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More Than 15,000 Scientists From 184 Countries Issue 'Warning To Humanity' (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: More than 15,000 scientists around the world have issued a global warning: there needs to be change in order to save Earth. It comes 25 years after the first notice in 1992 when a mere 1,500 scientists issued a similar warning. This new cautioning -- which gained popularity on Twitter with #ScientistsWarningToHumanity -- garnered more than 15,000 signatures. William Ripple of Oregon State University's College of Forestry, who started the campaign, said that he came across the 1992 warning last February, and noticed that this year happened to mark the 25th anniversary. Together with his graduate student, Christopher Wolf, he decided to revisit the concerns raised then, and collect global data for different variables to show trends over the past 25 years. Ripple found: A decline in freshwater availability; Unsustainable marine fisheries; Ocean dead zones; Forest losses; Dwindling biodiversity; Climate change; Population growth. There was one positive outcome, however: a rapid decline in ozone depletion. One of the potential solutions is to stabilize the population. If we reduce family size, consumption patterns don't rise as much. And that can be done by empowering girls and women, providing sexual education and education on family planning.
So, other than driving a Prius and moving to a sardine can style apartment in the inner city, what realistically can people do as something against AGW? There is tons of talk, but all of it seems to just be blaming people.
It reminds me of the town I live in, where water rationing was killing property values, because the older oak trees were dying. However, it was found that the golf court down the road was using 75% or more of the water, so all the losses in dead trees and cracked foundations due to ground shrinkage did nothing. Similar with the rice paddies.
The people who can do something won't... and promptly blame it on the people who can't do anything about AGW.
Get back to me when 15,000 scientists agree on what the problem is with concrete evidence as opposed to this is what we think. Then we can start arguing about what the solution should be. This is how real science is supposed to work.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
If you actually look at some of the statistics published at COP25, you'll see that US and EU emissions are down but GDP is up.
The most rapid growth in emissions is in India, which still has less emissions per person than China does. The rapid increase in pollution, greenhouse emissions, and climate impacts is mostly due to China and India, but even if we reduce it now, some of the gasses take 100 years to clear out of the atmosphere, although other shorter lived gasses are more impactful but have shorter lifespans.
The most obvious other solution is not population growth, which isn't driving either of those top two contributors to the environment, but is literally faster phasing out of harmful energy and food usage including farming, by more efficient energy sources and cracking down on illegal overuse of pesticides and crop waste burning. Note that crop waste can be processed into stored fuel with minimal impacts, but the open burning of crop waste accelerates many other processes.
Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Global Pandemic - works for me.
No muss, no fuss, and results have a high probability of "success".
Mother Nature can ( and will ) handle it.
And people sit there and wonder why there's an anti-science sentiment that keeps growing...
The reason is the observation that the lengthened basic education for women leads to the age of the first birth being higher. This leads to lower number of children, on average. Only a few years more education for women can lead to stabilization of the number of children per family to two, for example. On the other hand, some nations seem to be afraid of going extinct within a few hundred of years. So, for each according to their needs and solutions according to their problems.
the science on AGW was wrong, because they were in the minority. Now, I guess, 15,000 scientists are presumably the majority, so AGW must be right? Is that how science works?
That would probably solve one of the problems neatly.
These snowflakes are crying liberal tears because global warming melts snowflakes.
Slight correction, those aren't tears. You said it yourself, they're melting.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Empowering in this context is education - not just sexual and family planning, but education to help them start working. In most of the world, this is still not the norm - women are expected to stay at home and have babies. "No means no" is not going to change anything in such cases - there will be change when women actually get a chance to study, work and experience life outside the narrow set of rules they are expected to follow in many parts of the world.
Nope. If the theory disagrees with experiment, then it is Wrong. It doesn't matter how many voices sign the petition for the theory; it must still be rejected.
Those 15,000 scientists probably have a bigger carbon footprint and have little interest in changing that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Among those included in this list of Climate Scientists:
Davis, Joanne - Australian
Daweti, Nokuthula - Student
de Clercq, Deon - Earthling
Hamilton, Ava - independent documentary producer/citizen scientist
Jara, Andrea - Colombian
Thapa, Lal - Asst. Professor of Alien Invasion
It is very hard to take this (or their agenda) seriously when they won't even do the basic science of vetting a list of "scientists".
http://scientistswarning.fores... I really wish reporters would link to the actual articles they talk about. Sort of like when they jump all over someone's statements but don't actually quote what the person said.
There is a very simple explanation for why the number of scientists was reported. One can only hear "the science isn't settled; there is still a lot of disagreement" so many times before you just assume you have to emphasize the degree of consensus every single time AGW comes up.
Which is too damn many people. Of course now someone will scream "racism" just because its mentioned.
who keep yelling at them to update their skills. Because if it's one thing I know about folks in their 40s who have to work for a living it's that they love going back to school while working full time. Just sayin'.
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Take a moment to realize that what is being referred to here is not the developed world, where population tends to stabilize, even though footprint increases. It's the post-agrarian/tribal cultures that have large families and isolationism deeply ingrained in their traditions. It takes slow, patient work to untangle the Gordian knot of religion/mores/entrenchment. Also when you try to change someone's culture it takes a whole ass-ton of humility to not get run out on a rail. So, the bible-thumping anti-birth-control missionaries of the last several centuries were plainly a highly suboptimal approach.
