There is about as strong scientific consensus on human influenced climate change leading to drastic consequenses as there is for evolution.
No, there isn't. There's a decent consensus that global warming is partly man-made, but that's a far cry from your assertion that it leads to drastic consequences or the support that evolution has. To the contrary, all this debate is because there isn't such a consensus.
And I find it enlightening how the argument is based on consensus, not on evidence. Evolution is supported because it has a vast amount of evidence supporting the theory. "Climate change" is supported because there's a substantial funding bias towards research that gives lip service to such issues.
Re:Got that finger pointed the wrong way...
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So again, I suggest you head to the ammo box sooner rather than later.
As an aside, when I see babble like this in response to mere disagreement, I see that as evidence of diseased thinking.
I disagree with the assertion that the Baby Boomer generation somehow has an unusually large share of guilt for what's going on now. So that somehow means I should be stocking up on ammo? No logic or reason can get you to that conclusion. Either you've been poisoned by some particularly irrational memes or you have something biologically wrong with your brain. I have nothing to do with either one.
Of course, just the fact that someone actually does blame things on the members of some nebulous generation (especially when the members of that generation behave no differently than anyone else and in fact are indistinguishable from anyone else except when you happen to know their age) is inherently irrational, so I guess I am selecting for this sort of thinking.
We want to slow climate change so that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people don't die as a result of a depleted planet by century's end.
This is yet another non sequitur. Climate change has nothing to do with resource depletion.
Also, it's worth mentioning that hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths aren't much compared to the deaths from "poverty, corruption, desertification, disease, overpopulation".
Excepting only the last, our best projections expect climate change to exacerbate each of the problems you list.
But not by much. Further, if you deal with those problems, you also eliminate most of the harm that climate change is supposed to do. Such as responsive and effective disaster response greatly reduces the effects of the "extreme weather" harm that is supposed to be an aspect of climate change.
I really don't understand why you have such a massive emotional investment in ignoring our best available science?
Given that the world population is a concern with regards to climate change, it is not in the best interests of those who want to slow climate change to stop malaria.
That's an ignorant point of view. The problem is that malaria affects far more people than it kills. Glancing at Wikipedia, I see 200 million cases of malaria each year and only 1 million deaths each year. Further, a number of those infections are chronic, meaning they'll reoccur over many years, crippling the person each time they manifest. A disease which kills a small number of people, but harms 3% of the world's population each year is not an ally of population control advocates. It merely makes the overpopulation situation worse by creating a considerable relatively unproductive subgroup who is frequently weakened by the effects of the disease.
Malaria also increases the incentive in countries with endemic malaria to have more children so more children survive and can provide for the parents.
Those real problems you list are important, but so is climate change.
Far more important than climate change. Let's keep perspective here.
As to the rest of your post, why should we squander a vast amount of our wealth and infrastructure on climate change while ignoring these more important problems? My view is that climate change mitigation simply is not worth doing at the current price. The opportunity costs of it are an indication of the terrible human cost that it has.
In trying to reduce greenhouse gasses, they'll increase the efficiency of energy production, distribution, and the end use of it.
The thing is that isn't our highest priority. Why are we doing that at the expense of our bigger problems, for example?
What about it? We move all the time. It's not that expensive.
Note that you cannot sell your land/property to pay for moving. it is a total loss.
Well, don't hold it for a century after you move out then. Why storms and such will occasionally destroy land (such as cutting a large channel through former beach property), most such degradation is over decades or centuries. At that point, it's not much of a factor.
Folks on independent island archipelagos such as Togo or Micronesia can move to any country that has room to take them which at my last count stands at Zero.
They can move to Australia, New Zealand, or the US. All three have plenty of room and a history of taking in people from the Pacific Islands.
Re:Got that finger pointed the wrong way...
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That's nice, but whether there are other criminals out there doesn't prove or disprove the charges laid against you.
Well, I don't hear you saying those others are criminals too. I just hear the same cliched and uninformed rant about Baby Boomers. When one group is a bunch of criminals and another nearly identical group which does the same thing under the same circumstances is not, then that indicates partiality or bias, a grievous flaw in any ideal of justice or law.
For example, there's a huge accumulation of debt by current young adults.
That's personal debt, not generational debt.
