The reason many people right now don't care about climate change is because they are able to be reasonably certain they'll be dead before any shit hits the fan. And maybe their kids will be dead too. But beyond that?? It's fairly easy to scoff at something when the greatest proof of it is going to occur after everyone debating here is in the ground.
We won't be around if it turns out to be false or not related to human activity either. What's your point?
@Balrog99: @jjstraka34's point is that it's easier to do nothing if the damage isn't expected to happen in your lifetime. People don't take problems very seriously unless they personally stand to suffer, and climate change isn't supposed to cause serious damage until later on.
That's actually the reason I find it hard to believe that scientists are just cooking this up to get attention. If scientists wanted to scare people into buying books and donating money, they'd predict environmental damage soon.
This is especially the case when our societies tend to promote elderly alpha males into positions of power (not a snide dig at Trump, it's true generally). We need new ways of organising ourselves as we congregate in urban environments yet connect with each other diffusely to find local solutions for global problems.
@Balrog99: @jjstraka34's point is that it's easier to do nothing if the damage isn't expected to happen in your lifetime. People don't take problems very seriously unless they personally stand to suffer, and climate change isn't supposed to cause serious damage until later on.
That's actually the reason I find it hard to believe that scientists are just cooking this up to get attention. If scientists wanted to scare people into buying books and donating money, they'd predict environmental damage soon.
I know what his point is. That doesn't mean his point is right. Scientists stand to garner a lot of research money from scare tactics so don't say they have nothing to gain...
@dunbar: Yeah, I kind of think it's ludicrous to say they 'owe' us. However it would be nice if the European countries actually acknowledged the fact that we practically rebuilt Europe after WW2 and didn't act all holier than thou while benefitting from our protective umbrella all these years. They are after all the same countries that brought us two world wars and colonialism...
@Balrog99: @jjstraka34's point is that it's easier to do nothing if the damage isn't expected to happen in your lifetime. People don't take problems very seriously unless they personally stand to suffer, and climate change isn't supposed to cause serious damage until later on.
That's actually the reason I find it hard to believe that scientists are just cooking this up to get attention. If scientists wanted to scare people into buying books and donating money, they'd predict environmental damage soon.
I know what his point is. That doesn't mean his point is right. Scientists stand to garner a lot of research money from scare tactics so don't say they have nothing to gain...
That people believe this is the case is flabbergasting to me. 90+% of scientists are inventing global warming for reasearch money?? What seems more likely: that scientists are exaggerating a threat to get 10s of thousands of dollars in reasearch money for a given study, or that oil, gas and coal companies are downplaying it to rake in billions??
I don't see why there is such a focus on hypothetical environmental damage brought by climate change when pretty much most of China and many other industrial powerhouses already can't leave their homes without a mask. If that's not reason enough to move to clean energy, I don't know what is.
There is this fascinating trend among conservatives that at a certain point, once it starts to involve the government, experts on certain issues all of a a sudden become completely discredited and turn into "elitist eggheads". If you need eye surgery in your everyday life, you see an optometrist. If your toilet needs fixing, you hire a plumber. This is how almost everyone in society functions and thinks. People who are professionals at what they do are trusted to do certain jobs.
However, when it comes to global warming or pollution, suddenly scientists who have spent their life studying it are immediately distrusted and engaged in some sort of plot. We don't put someone with expertise in urban housing in HUD, we hire a brain surgeon. It's like that all normal roles of professions and expertise go out the window and we should just have "regular joes" running random things, because they have "common sense". I WANT experts running things, and this is a monumental divide in liberal and conservative thinking.
Their best candidate was not a politician but reality show conartist. He won because of her emails (lol?) and they believed he would drain the swamp, bring back manufacturing jobs, take only 1$ salary, never take a vacation, provide healthcare for everyone, build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, etc etc. Just blatant lies....
