[Discussion] Climate Change

This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.

thanks for the info and learning folks, my bad

Why doesn't Gore just get one of these?

Exxon deliberately misled public on climate science, say researchers

ExxonMobil has knowingly misled the public for decades about the danger climate change poses to a warming world and the oil giant’s long-term viability, according to a peer-reviewed study.
Gremlin wrote:

Exxon deliberately misled public on climate science, say researchers

ExxonMobil has knowingly misled the public for decades about the danger climate change poses to a warming world and the oil giant’s long-term viability, according to a peer-reviewed study.

This is my shocked face.

Gremlin wrote:

Exxon deliberately misled public on climate science, say researchers

ExxonMobil has knowingly misled the public for decades about the danger climate change poses to a warming world and the oil giant’s long-term viability, according to a peer-reviewed study.

Actual evil.

DSGamer wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Exxon deliberately misled public on climate science, say researchers

ExxonMobil has knowingly misled the public for decades about the danger climate change poses to a warming world and the oil giant’s long-term viability, according to a peer-reviewed study.

Actual evil.

And it frustrates me to no end that people, who otherwise complain loudly about supposed unemployment benefits fraud or a fugitive getting 1000€ a month, shrug their shoulders when confronted by this news.

Same when the news broke on the Volkswagen CO2 car test fraud. Billions in tax evasion but we just accept it because corporations will be corporations? Bah.

/Rant

It's not that "corporations are corporations". It's what the person considers harm. When Exxon tells people that climate change is no big deal, and that matches their beliefs, then where will they see the harm? Same thing if they don't think the environment is small enough *to* harm (or that their Sky Friend will keep it from harm).

But stealing money is a harm they can relate to; it's a crime in their Bronze Age books as well as in today's legal system, and certainly many of them would do it if they thought they could get away with it), so they are quite comfortable with believing it's a HUGE problem for government programs, which is one reason they should be cut back or eliminated.

(Note that almost exclusively, my conservative friends believe that belief in God is holding them back from evil acts like theft - "I'd do it if I thought I could get away with it, and God was not watching" - but my liberal friends tend to answer that it is always wrong because it hurts others. Of course, generalizations are not accurate for everyone, but I've always found this puzzling. Anyone would steal out of necessity - food for the starving family, etc. - but stealing for gain being a reasonable choice absent an omniscient, all-powerful being scares me, because it says that the only thing holding these people back may be the strength of their will at any given time.)

Robear wrote:

Anyone would steal out of necessity - food for the starving family, etc. - but stealing for gain being a reasonable choice absent an omniscient, all-powerful being scares me, because it says that the only thing holding these people back may be the strength of their will at any given time.)

Well isn't that exactly the same place that your average ethical atheist lives in? The only thing holding us back from going on a crime spree at any given moment is our strength of will?

On the one hand it's true, on the other hand, it's a oversimplified to the point of meaningless.

To whit, I've had to exert zero will my entire life to maintain a score of zero murders, as I'm sure most of us had. Most of us have aren't champing at the bit to steal anything not nailed down every given moment, we're not managing to get home with empty pockets only through gritted teeth and white knuckles.

Robear wrote:

(Note that almost exclusively, my conservative friends believe that belief in God is holding them back from evil acts like theft - "I'd do it if I thought I could get away with it, and God was not watching" - but my liberal friends tend to answer that it is always wrong because it hurts others. Of course, generalizations are not accurate for everyone, but I've always found this puzzling. Anyone would steal out of necessity - food for the starving family, etc. - but stealing for gain being a reasonable choice absent an omniscient, all-powerful being scares me, because it says that the only thing holding these people back may be the strength of their will at any given time.)

How do they square that with Matthew 5:28?

Yeah, the perceived harm seems to be what it comes down to.

It's also not very Christian--well, I should clarify. There's a sense in which sinning is regarded as the natural state of humans. In some traditions. But the general idea is that redeemed Christians are given the grace to resist sin. (And, as Bonus_Eruptus points out, wanting to sin counts as sin.*)

But, then, the practice of cultural Christianity in America doesn't line up with the teachings of the religion very often. It's gotten tangled up with middle-class cultural markers, capitalism, and prosperity gospel. There have been Christian traditions that are very concerned with the environment (and social justice, and so on) but they're unfortunately not representative in the United States today.

The no-perceived-harm thing unfortunately also extends to a lot of non-Christians and nominal Christians: I think it's a version of the just-world hypothesis applied to the environment. Because the connection between individual action and the global harm is so tenuous, it's difficult for humans to really believe in the danger unless it's tied to another, stronger belief. Hence why so much of the focus in the popular dialog has been on things like recycling instead of on, say, the major infrastructure work that is needed to reduce industrial CO2 output.

Not that doing stuff as an individual is bad, but unfortunately a collective problem needs a collective solution, even though our society is particularly configured to make collective solutions difficult.

*

Spoiler:

Subtle distinction that a lot of young Christians miss, and that consequently causes a lot of guilt: intrusive thoughts about sin (usually lust) get blown up as a bigger deal than the actual teachings of Christ warrant. The idea is not that you'll never have a sinful thought. The idea is that you are redeemed by Christ and therefore he has already taken care of it.

Jonman wrote:

Well isn't that exactly the same place that your average ethical atheist lives in? The only thing holding us back from going on a crime spree at any given moment is our strength of will?

No, not at all. If what's holding you back is the concern that stealing for anything other than sustaining life is bad for the people you steal from, then willpower is not involved; you simply don't do things you think are evil (unless, as I said, the necessity is great, and that's actually a recognized thing in Judaism, if not Christianity and Islam as well). It's a matter of not even wanting to do them.

I've been poor, for years, to varying degrees, but enough that my life would have been made a lot better by the odd random theft, but I've never even felt the inclination. It just... doesn't process. That's the difference. It's not willpower, it's how I'm wired. I saw $119 fall out of a guys sweat pants cuff as he boarded a bus, scooped it up, chased the bus, then visited the area for the next three workdays to see if I could spot him to return it. I suspected he was going to take a beating for losing it. I felt bad that I could not find him.

Several of my conservative friends laughed at his misfortune, figuring he was a drug dealer, and urged me to forget about it completely. "Not your problem, and you got $119 out of it, what's the worry?".

The difference is that a lot of people I've talked to - mostly conservatives, but not always - have little issue with stealing from or otherwise abusing others, absent some restraining power. That's why these surveys start with "Assuming you would never be caught, would you...?". And these people assume that everyone thinks and feels like they do. I've known a few who absolutely reject the idea that *anyone* would follow the "Golden Rule" if it were not enforced by God or the Police or the neighbor with a firearm by his bed. It just makes no sense to them.

And that scares me. Maybe I'm out of the norm in seeing that in conservatives, but that's my personal experience.

Interesting. Only a very few of us here are the same way. When I forgot my wallet, my mother managed to sneak through about $5 which was just enough to get me home. The problem was she DIDN'T manage to communicate that the money was from her. So I took the mystery money, and walked 3 hours home with a backpack heavy with schoolbooks. I didn't want to spend the money because it wasn't mine.

This was considered a very funny story demonstrating how "naive" I was. My mother pointed out that I could have spent the money and then I could have reimbursed whoever it belonged to once I had my wallet, but then I had no way of knowing that I could get to my wallet before whoever owned the money would need it.

So I guess when they point out that Filipinos are "conservative," it's also meant in the "not really very civilized" sort of way. A great majority of my friends feel that "enforcement" is the keystone of law and order because who would even bother to learn law when no one is going to watch? They literally can't understand why I follow traffic laws when I could get away with not doing it.

PS: And now I recall all those men who keep insisting that gay marriage would be disastrous because traditional marriage laws are THE ONLY THING making men marry women and have sex to procreate.