It isn't. There are two reasons why. First, much of that is educational debt which is heavily subsidized by the rest of society. Second, there's a very good chance that much of that debt can't be paid back. In which case, it becomes everyone else's problem.
No, both are equally easy. You don't have to start a government that displaces one or more current governments, the same way you don't have to start a business with the requirement that you'll topple existing (big) businesses. Start small on the local level. That's what the Tea Party does. The requirements for a US citizen to enter politics is relatively low.
In my view, to say that starting a government is hard(er than starting a business) in the United States is the same as saying the US is no longer the US as intended by the Founding Fathers. Starting a government is supposed to be easy for citizens so they can retain control. If you really believe starting a government is hard today, I suggest you get off the soap box, ignore the ballot or jury box, and jump to the ammo box and take back your country. Pointing fingers at whether it's Boomers or young people screwing things up will do you little good.
I'll just note that my statement remains correct no matter what "view" you choose to entertain. Getting elected is not starting a new government. Also, two party dynamics has been around since the first decade of the US under its current constitution. That's a huge obstacle to national level third parties.
Actually, he did offer an alternative: "repeal the Boomer generation". It's not an alternative you may like, and depending on how literal you take the statement it is impractical, but he did offer an alternative.
Was that supposed to be a serious argument? A non sequitur is not merely impractical. It simply doesn't make sense. People aren't something you can repeal or revoke with laws.
I can see a not-so-literal interpretation of that possible though, simply because of attrition. It's a little thing called old age. Nature will "repeal" the Boomers in time.
Unless, of course, longevity improvements trump Nature. I don't think it's likely, but one should remember that there is the possibility of better outcomes than waiting for a generation of unfairly scapegoated people to die.
Though if younger generations are just as ignorant as you said, you'll still be screwed. So again, I suggest you head to the ammo box sooner rather than later.
Alternately, I can communicate with those ignorant masses like I'm with you. And it doesn't require killing anyone.
Dim as only a Republican oil lamp can be. Yes we know all major coastal cities have only a fifty life span, at the end of that time they are abandoned and everyone relocates to one of the spare earth coast lines. Proportional king tides and storm surges are also nothing to worry about, same for a rising water table bringing salts closer to the surface where they can contaminate fresh water supplies and poison salt intolerant vegetation.
The grown ups here are speaking of an 18 inch sea level rise over 50 years. While that might cause some degree of increased harm from storm surges or a bit of salt water intrusion into water tables, it's not going to cause us to abandon cities. Nor are we leaving future generations to die since an 18 inch sea level rise isn't much.
most people take pride in trying to leave the world a better place than what they got, why, because humanity that's why. Those that don't, well, psychopath, that's why.
If you're really interested in all that, then advocating tackling real problems like poverty, corruption, desertification, disease, overpopulation, etc. As I understand it, about a million people die from malaria each year. Ending that would save 50 million or so people over the next fifty years (as well as helping hundreds of millions by ending chronic malaria) and have a much more profound positive effect than any climate change mitigate proposed to date (most which are more harmful than merely doing nothing about climate change).
You speak of leaving the world a better place. Step one towards that would be abandoning the climate change hysteria. Start by not making the world a worse place.
In addition, no, I would not consider flooding by rising sea levels to be catastrophic - especially given the time frame it happens over (centuries). One can merely move to higher ground. There is a lot of higher ground throughout the world. And if for some reason, you want to stay in the same place, then you can build your own higher ground on the spot.
If a lot of people wandered into the ocean at a normal beach during low tide and stayed put and drowned as the tide moved in, we probably would consider that a "catastrophe", but we wouldn't blame those deaths on the tide.
Flooding caused by rising sea levels isn't catastrophic enough for you?
Sure, the story talked about that. But what caught my eyes was "has documented a sea level rise of 9 inches in the last century, and officials expect that to double over the next 50 years". It's a typical climate change non-story.
What's this about "catastrophic climate change"? Did someone finally come up with some evidence to support that claim? Of course not. It's just an AC repeating the party talking points about psychopath CEO types.
Re:Got that finger pointed the wrong way...
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The thing I think you're missing here is that every generation before and after the Boomers does the same thing. For example, there's a huge accumulation of debt by current young adults. They have their own "wars" (such as the war on global warming or the war on military conscription, a peculiar US college-based hysteria). They happen to be just as profoundly ignorant (like not having a clue why the value of labor is going down today).
