Environmental Collapse: when and how bad?

sus

Well-known member
Do we agree with this dichotomy: that severe climate change alarmism is either scientifically warranted, or it is manufactured by industrial interests who stand to gain from a green transition.

Assuming this is a valid, practical dichotomy, I would take the former position as of now.
I think my belief is that climate change alarmism is a strategic response (part of what being "political" entails) by liberals in response to conservative denialism. People are trying to "tug-of-war" policy in the direction they'd like, and just like haggling/bargaining in a marketplace, this can involve demanding way more money than you're willing to eventually sell for.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It's also important to point out that a major disagreement between many Ds and Rs is how competent/capable the government actually is. Sure, some conservatives are anti-gov for ideological reasons. But many just see it as a logistical question: is a private or public system better at meeting human desire. If you see the government as an incompetent waste of money, it seems strange to keep throwing ever-more funding at it, even if you agree there's a problem (like climate change) in need of solving—b/c you don't even believe they can solve it.
Yeah thats a good point too, somewhat orthogonal to whether someone believes that the government ought to be granted wider capabilities [edit: that is, to grant itself wider capabilities].
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
Ive always thought it was the speed at which its fucked is up for debate but that it will eventually get fucked is a forgone conclusion
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I think my belief is that climate change alarmism is a strategic response (part of what being "political" entails) by liberals in response to conservative denialism. People are trying to "tug-of-war" policy in the direction they'd like, and just like haggling/bargaining in a marketplace, this can involve demanding way more money than you're willing to eventually sell for.
Yeah I see the logic here, that the way to snap people out of denialism is by being louder, more extreme, harder to ignore, etc.
 
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version

Well-known member
And of course, this stuff is very convenient isn't it when you have an authoritarian leftist movement right in front of you in America which is willing to toss out free expression, innocent until proven guilty, "beyond a reasonable doubt," in the name of promoting the Correct Pure Ideology. Which attempts to top-down apply its sense of propriety on a global scale. No subculture, no office space left untouched. (For better and worse! Some stuff like sexual harrassment norms, this seems good. But it's basically definitionally authoritarian, these raids and policings of locality.) A movement which can't be called authoritarian in tendency because it is basically the secular religion of our times, which incurs immense punishment on those academics who criticize or challenge it. Difficult to think of something more fascist. (And calling yourself anti-fascist doesn't let you off the hook.)
Another problem is that they don't necessarily adhere to the rules they're enforcing, e.g. the person organising the Netflix protest against Dave Chappelle turning out to have a history of making racist and homophobic comments and the woman who ran Time's Up resigning after being found to have been involved in a smear campaign against one of Cuomo's accusers.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Do we agree with this dichotomy: that severe climate change alarmism is either scientifically warranted, or it is manufactured to some degree by industrial interests who stand to gain from a green transition.

Assuming this is a valid, practical dichotomy, I would take the former position as of now.
I don't think "alarmists" really exist outside of the right-wing imagination. Where climate scientists have got it wrong in the past, it's generally been because their predictions have been too conservative, not too hysterical.

Gus keeps banging on about "Democratic apocalyptica", but from where I'm sitting, large parts of the world have been been looking pretty apocalyptic in the last few years.
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Im not really up to date on the climate science, is the earth not completely fucked?
There have been alarms sounded for decades, and some of the graphs I;ve seen (regarding temperature increase as a function of time, a plot which spans the known major extinction events and conceivably is correlated) are dire, but I don't think this is an extinction level event. I doubt we could go extinct if we tried.

Plus I am under the impression that the major geoeconomic organizations (IMF, etc) are genuinely committed to a green transition. I'm also under the impression that this transition can be handled in such a way as to benefit global capitalism.
 
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version

Well-known member
Do Democrat voters know more about climate change or are they just more trusting of the people we expect to know more about climate change and echoing their views?
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I don't think "alarmists" really exist outside of the right-wing imagination. Where climate scientists have got it wrong in the past, it's generally been because their predictions have been too conservative, not too hysterical.

Gus keeps banging on about "Democratic apocalyptica", but from where I'm sitting, large parts of the world have been been looking pretty apocalyptic in the last few years.
Yeah I should clarify I didn't mean alarmism as a value judgement, but I suppose that is how the term is most often deployed so I ought to reckon with that. By "alarmists" I meant scientists who called attention to alarming data and/or alarming. conclusions drawn from data.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Do Democrat voters know more about climate change or are they just more trusting of the people we expect to know more about climate change and echoing their views without any real understanding of the subject themselves?
its that. no one knows anything
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Do Democrat voters know more about climate change or are they just more trusting of the people we expect to know more about climate change and echoing their views?
I think Democratic voters would be more inclined to watch a short video explaining climate change than would Republican voters, but whether or not that constitutes a better understanding is dubious. So yeah I'd say Democrat voters are more likely to trust climate scientists, for no small part because the topic has been politicized as much as it has.
 

sus

Well-known member
There have been alarms sounded for decades, and some of the graphs I;ve seen (regarding temperature increase as a function of time, a plot which spans the known major extinction events and conceivably is correlated) are dire, but I don't think this is an extinction level event. I doubt we could go extinct if we tried.

Plus I am under the impression that the major geoeconomic organizations (IMF, etc) are genuinely committed to a green transition. I'm also under the impression that this transition can be handled in such a way as to benefit global capitalism.
Before I go, I wanna add a bit more provocation so people can yell at me and keep the thread going/board energy up.

I basically don't think species extinction is a big deal like everybody claims. I care quite a bit about the suffering of sentient creatures. But I don't think there's any reason to care whether some particular species is around or not, unless they're so ecologically critical that their loss causes a big domino effect. Like really, why does us not having a sabertooth tiger or woolly mammoth or dinosaur around matter at all other than the fact they're "sick"? Yeah, platypuses are pretty cool, but that's not a moral argument.

The earth has had a lot of extinction effects, and life, in all its complexity and subtlety, always bounces back. I don't see any reason to believe the current batch of biology is "sacred" in any meaningful sense, when we've had so many batches. Humans are special for obvious reasons, nothing we know of has ever been able to do what we can do. But some pretty tropical bird? Really, who gives a shit. The whole anti-extinction fetish, particularly from people who are fine locking up billions of mammals and birds in horrific Holocaust-level conditions for the meat industry, strikes me as a bad & boring take.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
its that. no one knows anything
I think this is a major factor. We are talking about ultra complex systems that have waxed and waned through some number of equilibria for, what, hundreds of millions of years before anything discernibly human entered the scene?

That said, I'm under the impression that the data indicated anthropogenic impact is conclusive, and that it isn't really that difficult to comprehend this aspect, from tilling soil to pumping out however many orders of magnitude of tons of greenhouse gases annually.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Tea's big flaw is obviously that if you dont preface every comment with I BELEIVE THE SCIENCE he will assume you are the living embodiment of Kek the elder frog god of the alt right
 
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