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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 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.
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
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.
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."
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.