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Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming and Humans Are the Cause (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming, according to the the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers. The climate report, obtained by NPR, notes that the past 115 years are "the warmest in the history of modern civilization." The global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 degree Fahrenheit over that period. Greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture are by far the biggest contributor to warming. The findings contradict statements by President Trump and many of his Cabinet members, who have openly questioned the role humans play in changing the climate. The report states that the global climate will continue to warm. How much, it says, "will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally." Without major reductions in emissions, it says, the increase in annual average global temperature could reach 9 degrees Fahrenheit relative to pre-industrial times. Efforts to reduce emissions, it says, would slow the rate of warming.
News for 'tards; Jewish propaganda.
Jeezuz, the trolls are getting pathetic. Do you think you can sow doubt by sounding like a third grader on Ritalin? Thanks for playing though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I suspect that
Translation: I don't actually know this, but I want to say something that sounds smart (to me at least), so I'm going to move my head aside far enough to pull this statement out of my ass.
We're talking about average temperature - daily temperatures that swing wildly by up to 20 degrees F or more every day. If that averages out to a half a degree higher per year on average, it's absolutely measureable.
Fortunately the report was basically completed before he took over the reigns of power. He can have it scrubbed from Federal web sites but the report is out in the wild now and he can't do much about that.
You need to get your priorities figured out. CO2 is on track to wreck society in a way far more serious than not being able to easily drive your car 9000 miles in 10 days.
Ok. Feeding the troll here, but I have a super serial question then:
Obviously when we dump shit into the atmosphere, it creates a net positive increase in temperature. Even if it's not the primary contributor, why the fuck are you retards so hell bent on doing nothing about it?
What's the harm in reducing emissions? If we're not causing it then cutting emissions can't hurt. If we are causing it, then cutting emissions will help. Seems like a win-win to me.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Yeah, globally it is cooler than 2016 and may or may not end up being cooler than 2015 but that's all. 2017 is going to end up being the 2nd or 3rd warmest year in the temperature record.
Nope. You can't legislate or decree away reality. Reality always wins.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The problem isn't denying that there are environmental problems with our industry. The problem here is that most of the international agreements being done in regards to the environment gives exemptions to China and India, because they have to "Catch up". China gets a free ride to build some of the most polluting industry in all of our history because of political interests and business interest, meanwhile, the western world needs to go back to medieval times, but without the wood burning in the winter.
The fact is, unless we all have a fair agreement in dealing with these problems, it will never work and we'll be back at square one. Trump is correct that these agreements aren't fair to the US, because they really aren't at all. The exemptions give more reason to outsource to China, meanwhile increasing China's industrial capacity. It doesn't solve our environmental issues when it's just being outsourced to another country in a far worse scale. All of you are guilty for accepting this and buying their products as well, even if you live in fancy Germany. This problem needs to be tackled together and our technology needs to be shared to do so. Blaming "Republicans" or Donald Trump is just silly, when we all know China and India is heavily influencing these agreements for their own benefit.
Tell me, how is your standard of living right now? Can you afford to double your expenses? Double the cost for medicine, insurance, etc.? How about triple it? How far would you be willing to go for how much emission reduction? As the cost of energy goes up so does the cost of everything else.
Because this is the same thinking I've heard religious people say. If you can't be 100% certain there is no God, what's the harm believing? What can it hurt? But then, science is creeping ever closer to religion.
So here's the discussion and I'll keep it brief.
When you have "elites"; UN, Government Officials, Corporate Tycoons; all proposing a carbon tax in order to reduce CO2 emissions. It takes a really special kind of a-hole, who's lived such an ivory tower kind of life that they've never experienced a discussion with a truly innovative and intelligent person, to think a tax is actually going to save the world.
Literally, the reason why that one gets proposed is because innovation in energy sourcing and energy transmission technologies threatens an established elite and they know it. You make energy cheap all of a sudden people can move around more, fly in machines, communicate freely, foreign countries catch on and bring their holy wars here just for fun. That tax, by the way, you and I get to pay by living in abject poverty with lifespans of maybe 30 years, and that's after engaging in warfare against foreign countries who don't follow along or who decide "good the Americans aren't polluting as much? That means we can pollute more!".
In the business world there's a saying; first generation builds a business, 2nd runs it, 3rd ruins it. This is no different.