To be fair, you do see liberals shifting positions on the value of experts on one subject: GMOs. The vast majority of scientists agree that GMOs are perfectly healthy, and numerous studies have failed to verify any of the wild fears about "Frankenfood." I remember reading about golden rice and Greenpeace's persistent campaign to prevent it from reaching Asian populations with literally crippling Vitamin A deficiencies. Greenpeace's campaign indirectly killed and blinded countless Asian children, because they were afraid of a mad scientist boogieman.
@Balrog99: I was saying that, if scientists were just doing this for research money, they'd make more dire pronouncements than saying the sea level is increasing 0.13 inches per year or saying coastal communities in Florida will be swamped in 100 years. If you want to scare people, you warn them about imminent threats.
You might object that if they predicted something would happen next year and it didn't, they'd be discredited. That's not actually true--it certainly didn't apply to fears about terrorism. We've seen predictions of terrorist attacks from refugees for years now, and even after not a single terror attack by a refugee anywhere in the United States, fear is still so strong that we've got an actual travel ban in the works.
Making wrong predictions hasn't stopped scaremongers before. So if scientists were just scaremongering, they wouldn't push their predictions into the distant future, when people are less likely to worry about them.
Also, it's not like scientists are getting rich off of grant money. American researchers struggle to get funding for their projects unless they're employed by a corporation (like biochemists working for a drug company). People don't go into the sciences to get rich; the money's just not there.
Also, we have a catch-22 here: If scientists produce lots of studies proving climate change, folks say the proof is all fake--they're just scaremongering for research money. But if scientists didn't produce lots of studies, folks would say there's no proof.
To be fair, you do see liberals shifting positions on the value of experts on one subject: GMOs. The vast majority of scientists agree that GMOs are perfectly healthy, and numerous studies have failed to verify any of the wild fears about "Frankenfood." I remember reading about golden rice and Greenpeace's persistent campaign to prevent it from reaching Asian populations with literally crippling Vitamin A deficiencies. Greenpeace's campaign indirectly killed and blinded countless Asian children, because they were afraid of a mad scientist boogieman.
@Balrog99: I was saying that, if scientists were just doing this for research money, they'd make more dire pronouncements than saying the sea level is increasing 0.13 inches per year or saying coastal communities in Florida will be swamped in 100 years. If you want to scare people, you warn them about imminent threats.
You might object that if they predicted something would happen next year and it didn't, they'd be discredited. That's not actually true--it certainly didn't apply to fears about terrorism. We've seen predictions of terrorist attacks from refugees for years now, and even after not a single terror attack by a refugee anywhere in the United States, fear is still so strong that we've got an actual travel ban in the works.
Making wrong predictions hasn't stopped scaremongers before. So if scientists were just scaremongering, they wouldn't push their predictions into the distant future, when people are less likely to worry about them.
Also, it's not like scientists are getting rich off of grant money. American researchers struggle to get funding for their projects unless they're employed by a corporation (like biochemists working for a drug company). People don't go into the sciences to get rich; the money's just not there.
Also, we have a catch-22 here: If scientists produce lots of studies proving climate change, folks say the proof is all fake--they're just scaremongering for research money. But if scientists didn't produce lots of studies, folks would say there's no proof.
Also to be fair, the only thing seriously being considered in Congress is a label on the food. I agree it's pretty much useless, but it's a sticker. There are labels on food for all kinds of things: dolphin free tuna, low sodium, reduced fat. And again, it's something nearly all other major countries have. I'm not sure simply informing people of where there food comes from is some sort of assault on science.
I don't see why there is such a focus on hypothetical environmental damage brought by climate change when pretty much most of China and many other industrial powerhouses already can't leave their homes without a mask. If that's not reason enough to move to clean energy, I don't know what is.
I agree. I don't agree with the scare tactics is all. Tell the truth. Fossil fuels are dirty just don't tell me that they're going to kill everybody and destroy the planet. I don't agree that it's that bad. Cutting down all the rainforests is far more detrimental to the planet than fossil fuels.
There is this fascinating trend among conservatives that at a certain point, once it starts to involve the government, experts on certain issues all of a a sudden become completely discredited and turn into "elitist eggheads". If you need eye surgery in your everyday life, you see an optometrist. If your toilet needs fixing, you hire a plumber. This is how almost everyone in society functions and thinks. People who are professionals at what they do are trusted to do certain jobs.
However, when it comes to global warming or pollution, suddenly scientists who have spent their life studying it are immediately distrusted and engaged in some sort of plot. We don't put someone with expertise in urban housing in HUD, we hire a brain surgeon. It's like that all normal roles of professions and expertise go out the window and we should just have "regular joes" running random things, because they have "common sense". I WANT experts running things, and this is a monumental divide in liberal and conservative thinking.
All of this is 'theoretical'. Brain surgery is not. It cannot be proven that we're the cause of global warming that's why I think it's a scam. There is absolutely no way to prove it other than the passage if time. I've got more important things to think about like getting my daughter through college. Sorry, but that's the truth...
The reason i don't engage in moralizing grand-standing on telling other countries to 'do more' is because everyone is not willing to make harsh sacrifices to solve any pollution problem.
It's easy to just ask the Government to 'use clean energy' and pin our hopes on technological solutions that conveniently don't affect the comfort of our daily life.
What if i was to demand everyone not to use plastics? never use cars? Don't have children at all? Are those same people going to do that? I doubt it.
The fact is, it's very easy for us in developed nations that luckily got onto the industrial revolution and reaped the benefits at an early time with low population that we didn't crash our environment to lecture other nations.
Not so easy for late-coming nations to stifle their industrial revolution, and ask them to remain longer in poverty so as not to affect the environment.
I think you started with a good point. The basis of civilization is saying what you can and can't do as a society. Don't murder, don't steal, etc and we all won't do that unless you want the consequences.
Other countries are pursuing clean energy, and not using plastic bags and things. In the Netherlands most stores are closed on the weekends so people can spend more time with their families. And that is ok.
I think you started with a good point. The basis of civilization is saying what you can and can't do as a society. Don't murder, don't steal, etc and we all won't do that unless you want the consequences.
Other countries are pursuing clean energy, and not using plastic bags and things. In the Netherlands most stores are closed on the weekends so people can spend more time with their families. And that is ok.
I don't think anything reveals American capitalism's rancid underbelly more than Black Friday now starting at 3pm on Thanksgiving afternoon. On one hand, most elements of our society preach about how important families and morals are, and one of the VERY few days of the year that most families can be together, retail workers are now forced to skip it so everyone else can get TVs for $50 off. I refuse to participate or even visit a single store on those two days.
There aren't many holidays in this country everyone gets off to begin with (and one of them is a the celebration of a genocidal explorer). If you are LUCKY, you get Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Day, and New Year's. Some people may only get 2 or 3 of those off. There are really no traditional days off for American workers from January til May.
I favor 4-day workdays actually, its amazing how much one extra day makes.
4 workdays and 3 off days feels ideal, 2 off days you barely have any relaxing time after cleaning up and doing personal maintenance activities.
On this, we finally agree. I currently work 4 ten hour shifts, and it basically feels like I work half the week and the get the other half off. Hell, three days flies by pretty quick, but 2 often feels like it didn't even take place. There is alot to be said for one's own mental health by making sure you spend enough time away from work.
I favor 4-day workdays actually, its amazing how much one extra day makes.
4 workdays and 3 off days feels ideal, 2 off days you barely have any relaxing time after cleaning up and doing personal maintenance activities.
On this, we finally agree. I currently work 4 ten hour shifts, and it basically feels like I work half the week and the get the other half off. Hell, three days flies by pretty quick, but 2 often feels like it didn't even take place. There is alot to be said for one's own mental health by making sure you spend enough time away from work.
Here's the basic problem with that line of reasoning: If humankind can adapt enough to handle climate change, why can't it adapt enough to limit climate change? All it would require is for us to transition to sources of energy, like nuclear power, that have already been invented.
