensus shifted before on this issue. If you want it to shift again, you need to argue about the science. Alleging some conspiracy is responsible for the consensus is very literally politicizing the scientific debate. There is no evidence for a conspiracy, and substantial evidence in opposition.
So, the reason you get called a denier is that your ignorance on this subject is deliberate and politically motivated. Scientists are not just people who try to take the world apart and see how it works. There is some inherent degree of nuttiness involved in examining different models of reality, and reality is frequently outlandish beyond common ken, so having a tolerance for crazy ideas about reality is very much part of scientific philosophy. There's that classic line by Bohr,
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Now, maybe you don't adhere to the concept of an objective reality, and that's at least a valid philosophy. However, if such a thing exists, then science does describe that objective reality, and arguments about what the world is like need to be made by means of specific and precise empirical measurements. That is to say, if you're going to use political or rhetorical arguments against a vast body of scientific evidence, we can't really stop you from doing that, but you will probably not be taken very seriously and you may be called a "denier".
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.