Climate change

That video contains a lot of answers; the biggest problem is that it is 20 mins and few people will watch one that long. But Sabine is excellent in cutting out the boring crap. She also has a really good technical understanding of the material.

There are many options for dealing with waste. The main driver is economics (storage is cheap) and then concerns over reprocessing (not cheap, and plutonium is a hazard because you can make bombs with it).

Youtube is in many ways the main (and sometimes the only) thing that offers true scientific research and musings from scientists and researchers without everything being filtered or manipulated in some way or the other. I mean, the knowledge is out there, by the tons. Only not really available for the average person. Most of it is behind paied firewalls, and the whole concept of science makes it difficult to read without knowing exactly what to look for, and how to filter it. Scientific papers is a jungle that consists of 95% irrelevant nonsense (for a whole lot of reasons) and 5% “true” stuff. This is the way it must be, because nothing is “the truth” unless it is proven (scientifically) to be “the truth” by many.

A direct consequence of this is there are no “experts” in the way we think of experts in other fields of life. The only thing a scientist can be expert in, is the scientific method itself, period. Sabine is one of those experts, although she probably more and more is an expert in communicating the scientific method, and what science have to say about all the stuff in the world. She is also very funny There are lots of others just like her.

One of the best known (or most popular) is Veritasium. He also has a good video about experts

My disliking about the whole climate debate (or whatever it is) is it’s almost 100% unscientific. The “truth” isn’t measured by consensus (by “experts”. See the video above how clever so called “experts” really are). The truth is measured by facts only. This means that anyone can hijack the debate, and this is exactly what is happening. Greta is the prime example, and she is playing it straight into the pockets of much worse forces.

Great video.

Steve6443 wrote:

Yes, I’m sick to the back teeth about the reporting and fear mongering surrounding climate change – as if paying more in taxes to the government will, in some form or other, prevent the climate from changing. It’s what the climate does. Constantly. CHANGE.

To this I agree. The way climate change is misused to extort taxes and impose restrictions and austerity fantasies on people is totally counterproductive. Your statements here are a typical and pretty logical reaction to what governments and radical NGO’s are doing.

This kind of fear-mongering will in the end cause the opposite of the targets which should be attained, because they will loose the population and therefore any form of chance that people will take these kind of things on board. The Covid pandemic was proof of that, people simply go into denial mode and instead of protecting themselves against serious threats will follow any populist who will tell them what they want to hear. The same happens with Climate Change.

Steve6443 wrote:

Once Gates, Schwab and co stop using their private jets, stop swanning off around the world on every whim, start eating insects instead of prime Kobe beef, then I’m sorry, I believe that this whole issue of climate change is just a scam.

This is exactly the result of what happens if environmental protection gets mixed with socialist envy politics….. People will do everything to protect their interest against everyone else, who is the evil user of biz jets or what not. Politicians are good at this, divide and conquer instead of making it attractive to actively participate in the quest for a better environmental protection in a positive way, so everyone can profit from it. And if I hear some of those radicals proclaim openly that climate change can not be stopped by democratic means, it sais more than enough about the political nature of those guys.

Steve6443 wrote:

If there is truly a need to combat climate change in any meaningful manner, it needs to be driven top down – means those who are the richest, who live in opulence and decadence, surrender their life styles “for the good of the planet” rather than telling us our annual holiday to Bognor Regis is cancelled under the guise of “managing climate change”.

That is what I mean. The actual issue of trying to slow down global warming gets forgotten in socialist style quarrels about who can do what. The typical human trait of imposing one’s will upon others.

It could also be seen quite well what kind of reactions the Ukraine crisis got: Instead of working tirelessly to assure net reliability for electricity, to do the logical things and e.g. keep some nuclear power stations running to migate the gas shortages, politicians come up with austerity plans for the population which is likely to cause SEVERE political unrest apart from massive medical problems, if i.e. people can’t heat their houses or are forced by environmental police to cool down to 19 degrees. If there is one way to provoke uprising, I don’t know it. What if Uncle Vladimir eventually calls out that he can sort it all out for the freezing people in Europe if they help him overthrow the Ukraine and accept his benign grace to feed oil and gas to the masses? Who will bet against whole populations demanding immediate stops to sanctions and support for Ukraine? First is food and heat, then morale… Berthold Brecht had this very right.

One thing which really annoys me as well is that those circles of extremists and lobbyists keep denying the immense progress which has been done already. If the rate goes on like it has in the last decades, most of the perceived problems will be addressed by the normal technical evolution rather than political control fantasies. Some factors of climate change will even help along, such as that energy levels to heat buldings will reduce over the years, hence slowing down CO2 production from heating, which is one of the major factors.

YES. The climate is changing and some of those changes are man made. Yes it would be good if the efforts to slow down and eventually stop global warming factors we actually CAN control would progress to an extent that some meaningful results can be seen. But it will not happen like this. The way climate change is postulated right now will rather do the opposite: It empowers demagoges and populists, it divides populations to the bring of civil war, it will cause some countries to go bancrupt or suffer massive recessions while others who ignore the whole thing thrive momentarily.

There are lots of measures which could and must be taken to reduce CO2 from which everyone will profit. Reforestation in big style, particularly in places where way too much of forests have been destroyed and the land left barren is just one thing where preciously few efforts go into. Yes, we can change the way we do things WITHOUT taking away the hard earned perks of civilisation, primarily by cutting red tape and bureaucratic nonsense. But it is always easier to point fingers and trigger envy buttons than to do that.

Steve6443 wrote:

I believe that this whole issue of climate change is just a scam

I’m curious. Which part of climate change do you believe is a scam?

Do you not believe that the climate is changing?
Or is it that you don’t believe that it’s changing because of human actions?
Or is it that you don’t believe that it’s within our power to change our activities to stop changing the climate?
Or do you just want to be allowed to continue as before irrespective of the consequences?
Or is it something else that you believe makes climate change a scam?

dublinpilot wrote:

Or is it that you don’t believe that it’s changing because of human actions?

In my humble opinion, it’s not a scam as much as it is a massive derailing from the only important thing. And this is well known, a scientific fact, undisputed.

dublinpilot wrote:

Or is it that you don’t believe that it’s within our power to change our activities to stop changing the climate?

Even if we by some miracle of technology should be able to stop the use of fossil fuel completely, this will not solve the problem.

What is the main problem? The main problem is that the worst thing we can do for the climate (and the world as such) is to have children. Every additional child birth represents an added climate effect so large it is impossible for any single individual to make up for it. Not even 100 individuals can make up for it. Perhaps not even a 1000 (don’t remember exactly). The main problem is there are too many of us. It is not possible for us to change the climate, unless we become fewer. It’s the only thing that will help. People just close their eyes for that fact. Surely, if we all eat grass and travel by electric trains (using electricity from wind and sun), we can just continue as before. It doesn’t work like that.

I believe the globe can sustain a whole lot of people, more than today (I have seen some numbers). But not without massive changes to the climate, complete change to the land and sea, and certain death to most other creatures. That’s were we are heading, and paying CO2 tax, eating grass and have a room temperature of 18 deg won’t change this one single bit.

We have one choice IMO. We can:

• Accept our fate as the dominant species and accept the fact that our presence will completely change the face of the earth (including climate). An inevitable force of nature, more like the creation of life itself, that also changed the earth beyond recognition. We have no clue what the earth eventually ends up like though. Or:
• Do what is necessary to reduce our inprint and changes on the earth: become vastly fewer than today.

Unless we destroy ourselves in wars, by some disease or other catastrophe, I cannot imagine that we end up with any other scenario than the first one.

dublinpilot wrote:

Which part of climate change do you believe is a scam?

Looking at the whole sentence I think this is about VIP’s who are very much advocating restrictions to climate change not living by their own standards. And that the scam refers to the taxes and ambitions of control over fellow humans rather than climate change itself.

Climate change is a reality, no question about that. And the way it is addressed with repression and threats despite progress being made rather than as a vision for an aspirable better future is exactly why we see civil unrest up to religious ecofanatics vs climate change deniers starting to emerge all over the place.

A lot of politicians scam their way through this by misusing the issue of climate change to press forth with changes in society they wish for other reasons. That part can easily be called a scam.

LeSving wrote:

The main problem is there are too many of us.

The old “population bomb” and Malthusian ideology. All turned out not to be true in any of their predictions.

It has nothing to do with any “population bomb”. It has to do with how we affect the environment. The basics for all climate change “ideologies” is that we somehow can continue as we do now, if we only change the use of energy. Going all non-fossil energy will help, but we still need houses, we need roads, we need communication, media, food water, air. We need all the stuff we have, our culture, our democracy. All that stuff will also affect the climate, and without it, what would we become? We are way too many already. There is no “need” for all these people for humanity to live forever and prosper. Perhaps only a fraction is enough, 1/10 or 1/100 would perhaps be the sweet spot? I don’t know. Every single person above that “sweet spot” will do nothing but pollute the environment and make life worse for everybody else.

We don’t think in such terms (the Chinese do although despotism is taking more and more over) For us human life is sacred. Each individual has a right to live, and the right to have children. Without those rights, what would we be? With that in mind, the only way this can go, is we will change the whole globe to something very different. All land area must be used for food production, housing or industry (and god forbid; wind and solar). Some pockets left here and there for recreation. The oceans will become nothing but a food recourse, tailor made for our needs (which it already has been for a long time, we have just become better and better at it, unless it all disappears in plastic). We will not only rule the globe. We will become the very thing that defines it.

What I mean is that we either accept who we are, and the consequences we cause on nature, or the globe as a whole. The globe will change to something drastically different, including the climate, regardless of taxes and solar panels We are created by nature, and we are a force of nature. We are the next step in the evolution of whatever it is that guides the evolution of the universe. Or we don’t accept it. If we don’t, then the only way forward, IMO, is to make sure humanity will survive in harmony with the rest of nature. This can only be done by greatly reducing our size. I have no doubts that it is possible, but I don’t see how with our values (China values perhaps, who knows).