I'm more saying its a natural cycle and thus can't really be prevented. Not with current technology at any rate.
*EDIT* I'm also not saying we shouldn't pursue clean energy technology. A simple look at the pollution of other nations is all proof needed that this is a good thing.
So Gallup today has Trump's approval rating at 37%, a point lower than Obama ever got in 8 years. Before moving on, I'd like to say something about polls in the wake of the Election. They got a bad rap in the days after the Election for being wrong, but, as bore out in the weeks when all the votes were counted, the national polls were dead on, well within the margin of error. The only thing that was wrong was essentially the polls in the Rust Belt states. So dismissing polls (especially national polls) based on the 2016 election doesn't really pass scrutiny. They were correct, but like a correction in a newspaper, it didn't get nearly as much attention as the initial story.
37% is bad, but the interesting thing is that Trump is already nearing his bottom, which I view as being around 33%. Even if the wheels completely fall of the wagon, I simply do not see any way enough of his supporters abandon him to get much below that. MAYBE 30%, but I doubt it. You can probably chalk this up to both the bald-faced about Obama and the details of the Health Care legislation (which is polling at 75% disapproval). Point being, Trump's core support is always going to hold steady. But it's reaching the point where that is basically ALL he is holding.
Moving Day average poll's are never accurate, and poll's haven't ever been close to accurate unless you take poll aggregation and even those weren't accurate.
Voting poll's are also radically different, because they use past precedent of voting numbers in 2012 to estimate with weighted formulas.
It's not really comparable.
Syrian rebels launched a massive attack on Damascus Sunday amid government bombardments of rebel-held areas as a new round of U.N.-brokered peace talks was scheduled to begin in Geneva this week.
The presidential palace was rocked by explosions, Twitter user Eboumhna Remaly reported.
Really hope this is not true. Call me selfish, but I like my drinking water (Lake Ontario in this case) to be at least potable. Can't say I have a lot of confidence in that remaining to be the case if the US isn't at least doing its part.
Turns out the Trump administration actually wants to go through with it.
"It's like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick," said David Ullrich, executive director of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a coalition of 128 municipalities on both sides of the border.
"Very vindictive and mean-spirited is what it is ... And morally, it's reprehensible because this is something we need to leave to future generations in good shape."
Comey: Trump campaign under FBI investigation since mid-July, absolutely NO evidence of Obama wiretapping. First off.....no shit to both of those. Second, Comey holds this information from the American public but goes public with inquiry into duplicates of Hillary's emails?? The only remotely good excuse for this would be that he eventually knew he would be going after Trump and sent the letter about Hillary to avoid any chrages of bias. What happened in late July?? Trump held a press conference asking Russia to hack Hillary. My guess is people like Flynn, Manfort, Roger Stone and Carter Page are on the phone with their lawyers right about now.
My guess is people like Flynn, Manfort, Roger Stone and Carter Page are on the phone with their lawyers right about now.
For one thing, I think they haven't waited this long to try and cover there tracks. For another they are probably not too worried about Trump's Department of Justice. They are buddy buddy with Sessions, no need to worry. And finally even in the unusual scenario that these rich white men do get sent to jail they can rely on their buddy Trump who will pardon them before he leaves office.
Comments
That's actually the reason I find it hard to believe that scientists are just cooking this up to get attention. If scientists wanted to scare people into buying books and donating money, they'd predict environmental damage soon.
Yeah, I kind of think it's ludicrous to say they 'owe' us. However it would be nice if the European countries actually acknowledged the fact that we practically rebuilt Europe after WW2 and didn't act all holier than thou while benefitting from our protective umbrella all these years. They are after all the same countries that brought us two world wars and colonialism...
However, when it comes to global warming or pollution, suddenly scientists who have spent their life studying it are immediately distrusted and engaged in some sort of plot. We don't put someone with expertise in urban housing in HUD, we hire a brain surgeon. It's like that all normal roles of professions and expertise go out the window and we should just have "regular joes" running random things, because they have "common sense". I WANT experts running things, and this is a monumental divide in liberal and conservative thinking.
