CO2 emissions per capita are far from meaningless.
Per capita emissions only measure how much carbon people in that country emit per capita. They don't measure either how much carbon emission each person causes, or what the carbon is used for.
Resource requirements, including energy requirements, are based on population, so emissions per capita is a measure of how efficiently that energy is delivered.
So you're saying that if China doubled its population and its per capita CO2 consumption fell by 60%, that would be an improvement for the world? Of course it wouldn't, because total carbon emissions would be higher. Likewise, if per capita carbon emissions were averaged out between Europe and Africa, the world would emit the same amount of carbon, but it would also be much poorer.
The Earth doesn't give a fuck about carbon emissions or climate change either. The Earth is going to be fine no matter what. In fact, if we manage to substantially warm the Earth, it would simply be returning it to its more usual state.
That's because the US doesn't pay for those things.
That's actually incorrect too. The US both spends more on public single-payer health insurance and more on public retirement plans than most European nations. But on top of that, it also keeps the taxes for the middle class much lower than European nations.
Read your own reference: our current extinction event doesn't meet the definition of a "mass extinction".
We have limited information about the cause of past extinction events, but we've got some good evidence that climate change played a major role in some of them.
"Played a role" is irrelevant, the question is whether climate change causes mass extinctions. Since there have been many instances of rapid climate change without mass extinctions (or even significant extinctions), it's clear that climate change doesn't cause mass extinctions.
Are you saying the US has more coal plants, or factories, or what? Coal can be replaced by solar, wind, etc.
I'm saying that a German car manufacturer can simply move the carbon intensive production steps to some third world country and lower their apparent carbon footprint in Germany, even though there is no actual reduction in carbon emissions associated with building that car.
Countries with a lot of resource extraction and agriculture (like the US) can't play such games to the same degree.
I do agree there are different ways to score, such as whether consuming items that pollute at foreign manufacturers should count against the producer or consumer. In my opinion, both parties are guilty and perhaps the demerit should be split between both.
There is no "splitting"; ultimately, it's always the consumer that pays, for everything. But the consumer already fully pays for the carbon that gets emitted as part of the production of their products. And if you impose additional carbon taxes, it really changes very little, since pretty much all prices for all products will go up.
No, emission is simply current emissions, and it may not even capture sources other than fossil fuel burning.
Furthermore, for capture, you need to talk about baselines. The pristine state for Europe is 90% forested, and it's around 35% now; if you use the pristine state for Europe, Europe has a massive carbon and capture debt.
thats why China is the world leader in renewables.... https://futurism.com/china-new... [futurism.com] - it'll just take a longer time due the size of China.
Yes, "longer time" to get to carbon neutrality means "more than 10-20 years". Ditto for India. Those countries could switch completely to renewables for energy generation and they still would be far from carbon neutral.
The Holocene extinction is not known to be a mass extinction and it's not even been proven to be caused by humans. And while "mass extinction" sounds scary, if it is simply humans killing off many species and replacing them with other species, it's not clear that it is even a problem.
For example, the extinction of megafaunas around the world has been attributed to humans, but that's been hard to prove. And while the loss of giant sloth and 10 ft killer birds may be lamentable to modern humans, it isn't really an existential problem for humanity.
One is that while the hothouse Earth might be conducive to supporting human civilization as it presently exists.
You trail off there. If you're trying to say that it's unclear whether such a warmer earth is conducive to human civilization as it presently exists, why not? A warmer, wetter, milder climate seems more conducive to human civilization.
The second is that such an abrupt transition period would be incredibly stressful for life in general. We're not currently seeing mass extinctions, but such a severe transition in climate could certainly trigger such an extinction.
The article claimed that 4-5C higher temperatures per se were an "apocalyptic nightmare" and that is what I was responding to.
Now, you raise a different question, namely whether a rapid rise in global average temperatures by 4-5C would lead to mass extinctions. There have been many such temperature increases in the past, and they were not usually associated with mass extinctions. Mass extinctions are extremely rare and seem to require multiple factors to coincide.
t's not just the intensity but also how that energy is generated. Norway is comparable to the USA, however hydro makes up for 105% of their energy needs (they export some of it)
Well, how lucky for them that they have so much hydropower for so few people. Why can't every country be like Norway!
Look at the CO2 emissions per capita, the USA is way up there
CO2 emissions per capita are a meaningless measure. You need to look at CO2 emissions per $GDP at the very least, but even that isn't really a correct measure. You also need to look at carbon capture, where Europe is doing particularly poorly.
No, that wasn't your claim I took issue with. We both know that, see your post was here:
Oh, I'm sorry, with your flurry of insults, non-sequiturs, and ad hominems, I really can't keep track of what happens to raise your heckles right now. So here you go:
Claim: Unfortunately, a lot of the social sciences these days just teaches a view of history in which the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire, and technology are just tools of the male patriarchy to suppress women and Africans
An obvious example that most educated Americans would recognize is Zinn's history textbook, pretty much the de-facto standard, but given your background, it's not surprising that you are unfamiliar with it.
Of course, since you don't actually ever ask questions and instead just launch into personal attacks when statements don't match your personal beliefs, it's hard to address your various confusions.
Between the wars, people couldn't read or write in Europe. They couldn't care less about American eugenics, because they wouldn't have a way to know about i
Really? How do you imagine that worked? People came back from WWI and suddenly became illiterate? My parents grew up between the wars and I emigrated from Europe. Of course European societies were literate and educated. Scientific racism was taught in schools and promoted by government scientists.
Sleazy politicians started telling people what they wanted to hear: all politicians except me are corrupt, we need to find a more modern system than democracy,
The people didn't elect Hitler, they didn't even give the Nazis an absolute majority. Hitler became chancellor of Germany because Hindenburg appointed him. And Hitler became dictator of Germany by the vote of educated parliamentarians, foremost the Christian party under Prelate Kaas. It wasn't "sleazy anti-democratic" politicians who put Hitler into power, it was educated German elites who made the call.
After being destroyed by fascisms, Europe has seen the longest period of peace in its history because of commerce, collaboration, policies of social welfare, and rejection of nationalism.
Post-WWII Europe has had military dictatorships, socialist states, genocides, religious wars, and massive conflicts in its colonies. But I suppose by the dismal record of European history, that is, relatively speaking, "peaceful". In any case, Europeans didn't suddenly become peaceful and liberal; instead, Europe didn't have a choice but to be peaceful, with thousands of American nuclear warheads and troops on its territory and the CIA and NSA tracking everything and everybody on the continent.
are now under attack by enemies of a strong, peaceful, wealthy Europe
Europe's problems are not external, they are internal. Europe is an aimless hedonistic bureaucratic superstate with massive social problems and lousy economic performance. Schengen and the Euro are falling apart less than a generation after their introduction; they were wishful thinking, not sustainable good policies. Germany is making itself increasingly dependent on Russia. Putin didn't cause this, but of course, he's taking advantage of it, and who can blame him; it's what European intelligence services used to do to other weak countries.
As for Trump and Americans, why should we care about what happens to Europe these days? Why shouldn't Trump sell out Europe to Putin? What has Europe done for the US lately, if ever?
The direction doesn't matter much, for the USA is still a bigger "carbon pig" per capita than those countries
That's because a lot of those countries simply export their carbon emissions; that is, they switch to domestic industries like service industries that are low carbon and simply move production of carbon intensive goods to other countries. The US is so large and diverse that that's not an option.
In any case, in terms of energy intensity, the US is comparable to Sweden, Belgium, and Australia and about world average; in terms of carbon intensity, the US is far below world average. Calling the US a "carbon pig" given those facts makes little sense.
Hothouse Earth is an apocalyptic nightmare where the global average temperatures is 4 to 5 degrees Celsius higher (with regions like the Arctic averaging 10 degrees C higher) than today, according to the study,
That so-called "apocalyptic nightmare" is actually the warm, wet, and mild conditions that existed through most of the past 50 million years, the climate that led to the spectacular success of mammals and primates. Not only is it "hospitable" to human life, it is more hospitable than the cold and dry climate we have had over the last million years and that climate activists want to perpetuate.
What we do in the next 10-20 years will determine whether our planet remains hospitable to human life or slides down an irreversible path
Short of global thermonuclear war, there is nothing we can do over the next 10-20 years that will have any appreciable impact on long term climate: there is no conceivable political or economic way that China, India, or African nations would agree to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, developed nations are already eliminating dependence on fossil fuels as fast as possible for economic reasons.
That would kind of work as a lame-ass excuse if you weren't posting blatant bullshit as facts.
Claim: Social science departments at universities like Yale have explicitly defined themselves as institutions for political change, not institutions concerned with seeking truth.
By being unfamiliar with such basic facts and denying them as "blatant bullshit", you just keep demonstrating that you are completely unfamiliar with modern US society.
What if they take from high income earners and instead of just handing cash to the poor they invest in public education, health care, transportation etc. Would that also make everyone poorer in the long run?
We're talking about reduction of income inequality in Europe and that's not what Europe is doing. In Europe, the middle class pays for those services through much higher taxes than in the US.
to know when you're blatantly makshit up and refusing to provide any evidence..
I already have in another thread to someone who asked. But you're a bigoted, ignorant jerk who can't bring himself to say "I didn't know that, can you please provide me with a reference?"
There are frameworks that lesson the complexity, one of them is used in the e-commerce system I manage that handles over a billion dollars a year in volume.
If we're talking about mature democracies, as I suppose you're doing, then European governments are elected, typically every five years, and therefore they are fully representative of the people who voted for them
The politicians that stand for election are themselves not representative of voters or the wishes of voters; European voters, like US voters, pick the least bad choices among a whole range of bad and unrepresentative choices.
Europe has been under fascism, has been destroyed by it, and there it is known that fascists aren't green aliens coming from Mars, but simply ignorant or gullible normal people whose minds have been poisoned by hate speech
It's absurd for you to imply that Hitler came to power because Germany didn't restrict free speech enough; Germany had strict restrictions on free speech in the Weimar Republic. Hitler came to power because German elites had run the country into the ground in the preceding decades and because the mainstream parties installed him as dictator with the enabling act. And Hitler's genocidal racism wasn't the result of "gullible normal people" and their hate speech, it was based on scientific racism and eugenics developed by American and German scientific elites. And the same toxic stew of government incompetence, illiberalism, and bad science is again brewing in Europe today: Europeans have learned nothing from the horrors they let loose on the world in the 20th century.
You made the claim: the onus is on you t oback it up.
One usually doesn't automatically provide evidence for widely known facts. If you are ignorant of such a fact, you should have asked for more information. When someone else did so, I provided it.
Another made-up fact!
No, just another well-known fact that you happen to be ignorant of. And, again, instead of asking for information, you accuse people without evidence.
I'm amazed you didn't vote for Trump. He sonuds right up your street.
Well, I didn't know what to make of him before the election, but I'm happy with his performance as president so far: he lowered my taxes, he lowered corporate taxes, he's making a decent attempt at enforcing immigration law, he appointed a good SCOTUS judge, he's been slashing regulations, and the economy is doing well. So, I may indeed vote for him in 2020, why wouldn't I?
And in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton has revealed herself to be far worse than I imagined, an incompetent, corrupt, angry psychopath. I think we really dodged a bullet in the 2016 election.
European governments are not representative of public opinion. For example, majorities of Europeans have objected to migration/immigration from Muslim countries for many years, yet mainstream parties are simply refusing to implement meaningful restrictions. Furthermore, statements critical of Islam or Muslims are frequently prosecuted and punished by European governments.
You're free to argue, like European governments, European churches, and European socialists do, that such restrictions on speech are necessary for minority protection. But it remains a fact that such prosecutions of political speech do happen.
Well, here's a newsflash for you: the Chinese are culturally very different from Americans and are willing to tolerate authoritarianism to a much greater degree.
There have also been cases of regimes who purged academia entirely, because they perceived anyone with an education as opposed to their ideology.
True, but many of those educated people were in favor of totalitarian regimes and then are quite surprised when they are carted off to the firing squad.
Beware any ideology that believes in itself so much that it can contemplate purges of any sort.
Beware of any intellectual claiming that they want to protect you from totalitarianism, because most of them are lying.
Slashdot Mirror
Per capita emissions only measure how much carbon people in that country emit per capita. They don't measure either how much carbon emission each person causes, or what the carbon is used for.
So you're saying that if China doubled its population and its per capita CO2 consumption fell by 60%, that would be an improvement for the world? Of course it wouldn't, because total carbon emissions would be higher. Likewise, if per capita carbon emissions were averaged out between Europe and Africa, the world would emit the same amount of carbon, but it would also be much poorer.
The Earth doesn't give a fuck about carbon emissions or climate change either. The Earth is going to be fine no matter what. In fact, if we manage to substantially warm the Earth, it would simply be returning it to its more usual state.
That's actually incorrect too. The US both spends more on public single-payer health insurance and more on public retirement plans than most European nations. But on top of that, it also keeps the taxes for the middle class much lower than European nations.
Yes, which is pretty much all products, since energy and labor are the two major inputs to almost all products.
Read your own reference: our current extinction event doesn't meet the definition of a "mass extinction".
"Played a role" is irrelevant, the question is whether climate change causes mass extinctions. Since there have been many instances of rapid climate change without mass extinctions (or even significant extinctions), it's clear that climate change doesn't cause mass extinctions.
I'm saying that a German car manufacturer can simply move the carbon intensive production steps to some third world country and lower their apparent carbon footprint in Germany, even though there is no actual reduction in carbon emissions associated with building that car.
Countries with a lot of resource extraction and agriculture (like the US) can't play such games to the same degree.
There is no "splitting"; ultimately, it's always the consumer that pays, for everything. But the consumer already fully pays for the carbon that gets emitted as part of the production of their products. And if you impose additional carbon taxes, it really changes very little, since pretty much all prices for all products will go up.
No, emission is simply current emissions, and it may not even capture sources other than fossil fuel burning.
Furthermore, for capture, you need to talk about baselines. The pristine state for Europe is 90% forested, and it's around 35% now; if you use the pristine state for Europe, Europe has a massive carbon and capture debt.
Yes, "longer time" to get to carbon neutrality means "more than 10-20 years". Ditto for India. Those countries could switch completely to renewables for energy generation and they still would be far from carbon neutral.
The article didn't argue that the fast transition would be bad, it argued that the hothouse state itself would be bad.
Really? Where is the evidence for any of those statements?
The Holocene extinction is not known to be a mass extinction and it's not even been proven to be caused by humans. And while "mass extinction" sounds scary, if it is simply humans killing off many species and replacing them with other species, it's not clear that it is even a problem.
For example, the extinction of megafaunas around the world has been attributed to humans, but that's been hard to prove. And while the loss of giant sloth and 10 ft killer birds may be lamentable to modern humans, it isn't really an existential problem for humanity.
You trail off there. If you're trying to say that it's unclear whether such a warmer earth is conducive to human civilization as it presently exists, why not? A warmer, wetter, milder climate seems more conducive to human civilization.
The article claimed that 4-5C higher temperatures per se were an "apocalyptic nightmare" and that is what I was responding to.
Now, you raise a different question, namely whether a rapid rise in global average temperatures by 4-5C would lead to mass extinctions. There have been many such temperature increases in the past, and they were not usually associated with mass extinctions. Mass extinctions are extremely rare and seem to require multiple factors to coincide.
Well, how lucky for them that they have so much hydropower for so few people. Why can't every country be like Norway!
CO2 emissions per capita are a meaningless measure. You need to look at CO2 emissions per $GDP at the very least, but even that isn't really a correct measure. You also need to look at carbon capture, where Europe is doing particularly poorly.
Oh, I'm sorry, with your flurry of insults, non-sequiturs, and ad hominems, I really can't keep track of what happens to raise your heckles right now. So here you go:
Claim: Unfortunately, a lot of the social sciences these days just teaches a view of history in which the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire, and technology are just tools of the male patriarchy to suppress women and Africans
An obvious example that most educated Americans would recognize is Zinn's history textbook, pretty much the de-facto standard, but given your background, it's not surprising that you are unfamiliar with it.
Link: Zinn's influential history textbook has problems, says Stanford education expert
There are plenty of other examples. For example:
Link: Yale ‘decolonizes’ English dept. after complaints studying white authors ‘actively harms’ students
Of course, since you don't actually ever ask questions and instead just launch into personal attacks when statements don't match your personal beliefs, it's hard to address your various confusions.
Really? How do you imagine that worked? People came back from WWI and suddenly became illiterate? My parents grew up between the wars and I emigrated from Europe. Of course European societies were literate and educated. Scientific racism was taught in schools and promoted by government scientists.
The people didn't elect Hitler, they didn't even give the Nazis an absolute majority. Hitler became chancellor of Germany because Hindenburg appointed him. And Hitler became dictator of Germany by the vote of educated parliamentarians, foremost the Christian party under Prelate Kaas. It wasn't "sleazy anti-democratic" politicians who put Hitler into power, it was educated German elites who made the call.
Post-WWII Europe has had military dictatorships, socialist states, genocides, religious wars, and massive conflicts in its colonies. But I suppose by the dismal record of European history, that is, relatively speaking, "peaceful". In any case, Europeans didn't suddenly become peaceful and liberal; instead, Europe didn't have a choice but to be peaceful, with thousands of American nuclear warheads and troops on its territory and the CIA and NSA tracking everything and everybody on the continent.
Europe's problems are not external, they are internal. Europe is an aimless hedonistic bureaucratic superstate with massive social problems and lousy economic performance. Schengen and the Euro are falling apart less than a generation after their introduction; they were wishful thinking, not sustainable good policies. Germany is making itself increasingly dependent on Russia. Putin didn't cause this, but of course, he's taking advantage of it, and who can blame him; it's what European intelligence services used to do to other weak countries.
