Mod+ 234. GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE CHANGE AND OUR ILLUSION OF CONTROL

just because I'm emotional about this issue does not mean I'm a 'thug'. In fact yelling is said to indicate not being heard. I think LoneShaman's prophetic proviso, about the elite, confirms the environment movement is not being heard, it is being manipulated. And you've already assumed
I assumed what? I did not call you a thug.

The enemies of climate change action, in rank of most malicious to least malicious impact:

1. Socialist thugs, screaming - really focused on who they hate more than anything else... fully unaware of the work that is underway now.
2. Fossil fuel industry lobbyists
3. Science communicators
4. Apathy
5. Informed 'deniers'
6. Alarm raisers: Physicists, climate scientists
7. Engineers, market strategists, capital planners, energy companies, agricultural innovators.

I like informed deniers because I can talk with them, and listen and really consider what they have to say. I have no problem that they disagree - and some of their points are very good. I think there is something else to this, and they have suggested plurality which cannot be ignored in some cases. In the meantime, us in the real world continue robust work on solutions.

We would love for #'s 1 - 4 to join us... but...

#6 is great - BUT THEY HAVE NO SOLUTIONS... How can you raise alarm and have absolutely no solution other than symbolic crap and buzzwords...???

When I talk with physicists and climate scientists about mapping the carbon value chain on the production of corn or the contribution nodes and slack/risk value chain on consumer goods production, consumption and disposal, or waste to energy, or re-crafting global agricultural markets to promote permaculture and localism - their eyes just glaze over.... They do not know what all this even is... For instance, if you say the buzzword 'Zero Landfill' - their eyes light up because they recognize that buzzword. But they have no idea that there are 10,000 moving parts to achieving zero landfill. Thousands of people have to come together in agreement. A LOT of capital planning (socialism is NOT going to be able to achieve this without slavery) has to be done and executed, based on sound strategy, market planning, municipal bond leveraging, angel capital, engineering, design and deployment.

And as someone who has done strategy and operations in the fossil fuel industry, I can speak with them and propose compatible solutions which have large impacts, and have them go 'Hey you know, you are the first climate change promoter I have ever met, who made sense... I'm willing to listen to this.'

Things do not happen by buzzwords. And they will never happen through screaming or the elimination of capital (capital is not just money).
 
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I have just spent 30 mins reading the posts above. I don't know enough about the science to have an opinion about climate science - so I don't know the extent to which disagreement is rooted in disputes about the validity/integrity of data, disputes about interpretation of data or disputes about how the data should be applied - or disputes about which overall theory about how things work should prevail. I suppose its an argument we must have.

What I do know from direct experience is that climate is changing in my part of the world - and that is good in some respects and crap in another. I also know that our collective conduct is having an increasingly adverse impact on our world - adversely impacting systems at multiple levels. I know some folk say what we are doing is causing climate change - and others say it is not. However I take a point from LoneShaman and wonder whether a narrow focus on what seems to be the Big Problem means that other systemic problems are being shoved off to one side.

I am not a fan of environmentalists, not because I do not value their concern and passion, but because they seem to be taking a fragmented, rather than holistic/systemic view - missing the underpinning sense that a calmer way of engaging in challenge of changing attitudes. It seems that the pro and anti camps are divided into narrow interest groups and the energy that could be used to stimulate change is being dissipated.

I didn't think we need to make human behaviour as the cause of climate change as a condition upon which we focus on addressing manifestly toxic conduct that is damaging so many ecosystems - and having a cumulative effect. Collectively we are shitting in our own nest on multiple levels -because we do not understand that 'freedom' does not mean unfettered liberty to act without concern for consequences.

Our ancestors assumed that the Earth was an endless recipient of abuse, and we could treat her as an endless resource and an endless sewer. That belief in the absence of consequence is a peculiarly Christian one. Believers would be forgiven their sins and those who were not could be exploited without shame or recourse - including Nature, which was not considered sacred.

Humans have always been constrained by the law of sacred restraint - the empathic and moral interplay between the human and the divine. We are dangerous without that constraint, whether it is discerned by religion or science. The dream of unlimited human potential is not attainable by careless 'progress'.

The debate about 'Global Warming' or 'Climate Change' is euphemistic and stupid. Its a debate about the degree of toxicity of human conduct, and the consequence of that toxic conduct. Maybe our conduct is causing the climate to change - the macro system - but it is certainly adversely effecting multiple micro systems in catastrophic ways that are, or maybe, contributive to a catastrophic marco effect - for humans at least.

As I read the back and forth arguments I am surprised anybody thinks we can definitively know. We humans are a passing fad in the planet's scheme of things. Perhaps we need to be thinking more about the quality of our actions, rather than their consequences? This concerns an old fashioned notion of morality, rather than the transactional notion of what we can get away with.

It does seem to me that the whole 'Climate Change/Global Warming' debate is an effort to determine what we can get away with - how much shit is too much in our nest?
 
Thank you for being so patient with me. I wish I could let this subject go, but it is so fundamental, and I think urgent, altho that sounds 'alarmist'.
One of my main issues with the CO2 thing is that it forces other more important environmental issues into the background. It detracts the seriousness from them with a false issue.
I agree, but I don't think isolating CO2 as a 'not harmful' chemical will mean other pollutants get addressed. It will instead probably be used to validate the 'harmlessness' of oil and coal etc. I also think people want a simple explanation for the intense weather we're having, and it's been a long time since so many people have been motivated to make demands on their 'leaders' to curb industrial/corporate behaviour, even though I know it's futile. The picture is very big, and it is regrettable that people require fear to achieve this reaction, but if that is what it takes to give up fossil-fuels, I'm ok with it. I only understand excess CO2 inhalation (by people stuck underground) as an analogy of poor quality air that slows brain function.
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And if that's true then people are only going to get less motivated, although that would be another convenient form of control..
It's also a lot to give up and climate change 'denial' is an easy way to avoid any change.

Science and mysticism require each other, I listen to both.
That is exactly what I've just said. I just don't see it in your argument.
prickly people believe the ultimate constituents of matter are particles, goo people believe it's waves.
Yes, we are made of both particles and waves, in body and mind.
No doubt I am being a prickly goo. Thanks for talking.
 
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The debate about 'Global Warming' or 'Climate Change' is euphemistic and stupid.
Lovelock would agree with this.
Its a debate about the degree of toxicity of human conduct, and the consequence of that toxic conduct. Maybe our conduct is causing the climate to change - the macro system - but it is certainly adversely effecting multiple micro systems in catastrophic ways that are, or maybe, contributive to a catastrophic marco effect - for humans at least.
It is, or should be, a debate about our conduct. And not just for our own well-being.
 
Lovelock would agree with this.

It is, or should be, a debate about our conduct. And not just for our own well-being.

Of course. I had my mental short cut switch on - in that context our well being implied the well being of other lives. Other than those we 'harvest' for food, naturally. At least we could consume them with gratitude and humility - rather than "I don't care! I love it!"
 
Of course. I had my mental short cut switch on - in that context our well being implied the well being of other lives. Other than those we 'harvest' for food, naturally. At least we could consume them with gratitude and humility - rather than "I don't care! I love it!"
I agree with you. And caring about the well-being of our food is bound to motivate people. Altho I meant all the other species regardless of our 'interest' in them. They too are suffering from climate change, and they have no outlet for debate.
 
In the late modern times (post-WWII), the appeal to authority was very actively whitewashed, to make an impression that is only wrong if the authorities to whom one appeals are somehow "invalid" ("irrelevant", "illegitimate", etc.). Such whitewash is understandable, since late modernity are exactly the times when scientific enterprise started to wither and crumble, because of social factors such as bureaucratisation, commercialisation, ideologisation etc.


But if one looks in the pre-WWII literature - literature written in the golden age of science, when the bedrock of the fundamental knowledge on which the science stands up to this day were formed - one finds up the original notion that ALL appeal to ANY authority is fallacious in EVERY circumstance.

Just think, this notion was in use when science was flourishing. And compare it to the notion in use in the times when science is decaying.

And remember that science once arose as a rebellion against authority, as an insistence that knowledge is assessable to anyone who makes a careful and organised effort to obtain it, and has nothing to do with one's institutional status. Nowadays, this primary drive behind scientific endeavor was given up - if not to say, thrown away as garbage, with the "denialism" or "pseudoscience" brand burned on it - and the originally rejected appeal to authority was once again exalted, returned to its place in the pre-scientific epoch.

What we are living now, Laird, is a post-scientific age that, however, still tries to present itself as a "scientific" one - just like some barbarian chiefs after the fall of Roman Empire started to dress as Roman emperors, gathered Roman relics and texts, invited some old surviving members of Roman aristocracy to their circles etc. They called themselves "new Romans", but all these was just a play, a pretence. Rome was dead, and only in a thousand years, in the epoch of Renaissance, its legacy would be genuinely rediscovered. And even then, it would be a rethinking of the Roman legacy rather than its simple reanimation.

In the post-scientific age, the age than science institutions and science community is rotten to the core and no longer trustworthy, the really useful heruistics is the direct opposite to the one you think - never trust "credible experts" until/unless there is a really strong evidence, which you researched by yourself rather than simply found out in the institutional proclamations, to accept their statements in this one exact case.

Maybe, we will see the genuine scientific Renaissance one day - I hope we will. But, it will definitely come from outside the academic institutions, exactly from the "denialists" and "pseudoscientists" who are being banished from them; banished exactly for their attempt to keep the original spirit of science as free, anti-authoritarian search for the authentic knowledge alive.

An addition to my previous post - the superb article by Caitlin Johnstone, where she explains how mainstream defends itself by automatically dismissing every source that is outside mainstream. While it deals with politics rather than science, it is fully relevant for the science debates as well, since mainstream-vs.-fringe social dynamics is sadly the same across the whole range of controversial topics:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/1...tablishment-loyalists-favorite-online-tactic/

Let me use a slightly changed quote by Caitlin - with the only change being the word "academic" added by me here and there:

The demand that you only ever use mainstream academic establishment media when arguing against academic establishment narratives is itself an inherently contradictory position, because academic establishment media by their very nature do not report facts against the academic establishment. It’s saying “You’re only allowed to criticise academic establishment power using outlets which never criticize academic establishment power.”

This is what I call agenda-driven and status-driven information filterings - the systematic practice of dismissing any source, and any data, that goes against the preordained, not-to-be-questioned conclusion (yet if you hold the dominant position, it is the sign of your social "respectability").

To be clear, this works both ways - in our case, both pro-CAGW and anti-CAGW crowds are guilty of using it. That's how unchangeably rigid - and perpetually mutually hostile - "reality tunnels" (to use the expression of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson) are made.

P.S. As Caitlin explains in the article, and as I want to clarify as well, it does mean that all sources are equally reliable: sometimes there are valid reasons to dismiss a few of them as evidently unreliable, as, as I told before, is the case with (Ir)RationalWiki and the Daily Stormer. What I meant is that neither presence / absence official institutuional status nor general political leanings are valid reasons to dismiss a source.

P.P.S. It is the burden of proof for the source's critic, to find arguments and evidence that the particular source is unreliable and not to be trusted. Overwise, one should act on the presumption of source innocence (but still be cautious and critical, of course).
 
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LS,
Can you give us a summary of how Big Oil will make its money out of a 'carbon-free world'. I can well believe that someone with money is behind this hoax, but I don't understand how they gain.

David
 
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