human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
VIEWED: 60750
PAGE 70 of 111
Second's just fine with wasting energy if you're rich or it's in the name of war.
It's candles for you though, and you'll eat bugs and like it.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Speaking to the cause of war: Confederate slave owners worried about not having slaves to pick cotton, but somehow the descendants of Confederates got along without slaves. Now they feel threatened enough to start another war because of their worries about not having gasoline for their cars, but somehow the descendants of the descendants will get along without gasoline (the kind of gasoline made from crude oil).
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Second's just fine with wasting energy if you're rich or it's in the name of war.
It's candles for you though, and you'll eat bugs and like it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics
By Christopher Ketcham | Oct 29, 2023
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people. This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting — is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.
Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.
His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.
In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”
Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”
In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Speaking to the cause of war: Confederate slave owners worried about not having slaves to pick cotton, but somehow the descendants of Confederates got along without slaves. Now they feel threatened enough to start another war because of their worries about not having gasoline for their cars, but somehow the descendants of the descendants will get along without gasoline (the kind of gasoline made from crude oil).
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Second's just fine with wasting energy if you're rich or it's in the name of war.
It's candles for you though, and you'll eat bugs and like it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
God, that's your THIRD favorite topic, innit??? Can you POSSIBLY stick to the topic w/o mentioning Russia, Trump, or the Confederacy???
UNLIKE YOU, I happen to think climate change- and environmental degradation in general- is a REAL issue, not to be muddied with pointless virtue-sigalling, fundamentally conflicted rhetoric, and emotional hobby-horses.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Climate Change Policy Contradictions
Countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things. A report released by the United Nations and several climate organizations this week found that governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned.
https://productiongap.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PGR2023_web.pdf
In total, countries that hold the world’s oil, gas, and coal deposits still plan to produce 69 percent more fossil fuels than is compatible with keeping warming under 2 degrees Celsius, the riskier cousin to the 1.5-degree-Celsius goal each of those countries pledged to aim for. Many experts now consider that goal impossible, because of global reluctance to phase out fossil fuels. One expert who worked on the UN report called this “insanity,” a “climate disaster of our own making.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/08/insanity-petrostat
es-planning-huge-expansion-of-fossil-fuels-says-un-report
The scientist James Hansen, famous for his early warnings about climate change, suggested in a paper released last week with a suite of high-level colleagues that warming is accelerating more rapidly than is presently understood: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree-Celsius in the 2020s.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgad008
The report sets out starkly the fundamental conflict driving the climate crisis: fossil fuel burning must rapidly be cut down to zero, yet petrostates and companies intend to keep on making trillions of dollars a year by increasing production.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/revealed-oil-secto
rs-staggering-profits-last-50-years
In the places still extracting and using the most fossil fuels, like the U.S., leaders aren't yet paying a political price for promoting clean energy and pursuing climate action while simultaneously promoting and pursuing policies that have the exact opposite ends. But at some point, that internal contradiction must become so obvious to the average citizen, or so untenable in the face of the damage it has done, that one way or another it collapses. And only when it does will the world have a real chance at closing off the widening gyre of loss that is coming for us.
Oddly enough, the difference between the world we have and the one we could have is buried in two contrasting modeling reports by two of the world’s most important energy-information organizations. Whereas the International Energy Agency projected that we’d hit peak fossil-fuel use in 2030, the U.S. Energy Information Administration came to a very different conclusion: It saw demand for fossil fuels rising through at least 2050.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/narrative/index.php?=all-open
The difference between the two agency’s models is how they treat government policy. “It’s important to understand we are modeling exactly what’s on the books as it is written,” Michelle Bowman, a senior renewables analyst at the U.S. EIA, told me. If a policy is set to expire, the U.S. EIA treats it as expiring. It doesn’t take into account policies that countries have talked about but have had yet to implement. The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/11/climate-change-pol
icies-contradictions/675967/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Climate Change Policy Contradictions
Countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things. A report released by the United Nations and several climate organizations this week found that governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned.
https://productiongap.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PGR2023_web.pdf
It turns out that we don't have any viable alternatives to the sources we've been using and people are only willing to pay much higher prices for things like these when the economy is good.
Who could have seen any of this coming?
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:People like you base everything on price. They would only stop burning fossil fuels if stopping is cheaper than continuing to burn. Burning up the World? They don't care because it is all a hoax as they have been told many times by the people who sell fossil fuel and by Trump. They don't care about anything beyond price and that is why, ironically, they struggle and strain to have enough money. From my decades of experience with such people, they will never be able to make the connection between their enduring difficulties in life and their self-sabotaging ideas about how to live.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It turns out that we don't have any viable alternatives to the sources we've been using and people are only willing to pay much higher prices for things like these when the economy is good.
Who could have seen any of this coming?
It is the "nothing matters" attitude of Trumptards. To them, global warming and the rising tide of authoritarianism are nothing. Loss and misery are just inevitable parts of existence, so why do anything? Instead, buy the cheapest energy since nothing matters.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Texas Board of Education opposes depiction of climate change, evolution in new science textbooks
By Edward McKinley, Austin Bureau | Nov. 14, 2023 6:42 p.m.
The Republican-led State Board of Education preliminarily rejected several new science textbooks on Tuesday over their presentation of climate change and evolution, a sign the books may be watered down before a final vote later this week.
Publishers were allowed until Wednesday to make changes that address criticism from board members, such as altering the depiction of the oil and gas industry.
“(The book) emphasizes the negative effect of fossil fuels. If that's what's presented to our children, that would have a negative effect on our state’s GDP,” board member Julie Pickren, R-Pearland, said about one of the textbooks. “It is factually inaccurate to the way that the negative effects of fossil fuels are presented because it is stated as fact and it is theory.”
Pickren said the book should include information about the harms of Chinese lithium mines, which are part of the supply chain for electric vehicles, to balance out the information highlighting fossil fuels' impact on global warming.
In discussions over another book by the publisher Edusmart, Member Aaron Kinsey, R-Midland, said he felt its photos “are encouraging a negative view” of the oil and gas industry.
“The selection of certain images can make things appear worse than they are and I believe there was bias,” said Kinsey, whose district encompasses the state’s most active oil and gas fields. He declined to answer when asked several times by another member what changes he would suggest to address his concerns.
“You want to see children smiling in oil fields?,” said Aicha Davis, D-Dallas. “I don’t know what you want.”
More at https://www.expressnews.com/politics/article/climate-change-textbooks-
18491484.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory
This report is part of our series of concise and easily accessible yearly updates on the state of the climate crisis.
Climate-related all-time records
In 2023, we witnessed an extraordinary series of climate-related records being broken around the world. The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected (Armstrong McKay et al. 2022, Ripple et al. 2023). This year, exceptional heat waves have swept across the world, leading to record high temperatures. The oceans have been historically warm, with global and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures both breaking records and unprecedented low levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica (figure 1a–1d). In addition, June through August of this year was the warmest period ever recorded, and in early July, we witnessed Earth's highest global daily average surface temperature ever measured, possibly the warmest temperature on Earth over the past 100,000 years (figure 1e). It is a sign that we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.
. . .
Conclusions
The effects of global warming are progressively more severe, and possibilities such as a worldwide societal breakdown are feasible and dangerously underexplored (Kemp et al. 2022). By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change (Lenton et al. 2023). Big problems need big solutions. . . .
More at https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci
/biad080/7319571?login=false
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:People like you base everything on price. They would only stop burning fossil fuels if stopping is cheaper than continuing to burn. Burning up the World? They don't care because it is all a hoax as they have been told many times by the people who sell fossil fuel and by Trump. They don't care about anything beyond price and that is why, ironically, they struggle and strain to have enough money. From my decades of experience with such people, they will never be able to make the connection between their enduring difficulties in life and their self-sabotaging ideas about how to live.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It turns out that we don't have any viable alternatives to the sources we've been using and people are only willing to pay much higher prices for things like these when the economy is good.
Who could have seen any of this coming?
It is the "nothing matters" attitude of Trumptards. To them, global warming and the rising tide of authoritarianism are nothing. Loss and misery are just inevitable parts of existence, so why do anything? Instead, buy the cheapest energy since nothing matters.
Do you have a brain defect or something, son?
I'm going to be working on my house again today. I haven't had a job since summer of 2019 and even in Biden*'s economy I'm not worried about money.
Have fun at work today so you can pay off all your interest, honey.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME