Cont: Global warming discussion V

dann said:
Yet another misanthropic post!
Drop the 'we'! There is no 'we' in this question.
Some of 'us' were smart enough to discover that 'we' couldn't continue to pump out CO2 at the rate it was happening 50 years ago.
Others were smart enough to grasp the argument and warn against what was happening.
However, others were rich enough and profited enough from the extraction of fossil fuels to pay scam scientists and pretend experts to produce fake studies and false arguments and to pay politicians and media to spread the lies and make sure that nothing was done about the problem.
They didn't do so because they weren't smart! They did so because of an economic system that encourages and enables that kind of behaviour.
Instead of your "Humans. We think we are so smart...", it's actually: Capitalism. It's damaging vast majority of us while telling us that it's the best of all possible worlds.
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And who invented and continue support capitalism? Humans.

You call me misanthropic for disliking the way many people behave, but that doesn't mean I hate mankind. We (those of us who know what needs to be done) have to understand that this is just the way it is and we can't do a lot to change it. I reckon that as the climate gets worse the majority will come around. Things are going backward in New Zealand at present, but you have to be pragmatic about it. We don't contribute much to global warming and don't have much influence on the rest of the world, so it doesn't matter that much.

Capitalism's not going away anytime soon, if ever. We're not smart enough to come up with something better that's appealing enough to most people. So we have to rely on governments making up for capitalism's weaknesses, and the people supporting them. It will play out how it plays out and I can't do much more that sit on the sidelines and watch. I still do my bit of course, but not stridently because that just gets people's backs up. Except for here. In this backwater of the internet I can vent a bit and it won't hurt.
 
I've experienced many days in the high forties, and they are horrible.

So far, I've never been anywhere when the temperature is 50 or over.

Hopefully, I never will be.
 
novaphile said:
I've experienced many days in the high forties, and they are horrible.

So far, I've never been anywhere when the temperature is 50 or over.

Hopefully, I never will be.
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My personal record is 52C, in Kuwait a few years ago.
The heat is quite disconcerting. The ony thing I can compare it to is when you're cooking a pizza, and you open the oven to see how it's doing. That blast of hot air from the oven, is like opening the front door here. It's just crazy.
I did actually fry an egg on the ground outside my villa in Riyadh, just to prove it could be done. It took 30 minutes (47C outside), but it did cook through. Didn't eat it, though!
 
52C is my record as well, but in Arizona in the USA southwest. Spent a summer doing a system upgrade around Lake Havasu City and it really does feel like opening an oven door when you step outside.
 
+1.5 °C actually means I save about €0.75 on my heating bill per day. With ca. 200 days per year that used to be cool enough to switch on some heating, that's €150 per day.

During the last cool season, from October 2023 to April 2024, however, the temperature anomaly in my neck of the plains (Germany, near Dutch and Belgian borders), was +2.2 °C, saving me €220.
(Current cool season so far is not quite as warm - "only" about +0.9 °C for October through December 24th
(And the entire year 2024 is going to be near +1.0 °C)

Reference period for these aberrations is the average of years 2002 to 2006! As measured at the local weather station. Not "since pre-industrial period"!
 
The reduction in the cost of winter heating must, of course, be set against the increase in the cost of summer air conditioning. Likewise deaths from hyperthermia vs death from heat stroke. The cost/benefit will vary from country to country.
 
Pixel42 said:
The reduction in the cost of winter heating must, of course, be set against the increase in the cost of summer air conditioning. Likewise deaths from hyperthermia vs death from heat stroke. The cost/benefit will vary from country to country.
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We have no A/C. Very rare in Germany.
That's more and more of a probleum. Although I think that winter months are warming more than summer months.
 
Pixel42 said:
The reduction in the cost of winter heating must, of course, be set against the increase in the cost of summer air conditioning. Likewise deaths from hyperthermia vs death from heat stroke. The cost/benefit will vary from country to country.
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many plants need a continued period of subzero temperature before they will blossom again in the next year - warmer winters impact agriculture negatively both in winter and in summer.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
And who invented and continue support capitalism? Humans.

You call me misanthropic for disliking the way many people behave, but that doesn't mean I hate mankind. We (those of us who know what needs to be done) have to understand that this is just the way it is and we can't do a lot to change it. I reckon that as the climate gets worse the majority will come around. Things are going backward in New Zealand at present, but you have to be pragmatic about it. We don't contribute much to global warming and don't have much influence on the rest of the world, so it doesn't matter that much.

Capitalism's not going away anytime soon, if ever. We're not smart enough to come up with something better that's appealing enough to most people. So we have to rely on governments making up for capitalism's weaknesses, and the people supporting them. It will play out how it plays out and I can't do much more that sit on the sidelines and watch. I still do my bit of course, but not stridently because that just gets people's backs up. Except for here. In this backwater of the internet I can vent a bit and it won't hurt.
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0. Yes, apes didn't invent and don't support capitalism.

1. No, that's not why I call you misanthropic.
2. No, it's not "just the way it is."
3. No, we can actually "do a lot to change it."
4. No, you don't "have to be pragmatic about it," and it does matter much.

5. No, we are actually "smart enough to come up with something better that's appealing enough to most people."
6. No, we don't "have to rely on governments making up for capitalism's weaknesses."
7. No, you can "do much more than sit on the sidelines and watch."


0. It's your unfounded standard defense of the idea that no matter what happens, humans (or human nature) are to blame for it. And it is universally applicable: Hitler, Stalin and Trump were or are all humans, so no matter what they did, you can (and do!) claim that they did it because they were/are humans. The only thing that is required to believe your argument is to always ignore the people who didn't and don't follow rulers like those three guys and often actively fight against them.
Why do they fight them? No, it's also not because they're human. People have very different interests, they have very different ideas about what is right or wrong with the world. There is no human nature that decides those ideas for them.

1. See 0. It's your standard argument about anything that's wrong with this world: Humans did it! Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I see this again and again in your posts, be it about global warming or the pandemic, and I have never seen you praise any good thing that people have done and explain it (away) with the same argument: because they're humans!

2. 'It is the way it is' is a tautology. As for global warming, it is the way it is, not because people are being people, but because capital is being capital. The owners of Big Oil have an awful lot of money to invest in people who persuade the rest of humanity to let them continue to drill, drill, drill, even though it's to the detriment of the vast majority of humanity. The owners of Big Oil act the way they do because they're capitalists in the oil industry, not because they are humans. (For the same reason, people in the health-insurance industry delay, deny, defend and depose.)

3. And it is so obvious that 'we' can do a lot to change it. And some of 'us', i.e. people, humanity (never other primates) are already doing it. It is so bloody obvious that it is not human nature to deliberately destroy the environment. I have mentioned the stuff that's being done in Denmark to get to zero CO2 emissions. Like New Zealand, Denmark is a small country, but small countries matter too, in particular when enough of them decide to so something. It obviously matters more when big countries do, and the largest one of them actually does:
Arnaud Bertand on X, Nov 15, 2024
This one is hilarious: the US ceded global climate leadership to China long ago...
China literally has an 70-80% global market share in most green industries and installs more renewable energy each year than the rest of the world combined.
The level of delusion is crazy...
Trump may cede global climate leadership to China (CNBC, Nov 14, 2024)
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Mark on X, Aug 24, 2024
Each year from 2020 to 2022, China installed about 140GW of new renewable electricity capacity, more than the US, the EU, and India put together. (A gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.)
This is from November; the 2023 column was only an estimate.http://ft.com/content/33ca0d…
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See graph in tweet if the link to the Financial Times article doesn't work.
NOT Potato Bolshevik on X, Aug 24, 2024
China really locked in with solar panels,
no clue why they decided to make 1 trillion of them,
but we are less likely to all die now so that is good
China Hits Xi Jinping's Renewable Power Target Six Years Early (Bloomberg, Aug 22, 2024)
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I saw the three tweets above here: Trump Gets Outmaneuvered by China at Worst Time (MeidasTouch on YouTube, Dec 27, 2024)

4. Translation of 'being pragmatic about it': 'I have found a way to give up and blame climate change on human nature. I would like to do something about it (I'm one of the good guys, after all), but against human nature the gods themselves contend in vain. And while I'm despairing about human nature I come up with excuses for Big Oil: Like me, Big Oil is also a mere victim of human nature. "'Big Oil' is "simply responding to demand" - demand from humans, obviously.

5. See 3!

6. The worst thing about relying on governments making up for capitalism's weaknesses is that governments in general don't make up for it. On the contrary, they tend to exacerbate the problem, even the governments you like.

7. The worst thing about this one is that you are actually doing much more than sitting on the sidelines watching. You are preaching against going on the attack against the industry and the governments, you are defending both even though reality shows you that they, and not "humans", are the perpetrators of not only global warming but also of letting a deadly and debilitating virus rip through their populations and organizing a massive propaganda machine unlike anything humanity has ever experienced before in order to let capitalism, the cause of both of these scourges, continue in a still more aggressive manner.

I hope you've noticed what has been happening to the consciousness of humans in the USA in this the last month of the year. The murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, and the response of billionaires, politicians and the media, has made people begin to realize what they have in common and who their enemy is. It hasn't yet affected Big Oil, but the owners and CEOs of the industry are no doubt already investing as much in security as they have been doing in astroturfing in the last 50 years.
Humans are starting to realize that the enemy of (most of) humanity may not be who they've been conned into believing the enemy to be.

It remains to be seen if Trump and his cronies will manage to distract people again, which is one of the few things he is very good at, but I haven't been this optimistic for the past 30-40 years. The MAGA voters can't have expected that Trump would fill his cabinet with billionaires who would start calling them retards even before his second term has begun.
It will be interesting to see how they'll cope with the current level of cognitive dissonance.
 
New book, about "the Achilles heel of green power and digital":
Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future (Penguin)
Vince Beiser - "Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future" (The Daily Show on YouTube, Jan. 31, 2025 - 13:41 min.)
Journalist and author Vince Beiser sits down with Michael Kosta to discuss the paradox of electric vehicles and renewable energy and his latest book "Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future." They talk about how preventing climate change has led to a rush for “critical” metals, how China has dominated the field of mining and manufacturing, the minerals and metals behind Trump’s Greenland obsession, recycling electronic waste, and the importance of reusing and repairing gadgets.
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As almost always in interviews, the author of the book is asked what we can do as individuals. I like his answer because he points out that there really is no individual solution to the problem of global warming, i.e. to CO2 emissions.

12.29--> Michael Kosta: Why should we not buy a car?
VINCE BEISER: Well, because cars are by far the most material and energy-intensive thing that most of us own unless--except for your house if you own a house. Right?
And I'm not saying you're a bad person if you own a car, even if you own nine cars. Right? I own a car myself.
What I am saying is, we need to get to a place--we need to reduce the number of cars thatnare out there because if we swap all 1 billion gas cars that are already out there for one billion electric vehicles, we're going to swap one set of problems for another.
MICHAEL KOSTA: Right.
VINCE BEISER: Much better is, we got to reduce the number of cars by giving people the freedom to choose whether or not to have a car, because right now, most places in America, you've got to have a car.
MICHAEL KOSTA: Right.
VINCE BEISER: You need one.
MICHAEL KOSTA: Right.
VINCE BEISER: But if we can, you know, promote things like bicycling, public transit, getting around by foot, so that fewer people need to own cars, so that more people can choose whether or not they want to own a car--MICHAEL KOSTA: Yeah. We'll all be much better off. Thank you for writing a great book.
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I wish he had been given time to explain what exactly he means by "promote" in this context, but I hope he is talking about more than trying to change people's attitude. I don't know if it's in the book.

By they way, he also doesn't think that Trump's annexation of Greenland is a solution, but that's probably just because he's Canadian ...
 
dann said:
New book, about "the Achilles heel of green power and digital":
Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future (Penguin)

"because right now, most places in America, you've got to have a car."
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Public Transportation Facts
45% of Americans have no access to public transportation.
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Which means that 55% do have access to public transportation. 80% of the population lives in urban areas.

The state with highest rural population is Vermont, at 65%. Vermont has a comprehensive public transport system including a rural bus network, ride sharing, and free transport for elderly and disabled people. Vermont also promotes car pooling, cycling, walking and working from home. For those who prefer driving their own cars, Vermont has a network of over 300 EV charging stations (the highest per person in the US) and four state EV incentive schemes. Vermont is ranked the second most likely state to go fully EV soonest, after California.
 
Finally some good news from Trump!
Mike Nellis on X, Mar 11, 2025:
There’s a full-on coordinated attempt by MAGA world to save Tesla while its stock is in free fall. Trump is out there saying he’s going to buy one. Hannity was hocking them last night. What happened to letting the free market decide?

Image
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James Ball on X, Mar 11, 2025:
Tbf “buy an electric car to own the libs” feels like an amazing place for 2025 politics to land.
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Is there anything we can do to make Trump and MAGA think that the 'libtards' really, really hate solar panels and wind turbines?
 
So, you're going to have a climate conference, and you really really need a four-lane highway, one with walls on either side of it so the commoners can't access it. What do you do? Why you hack it out of a protected area so those delegates can speed directly towards their champagne and canapés without being inconvenienced by the plebes of course.

notthebee.com

Thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest cleared to build highway for UN climate summit

Nope, this isn't The Babylon Bee.
notthebee.com notthebee.com

​

 
What shocks me is that the same people who were screaming bloody murder that environmental protections would hurt the economy and thus should be avoided at all costs are now cheering on a manchild burning down the economy for *reasons* doing far more damage with no return expected.
 
Lukraak_Sisser said:
What shocks me is that the same people who were screaming bloody murder that environmental protections would hurt the economy and thus should be avoided at all costs are now cheering on a manchild burning down the economy for *reasons* doing far more damage with no return expected.
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That just shows that, yet again, it wasn't actually about the claimed principles. Those principles were just being invoked as a convenient shield to mask their actual intentions.
 
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