15,000 scientists can't be wrong

[AlexH]

There was a study a few weeks ago saying human-powered climate change had been over-exaggerated. Obviously the Daily Fail (UK newspaper - maybe the equivalent of Fox News) ran with a headline along the lines of "World leaders duped by climate change".

It's all a big mess, and while we have a consumerist, convenience society, where economies and businesses constantly need to grow or else be seen as failing, we'll get nowhere. What if Apple decided to release a new iPhone every 3 years? That would actually be a big help to the climate. Even climate change is used to scam, and probably will be more so in future - the trading of carbon credits, for example. Exporting waste to less well-off countries to deal with. And the fact that getting rid of petrol and diesel cars is going to improve the environment and the well-being of everyone worldwide - in cities, perhaps, but the energy has to come from somewhere. How about the forests being cleared for biofuel farms, or the people who can't get food because now biofuel plants are being grown in its place? The cities in rich countries may be able to reach their targets, but how about everywhere else?

Something I don't see mentioned - I don't get how ice breakers are allowed - surely the sheer number of them has a massive impact on ice melting? If you make the pieces smaller, it melts quicker.

Anyway, that was my rant. Maybe we can't fix climate change right now, but we can slow it down by the choices we make, and who knows in the future. We can certainly take more care of the environment, by using less plastic, for example, and only replacing things when we need to, rather than going for the latest trend or status symbol.

 

[Parson]

I don't get how ice breakers are allowed - surely the sheer number of them has a massive impact on ice melting? If you make the pieces smaller, it melts quicker.

Maybe I don't understand, but this would seem to me to be a very small thing, and one that just slows down the inevitable by a relatively short time.

 

[BAYLOR]

Ridiculous.

No, we cannot sustain things as they are. A radical change in our lifestyles is required. This earth can sustain this many - and probably three times as many! But not by subjecting it to the abuse we are currently putting it through.

We are but Renters on this planet. If we don't treat the property we have leased with the proper respect, we won't be allowed to continue renting it (survive).

At the rate were going, Soylant Green is in our future. And I won't taste very good.

 

[LordOfWizards]

Being poor does prevent people from being as "green" as they can. Poor people often make choices that benefit them in the short term, not long term.

I believe i know where you are coming from 'Del'. (Can I call you Del?) This sounds like the US. I fully agree, although I was also referring to those in other less well off countries. My stand on the state of affairs is to educate people in general on every front. Not only would this provide them a better life, it would improve conditions for all of us. But I'm not referring to education as we know it, at least not in the US. These people need life skills. They could grow their own food, build their own infrastructure (sanitation in particular). Once your basic needs are covered, you can learn that bringing up children is a huge responsibility if it is to be done properly, rather than seeing them as an investment to make money for the family.

Most of the folks on the planet can only dream of such things. I am downright suspicious of the corporatocracy in their motivations. It is business as usual to go into a relatively poor country, promise their governments lots of money, and then rob them blind of all their natural resources. They pay off the governments so that they will hire soldiers or police to stop the populations from meddling in the crimes they are committing. If you want specific examples, I will gladly provide such. How this ties in to education - I don't think the big money wants people to be educated. If they were so, they might find out what I'm telling you now and rebel. Just because it's a conspiracy theory doesn't make it false.

 

[tinkerdan]

That's like::
0.000189873417722%
of the population of the Earth.
Pretty small percentage.

and

0.214285714286%
of the total number of scientists in the world.
This::
97 percent of working climate scientists agree that the warming of Earth’s climate over the last 100 years is mainly due to human activity that has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
::could be impressive if we had the actual number, which I've yet to find, of working climate scientists.

Unfortunately the 15,000 are not listed as working climate scientists and I'd guess there is a reason for that.

They need to be more forthcoming about the number of actual working climate scientists there are as opposed to the number of Concerned Scientist. And then bring the real numbers into play regarding the consensus amongst the those experts.

As it is the number in relationship to scientists would be so small that it would be like saying that we believe that the 1 out of 1,000 experts should be considered infallible.

 

[DelActivisto]

I believe i know where you are coming from 'Del'. (Can I call you Del?) This sounds like the US. I fully agree, although I was also referring to those in other less well off countries. My stand on the state of affairs is to educate people in general on every front. Not only would this provide them a better life, it would improve conditions for all of us. But I'm not referring to education as we know it, at least not in the US. These people need life skills. They could grow their own food, build their own infrastructure (sanitation in particular). Once your basic needs are covered, you can learn that bringing up children is a huge responsibility if it is to be done properly, rather than seeing them as an investment to make money for the family.

Most of the folks on the planet can only dream of such things. I am downright suspicious of the corporatocracy in their motivations. It is business as usual to go into a relatively poor country, promise their governments lots of money, and then rob them blind of all their natural resources. They pay off the governments so that they will hire soldiers or police to stop the populations from meddling in the crimes they are committing. If you want specific examples, I will gladly provide such. How this ties in to education - I don't think the big money wants people to be educated. If they were so, they might find out what I'm telling you now and rebel. Just because it's a conspiracy theory doesn't make it false.

You can call me Del, DA, or Ted, whatever you'd prefer. I've had people call me Lemons before, so there's always that option, too.

I get what you are saying. Education is important. Some of those countries are poor because of corrupt government. That is true. Our corporations often take advantage of these corrupt governments. We don't do anything about it if corse, because that would effect our bottom dollar.

Education is very important. I think despite some of our more vicious companies, we're making global progress. Birth rates are falling all across the board. Democracies are being experimented with. Some of them are falling apart, but hopefully they will be rebuilt. The healthy society can make a healthy environment. Can. It can also destroy the environment. But the main reason Americans nearly destroyed the environment here is because we thought the continent was endless. Turns out it wasn't so.

 

[Vladd67]

Never mind Trump, I am still genuinely astonished, and appalled, that Michael Gove, now a has been Tory MP who's gamble for Power failed, made a statement in which he urged the Public, during the Brexit referendum campaign to "don't listen to Experts - afterall, what do THEY know?" yeah, Mrs Miggins, a waitress in a Pie Shop, who doesn't have a GCSE or A Level to her name, is proud that she has never read a book of any kind, clearly knows more than someone with a Scientific Doctorate who has spent their long career investigating climate change, or indeed some windbag MP who couldn't even manage to successfully Backstab a colleague, despite belonging to a Party where backstabbing has been developed to a fine art clearly knows better too.

It appears that in the English Speaking part of the Western World, we are sorely lacking in Mature Adults amongst our Politicians, when we need them more than ever.

This is just another case of the Media fixating on a fraction of a statement and ignoring what was actually said, what Gove said was

had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’.

not that the guy isn’t an idiot but it wasn’t quite don’t listen to experts what do they know?

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

We need to legislate globally. Climate change deniers and heavy polluters should be prosecuted for negationism and crimes against the planet / humanity.

As long as polluting will be cheaper than going green, multinationals will have no enticement to do anything about it. We need to hit them where it hurts, their wallets, as usual. There should be a vast array of laws out there (taxes and fines) to make pollution costly.

 

[Mouse]

A poor person simply has no choice, They cannot afford the often shocking price of food that is organic, free range, gluten free, vegan, vegetarian and so on.

I'm going off topic a bit now but... I'm coeliac (therefore I have no choice but to eat gluten free, otherwise my immune system attacks my own body) and I'm veggie (by choice). I'm on a very tight budget (I have a spreadsheet showing all my incomings and outgoings and I update it all the time so I know exactly how much I can spend each month). I hear people on my coeliac page on FB complain all the time about how expensive GF food is. Yes, it is. GF bread can be £3 a loaf! The thing is, lots of food is naturally gluten free. Vegetables, for example. Vegetables also happen to be cheap. It's cheaper being a vegetarian than it is being a meat eater because, wait for it, vegetables are cheaper than meat. Even when I was a meat eater, I bought Quorn most of the time because it was cheaper! And yeah, I know people don't want to eat veg all the time. I frigging love cakes and biscuits - gluten free versions of which are ridiculously expensive. So you know what I do? I bake my own.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Something I don't see mentioned - I don't get how ice breakers are allowed - surely the sheer number of them has a massive impact on ice melting? If you make the pieces smaller, it melts quicker.

My guess would be that most ice breakers are either used in the North-West passage or along the northern edge of the continents - generally for commercial reasons - and a few will be used to support scientific expeditions to the Antarctic. So the main impact is in the North. And really there should be no impact - because if the entire North Pole's ice cap were to disappear it would virtually no difference to sea level*. The main ice sheets to worry about are the ice sheets resting on land at the moment - so Greenland and Antarctica - which of course a ship can't go across!

Now you might argue that, perhaps the few ships that go to Antarctica (which are, I believe few and far between) are somehow 'carving' off ice, and this promotes more ice to slip off the continental ice masses...but my guess is that there will be a maximum thickness of ice a ship could attempt before being stopped - and the traversable ice sheets may be thin enough that the path they are making refreezes reasonably quickly after their passage. So given that there only a few such missions, my guestimate is that there is probably no impact compared to the main driver of increased ice calving - the vastly increased temperatures at the poles.

----------------------
* Ice is less dense than water, so any ice that floats will displace the same mass of water- if the ice melts the resultant mixture has virtually no impact on sea level. (There may be odd perturbations, because ice has virtually no salt and polar sea water is pretty salty - so that when they mix there is an impact that would increase sea level, but I believe the people that looked into this, calculated that if all sea ice were to melt it would increase global sea levels by the order of centimetres.)

 

[Venusian Broon]

This is just another case of the Media fixating on a fraction of a statement and ignoring what was actually said, what Gove said was not that the guy isn’t an idiot but it wasn’t quite don’t listen to experts what do they know?

Also I believe that he was referring to experts in that most dismal of sciences, economics. A science so dismal, it is barely a science.

Hence my disbelief at virtually all projections in that field - the latest Rees-Mogg one for example.

Oddly enough, Gove seems to be listening to real science in his current job and making the right noises about soil degradation and pesticide impact on Bee health. What he actually manages to do, concretely, is another thing.

 

[BAYLOR]

We need to legislate globally. Climate change deniers and heavy polluters should be prosecuted for negationism and crimes against the planet / humanity.

As long as polluting will be cheaper than going green, multinationals will have no enticement to do anything about it. We need to hit them where it hurts, their wallets, as usual. There should be a vast array of laws out there (taxes and fines) to make pollution costly.

That won't happen for a lot practical and impractical reasons.

 

[Mike Donoghue]

Ignoring the politics/controversy of AGW, 15,000 scientists CAN BE WRONG. That is the entire point of the scientific method! If enough data, experiments, and replication conclusively show that a reigning model of anything is wrong, then adherents to that model are wrong. Case closed.

 

[Cathbad]

Ignoring the politics/controversy of AGW, 15,000 scientists CAN BE WRONG. That is the entire point of the scientific method! If enough data, experiments, and replication conclusively show that a reigning model of anything is wrong, then adherents to that model are wrong. Case closed.

"Case closed"?

Where is the results of that data/experiments that proves the 15,000 wrong?

 

[Cathbad]

That won't happen for a lot practical and impractical reasons.

"Impractical"?

Are you suggesting that the destruction of our species is "more practical"?

(Not saying I'd necessarily disagree with such an opinion...)

 

[DelActivisto]

Ignoring the politics/controversy of AGW, 15,000 scientists CAN BE WRONG. That is the entire point of the scientific method! If enough data, experiments, and replication conclusively show that a reigning model of anything is wrong, then adherents to that model are wrong. Case closed.

Yep. They can be wrong.

But your statement is mostly irreverent without anything to back it up. So, what makes the case closed?

 

[Cathbad]

Yep. They can be wrong.

But your statement is mostly irreverent without anything to back it up. So, what makes the case closed?

Perhaps we're no supposed to believe 15,000 scientists IN CASE they are later proven wrong?

 

[BAYLOR]

"Impractical"?

Are you suggesting that the destruction of our species is "more practical"?

(Not saying I'd necessarily disagree with such an opinion...)

Im suggesting that people aren't going to be practical in how they make their choice in this.

 

[Cathbad]

Im suggesting that people aren't going to be practical in how they make their choice in this.

~shrugs~

Then our race dies.

'k

 

[BAYLOR]

~shrugs~

Then our race dies.

'k

Cathbad , relatively few people look at the big picture. Live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself. Maybe that's a reason why we've found no other intelligent life out ther,e because maybe they took the same attitude that people in our world are taking now and died out as a result of short sighted thinking about the fate of their worlds.