@Balrog99: I was saying that, if scientists were just doing this for research money, they'd make more dire pronouncements than saying the sea level is increasing 0.13 inches per year or saying coastal communities in Florida will be swamped in 100 years. If you want to scare people, you warn them about imminent threats.
You might object that if they predicted something would happen next year and it didn't, they'd be discredited. That's not actually true--it certainly didn't apply to fears about terrorism. We've seen predictions of terrorist attacks from refugees for years now, and even after not a single terror attack by a refugee anywhere in the United States, fear is still so strong that we've got an actual travel ban in the works.
Making wrong predictions hasn't stopped scaremongers before. So if scientists were just scaremongering, they wouldn't push their predictions into the distant future, when people are less likely to worry about them.
Also, it's not like scientists are getting rich off of grant money. American researchers struggle to get funding for their projects unless they're employed by a corporation (like biochemists working for a drug company). People don't go into the sciences to get rich; the money's just not there.
Also, we have a catch-22 here: If scientists produce lots of studies proving climate change, folks say the proof is all fake--they're just scaremongering for research money. But if scientists didn't produce lots of studies, folks would say there's no proof.
In my opinion of course...
It's easy to just ask the Government to 'use clean energy' and pin our hopes on technological solutions that conveniently don't affect the comfort of our daily life.
What if i was to demand everyone not to use plastics? never use cars? Don't have children at all? Are those same people going to do that? I doubt it.
The fact is, it's very easy for us in developed nations that luckily got onto the industrial revolution and reaped the benefits at an early time with low population that we didn't crash our environment to lecture other nations.
Not so easy for late-coming nations to stifle their industrial revolution, and ask them to remain longer in poverty so as not to affect the environment.
Other countries are pursuing clean energy, and not using plastic bags and things. In the Netherlands most stores are closed on the weekends so people can spend more time with their families. And that is ok.
There aren't many holidays in this country everyone gets off to begin with (and one of them is a the celebration of a genocidal explorer). If you are LUCKY, you get Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Day, and New Year's. Some people may only get 2 or 3 of those off. There are really no traditional days off for American workers from January til May.
4 workdays and 3 off days feels ideal, 2 off days you barely have any relaxing time after cleaning up and doing personal maintenance activities.
*EDIT* I'm also not saying we shouldn't pursue clean energy technology. A simple look at the pollution of other nations is all proof needed that this is a good thing.
37% is bad, but the interesting thing is that Trump is already nearing his bottom, which I view as being around 33%. Even if the wheels completely fall of the wagon, I simply do not see any way enough of his supporters abandon him to get much below that. MAYBE 30%, but I doubt it. You can probably chalk this up to both the bald-faced about Obama and the details of the Health Care legislation (which is polling at 75% disapproval). Point being, Trump's core support is always going to hold steady. But it's reaching the point where that is basically ALL he is holding.
Voting poll's are also radically different, because they use past precedent of voting numbers in 2012 to estimate with weighted formulas.
It's not really comparable.
Syrian rebels launched a massive attack on Damascus Sunday amid government bombardments of rebel-held areas as a new round of U.N.-brokered peace talks was scheduled to begin in Geneva this week.
The presidential palace was rocked by explosions, Twitter user Eboumhna Remaly reported.
Both moderates and jihadist rebels were reported involved in the attack about 1.2 miles from the heart of the Old City.
http://www.ibtimes.com/syria-war-news-presidential-palace-damascus-bombarded-2511040
Peace looks very far over there.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canadian-politicians-outraged-at-trump-great-lakes-funding-cuts/article34338510/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4329714/Remote-controlled-flying-squad-chase-criminals.html
Soon i'll just have to go outside instead of playing Metal Gear Solid.
"Very vindictive and mean-spirited is what it is ... And morally, it's reprehensible because this is something we need to leave to future generations in good shape."
-Yep sounds like the Trump administration.