Someone had to do it.
Why do we not reject every climate model? All of them have been proven wrong in the last decade.
The huge problem you have is most first world countries that at this point are taking large steps to protect the environment (in no small part by pushing those concerns off to other countries that handle manufacturing and power generation) actually have negative population growth.
That would seem to solve the problem you are laying out, except for one thing - a lot of the countries with positive population growth are not really that concerned about the environment.
If you really think about this long term, that is a huge issue for environmental protection - the future belongs to the people that show up. If you care about the environment, you should probably be encouraging people who feel the same to have more, not fewer, children. Otherwise we may do well now, only to find in fifty years environmental concern is non-existent.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What? Move off campus into a productive job after graduating?
Certainly not!
or in India's case just plain collecting taxes in the first place. Crop burning's already illegal in India. They do it anyway. You'd need money for enforcement and to pay the enforcers well enough they don't just become corrupt. The only place you're gonna get that kind of money is the ruling elites and good luck getting money out of them.
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Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.
And there you go, mixing your political position with the scientific conclusion. This is what causes science denial.
Does the science mandate your position? Are there better solutions available?
I strongly suspect that the best solution is to turn our attention to improvements in technology. This is already happening in the US with the onset of electric vehicles - this will reduce fossil fuel consumption considerably, and serve as a model and testing ground for other nations.
We then have to find energy sources to replace our current fossil fuel use.
I strongly suspect that the best solution will be rooftop solar. This is already happening in the US with the cost of rooftop solar dropping precipitously over the last 15 years.
Both of these solutions would dramatically reduce our carbon footprint, and both would benefit from improvements in technology.
Perhaps we should look to science to solve the problem, instead of identity politics?
The linked article is virtually devoid of any kind of meaningful data. Who keeps putting junk like this on /.?
The 15,000 scientists are overruled by the 50,000 US coal miners.
Well, if those 15,000 scientists met up with the 50,000 on the streets . . . at least we could make progress on the overpopulation problem by about 65,000.
And we could offer the spectacle on pay-per-view, like the Connor McGregor / Floyd Mayweather fight. We could spend the profits on fixing ocean dead zones . . .
. . . or just blow it Vegas on whores, coke and blackjack, since we are all doomed to die anyway because of Unsustainable marine fisheries; Ocean dead zones; Forest losses; Dwindling biodiversity; Climate change; Population growth.
Wow! Some scientists took some time to write an actual letter about this?!?!?! Now I am relieved . . . we are saved.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Climate change activists should wholeheartedly welcome greater Social Justice influence and mission creep into their movement. Its proven track record of swaying public opinion can only have a positive impact on the debate.
Warmist regards,
ExxonMobil
There is an excellent documentary on Netflix called Mission Blue
The problem is that we've let greed over-rule sustainability. All the environmental disasters we are seeing are just the natural consequences of choosing false profits over scientific prophets.
This begs the question though -- What can the average citizen do to make an impact? The article mentions stabilize the population as one possible solution. What are others?
The people and organizations who should care, because they have the money, power, and influence to do something about it: Rich people, global corporations.
Why they don't care: Short-term profits, keeping shareholders happy, is more important than what'll happen a couple hundred years from now. That's 'someone else's problem to deal with', and these people will all be dead and gone by then; why, so far as they're concerned, should they even care?
Who else is standing in the way of doing something about this: Dominionists, and fundamentalist religious organizations. So far as they're concerned, The Earth is a 'temporary' home for humanity, and is therefore expendable, as is all other life on it. Dominionists in particular are more interested in accelerating the destruction of the Earth, because they fervently believe that the sooner they can bring about the Apocalypse, the sooner Zombie Jesus will 'return' to the Earth to 'take them all home'. So anything they can do to make Earth uninhabitable faster is all to the good so far as they're concerned.
Then there's the Average Person; they're too busy just trying to deal with their day-to-day lives (and in some cases, too literally trying to stay alive) to even think about anything that's going to happen even 10 years from now, let alone several hundred years from now. Again, that gets waved off as 'someone elses problem', because they'll all be dead and gone before that even happens. Sure, they think about what their theoretical grandchildren may have to deal with -- so maybe they turn off the lights when they leave a room for more than a few minutes, or put off that errand they need to do until later. But it's all a drop in the bucket that really has no effect, not even if everyone does the same.
Overall there needs to be top-down actions taken, world-wide, in every country that creates a large enough fraction of the total problems. Seeing as we can't seem to get enough nations to agree on how to handle problems a fraction of the size and scope, good bloody luck with that. Add to that resistance the fact that The Rich, the aforementioned religious types, rich, influential religious types, and disinterested greedy corporations aren't going to be cooperative, and the likelihood that anything more than just 'feel-good', overall ineffective things being done becomes rather small. What we really need to have happen first, is a change of hearts and minds across the board; we need everyone to actually give a damn, right down to the core of their being. If someone's got a recipe to make that happen, I'm all ears.
Every thing the coal industry had has been stripped and sold. From profitable mines, to equipment, to river front real estate, to scenic valleys, to pension funds to ... every last thing the coal industry had has been stripped and raided and stolen and sold away.