Add to this we have an epic media oligopoly that literally has drowned out any reasonable debate, and a public school system that teaches affinity for news brands instead of news literacy. Finally, add to this the public's been taken advantage of for generations by one scam after another becoming law; the public doesn't know how to ascertain the accuracy of information and that has produced a situation where people are just plain angry and distrustful. You won't get anywhere with them coming off as a selfish uppity yuppie liberal who wants to maintain their perfect little habitat and thinks they are so much better than everyone else.
Frankly, understanding our manufacturing processes well enough to eliminate pollution while at the same time cleaning up the mistakes of past generations is something that has to happen, But before that can happen, you have to move beyond "the climate change debate", which is as sullied as the "Hillary Clinton should be in jail" or the "Trump is a traitor" debates. The new discussion needs to be "0 generational debts"; what are we leaving our kids?
Of course, with marriage rates at a record low, with about 20% of women and around 25% of men never having kids or getting married in the US, meaning about a quarter of society is completely disinterested in the long-term interests of "someone elses little sh!t", combined with record immigration levels, that's going to be a really hard sale in a democracy just from the voting numbers alone.
So installing Wind and Solar is a compromise and passes the buck. Real solutions in energy generation and energy transmission are needed and no amount of self-aggrandizing regulatory pressure is going to make those happen. You have to fix the societal and government issues and restore our country to an actual republic and restore free markets first. Well over 50% of the population want this, the problem now is leadership.
If you want to do something about it, start up a PAC and begin advertising to people they are making an investment with an ROI for certain laws. E.G. You get 10 to 20 million people to make a $10 a month donation to the EFF, you can be pretty certain telco's don't have that kind of money for political discussions, and those 10-20 million people, after 4 or 5 years of investing in the EFF, will see a lower bill. You can do the same thing, but package environmentalism into it; e.g. we can decide not to do business with China and instead of business here so we can encourage the market to innovate which creates jobs and opportunities for US Citizens. You begin innovating, all of a sudden investments start to look good.
Why not reduce emissions? I'm a skeptic: CO2 is a minor problem - there is exactly zero evidence of positive feedbacks. Nonetheless, you are absolutely right - there is no reason not to reduce emissions. However, it is a question of price. Where emissions can be reduced with a reasonable effort, then absolutely, there is every reason to do so. However, I disagree with efforts that are disproportionately expensive.
What I'm not seeing - from either side - is any attempt to produce a prioritized list. Either it's "OMG we're all gonna die - let's destroy civilization in order to save it", or else its "go away, don't bother me".
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
First of all, the problem with the treaties is that because the large polluters (US included) have such a varying level of enerfy infrastructure the treaties signed are not binding. The Paris agreement is about common emission goals that countries ought to strive to reach, there are no mechanisms in it to impose sanctions on nations that fail to meet theirs. So to speak of 'exemptions' in such a treaty is nonsense to begin with, you can't be 'exempt' from sanctions that do not exist in the treaty. Would it be good to have some kind of sanction system in place? Yes, yes it would, but if you think the US government would ever agree to internationally binding treaties that would impose sanctions on US trade should its goals not be reached, you're occupying an entirely different political reality than I am.
Second of all: why do you think it'd be realistic not to account for the fact that massive infrastructure overhaul will not happen immediately and give these countries realistic timeframes in the treaties? China at the moment gets roughly 2/3rds of all its energy from coal and has 4 times the population of the US with increasing private car ownership and you think giving them 13 years time to turn their greenhouse emisions downward (the paris agreement limit for when China's promised it will reach peak CO2 emissions is 2030 and they've also agreed to reduce their carbon intensity by 60 % by the same date, which means they have 13 years time to essentially redo the majority of their energy production) is somehow excessive? Wtf?
Thirdly, do you realize that China has very much woken up to the fact that it is within their own national interests to cut down on emissions? The level of pollution in many Chinese megacities is so bad (quivalent to smoking 1.2 packs of cigarettes just for breathing the air) its having significant adverse health effects leading to increased health care costs and declined productivity if they are not addressed. It's a major issue in domestic Chinese politics because the people don't like the status quo at all, which means if they keep making things worse they'd push the country towards increasing political instability which is certainly not something they want. The idea that China will just keep building polluting tech even though they're already struggling with massive pollution issues is not based in reality. They're building massive amounts of nuclear power plants and heavily focusing on renewables, but as is obvious to anyone with half a brain, this level of change will take a few years to accomplish. They're currently on the track to meeting their 2030 goals.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Do you realize that Americans emit twice as much CO2 per capita
And do you realize that it does not matter one whit for Earth's climate ? If you, as in one person, farted even a million times more methane than an average human, it would not have mattered the same - because the average farters number in billions.
If you push social justice agenda, please do say so overtly. Otherwise, please do remember that climatic processes deal with absolutes. Not anybody's "fair shares" or any such crap.
CAPTCHA: refute
Translation: You want me to pay for your low-cost lifestyle by externalizing your costs.
Fuck off.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
that's a pretty stupid point. it seems pretty fucking obvious that it takes more energy to keep 1.4 billion people alive than it does 300 million. ignoring reality is not going to win anyone to your stupid misguided side.
Lots of childish cynical trolls on Slashdot lately... how about growing up and entering the reasonable discourse among adults again? Do something good to yourself and your country and give rational arguments another try.
There are a few reasons, some are economic like the direct costs and concerns about competitiveness, but there's also the problem of how it was presented. Concerns about pollution impacting the climate began to rise back in the late '60's and early '70's. At first they gained real traction among conservatives (Nixon even created the EPA), but rather quickly the messaging was taken over by some real wackos who wanted massive, immediate, de-industrialization. Suddenly instead of, "we need to clean things up or we'll make a mess of the climate", the message was, "OH DEAR GOD THE WORLD WILL END IN 15 YEARS IF WE DON'T TEAR DOWN ALL THE POWER PLANTS AND STOP DRIVING!!!! AAAHHHHHHH!!!!"
So, that closed a lot of ears real quick. Nobody wanted to hear a lot of crazy nonsense from a bunch of dirty, tree-hugging hippies. And it didn't help that every single prediction was totally wrong for decades. According to the early warnings, the planet should have frozen solid before Reagan was out of office. Then runaway greenhouse was supposed to render the planet uninhabitable 20 years ago. Given all that, it shouldn't be a surprise people would have a hard time accepting climate change arguments. The people making them turned it into a whole "Chicken Little"/"boy who cried wolf" situation.
It takes time to overcome that history.
It's not a "fuck you". It's reality. It's physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics. Do you think mother nature has a personal vendetta against you when an acorn falls from a tree and hits you in the head? Or a seagull decides to drop a deuce on you while flying overhead?
~X~
And of course the solution will be to increase the size of government in order to tackle this difficult problem.
Consider the increase in government we'll need to build massive coastal dikes, relocate 50% of the population, relocate a significant percentage of agricultural production[1], and deal with the security threats caused by big population crises elsewhere[2]. And those are just the foreseeable problems.
Tackling the climate change problem now can probably be done with relatively minimal government intervention. Institute a heavy carbon tax and phase it in over the course of a few years, and then let the market sort it out. To prevent the carbon tax from pushing emissions offshore, institute additional tariffs on goods, services and energy from any country without an equivalent scheme.
Waiting for climate change to raise sea levels, change weather patterns and destabilize marginal economies and then trying to manage the effects of those changes will require much bigger government than would striking at the root of the problem. Fans of small government should be agitating for carbon taxes and carbon tariffs now.
[1] I don't know that the amount of arable land will decrease, but it will probably move.
[2] ISIS probably couldn't have arisen without the massive population upset caused by the years'-long drought in Syria, which was at least partially-caused by climate change.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
US is around the middle of the pack, producing value of $2,291 per ton of CO2 emitted. China is one of the worst, at $435/ton
The numbers are distorted because a lot of the US/Eur manufacturing is outsourced to China.
A Chinese factory makes a widget for $5 that gets sold in the US for $35. All the CO2 produced to create the widget is counted as China's emissions towards the $5, while the US claims $30 added value for zero CO2 emissions.
They don't get continued funding. In fact, they are likely to be defunded or fired. If someone says to you, "prove that this doesn't exist. If you prove it does, you will not be working here for long" and pays you to do that, you tend to not be inclined to prove something.
So, what is talked about climate change is likely the tip of the iceberg.
Oh, ever been or know anyone in that area? The people that do can tell you pretty well about desertification and loss of farmland.