As for Trump and Americans, why should we care about what happens to Europe these days? Why shouldn't Trump sell out Europe to Putin? What has Europe done for the US lately, if ever?
That's because a lot of those countries simply export their carbon emissions; that is, they switch to domestic industries like service industries that are low carbon and simply move production of carbon intensive goods to other countries. The US is so large and diverse that that's not an option.
In any case, in terms of energy intensity, the US is comparable to Sweden, Belgium, and Australia and about world average; in terms of carbon intensity, the US is far below world average. Calling the US a "carbon pig" given those facts makes little sense.
That so-called "apocalyptic nightmare" is actually the warm, wet, and mild conditions that existed through most of the past 50 million years, the climate that led to the spectacular success of mammals and primates. Not only is it "hospitable" to human life, it is more hospitable than the cold and dry climate we have had over the last million years and that climate activists want to perpetuate.
Short of global thermonuclear war, there is nothing we can do over the next 10-20 years that will have any appreciable impact on long term climate: there is no conceivable political or economic way that China, India, or African nations would agree to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, developed nations are already eliminating dependence on fossil fuels as fast as possible for economic reasons.
Claim: Social science departments at universities like Yale have explicitly defined themselves as institutions for political change, not institutions concerned with seeking truth.
LInk: About SBS The Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) Department aims to understand and improve health equity and social justice, both domestically and globally.
Link: The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program empowers students to transform the world. Students acquire the knowledge and skills to prepare them as innovators, scholars and activists; to cultivate them as leaders in feminist and social justice projects, in journalism and digital media, in law and public policy, and in community organizing and corporate enterprise.
Claim: Hillary laughed about killing people.
Link: We came, we saw, he died
By being unfamiliar with such basic facts and denying them as "blatant bullshit", you just keep demonstrating that you are completely unfamiliar with modern US society.
We're talking about reduction of income inequality in Europe and that's not what Europe is doing. In Europe, the middle class pays for those services through much higher taxes than in the US.
I already have in another thread to someone who asked. But you're a bigoted, ignorant jerk who can't bring himself to say "I didn't know that, can you please provide me with a reference?"
You have no idea what tools I know.
Sure you do.
The politicians that stand for election are themselves not representative of voters or the wishes of voters; European voters, like US voters, pick the least bad choices among a whole range of bad and unrepresentative choices.
It's absurd for you to imply that Hitler came to power because Germany didn't restrict free speech enough; Germany had strict restrictions on free speech in the Weimar Republic. Hitler came to power because German elites had run the country into the ground in the preceding decades and because the mainstream parties installed him as dictator with the enabling act. And Hitler's genocidal racism wasn't the result of "gullible normal people" and their hate speech, it was based on scientific racism and eugenics developed by American and German scientific elites. And the same toxic stew of government incompetence, illiberalism, and bad science is again brewing in Europe today: Europeans have learned nothing from the horrors they let loose on the world in the 20th century.
One usually doesn't automatically provide evidence for widely known facts. If you are ignorant of such a fact, you should have asked for more information. When someone else did so, I provided it.
No, just another well-known fact that you happen to be ignorant of. And, again, instead of asking for information, you accuse people without evidence.
Well, I didn't know what to make of him before the election, but I'm happy with his performance as president so far: he lowered my taxes, he lowered corporate taxes, he's making a decent attempt at enforcing immigration law, he appointed a good SCOTUS judge, he's been slashing regulations, and the economy is doing well. So, I may indeed vote for him in 2020, why wouldn't I?
And in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton has revealed herself to be far worse than I imagined, an incompetent, corrupt, angry psychopath. I think we really dodged a bullet in the 2016 election.
European governments are not representative of public opinion. For example, majorities of Europeans have objected to migration/immigration from Muslim countries for many years, yet mainstream parties are simply refusing to implement meaningful restrictions. Furthermore, statements critical of Islam or Muslims are frequently prosecuted and punished by European governments.
You're free to argue, like European governments, European churches, and European socialists do, that such restrictions on speech are necessary for minority protection. But it remains a fact that such prosecutions of political speech do happen.
Well, here's a newsflash for you: the Chinese are culturally very different from Americans and are willing to tolerate authoritarianism to a much greater degree.
True, but many of those educated people were in favor of totalitarian regimes and then are quite surprised when they are carted off to the firing squad.
Beware of any intellectual claiming that they want to protect you from totalitarianism, because most of them are lying.