The last thing remaining is the vote of these desperate people, stuck in a dead end job, too old to retrain, in isolated communities. A country as rich as ours should be able to take care of them. After all the coal industry built America, they contributed significantly to the wealth we are enjoying today. We should be able to buy any mine that is losing money, keep all the miners on the payroll to properly shut the mine down, cap off, and close it. Absorb them all into fish and wildlife service and park service and do conservation work till they all retire. There are not that many left, and we need their expertise to close the mines safely.
But that is not going to happen. Their vote is valuable, and keeping them angry and desperate is the way to get it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Also when you try to change someone's culture it takes a whole ass-ton of humility to not get run out on a rail. So, the bible-thumping anti-birth-control missionaries of the last several centuries were plainly a highly suboptimal approach.
What are you talking about? From what I've read, the bible-thumping anti-birth-control fundamentalist missionaries are highly successful in Subsaharan Africa. They're the reason in fact that some countries there passed "kill the gays" laws.
One thing that'd help is a cheap, reliable, and reversible contraceptive for men. They're doing trials of such a thing now that blocks the sperm ducts.
Honestly, I think marriage is just a bad institution all around, for everyone. It worked somewhat OK back in the days when women were 2nd-class citizens, but not any more, as proven by the high divorce rate and the huge number of single mothers and kids with divorced parents. We need to re-think the whole thing.
The summary fails to link to the actual article; instead it links to articles talking about the article.
The article in question is here:
http://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/sites/sw/files/Ripple_et_al_warning_2017.pdf
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Snow in the forecast for tonight where I'm at. Save the earth? That's up to the people with the money. They're only interested in making more. Sorry.
Highly unlikely since they live under the same government and policies as the rest of the coal miners.
But herp derp, lets keep making excuses from steering the car away from the brick wall in front of us.
I see, it's always get rid of someone else's children, isn't it ? We can just "empower girls and women" in THOSE cultures to abort their babies.
It's odd that when an article suggests reducing the rate of population growth, a certain subset of radical conservatives immediately starts shouting "We need to abort their babies!"
What the actual article says is taking the step of:
So, why is it that you suddenly start shouting about abortion?
Do you want to actually reduce the rate of abortion? That turns out to be really simple: abortion rates decrease when people have access to birth control. Simple.
Boy, it would be really convenient of all these simple cultures would just stop procreating in the first place. Maybe the WHO could just pay some group to just sterilize them, like they did in Kenya? But you know what would really "eliminate" the problem? What if we just eliminated those humans, so they don't burn all those fuels without scrubbers, and pollute those lakes, and cut down the forests for fields to grow food? After all, those leftists are looking out for the "greater good", so it's ok if it's nonconsentual.
What part of "access to education and voluntary family planning" is it that you are referring to here?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Goddamn right. Those egghead scientists ain't so smart. It's not like they're rocket scientists. Well, OK, some of them are, but not all of them, so screw them. If I cain't dig coal, how'm I supposed to get the Black Lung like my daddy and his daddy before him? Us Crowder's been on this hill since eighteen and twenty and ain't no goddamn scientist with his fancy calculus gonna get us off'n this hill. And by the way, any chance we can get the age of consent down to 12? I'm looking to run for the United States Senate, and I don't want to run into problems like my uncle Roy in Alabama, who is a good and Godly man.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, educating women about reproduction and educating communities about the long term economic and social impacts of having offspring = euthanasia.
Does it hurt to be so stupid?
Actually yes, we just can't bear to admit that. What we call "objective truth" is merely a reflection of how many credible people believe in that claim being true. And it's even worse than that: it's how many people who *we believe* are credible do *we believe* they believe a claim is true. If it sounds like turtles all the way down it is: just try to trace the claim of "97% scientists agree" to its roots in reality and you'll see it's based on a long chain of implicit trust based on implicit credibility. (Who did they poll? What was the poll? Did scientist accurately report their convictions? Who reported the news? etc. etc.)
That doesn't mean our scientific knowledge is not useful -- on the contrary, whether it is useful is the (only) criteria to go by. But it means it is acquired statistically, as if humanity were one giant neural network. If you need a confirmation, here's a quote (supposedly) from Max Planck who (we believe) had enough experience to see the pattern: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
The Club of Rome published this book in 1972. It is based on a computer simulation of using resources and population to evaluate how long humanity can exist in this system. At that time the tipping point was about 2030. The model used has been re-evaluated many time since. The latest study has added social stability and things are not looking good.
Corporation and the rish have not done anything for the last 45 years, do you really think thay would do anything now "to reduce their profits"?
Nobody is going to educate those women, they might find out whom better to vote for, and they might find out about the HGC laced tetanus vaccines that the WHO is issuing to them. And already issued in the 1990's in Mexico and The Philippines.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I'm a Libertarian, following Ayn Rand's wisdom, which
Ayn Rand was not a libertarian (with or without a capital L)-- she was an "Objectivist," a philosophy which she coined and led.
Rand hated libertarianism, and did not hesitate to say so: "Libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology... So the Right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the libertarian movement."
(Ayn Rand, Ford Hall Forum, 1971)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You're talking about American women, not women in general.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I feel hurt by your expression of micro-aggression by assuming there's only 2 genders.
I feel shut out.