Let's look at a couple of comments you made to illustrate this point.
First, my son will have his entire life tracked and monitored by government and business (which are basically the same things). And when the fact that they're actually doing these things comes to light...boomers ain't care. "Just so long as they're not listening to me talk to my sister!" Which of course they are. But the boomers are either too ignorant of technology to understand why having your geolocation data, call history, and email scanned and stored forever is a bad thing, or they understand it's bad, but since it's aimed at their kids and grandkids more than they, they just don't care.
First, it's not true. Boomers aren't any more inclined to desire this than anyone else. Second, you conflate government and business. They are different. For example, you can start a business easily. There's low barrier to entry for businesses to the point that anyone can start one. Starting a government is much harder, especially, if it is to displace one or more current governments. They employ people which helps with that job thing you seem to care about. Businesses are also useful political counterweights to government. You know, the organizations that have the actual power and are actually doing very intrusive spying on their citizens?
Second... My father is about one of the best men you could ever hope to know. Perfectly honest, a pillar of responsibility. I was complaining about how the H1-B visa program is a scam to force down wages for high-tech workers such as myself. That the STEM shortage is made up, and it's simply that the richest corporations in America don't want to pay American wages so they've re-invented indentured servitude. And he said to me, "well, as a stock holder, that's good news to me!" I just looked at him with a wide-eyed stare. Even my father, the best of the boomers...is completely fine with suppressing the wages of an entire generation so he can make a couple extra bucks off his stock holdings.
The thing you should be asking here is how could it be different? "American wages" are going down and will continue to go down. That's because in a lot of industries there's not much more value to employing US workers over a large supply of far cheaper workers in other countries. Your father adapted to that reality by owning capital (which isn't affected by this decline in labor pricing) rather than merely working for less. You're just complaining without offering an alternative.
The worst case scenario was that only 1 in 5 nukes would reach their targets and detonate properly. Accordingly, in an all out preemptive attack, you assign 5 warheads for every target in order to assure success. Hence, destroy the world 5 times over.
Except that the world is much more than just a few military targets in the US or the USSR. If your intent is to destroy infrastructure, then there were far more nukes than necessary. If your intent was to destroy the human race with raw nuclear force, well, you need more nukes.
Agreed that most nukes do not compare to Krakatoa or a decent sized meteor, but with entire arsenals going off at once (tens of thousands of devices) there is good reason for a lot of dust to be kicked into the atmosphere.
My point is that the larger volcanic eruptions of history dump a lot of volcanic ash and sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere - on the order of cubic kilometers of the former and millions of tons of the latter. Sure, the detonation of tens of thousands of warheads over urban areas will result in a considerable injection of soot into the upper atmosphere from the many firestorms.
The point is we've seen similar effects to a nuclear winter just in human history and they just aren't that bad. I think they're portrayed as that bad because there's a group of people with a vested interest in exaggerating the harm of nuclear war. I'm not advocating for nuclear war, but I think it's worth noting here that not everyone will adhere to this dogmatic belief of nuclear war and some of those people and countries will have and perhaps will use nuclear weapons of their own. This could potentially create a very lethal blindness towards someone's willingness to use nuclear weapons.
And it will continue to be a 2 player game as long as Russia and the US maintain a nuclear arsenal that is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than that of any other nuclear power.
Well, there's the out. There's no particular reason to expect China's nuclear arsenal to remain that small.
Even if electric cars are ZERO percent more efficient today, heck even if they are NEGATIVE today, they are still an investment in the future and the way forward. I don't get how people can't see this. Centralization always drives efficiency.
Two things to note. First, the investment can occur later. Second, centralization doesn't always drive efficiency. There are plenty of examples where the more centralized solution is a poorer one. For example, failure modes of centralized infrastructure tends to be much more destructive than failure modes of more decentralized infrastructure because more stuff is affected and the larger size of failures makes it harder to mitigate and repair when a failure occurs.
Re:Got that finger pointed the wrong way...
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd repeal the Baby Boomer generation.
Does anyone here aside from me see the profound stupidity in blaming a group of people because of when they lived. Who would have done better?
Unfortunately many online news papers have started to have 'opinion posts' or 'writer blogs' which completely seem to bypass any kind of editorial guidelines, fact checking etc and allow writers to post their opinions, often unsubstantiated, on anything seemingly as a news item.
So what? The point of an opinion post is to communicate an opinion, which despite your complaints has long been one of the useful functions of newspapers. Lack of editing, logical fallacies, not being based on actual fact, and similar errors are great warning signs.
whilst letting them dodge any kind of journalistic Codes of Ethics.
And how would that "Code" apply to an opinion writer's opinions? It's clear that the work in question is an opinion. Any such Code is satisfied at that point.
Ok, so you mention the usual three problems of nuclear war, the tremendous initial blast effect, fallout, and nuclear winter. For people who aren't near a target, who shield themselves from the effects of fallout, and who happen to have a decent food supply to last through the nuclear winter (which pretty much describes most rural people in the developed world), then they survive.
And only a small fraction of those weapons would need to be detonated to invoke a nuclear winter
It's like you're providing the stereotype that I was complaining about all along. Again, what is the point of greatly exaggerating the power of nuclear weapons? It's worth noting here that natural sources of particulates have to be pretty massive to have a noticeable effect on weather and climate. A full blown nuclear war with all the nukes we've ever had just isn't that big in comparison to say the eruption of Mount Tambora.
I'm no naive hippy and I am ok with paying for deterrence. But it's clear we could cut our stock in half tomorrow with no reduction in deterrence. An arsenal that is capable of destroying the entire planet is in no way inferior to one that would be capable of destroying the planet a dozen times. It just costs less.
No such arsenal has ever existed that could do that once, much less a dozen times. Instead, I think that Russia's cited behavior (basically stonewalling to get Obama to unilaterally cut nukes) indicates that they think that they'll get a lot of mileage from further reductions in the US arsenal and similarly would lose a lot of capability from cutting their own arsenals.
Because people need to eat. Do I need to go further?
No, I think you need to come up with a real argument instead. Your statements are a good example of the irrational nonsense that keeps coming up. Why in the world would you think that the observation that people need food is remotely relevant? Food just isn't that expensive. Nor is shelter for that matter.
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It only takes one success.
Brass or simple ceramics probably would well enough and they're even cheaper.
There is about as strong scientific consensus on human influenced climate change leading to drastic consequenses as there is for evolution.
No, there isn't. There's a decent consensus that global warming is partly man-made, but that's a far cry from your assertion that it leads to drastic consequences or the support that evolution has. To the contrary, all this debate is because there isn't such a consensus.
And I find it enlightening how the argument is based on consensus, not on evidence. Evolution is supported because it has a vast amount of evidence supporting the theory. "Climate change" is supported because there's a substantial funding bias towards research that gives lip service to such issues.
So again, I suggest you head to the ammo box sooner rather than later.
As an aside, when I see babble like this in response to mere disagreement, I see that as evidence of diseased thinking.
I disagree with the assertion that the Baby Boomer generation somehow has an unusually large share of guilt for what's going on now. So that somehow means I should be stocking up on ammo? No logic or reason can get you to that conclusion. Either you've been poisoned by some particularly irrational memes or you have something biologically wrong with your brain. I have nothing to do with either one.
Of course, just the fact that someone actually does blame things on the members of some nebulous generation (especially when the members of that generation behave no differently than anyone else and in fact are indistinguishable from anyone else except when you happen to know their age) is inherently irrational, so I guess I am selecting for this sort of thinking.
And why should we harm the future of humanity for the special interests of Bangladesh?
It takes a special kind of stupid to not believe that eighteen inches of sea level rise will cause significant effects.
Whatever. I just see this as another example of the irrational hysteria that surrounds "climate change".
Note that ice on land is still melting faster than expected.
I have to disagree. The people who expect ice to melt faster are making that claim. Nobody else is.
That means sea level rising faster than expected.
Except that we don't actually see this happening, I note.
But I would appreciate it if you would move to The Keys.
I'm not interested in living there. This irrational request doesn't reflect well on you.
We want to slow climate change so that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people don't die as a result of a depleted planet by century's end.
This is yet another non sequitur. Climate change has nothing to do with resource depletion.
Also, it's worth mentioning that hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths aren't much compared to the deaths from "poverty, corruption, desertification, disease, overpopulation".
Excepting only the last, our best projections expect climate change to exacerbate each of the problems you list.
But not by much. Further, if you deal with those problems, you also eliminate most of the harm that climate change is supposed to do. Such as responsive and effective disaster response greatly reduces the effects of the "extreme weather" harm that is supposed to be an aspect of climate change.
I really don't understand why you have such a massive emotional investment in ignoring our best available science?
The best available science is crap. That's why.
Given that the world population is a concern with regards to climate change, it is not in the best interests of those who want to slow climate change to stop malaria.
That's an ignorant point of view. The problem is that malaria affects far more people than it kills. Glancing at Wikipedia, I see 200 million cases of malaria each year and only 1 million deaths each year. Further, a number of those infections are chronic, meaning they'll reoccur over many years, crippling the person each time they manifest. A disease which kills a small number of people, but harms 3% of the world's population each year is not an ally of population control advocates. It merely makes the overpopulation situation worse by creating a considerable relatively unproductive subgroup who is frequently weakened by the effects of the disease.
Malaria also increases the incentive in countries with endemic malaria to have more children so more children survive and can provide for the parents.
Those real problems you list are important, but so is climate change.
Far more important than climate change. Let's keep perspective here.
As to the rest of your post, why should we squander a vast amount of our wealth and infrastructure on climate change while ignoring these more important problems? My view is that climate change mitigation simply is not worth doing at the current price. The opportunity costs of it are an indication of the terrible human cost that it has.
In trying to reduce greenhouse gasses, they'll increase the efficiency of energy production, distribution, and the end use of it.
The thing is that isn't our highest priority. Why are we doing that at the expense of our bigger problems, for example?
What about the cost of moving?
What about it? We move all the time. It's not that expensive.
Note that you cannot sell your land/property to pay for moving. it is a total loss.
Well, don't hold it for a century after you move out then. Why storms and such will occasionally destroy land (such as cutting a large channel through former beach property), most such degradation is over decades or centuries. At that point, it's not much of a factor.
Folks on independent island archipelagos such as Togo or Micronesia can move to any country that has room to take them which at my last count stands at Zero.
They can move to Australia, New Zealand, or the US. All three have plenty of room and a history of taking in people from the Pacific Islands.
That's nice, but whether there are other criminals out there doesn't prove or disprove the charges laid against you.
Well, I don't hear you saying those others are criminals too. I just hear the same cliched and uninformed rant about Baby Boomers. When one group is a bunch of criminals and another nearly identical group which does the same thing under the same circumstances is not, then that indicates partiality or bias, a grievous flaw in any ideal of justice or law.
For example, there's a huge accumulation of debt by current young adults.
That's personal debt, not generational debt.
It isn't. There are two reasons why. First, much of that is educational debt which is heavily subsidized by the rest of society. Second, there's a very good chance that much of that debt can't be paid back. In which case, it becomes everyone else's problem.
No, both are equally easy. You don't have to start a government that displaces one or more current governments, the same way you don't have to start a business with the requirement that you'll topple existing (big) businesses. Start small on the local level. That's what the Tea Party does. The requirements for a US citizen to enter politics is relatively low.
In my view, to say that starting a government is hard(er than starting a business) in the United States is the same as saying the US is no longer the US as intended by the Founding Fathers. Starting a government is supposed to be easy for citizens so they can retain control. If you really believe starting a government is hard today, I suggest you get off the soap box, ignore the ballot or jury box, and jump to the ammo box and take back your country. Pointing fingers at whether it's Boomers or young people screwing things up will do you little good.
I'll just note that my statement remains correct no matter what "view" you choose to entertain. Getting elected is not starting a new government. Also, two party dynamics has been around since the first decade of the US under its current constitution. That's a huge obstacle to national level third parties.
Actually, he did offer an alternative: "repeal the Boomer generation". It's not an alternative you may like, and depending on how literal you take the statement it is impractical, but he did offer an alternative.
Was that supposed to be a serious argument? A non sequitur is not merely impractical. It simply doesn't make sense. People aren't something you can repeal or revoke with laws.
I can see a not-so-literal interpretation of that possible though, simply because of attrition. It's a little thing called old age. Nature will "repeal" the Boomers in time.
Unless, of course, longevity improvements trump Nature. I don't think it's likely, but one should remember that there is the possibility of better outcomes than waiting for a generation of unfairly scapegoated people to die.
Though if younger generations are just as ignorant as you said, you'll still be screwed. So again, I suggest you head to the ammo box sooner rather than later.
Alternately, I can communicate with those ignorant masses like I'm with you. And it doesn't require killing anyone.
Dim as only a Republican oil lamp can be. Yes we know all major coastal cities have only a fifty life span, at the end of that time they are abandoned and everyone relocates to one of the spare earth coast lines. Proportional king tides and storm surges are also nothing to worry about, same for a rising water table bringing salts closer to the surface where they can contaminate fresh water supplies and poison salt intolerant vegetation.
The grown ups here are speaking of an 18 inch sea level rise over 50 years. While that might cause some degree of increased harm from storm surges or a bit of salt water intrusion into water tables, it's not going to cause us to abandon cities. Nor are we leaving future generations to die since an 18 inch sea level rise isn't much.
most people take pride in trying to leave the world a better place than what they got, why, because humanity that's why. Those that don't, well, psychopath, that's why.
If you're really interested in all that, then advocating tackling real problems like poverty, corruption, desertification, disease, overpopulation, etc. As I understand it, about a million people die from malaria each year. Ending that would save 50 million or so people over the next fifty years (as well as helping hundreds of millions by ending chronic malaria) and have a much more profound positive effect than any climate change mitigate proposed to date (most which are more harmful than merely doing nothing about climate change).
You speak of leaving the world a better place. Step one towards that would be abandoning the climate change hysteria. Start by not making the world a worse place.
In addition, no, I would not consider flooding by rising sea levels to be catastrophic - especially given the time frame it happens over (centuries). One can merely move to higher ground. There is a lot of higher ground throughout the world. And if for some reason, you want to stay in the same place, then you can build your own higher ground on the spot.
If a lot of people wandered into the ocean at a normal beach during low tide and stayed put and drowned as the tide moved in, we probably would consider that a "catastrophe", but we wouldn't blame those deaths on the tide.
Flooding caused by rising sea levels isn't catastrophic enough for you?
Sure, the story talked about that. But what caught my eyes was "has documented a sea level rise of 9 inches in the last century, and officials expect that to double over the next 50 years". It's a typical climate change non-story.
What's this about "catastrophic climate change"? Did someone finally come up with some evidence to support that claim? Of course not. It's just an AC repeating the party talking points about psychopath CEO types.
Let's look at a couple of comments you made to illustrate this point.
First, my son will have his entire life tracked and monitored by government and business (which are basically the same things). And when the fact that they're actually doing these things comes to light...boomers ain't care. "Just so long as they're not listening to me talk to my sister!" Which of course they are. But the boomers are either too ignorant of technology to understand why having your geolocation data, call history, and email scanned and stored forever is a bad thing, or they understand it's bad, but since it's aimed at their kids and grandkids more than they, they just don't care.
First, it's not true. Boomers aren't any more inclined to desire this than anyone else. Second, you conflate government and business. They are different. For example, you can start a business easily. There's low barrier to entry for businesses to the point that anyone can start one. Starting a government is much harder, especially, if it is to displace one or more current governments. They employ people which helps with that job thing you seem to care about. Businesses are also useful political counterweights to government. You know, the organizations that have the actual power and are actually doing very intrusive spying on their citizens?
Second... My father is about one of the best men you could ever hope to know. Perfectly honest, a pillar of responsibility. I was complaining about how the H1-B visa program is a scam to force down wages for high-tech workers such as myself. That the STEM shortage is made up, and it's simply that the richest corporations in America don't want to pay American wages so they've re-invented indentured servitude. And he said to me, "well, as a stock holder, that's good news to me!" I just looked at him with a wide-eyed stare. Even my father, the best of the boomers...is completely fine with suppressing the wages of an entire generation so he can make a couple extra bucks off his stock holdings.
The thing you should be asking here is how could it be different? "American wages" are going down and will continue to go down. That's because in a lot of industries there's not much more value to employing US workers over a large supply of far cheaper workers in other countries. Your father adapted to that reality by owning capital (which isn't affected by this decline in labor pricing) rather than merely working for less. You're just complaining without offering an alternative.
The worst case scenario was that only 1 in 5 nukes would reach their targets and detonate properly. Accordingly, in an all out preemptive attack, you assign 5 warheads for every target in order to assure success. Hence, destroy the world 5 times over.
Except that the world is much more than just a few military targets in the US or the USSR. If your intent is to destroy infrastructure, then there were far more nukes than necessary. If your intent was to destroy the human race with raw nuclear force, well, you need more nukes.
Agreed that most nukes do not compare to Krakatoa or a decent sized meteor, but with entire arsenals going off at once (tens of thousands of devices) there is good reason for a lot of dust to be kicked into the atmosphere.
My point is that the larger volcanic eruptions of history dump a lot of volcanic ash and sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere - on the order of cubic kilometers of the former and millions of tons of the latter. Sure, the detonation of tens of thousands of warheads over urban areas will result in a considerable injection of soot into the upper atmosphere from the many firestorms.
The point is we've seen similar effects to a nuclear winter just in human history and they just aren't that bad. I think they're portrayed as that bad because there's a group of people with a vested interest in exaggerating the harm of nuclear war. I'm not advocating for nuclear war, but I think it's worth noting here that not everyone will adhere to this dogmatic belief of nuclear war and some of those people and countries will have and perhaps will use nuclear weapons of their own. This could potentially create a very lethal blindness towards someone's willingness to use nuclear weapons.
And it will continue to be a 2 player game as long as Russia and the US maintain a nuclear arsenal that is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than that of any other nuclear power.
Well, there's the out. There's no particular reason to expect China's nuclear arsenal to remain that small.
Even if electric cars are ZERO percent more efficient today, heck even if they are NEGATIVE today, they are still an investment in the future and the way forward. I don't get how people can't see this. Centralization always drives efficiency.
Two things to note. First, the investment can occur later. Second, centralization doesn't always drive efficiency. There are plenty of examples where the more centralized solution is a poorer one. For example, failure modes of centralized infrastructure tends to be much more destructive than failure modes of more decentralized infrastructure because more stuff is affected and the larger size of failures makes it harder to mitigate and repair when a failure occurs.
I'd repeal the Baby Boomer generation.
Does anyone here aside from me see the profound stupidity in blaming a group of people because of when they lived. Who would have done better?
Unfortunately many online news papers have started to have 'opinion posts' or 'writer blogs' which completely seem to bypass any kind of editorial guidelines, fact checking etc and allow writers to post their opinions, often unsubstantiated, on anything seemingly as a news item.
So what? The point of an opinion post is to communicate an opinion, which despite your complaints has long been one of the useful functions of newspapers. Lack of editing, logical fallacies, not being based on actual fact, and similar errors are great warning signs.
whilst letting them dodge any kind of journalistic Codes of Ethics.
And how would that "Code" apply to an opinion writer's opinions? It's clear that the work in question is an opinion. Any such Code is satisfied at that point.
And only a small fraction of those weapons would need to be detonated to invoke a nuclear winter
It's like you're providing the stereotype that I was complaining about all along. Again, what is the point of greatly exaggerating the power of nuclear weapons? It's worth noting here that natural sources of particulates have to be pretty massive to have a noticeable effect on weather and climate. A full blown nuclear war with all the nukes we've ever had just isn't that big in comparison to say the eruption of Mount Tambora.
I'm no naive hippy and I am ok with paying for deterrence. But it's clear we could cut our stock in half tomorrow with no reduction in deterrence. An arsenal that is capable of destroying the entire planet is in no way inferior to one that would be capable of destroying the planet a dozen times. It just costs less.
No such arsenal has ever existed that could do that once, much less a dozen times. Instead, I think that Russia's cited behavior (basically stonewalling to get Obama to unilaterally cut nukes) indicates that they think that they'll get a lot of mileage from further reductions in the US arsenal and similarly would lose a lot of capability from cutting their own arsenals.
Because people need to eat. Do I need to go further?
No, I think you need to come up with a real argument instead. Your statements are a good example of the irrational nonsense that keeps coming up. Why in the world would you think that the observation that people need food is remotely relevant? Food just isn't that expensive. Nor is shelter for that matter.