Alright peeps, lets move the religion derail here.

EPA now requires political aide’s sign-off for agency awards, grant applications

Washington Post wrote:

The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of putting a political operative in charge of vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually, assigning final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience.

In this role, John Konkus reviews every award the agency gives out, along with every grant solicitation before it is issued. According to both career and political employees, Konkus has told staff that he is on the lookout for “the double C-word” — climate change — and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject in solicitations.

Konkus, who officially works in the EPA’s public affairs office, has canceled close to $2 million competitively awarded to universities and nonprofit organizations.

...

The ideological shift is a clear break from the practices of previous Republican and Democratic administrations. It bears the hallmarks not just of Pruitt’s tenure but of President Trump’s, reflecting skepticism of climate science, advocacy groups and academia.

Although the EPA has taken the most systematic approach to scrutinizing the flow of money, it is not the only entity to do so. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has vowed to withhold Justice Department grants from “sanctuary cities” that refuse to hand over arrested immigrants who cannot prove they are in the country legally. The Interior Department, which is conducting a review of its grants, last month canceled a $100,000 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine study aimed at evaluating the impact of surface mining on nearby communities.

Yet several officials from the Obama and George W. Bush administrations said they had never heard of a public affairs officer scrutinizing EPA’s solicitations and its grants, which account for half of the agency’s roughly $8 billion budget.

“We didn’t do a political screening on every grant, because many of them were based on science, and political appointees don’t have that kind of background,” said former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who served under Bush. She said she couldn’t recall a time when that administration’s political appointees weighed in on a given award.

Excellent primer on climate change on Sam Harris' podcast this week.

Might not be teaching the more well-read of us much that they don't already know, but it's a very good high-level summation of the topic, and addresses most of the key issues.

There might be too many humans on the planet.

That's a very overblown headline. The new measurements are 11% higher than expected, which is not the sort of error you would envision with the phrase "grossly underestimated".

No but see, it's grossly cause they're cow farts.

Clearly, we need to eat the cows faster.

GioClark wrote:

Clearly, we need to eat the cows faster.

This is my fault, I gave up red meat three years ago.

Prederick wrote:
GioClark wrote:

Clearly, we need to eat the cows faster.

This is my fault, I gave up red meat three years ago.

I gave it up 17 years ago. I didn’t know...

GioClark wrote:

Clearly, we need to eat the cows faster.

Pft. The solution is clearly to strap a spark plug triggered by a sonic fart detector to every cow's butt. Burn the methane before it causes a problem.

Additional bonus - rocket cows!

Jonman wrote:
GioClark wrote:

Clearly, we need to eat the cows faster.

Pft. The solution is clearly to strap a spark plug triggered by a sonic fart detector to every cow's butt. Burn the methane before it causes a problem.

Additional bonus - rocket cows!

Do you want the Great Chicago Fire? Because this is how you get the Great Chicago Fire!

BushPilot wrote:
Jonman wrote:

rocket cows!

Do you want the Great Chicago Fire?

... worth it?
"I wish I had steak!"
rrrrrrrrrrrruMBLEMoooooOOOOSplat!
"Steak!"

"Burnt Ends!"
/thread

I've seen a lot of innovations in news and magazines lately on the agricultural front when it comes to produce or chickens (example: This Tiny Country Feeds The World.

Haven't seen much on cow ranching. Anyone come across developments on this front lately? Aside from the cow rocket suggestion that obviously will save the world?

I think some testing has been done with cow fart collection, but I'm not sure it went anywhere.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5169903

deftly wrote:

I think some testing has been done with cow fart collection, but I'm not sure it went anywhere.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5169903

OK, but just to be clear, you standing out in a cow field taking deep breathes is a weird hobby...not science.

On mobile so no links, but apparently a relatively small amount of seaweed extract in cow feed drastically limits their methane production. I also believe that a more natural diet (aka not a huge amount of corn) reduces methane production.