Wheeeehhhhhh, sue you...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Ayn Rand was a banker's shill, out to destruct the family and religion in order to impose more bankers-favorite 'morality' onto the people.
All those atheist women-empowering individualism preaching shills are out to destroy the corner stones of society:
family, religion, unity.
Loosely connected Individuals are much easier to control and subdue than tight families with high moral values.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I'm extremely skeptical about your two last statements.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
The 15,000 scientists are overruled by the 50,000 US coal miners.
Do us all a favor and go back to your coal mines and never come out again. Eliminates unnecessary population and their carbon footprint. If we're lucky, no one left will know how to dig doom out of the ground to burn up.
Strange thing is that I've never seen a letter of 20,000 mathematicians stating that the value of pi isn't 3, when some state was going to pass a law that pi=3.
Or a letter of 10,000 physics that supported (or rejected) Einsteins views.
Was it maybe because in those cases solid proof was actually available?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
No, in 50 years population will have stabilized.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Nobody cares whether humanity will go extinct.
Every individual that's alive is proof that humanity isn't.
And every individual that isn't born obviously won't care shit.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I'm not convinced about low taxes, and low shelf prices and they need not go hand in hand with freedom. Gotta be free to set a high price if you want. I buy generic Excedrin, though there are obviously those who don't for example, And I'm not too thrilled over other people's freedom to poison me.
Depends on the definition of "scientists" used.
The GW alarmist counted high school students, politicians and people without a single day of real world work experience as "scientists".
Wait, you mean use the Scientific Method? No, we can't do that.
Besides out of these 15,000 scientists how many are experts in climatology? You're field of study is in molecular biology, that's great but is has nothing to do with the weather.
Isaac Asimov said that the biggest threats to humanity were 1) overpopulation and 2) humanity's habit of splitting itself into groups, and deciding that you are or are not a part of their group. I agree with him.
Here are an Asimov interview and speech on overpopulation and human unity.
Only some of the things they talk about are even remotely scientific-ish. While I could argue with "their purpose" or their merits of their augment to do so would be ceding the point that whole endeavor is subjective, non-specific feel good jargon.
"I disagree in principle and price" so I'm not going to negotiate on price
The population boom has been trending negative for decades non-uniformly. Birth rates are trending toward negative worldwide - without any idiot intervention. Its questionable if the negative trend can be stopped at all.... so replace quasi threat with another.
Family size is highly specific; who decides whether me or my children are justified to exist? Where is the science? The levels of arrogance and ignorance are thoroughly interlaced.
Global warming is not a uniform effect so how to you assign cost? Not science! If you though Brexit, Greek dept, healthcare, or taxes was a mess just wait...
Large powerful groups are the most likely to shirk responsibility, with the "solution" then becoming a noneffective political bludgeon used force the common "plebs" into accepting a loss of control to the powerful.
Do explain that theory of more than two biological sexes or that one were a guy thinks he is really a girl trapped in males body,declares himself a woman and his ugly ass ends up on Vogue?
How about we change the words around some to get the point home.. Lets keep the Earth Inhabitable. The earth will be fine. George Carlin was right!
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Millions of adherents of astrology, not to mention religious zealots would applaud your explanation. You also give legitimacy to polls conducted by Fox News and every other agenda-driven group seeking to influence opinion through the bandwagon effect.
I choose to believe that science is not a democracy.
If you will believe me I am as uncomfortable with that as you seem to be. But I've been sitting on it for a while and have only found confirmations for it. If that is indeed true ("true") then the sooner we accept it the less we'll fall for bad science. "That" being the idea that our objective knowledge is acquired, held, and maintained as a statistical process, not as our ever closer understanding of the mind of God which was a line of reasoning that started with Newton.
Far greater minds have claimed things to that end -- this is a quote from Philip K Dick: "In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law — in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy." I believe it is custom of our brain matter that also determines how we know what we know.
That said I also like to believe that what makes us different from a simple biological (or mechanical) deep learning network is how we decide to pursue one thing or another, before it is knowledge.
Oh bullshit. The divorce rate is proof that marriage doesn't work. Blaming it on the people isn't productive when more than half the people who try it fail at it; it's the institution.
yelling at them to update their skills while giving them little to no support to do so, especially when they're already in dire economic straights is _not_ helping. Worse, I'm not even sure people want to help. If you just look down on them you don't have to worry about your taxes going up to support them while they retrain. Or for make work public works projects while we wait for the economy to catch up. You can safely abandon them and feel none the worse for it. Because it's their fault for not updating their skills, and not because the entire manufacturing base of our country collapsed in the wake of NAFTA and free trade with China...
You do know that their blue collar guys, right? Most of them would fit in just fine building infrastructure or in manufacturing if we did such things.
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They reject training because a) there are no jobs and b) retaining while working full time is fucking _hard_. They've been abandoned, they know it, and they don't know what to do. So they voted Trump because, hey, what have they got to lose, right? Sure, he's already pushing the bad stuff of the TPP into other bills, but again, they've got nothing to lose. What is it people say about people with nothing to lose? Oh, right, they think clearly and rationally and make sound decisions. I think that was it.
And yes, I know I'm feeding trolls, but fact is lots of folks think like you. They need to stop that. You need to stop that. It's what got us in this mess in the first place.
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I could get more than 15k random signatures on a statement saying that AGW is horseshit.
That's pretty much the corollary to what these folks did.
In both cases people would rightly ask, "so what?"
We know we are harming our Host and how, and we are really trying to help Her recover. I would like it if one day we could have more of a symbiotic relationship. Where we can help as well. Some of those "Green Cities" being built is really a Flower in the Hair of Mother Earth. :)
[($)]
It takes 30 people in developing countries to consume the same amount of resources as you do, BigChigger.
The problem isn't their overpopulation. It's your overconsumption.
It takes 30 of them to consume the same amount of resources that you do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01...
You mean it's your excuse of the moment. If it wasn't this, it would be something else - that's how denialism works.
It's too late. The evolutionary experiment with intelligence is coming to an end. So be it.
Religion is based on the rejection of reason. At best, anything good that comes from religion alone is blind chance.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Have you ever worked in the private sector? They expect results!
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It doesn't take a radical fucking conservative to look out the window and see that depopulation has already hit white countries, hard.
Well, the country I live in is only white in small parts, and mostly in wintertime. I'll give you Greenland, but what other countries are predominantly white?
Stephan
Once you explain that theory then try a stab at explaining this. I saw a YouTube video of a young woman that claims she's a gay man. So she's a woman that cuts her hair short and wears baggy clothes, likes to fuck dudes, and demands to want to use the men's restroom to pee. Preventing this women from using the men's room so she can try to get a peek at some guy's dick is now some outrage. If that's what we should be outraged about then I'm thinking we're doing pretty good.
We've been so well fed, clothed, and healthy now that the outrage is not that this lady has to shit in the street, it's that she has to shit in the women's restroom. We've run out of things to be outraged about that we have to go to new extremes to invent them.
Am I saying that global warming is an invented problem? I'm saying that thought has crossed my mind. It's real easy to get a bunch of signatures that something must be done. It's real hard to actually do something about it. When these people start doing something about global warming instead of just get more signatures then I'd find the problem more convincing.
Do we really need more convincing of the problem? I think we got it already. This outrage has got so bad now I'm wondering if they "protest too much".
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Uh, what?
Are you trying to suggest that the pre-existing cultures didn't already hate gays, like every other culture did? The number of cultures accepting of homosexual behavior through history is vanishingly small.
Almost every religion - including the frequently-in-the-majority Islam - ban homosexual behavior. It's a cultural value thousands of years old. Trying to blame on it on recent Christian missionaries just highlights your own bigotry.
more interesting would be how many supposed scientists were actually putinbots selling penis enlargement equipement. man made global warming is soooo much nicer than the man made nuclear winters from the last few times humanity worked out the atom, I never understood what all the fuss is about.
The bigger the number the more true the reasoning...
In the old days we would have need only _one_ scientist, one with a sound argument. There was one Pitagoras, one Tales, one Copernicus, one Einstein.
15ooo scientists - this is a disgrace.
As I understand it, in almost all western countries, post industrialization, population grows at diminishing rates until it falls. While China and India are behind Europe and North America, they are predicted to follow the same trend, and ultimately stabilize global population. I couldn't find a text article about this, but I see it on this youtube video. Kurzgesagt - Overpopulation
Oh bullshit. The divorce rate is proof that marriage doesn't work.
No. The divorce rate is proof that highly incentivising one party to break a contract will cause that one party to break that contract.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Earth is going to survive. Once all the humans are dead, everything will gradually return to normal. Humans are arrogant to think they can kill the planet. They can kill themselves and perhaps all life on it but they can't kill the planet.
We'll make great pets
http://scientistswarning.fores... 1345 students (more because of language/spelling) 33 Veterinarians 96 Anthropologist Not to mention the many names with no qualifications mentioned at all. And this is after 5 mins skimming the surface of the list. This list is a joke.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio...
Our carbon dioxide emissions have been declining since 2005 and continue to do so. Direct your bitching to the rest of the world.
We'll make great pets
More information, China has double our emissions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Chinese emissions are going up, United States emissions are going down:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio...
Send this petition to the Chinese folks.
We'll make great pets
Uh, just to point out the obvious, a simpler and cheaper solution would be just to make sure that birth control is available to those who want it.
A better solution would be to mandate birth control for those that can't afford it.
If by "mandate" you mean "force birth control on people whether they want it or not"-- no.
If by "mandate" you mean "mandate that birth control be available for everybody who can't afford it," -- yes, that would be a good idea.
Its already happening in the first world. In most of the richest nations there is a declining birthrate with governments worried about the financial consequences that brings. It is places like the Third World where they're still pumping them out at a ridiculous rate where the issue lies.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Wrong again. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
Except that the climate models have, overall, worked remarkably well.
Here is the first and best-referenced of the global climate models, dated from 1967, and a comparison of the model against the data for the following fifty years: https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly-3c0854932a4a.
The model fit the data remarkably well over a time span of fifty years.
Vogue is not a scientific journal peer-reviewed by scientists, so it's not a scientific theory,
and they misuse the word "theory" in general, because the word theory refers to philosophically a
contemplative or speculative rationally justifiable understanding ("hypothesis") regarding natural things.
To be scientific; there must be specific predictions arising from the theory that can be proven false in order to invalidate the theory.
To be rational, evidence from a logical proof or induction is required, not merely a subjective assertion or belief.
Merely THINKING you are a Guy or a Gal does not make you one, much the same way as THINKING you are
Aristotle or an Elephant doesn't make you one --- you must show something tangible for a theory such as "more than two biological sexes".
Rarely do we see anything that hints at the root cause. Finally someone dares mention the cause. Pollution, by definition is a consequence of human activity as is the destruction of nature. We have already passed the load limit for humans on this planet. Only by establishing a much lower population rate can we hope to preserve anything at all. That is going to mean some very strict and highly enforced laws do we have any hope at all. The US, for example might choose a number of 60,000,000 as our population target. Strict birth controls must be applied. We may also need to issue reproduction permits based upon academic as well as physical attributes of potential parents. Obviously some emotional pain and changes in what is seen as moral or good behavior must be tolerated. Considering that the alternative is death and desolation mandatory birth control becomes a highly moral alternative. People who think that simply evermore science and technology can keep society rolling along are worshiping a false God.
If it sounds like turtles all the way down it is: just try to trace the claim of "97% scientists agree" to its roots in reality
OK, I traced it. The 97% figure came from the several references: J. Cook, et al., "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11, No. 4, 13 April 2016. DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
It states: "The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”
Another reference is J. Carlton et al., "The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists," Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 10, No. 94, 24 September 2015. Their results show a 96.7% agreement on anthropogenic contribution to rising temperatures among the group who indicated that 'The majority of my research concerns climate change or the impacts of climate change.'" (The agreement was "only" 91.9% when the group was expanded to all scientists and not just climate scientists.)
A slightly later paper by Cook et al. included a table summarizing fourteen other surveys of scientists, is here: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
And a nice site summarizing what scientific societies say is here: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
and you'll see it's based on a long chain of implicit trust based on implicit credibility. (Who did they poll? What was the poll? Did scientist accurately report their convictions? Who reported the news? etc. etc.)
Questions which are all answered.... if you had done the work that you suggested: "trace the claim to its roots."
That doesn't mean our scientific knowledge is not useful -- on the contrary, whether it is useful is the (only) criteria to go by. But it means it is acquired statistically, as if humanity were one giant neural network. If you need a confirmation, here's a quote (supposedly) from Max Planck who (we believe) had enough experience to see the pattern: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
The greenhouse effect isn't a "new scientific truth". It's been known and pretty well understood for well over a hundred years. It is the tool we use to understand planetary temperatures.
Strange thing is that I've never seen a letter of 20,000 mathematicians stating that the value of pi isn't 3,
There isn't a relentless and well-funded campaign to assert that mathematicians are liars who are perpetrating a hoax about the value of pi, nor a publicity campaign by the fossil-fuel companies to convince the public that there is no consensus about the value of pi because a trillion-dollar industry might make less profit if people knew that the value of pi was well known.
Among those included in this list of Climate Scientists:
A small correction: the people asked to sign were to be "scientists from any scientific discipline", not specifically climate scientists.
Davis, Joanne - Australian Daweti, Nokuthula - Student de Clercq, Deon - Earthling Hamilton, Ava - independent documentary producer/citizen scientist Jara, Andrea - Colombian Thapa, Lal - Asst. Professor of Alien Invasion
...
ON that last one: you conveniently left out most of the reference in order to highlight the phrase "alien invasion." Looking at the list, the full information following the name is:
Thapa, Lal Asst. Professor, Plant Ecology, Microbial Interaction, Climate Change, Alien Invasion Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University Nepal.
In the context of plant ecology, the phrase "invasion" means "invasion of a alien (that is, non-native) plant species into an ecology."
I think I'll give a person whose native language is Nepali the benefit of the doubt in not necessarily realizing that "alien invasion" might mean something different to slashdot readers than to plant ecologists.
I choose to believe that science is not a democracy.
The scientific method is not democratic, but perhaps unfortunately, the acknowledgement and cataloguing of scientific knowledge appears to be. I suppose that's why replication is important. Scientific experiments and even the scientific method are fallible. People can draw the wrong conclusions from experiments. They can design experiments that don't work well, and they can get fluke results. So we need to be able to verify what facts are true, and refine the models that we use to explain the facts in the face of new evidence. However, that's a process that is inherently democratic as it deals with our shared understanding of the universe and the way it works. Of course, it's also a meritocracy, as well, since while everyone could vote on whether a scientific fact is true (and often do, see anti-vaxxers and climate change denial, for example), the scientific community respects the carefully reasoned and explained presentation of facts by experts who have a publication record. And when multiple respected experts agree that a particular fact is true, it becomes accepted as part of the body of knowledge of science. Of course, it is always important to remember that those accepted truth are not sacrosanct. They are not the anointed words of holy men. They can and will be challenged, and occasionally those challenges will overturn an old model or improve upon it. But it is human nature to resist change, so those attempts may be met with undue scepticism, but the application of the scientific method should ultimately reveal the truth.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
...as long as the scientists signing also acknowledge that the 1992 predictions and forecasts as to the impact of global warming (it's name at the time) by 2017 were, how shall we say, WILDLY erroneous. Or maybe I am writing this in an underwater home in a world with no polar ice caps and just don't realize it.
These are exactly the people who voted against their own best interest last year.
A friend of mine dragged me to an evangelical church service back when I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s. This was back when televangelism was relatively rare, but this church—in Toronto—had cameras, and consequently often featured A-list itinerant men of the cloth (they were almost all men). One name I now recall was Hal Lindsay.
Whoever it was, the argument went like this: the plot of the number of diseases known to medicine was shaped like a hockey stick, with the heal of the hockey stick representing God getting extra super pissed off (almost certainly the usual homosexual suspects, et. al.) and come to Jesus quickly now, while there's still time. So why are the diagnostic manuals now thick enough to erect a stairway to heaven? Is it because anal intercourse kicked evolution into overdrive? As if crusty peckers haven't been a breeding ground for hundreds of millions of years already? Or is it because we invented the gas chromatograph, the electron microscope, the CAT scan, the MRI, genetic sequencing, and principle component analysis?
No surprise, the climate debate has likewise experienced narrative thickening over the last two decades.
Note that this is an absolute peak in the early 1980s. We're not even talking a mere relative peak. The earth is still reeling from this major shock to biomass distribution. Seven billion gangling apex predators all crowded together on slender seashores is a whole new ball of wax. Of course, one finds the evidence of this everywhere. Earth has had almost no time to adjust yet. And then we go around using pristine baselines, or prior composition, against which to measure decline.
Even if the earth isn't going to hell in a handbasket—either due to crusty peckers or crusty pecker aftermath—humanity's adolescent population spurt was really going to trash the joint for a couple of generations, any way you slice it. Seriously, if you extrapolate manhood from the age of 16 to 21, the only possible response is to televise REPENT NOW. Around age 21, men stop growing and start thinking (a slow process, with little to show for it in most cases until the late 20s).
Now we have 15,000 signatures that Animal House is an ecological eyesore. I really don't know what to make of this. It was plainly apparent back in the early 1970s that whatever came next was not going to be pretty, even if you regarded The Late, Great Planet Earth as being full of shit, and The Population Bomb as an alarmist wheeze.
The problems certainly demand attention, and more attention is probably better than less attention (we're still such a shallow, squirrel-obsessed species) and you can certain
Not one word was written about aborting babies. What was probably implied was family planning and , yes, that probably means 1 child. Moroon....(spelled on purpose because it fits )
I'm not sure to whom you are addressing your comment. The Anonymous Coward post that my reply was addressing stated:
We can just "empower girls and women" in THOSE cultures to abort their babies.
That explicitly does include a word about "aborting babies". So, I assume your comment was addressed to AC?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Actually, Ayn Rand hated EVERYTHING that wasn't Ayn Rand (and I am not even sure that she didn't actually hate herself too). That said, she did paint a pretty accurate indictment of coerced collectivism. But her proposed cure was quite flaky.
...
I am not saying we should ignore those claims, but rather use them as a hint to do more repetitions until we establish those claims as likely true or likely not.
Good God, how many repetitions do we have to do? We've done hundreds. Do you want thousands? Millions?
Literally hundreds of institutions on five continents are and have been repeating the work and running the models; the source codes for all the analysis tools are open-source and available to anybody; tens of terabytes of data is acquired every year (you do know that climate science is supported by data, right?; thousands of pages of documentation are available explaining exactly what and how the work was done; and they all agree on the overall consensus.
Let me suggest the opposite: the understanding of anthropogenic global warming is, at this point, the most well validated scientific theory in the history of science . Scientific theories are validated when they are challenged and meet the challenge, and no theory has ever been challenged as long or as relentlessly as anthropogenic global warming.
If there is any theory anywhere which has been challenged, and challenged, and challenged-- this is it.
Are you a fucking moron? Intro physics isn't something that most of the population *needs* to do; courses like that are intentionally designed to weed out people who don't have the aptitude or discipline to get a degree in that field. Marriage is pushed by assholes like you to be the answer for everyone, yet more than half the attempts fail, so it's clearly not the panacea it's been sold as.
Oh bullshit, you fucking liar. Go read about it; there's plenty of journalistic reports of Christian missionaries fanning the flames.
I think that's an overstatement, surely you'd agree that the Newtonian physics is the most well validated theory in the history of science -- it got the most mileage.
But that aside, and I don't doubt the huge amount of work involved, this is an opportunity to educate a layman: can you tell me what testable predictions does the theory make? Are any of those predictions (experiments really) simple enough for a lay person to follow?
I did a search regarding testability and found this from pro-AGW people who acknowledge that the theory is too complex and it cannot be falsified as a whole, only its individual components can. https://skepticalscience.com/a... (Pasting the best part below.)
This is fair, but I think it also shows that it is a natural block from people accepting it in order to make radically different decisions in life -- eat vegan, have fewer children -- based on such theory. Unless climate science can demonstrate almost prophetic powers like physics can, it will remain a partisan issue.
Post from the link:
falsifiability is a strange concept of limited use in science, despite its popularity. The reason is that when we test any hypothesis, we must make background assumptions both about other conditions, and about how our instruments work. These background assumptions then form auxilliary hypotheses which are tested alongside the hypothesis we actually desire to test. As a consequence, if our test gives a negative result, we do not falsify any individual hypothesis (including the one we wanted to test). Rather we falsify the conjunction of the hypotheses. We show that not all of them can be true together. This is known as the Duhem-Quine Thesis, after its two independent "discoverers".
To illustrate this, consider Dikran Marsupial's test of "global climate change theories" from 2 above. He claims that a centenial negative trend in temperatures would falsify the theory. Of course, if that centenial trend coincided with a 50% reduction of solar physics, the theory would not be falsified. Dikran is quite aware of this, and covered himself with the auxilliary clause that the trend occured "in the absence of any other change in the forcings that could explain it".
In very simple theories, we can radically reduce the number of auxilliary hypotheses making the particular hypothesis of interest more amenable to falsification in a "crucial test". We can also vary our experimental methods so that we are testing the theory with different auxilliary hypotheses. Thus, for very simple hypotheses, we can reduce the impact of the Duhem-Quine Thesis, but we can never entirely avoid it.
Because AGW is a complex theory with many auxilliary hypotheses, it is difficult to develop "crucial tests", ie, any individual test that will show it to be false. In fact, in the very short term it is impossible. What we can do is develop "crucial tests" for important elements of the theory, but not for the whole theory at once. We can also measure relative likilihood with respect to competing theories. Doing so, we can show that AGW easilly is a superior theory to its competitors. But we cannot pick a single experiment to falsify the theory, so you will not find much discussion of falsification with respect to AGW.
When you do, it is often for critics of AGW who take a farcically simplistic view of falsification to declare that "AGW is falsified". Spencer and Christy played this game for a while, declaring the UAH satellite temperature index falsified AGW. Then (on several occasions) they were embarrassed when it was shown that their auxilliary hypothesis that they had eliminated all significant errors from their temperature record was what was false, and that UAH tends to confirm rather than falsify AGW.
Lucia Liljegren has played a similar game, several times declaring that the recent temperature record falsifies IPCC predictions. She has neglected, however, the IPCC auxilliary hypothesis of neutral ENSO conditions*. She has merely falsified the conjunction of hypotheses that (CO2 forcing is increasing & climate sensitivity is in the IPCC range & ENSO fluctuations do not effect global temperatures & ....). As her third, tacit, auxilliary hypothesis is known to be false, her results are massively uninteresting. (She also uses a very simplistic definition of falsification in which events with a 1in 20 probabi
If I were looking for predictions that lay persons could compare to data, I'd go for measuring the upwelling and downwelling infrared flux from balloon experiments-- these days lots of students do high altitude balloons, and that would be a cool measurement to do.
I'll remember that thank you. I'm assuming from your references you may be a climate researcher yourself. FWIW I should let you know that my beef is not with your profession. I trust you do your work honestly and competently and as best you can. My distrust is with the people who are *not* climate researchers but who use a set of talking points about climate to either, as I see it, profit or get fame from it (Al Gore comes to mind), or to label their (usually conservative) opponents as dumb anti-science people, or merely to virtue signal, without doing anything whatsoever for the cause they profess to care. Whereas I for example drive very little, fly very little, and eat mostly vegetarian. I am convinced their smug scientism hurts your work more than it helps.
If I were a climate researcher I'd hang in there, history is full of people doing work that wasn't always appreciated but they knew it was the right thing to do it anyway, and maybe I'd try to find a way to make it all closer to the mind and heart of the common man.
I'll remember that thank you. I'm assuming from your references you may be a climate researcher yourself.
A reasonable assumption, but not quite-- I'm in the next field over, so I work with the atmospheric optical models, but not climate. I do know some of the climate guys (mostly the ones doing atmospheric transmission and scattering, not the ones you would have ever heard of) and occasionally even work with them (but not on the Earth's atmosphere).
FWIW I should let you know that my beef is not with your profession. I trust you do your work honestly and competently and as best you can. My distrust is with the people who are *not* climate researchers but who use a set of talking points about climate to either, as I see it, profit or get fame from it (Al Gore comes to mind), or to label their (usually conservative) opponents as dumb anti-science people, or merely to virtue signal, without doing anything whatsoever for the cause they profess to care.
Thanks. I'll accept your compliments on behalf of my colleagues next door.
It would be nice if "no meant NO" in all cases, but that currently doesn't seem to work always. Also, empowerment includes access to family planning methods and education.
You know what children with mothers have? Fathers. If you keep your pants zipped, guess what? No children! Are you so misogynous that this didn't occur to you?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That sounds awful! Where is it that young men go to prison for years for consensual sex?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Do you agree that women's minds and men's minds are alike, that there are no significant systemic differences? No? In that case, why would it be a stretch of imagination to think that, in rare cases, male minds can be born in female bodies or vice versa?
Two biological sexes would mean classifying everyone as biologically male or biologically female. That mostly works, but reality is more complicated. People are born with genotypes other than XX and XY, and sometimes with two sets of sex organs.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I've found that, typically, people who claim there are differences and that they explain modern behavior have at least the same politics as those who deny that transsexuals can exist. Clearly there are differences, or there wouldn't be transsexuals, but there's a lot of other crap going on that obscures what would happen with ideal behavior.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There's not much logic involved in this thread.
ter https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/... Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill. CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Ethics of Greed"
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
But why shouldn't we accept people who fit into society and aren't threats? What harm does it do?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes