to suggest the loved ones of anyone else on Earth paying that price is somehow justified by the results).
I didn't like that comment, either, but I'm fairly certain that @Mathsorcerer did not think deaths from natural disasters were justified. I think he was just pointing out one positive effect, which did not necessarily make the deaths a positive thing overall.
to suggest the loved ones of anyone else on Earth paying that price is somehow justified by the results).
I didn't like that comment, either, but I'm fairly certain that @Mathsorcerer did not think deaths from natural disasters were justified. I think he was just pointing out one positive effect, which did not necessarily make the deaths a positive thing overall.
Corporations, or more broadly capitalism as an economic system, is what is to blame for politicians being incentivized to care more about corporate lobbyists contributing to their party and their individual candidates ............ capitalism's fault more than anything.
I sadly agree with you. But I don't see a viable alternative to that. Revolutions have failed, and all the alternatives to capitalism have failed. The closer thing to what you advocate, economical democracy, that I can think about, the Yugoslavian socialism, based on self-management, where the workers of every factory decided and elected who was in charge to dirige them, has also failed. And people, the ones so lucky to live in rich countries, are hypnotized, are happy to be consumers instead of persons, so easy to be distracted from the real problems when the media decide to distract them. With a new political crisis, a new sex symbol or gossip, the last cellphone or whatever is needed. Nothing new, also Julius Caesar told "give people bread and circus and they will be happy, will cause no problem", even if Goebbels added his ingredient to the equation, ingredient that all the modern powers that want to manipulate people opinions now use. "how unlikely or absurd is what you say is not important, if you repeat it enough often the people will believe it".
Gandhi was talking of the same problems more than 80 years ago, in times when all the things that you address was less self evident and the hope of those who wanted to change the tings was communism. If someone do the effort to study what Gandhi told, not only read the autobiographic book, he will discover many things, and see how he was a prophet, that anticipated the failure of communism and addressed the problems that now we are living. He gave also his possible solution, that can roughly summarized in 2 concepts. Village and swadeshi. Village because anything bigger than that make impossible a true democracy, the representatives elected by the people become too distant from the people and instead of serving the people begin to serve other powers. Swadeshi, that mean using mainly, if not only, goods produced locally, because in that way a lot of economical problems are addressed. Nations that use their power to steal (or pay very little) the goods and the work of other nations are no longer possible. And also corporations and single men that accumulate incredible wealth and gain a tremendous power over the people are no longer possible. this does not mean that the villages can not federate to reach common goals that alone can not be reached, like sending men to an other planet like @Mathsorcerer hope or build big geothermal plants like you advocate. This mean that the village for him is the ideal place where a true democracy (power of the people) can exist. He also told that violence is not the way to reach his goals, that only persuasion, not by occult means, but plain argumentation, and consciousness expansion can lead to a durable change, when humanity will be ready and willing to have that change. He also told that he did not expect the change taking place soon, he guessed that about 300 years are needed, and only 80 have passed, if people who believe in this work actively to change their own life, not in convincing other people about that.
I guess that if the global environmental changes that we are talking about will really happen, that, after a period of wars and suffering, will happen a little sooner. but I am not sure about it. What I am pretty sure about is that we will not see it, and probably also our sons and nephews. And I am afraid that the process will be much harder than how Gandhi anticipated, as he had no clues of the possible environmental collapse. But this is the only safe road for humanity, it seems to me that all the other alternatives can lead only to self destruction or a people completely slave of a very small oligarchy. And if we look at the graphics about how the wealth is moving and concentrating in the hands of few, how the population and the nations are becoming slave of the debts, how the economical powers can decide at will the collapse of entire nations, that are loosing their sovereignty, even if for now give to the single persons the illusion of having a free will (but a great part of the people have debts, and there are ways to burn away the wealth of who does not have them), I would say that now we are going in that direction.
Perso, accept there is long play - Finnish "tunturi" - ground out Scandi mountains - and "harju" - fine earth formations formed in ice age melting waters' exit grooves make tje point.
But also - just now an art work I have had for number of years came undone for glue for nothing but underlying humidity, I think. I fear humidity and mold formation problems will become the typical issues of house building.
I'm not convinced we can do anything about climate change. I've heard several "experts", even among the most alarmist of scientists, saying that it is far too late to reverse the trend, even if we do everything humanly possible to cut down on carbon emissions.
So I tend to agree with @Mathsorcerer that our efforts would be better spent developing ways to cope with and adapt to the changes that are (probably) coming over the next century or two, rather than spending so much (likely wasted) effort on extreme reduction of carbon emissions. That said, I'm sure only good can come from trying to develop clean energy and to not pollute the environment any more than we have to. But I don't think we should wreck the world economy to do it.
I remain very skeptical and doubtful of "scientific" predictions of climate and weather, because those things are governed by chaotic equations (equations so complicated that their outcomes cannot be predicted, because even the smallest change in initial variables, of which there are dozens or more, produce profound differences in outcome - the so-called "butterfly effect").
In the 1970's, all the "climate scientists" were warning about global cooling being caused by human emissions, and they were just as adamant about it then, and just as insistent that the science was "settled", as they are today about warming.
There's a lot of pseudo-science in the world, and it can be very hard for lay people, including politicians and even scientists who are not specialists in the field that is in dispute, to tell the difference between that and legitimate scientific study. Legitimate science is supposed to always have a strong element of doubt in any conclusions, with constant re-testing, confirmation, replication of results, and revision.
One of the ways climate scientists have developed to cope with and adapt to the changes that are probably coming is complete (not just extreme, but total) reduction of carbon emissions, and in fact that will help us cope with the changes by lessening their impact. Whenever we do it, it will have a positive impact, it's just the earlier we do it the more positive the impact it will have, hence the urgency. No one is stopping the hunt for solutions, that's just one we know we can implement, and "wrecking the world economy" is a) not what would happen and b) better than exacerbating what we have to deal with both right now and in the future. But we don't need to worry about b, because the world economy is based on price fixing and artificial scarcity ESPECIALLY in the energy industry, and that won't change if they switch to renewable energy, they'll just overinflate infrastructure and maintenance costs to compensate and charge the same thing for freely available renewable energy that they do now for oil and gas. Nothing would change, and any "wreckage" resulting from the abolition of fossil fuels would be entirely their own doing to scare us into paying whatever they ask for the new energy sources.
And I don't think you've been following the climate science since the early 90s if you think it's been "settled" on global warming, as it's been "settled" as climate change as the term for a long time because the climate changes are extremes of both cold and heat and vary in different places. The worst effects are the global warming effects, but just the chaos you're talking about can mean extreme heat can generate extreme winters elsewhere as knock-on effects, and this has been understood for a long time, which is part of why climate change has been used for nearly two decades now by environmentalists and climate scientists (the big transition came post-9/11, which is when global warming basically phased out except in the climate change denialist community who like to focus on the term even though they're the only ones using it anymore). Those extreme winters haven't been (and aren't going to be) making the overall warming any less, and are themselves likely to become less and less extreme and then milder and milder as seasons radically change character to meet new global temperature norms, but global warming is still at this point a misnomer, hence why no one who does the science uses it (except as a piece of climate change, it still has explanatory power there, it's just not used as a catch-all term anymore except by denialists).
Also, the strong element of doubt is in play, any climate scientist will tell you they do real science with the scientific method and everything, they know how to do what they went to university for years for and it's always the point people pull out (i.e. "I have a pop science understanding of science and think somehow climate scientists understanding of it might not be at that level even though it should be astronomically above that") that makes me wonder about the reasoning power of the person bringing it up.
The thing about constant re-testing with that doubt in mind is that that is literally happening in climate science, and has been for decades, which is why there is overwhelming consensus in the field about what we need to do right now, no matter which of the futures we're likely to hit, since even the most optimistic ones mean coastal cities abandoned within two centuries at a bare minimum, and it's very likely to be far worse. They're hedging bets and being extremely conservative when they give us the scenario of coasts underwater for several miles in the span of a couple centuries, in part because of the rhetoric about them being alarmist but in part because, y'know, they're scientists and so they're willing to doubt (and no doubt emotionally invested in doubting) that it's going to be as bad as the data suggests. They've tested each other's results to death all over the world, and governments ask these things to be re-tested so often that they actually end up getting a better peer review going than a lot of fields these days, and that's what generates the strong consensus. It's not an irrational, emotional consensus, it's a scientific consensus, which means it's been thoroughly tested and confirmed and re-tested and re-confirmed to the extent the entire community can make safe bets, and the bet keeps getting safer and safer not more and more uncertain. There's always some degree of uncertainty, but the results have seen such massive universal replication for so many decades now it's getting ridiculous when people pull out that card when they don't pull it out for other fields of science reaching consensus on a topic.
For what it's worth, it would also look bad if the scientific consensus does NOT change. Because then it would indicate the consensus might not be getting examined.
The question is whether a shift in the consensus is because nobody has a clue, or because the old theory was simply wrong.
No deaths are justified. I was trying to point out that many people are more concerned with deaths which are predicted to happen at some unspecified point in the future rather than deaths which are happening right now. The past is the past--it is unchangeable; learn from it then move on. The future hasn't happened yet--you can prepare for it and plan for possible events but you can't actually do anything about it. The present, though...we do have control over that. There are things happening *right now* which can be addressed and solved *right now*, if only enough people would do something about it. Politicians are worrying about Syrian refugees--how many to let in, wondering if they should be let in at all, where to house them, how to educate the children, etc--but they aren't trying to do anything about the root cause--the de facto civil war in Syria. People flocked to social media to express their thoughts about Harambe but most of those people didn't expend any mental energy thinking about the children in their own city who went to bed hungry that night because there wasn't any food for them to eat. There are folks rioting in Charlotte about one death when no one in Chicago is rioting despite hundreds of deaths so far this year. There are people yelling insults at each other over their choice for President who cannot name a single person on their city council, which is illogical since your local elected officials have more of an effect on your daily life than does the resident of the Oval Office.
Incidentally, if sea levels were to rise dramatically then my own mother would die. Unlike most people, though, I am emotionally prepared for that eventuality--it isn't like I was close to my parents even back when I did live under their roof and nothing has changed in the 30 years since then.
In the 1970's, all the "climate scientists" were warning about global cooling being caused by human emissions, and they were just as adamant about it then, and just as insistent that the science was "settled", as they are today about warming.
There's a lot of pseudo-science in the world, and it can be very hard for lay people, including politicians and even scientists who are not specialists in the field that is in dispute, to tell the difference between that and legitimate scientific study. Legitimate science is supposed to always have a strong element of doubt in any conclusions, with constant re-testing, confirmation, replication of results, and revision.
You are correct, which is exactly why you think "all the climate scientists" were warning about global cooling in the 1970s. They were not. Popular media was. "Global cooling" was a fringe (but legitimate) hypothesis at the time that was never even once the scientific consensus. It got a few articles, ended up being disproven by the evidence, and that was it. It is in fact true that certain types of pollution had an effect that slowed down the process of global warming in the 20th century (along with many other negative effects), but that's as far as it goes.
Global warming as a hypothesis has been around a lot longer, and the evidence was always far stronger. The only place you'll hear different is popular media, which has a bias towards reporting "controversy" or things that are counterintuitive to accepted wisdom, and those who have a vested interest in pretending that climate science (a very rigorously tested field) is not as settled on the basic facts of the matter as it has been for decades.
The wikipedia article on "global cooling" is a good place to start to show how you and many others were hoodwinked into thinking that was the "scientific consensus" when it was never even close to that, as it has numerous citations on the subject.
For what it's worth, it would also look bad if the scientific consensus does NOT change. Because then it would indicate the consensus might not be getting examined.
The question is whether a shift in the consensus is because nobody has a clue, or because the old theory was simply wrong.
One thing about climate science since about the early 80s onwards is that it has been constantly shifting...but more doomwards because in every decade they're too cautious with the estimates they come out with, so it always ends up being quite a lot worse than the consensus was willing to tentatively predict when we reach what were then far-off years. The models get better, and as they get better the shape of the problem starts to tower ever-larger as the mists thin out around the beast we made that could be our end.
No deaths are justified. I was trying to point out that many people are more concerned with deaths which are predicted to happen at some unspecified point in the future rather than deaths which are happening right now. The past is the past--it is unchangeable; learn from it then move on. The future hasn't happened yet--you can prepare for it and plan for possible events but you can't actually do anything about it. The present, though...we do have control over that.
You are correct, the future hasn't happened, and also is utterly uncertain, if a meteor will collide with the earth the whole matter of climate changes will have no sense at all. And the present is now, we can change the present and have control over it. We can address problems that are happening now. I agree, but repeat what I told before, we can do it and I hope that we will do it, but changing the present and preparing a better future are not mutual excluding things, we can do both, we can be worried about both.
We are talking of global problems, but the same apply to a single person. I can have some problems to address related to what is happening now, maybe I have to fix the roof because is raining in the house or find a new job, because I was fired in the previous one. Problems of the present time, that I can solve now. But this does not mean that because I am now fixing the roof I don't have to worry about the time when I will be old and unable to work, I can do now something about that, I have to do something now, because when I will be old there will be little that I will able to do about it. Even if is not certain that I will become old, maybe I will die tomorrow, who knows it?
What you are telling sounds to my ears like saying "I worry only of my broken roof, because is a thing that is happening now, and I am not much worried about the time when I will be old, because I have no control over the future". If you focus only on the present let me tell you that in the present always happens something that prevents you on focusing also on the future, a war, an economical crisis, a tornado or something other. I can not think of a single period of my life where in the world was not happening something that had to be addressed in that "now". From the Cuban missile crisis, that I was to young to remember, to the present times.
And I suspect (but this is a very personal opinion of mine, and if you or others don't agree is perfectly fine) that some if not the most of the crisis are planned by who has the real power, the economical one. Lets take as example the Iraqi crisis, when and why all that begun? It begun with Iraq attacking Iran, sponsored and helped by the western countries, including yours and mine. Who gave to Iraq the lethal gas that was used on the solders of Iran, in violation of the international law? Western countries and corporate. The same powers that 20 years later pushed so hard to invade Iraq, using blatant lyes on mass destruction weapons that where never be found, and to have Iraq's leader killed for using something that they gave to him years before. By the way some of those western countries HAVE an huge amount of mass destruction weapons, one of them has also used 2 thermonuclear bombs to kill civilians. How we dare to judge other people and break into their own homes because we suspect that they have a gun, when our own cellar is filled with machine guns, bombs and cannons? This about when, about the why I suppose that the real answer is simple, oil.
And don't get me wrong, I am a citizen of a western country, I am not Muslim and I am deeply worried about the Muslim fundamentalism, I consider it a real treat to the freedom of the people as I see that where it controls a land in that land there is no more freedom, you have to become Muslim yourself or you die. I have tons of arguments against the Muslim fundamentalism. I am only saying that if the the Muslim fundamentalism is so strong in the present days is also if not mainly because of the interference from the western countries. And the western corporate had huge proficts from all that followed, both the oil companies and the ones that build weapons. The two strongest lobbies in your country. Is hard for me to believe that all this was not planned, even if maybe some part of the plan went out of control. Again I talk of Mickey Mouse wizard's apprentice.
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol, potentially creating a new technology to help avert climate change.
The researchers were attempting to find a series of chemical reactions that could turn CO2 into a useful fuel, when they realized the first step in their process managed to do it all by itself. The reaction turns CO2 into ethanol, which could in turn be used to power generators and vehicles.
"By using common materials, but arranging them with nanotechnology, we figured out how to limit the side reactions and end up with the one thing that we want."
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol, potentially creating a new technology to help avert climate change./
I wonder... why does this news remind me of the movie Snowpiercer?
@JuliusBorisov really interesting. I still have some doubts, the page in the link given tells "it works at room temperature, which means that it can be started and stopped easily and with little energy cost" but, if the thermodynamic principles are not proven false, energy can not be created from nowhere. Ethanol have more energy than CO2, so, even with that revolutionary catalyzer, more energy must be introduced in the system than the energy that can be obtained burning the ethanol. So probably an incredible amount of energy is needed to convert enough CO2 in ethanol to have a relevant effect on the climate changes. Probably the invention is true and will be useful, but not to solve the climate changes and have new energy doing it.
@gorgonzola , the next line after your quote is: "This means that this conversion process could be used as temporary energy storage during a lull in renewable energy generation, smoothing out fluctuations in a renewable energy grid." They're saying that, yes this would take energy, but that energy is being produced anyway because of the way the power grid system operates. Power plants produce electricity even when it's not being used and the proposal laid out in this article is to use that electricity to perform this reaction and store some of that wasted energy in the form of ethanol.
True, to use the surplus energy to convert co2 in ethanol is good and useful, but it will not solve the climate change problem, a little less oil and coal will be used to produce energy because some waste of energy is avoided, but this is very different from thinking of using the process as a mean to solve the problem of having too much CO2 in the atmosphere, that is the cause, or one of the causes of climate changes. That was the sense of what I told. That is obvious to who has some physics knowledge, but maybe not to who does not have it and can think that big converting plants can be built to eliminate the excess of co2 in atmosphere to revert the climate change.
The other problem with this method as a CO2 removal scheme is, if the ethanol is burned as a fuel, it will be returning the CO2 to the air. So I suppose it would be a nearly carbon neutral fuel, but it wouldn't actually reduce atmospheric carbon. To do that, you need to convert atmospheric CO2 into something solid.
Obviously then, it's a far better plan to use the ethanol to make cocktails.
Growing forests is a better method, as a tree converts more CO2 into O2 then the inverse conversion that take place when the wood is burned, and this is possible because it uses solar energy for the conversion. Solar power is always the better... But we should accept to convert parking lots in forests to have it possible, and we are destroying forests, not increasing them
It's counter-intuitive, but the timber companies are doing a lot for carbon sequestration. Most lumber used in construction comes from tree farms, not from forests. Tree farms specialize in fast growing pines that are harvested for lumber, then replanted. The carbon is locked up in the lumber and, if used to make lasting wood products, like houses and furniture, it won't be released back into the atmosphere for many decades.
I agree. I live in a wooden house, I make things with wood, things made to last, I have built and restored wooden houses, but even when I burn trees in my stove to heat the house the balance is positive. If I would use plastic dishes and bowls instead of the ones that I do myself in wood I would use carbon that was sequestered ages ago, not carbon sequestered recently by trees that leave place at other trees that will take that carbon again. A perfect, environment compatible cycle, propelled by solar energy. And I am even reverting to traditional hand tools instead of energy consuming electric machines for my woodworking, that together with playing music and BG is one of the things that I enjoy the most in life. Of those things seems that playing BG and participating at those boards is the less environment compatible, but don't expect me to shut it, I am not ready for that
Judging from that article, I think what they're basically saying is: "Hey, once our energy output drops the non-renewable sources, a renewable energy grid could use this method to mitigate/potentially reverse climate change."
So we're still gonna be waiting on the cessation of fossil fuel usage, but it seems like an awesome thing to try out once that's happening!
The problem with renewable sources, or some of them, is that you can not decide when and how much the production happens. Not all days are sunny or windy ones, to make it easy to understand. So, when the production will shift to those sources there will be the problem to store the energy somehow when there is a surplus to use it when the production is low. Nowadays when possible they pump water backwards in the dams, but is not possible anywhere. other methods are not very efficient, convert water in oxygen and hydrogen is not efficient. To convert CO2 in ethanol was possible but also not efficient, with the new method is possible that it can be used.
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But I don't see a viable alternative to that. Revolutions have failed, and all the alternatives to capitalism have failed. The closer thing to what you advocate, economical democracy, that I can think about, the Yugoslavian socialism, based on self-management, where the workers of every factory decided and elected who was in charge to dirige them, has also failed.
And people, the ones so lucky to live in rich countries, are hypnotized, are happy to be consumers instead of persons, so easy to be distracted from the real problems when the media decide to distract them.
With a new political crisis, a new sex symbol or gossip, the last cellphone or whatever is needed.
Nothing new, also Julius Caesar told "give people bread and circus and they will be happy, will cause no problem", even if Goebbels added his ingredient to the equation, ingredient that all the modern powers that want to manipulate people opinions now use. "how unlikely or absurd is what you say is not important, if you repeat it enough often the people will believe it".
Gandhi was talking of the same problems more than 80 years ago, in times when all the things that you address was less self evident and the hope of those who wanted to change the tings was communism. If someone do the effort to study what Gandhi told, not only read the autobiographic book, he will discover many things, and see how he was a prophet, that anticipated the failure of communism and addressed the problems that now we are living.
He gave also his possible solution, that can roughly summarized in 2 concepts.
Village and swadeshi.
Village because anything bigger than that make impossible a true democracy, the representatives elected by the people become too distant from the people and instead of serving the people begin to serve other powers.
Swadeshi, that mean using mainly, if not only, goods produced locally, because in that way a lot of economical problems are addressed. Nations that use their power to steal (or pay very little) the goods and the work of other nations are no longer possible. And also corporations and single men that accumulate incredible wealth and gain a tremendous power over the people are no longer possible. this does not mean that the villages can not federate to reach common goals that alone can not be reached, like sending men to an other planet like @Mathsorcerer hope or build big geothermal plants like you advocate. This mean that the village for him is the ideal place where a true democracy (power of the people) can exist.
He also told that violence is not the way to reach his goals, that only persuasion, not by occult means, but plain argumentation, and consciousness expansion can lead to a durable change, when humanity will be ready and willing to have that change. He also told that he did not expect the change taking place soon, he guessed that about 300 years are needed, and only 80 have passed, if people who believe in this work actively to change their own life, not in convincing other people about that.
I guess that if the global environmental changes that we are talking about will really happen, that, after a period of wars and suffering, will happen a little sooner. but I am not sure about it. What I am pretty sure about is that we will not see it, and probably also our sons and nephews.
And I am afraid that the process will be much harder than how Gandhi anticipated, as he had no clues of the possible environmental collapse.
But this is the only safe road for humanity, it seems to me that all the other alternatives can lead only to self destruction or a people completely slave of a very small oligarchy.
And if we look at the graphics about how the wealth is moving and concentrating in the hands of few, how the population and the nations are becoming slave of the debts, how the economical powers can decide at will the collapse of entire nations, that are loosing their sovereignty, even if for now give to the single persons the illusion of having a free will (but a great part of the people have debts, and there are ways to burn away the wealth of who does not have them), I would say that now we are going in that direction.
But also - just now an art work I have had for number of years came undone for glue for nothing but underlying humidity, I think. I fear humidity and mold formation problems will become the typical issues of house building.
So I tend to agree with @Mathsorcerer that our efforts would be better spent developing ways to cope with and adapt to the changes that are (probably) coming over the next century or two, rather than spending so much (likely wasted) effort on extreme reduction of carbon emissions. That said, I'm sure only good can come from trying to develop clean energy and to not pollute the environment any more than we have to. But I don't think we should wreck the world economy to do it.
I remain very skeptical and doubtful of "scientific" predictions of climate and weather, because those things are governed by chaotic equations (equations so complicated that their outcomes cannot be predicted, because even the smallest change in initial variables, of which there are dozens or more, produce profound differences in outcome - the so-called "butterfly effect").
In the 1970's, all the "climate scientists" were warning about global cooling being caused by human emissions, and they were just as adamant about it then, and just as insistent that the science was "settled", as they are today about warming.
There's a lot of pseudo-science in the world, and it can be very hard for lay people, including politicians and even scientists who are not specialists in the field that is in dispute, to tell the difference between that and legitimate scientific study. Legitimate science is supposed to always have a strong element of doubt in any conclusions, with constant re-testing, confirmation, replication of results, and revision.
And I don't think you've been following the climate science since the early 90s if you think it's been "settled" on global warming, as it's been "settled" as climate change as the term for a long time because the climate changes are extremes of both cold and heat and vary in different places. The worst effects are the global warming effects, but just the chaos you're talking about can mean extreme heat can generate extreme winters elsewhere as knock-on effects, and this has been understood for a long time, which is part of why climate change has been used for nearly two decades now by environmentalists and climate scientists (the big transition came post-9/11, which is when global warming basically phased out except in the climate change denialist community who like to focus on the term even though they're the only ones using it anymore). Those extreme winters haven't been (and aren't going to be) making the overall warming any less, and are themselves likely to become less and less extreme and then milder and milder as seasons radically change character to meet new global temperature norms, but global warming is still at this point a misnomer, hence why no one who does the science uses it (except as a piece of climate change, it still has explanatory power there, it's just not used as a catch-all term anymore except by denialists).
Also, the strong element of doubt is in play, any climate scientist will tell you they do real science with the scientific method and everything, they know how to do what they went to university for years for and it's always the point people pull out (i.e. "I have a pop science understanding of science and think somehow climate scientists understanding of it might not be at that level even though it should be astronomically above that") that makes me wonder about the reasoning power of the person bringing it up.
The thing about constant re-testing with that doubt in mind is that that is literally happening in climate science, and has been for decades, which is why there is overwhelming consensus in the field about what we need to do right now, no matter which of the futures we're likely to hit, since even the most optimistic ones mean coastal cities abandoned within two centuries at a bare minimum, and it's very likely to be far worse. They're hedging bets and being extremely conservative when they give us the scenario of coasts underwater for several miles in the span of a couple centuries, in part because of the rhetoric about them being alarmist but in part because, y'know, they're scientists and so they're willing to doubt (and no doubt emotionally invested in doubting) that it's going to be as bad as the data suggests. They've tested each other's results to death all over the world, and governments ask these things to be re-tested so often that they actually end up getting a better peer review going than a lot of fields these days, and that's what generates the strong consensus. It's not an irrational, emotional consensus, it's a scientific consensus, which means it's been thoroughly tested and confirmed and re-tested and re-confirmed to the extent the entire community can make safe bets, and the bet keeps getting safer and safer not more and more uncertain. There's always some degree of uncertainty, but the results have seen such massive universal replication for so many decades now it's getting ridiculous when people pull out that card when they don't pull it out for other fields of science reaching consensus on a topic.
The question is whether a shift in the consensus is because nobody has a clue, or because the old theory was simply wrong.
Incidentally, if sea levels were to rise dramatically then my own mother would die. Unlike most people, though, I am emotionally prepared for that eventuality--it isn't like I was close to my parents even back when I did live under their roof and nothing has changed in the 30 years since then.
Global warming as a hypothesis has been around a lot longer, and the evidence was always far stronger. The only place you'll hear different is popular media, which has a bias towards reporting "controversy" or things that are counterintuitive to accepted wisdom, and those who have a vested interest in pretending that climate science (a very rigorously tested field) is not as settled on the basic facts of the matter as it has been for decades.
The wikipedia article on "global cooling" is a good place to start to show how you and many others were hoodwinked into thinking that was the "scientific consensus" when it was never even close to that, as it has numerous citations on the subject.
I mean, it's not like any continent-sized canaries in the coalmine are starting to choke on their chirps or anything.
And the present is now, we can change the present and have control over it. We can address problems that are happening now.
I agree, but repeat what I told before, we can do it and I hope that we will do it, but changing the present and preparing a better future are not mutual excluding things, we can do both, we can be worried about both.
We are talking of global problems, but the same apply to a single person.
I can have some problems to address related to what is happening now, maybe I have to fix the roof because is raining in the house or find a new job, because I was fired in the previous one. Problems of the present time, that I can solve now.
But this does not mean that because I am now fixing the roof I don't have to worry about the time when I will be old and unable to work, I can do now something about that, I have to do something now, because when I will be old there will be little that I will able to do about it. Even if is not certain that I will become old, maybe I will die tomorrow, who knows it?
What you are telling sounds to my ears like saying "I worry only of my broken roof, because is a thing that is happening now, and I am not much worried about the time when I will be old, because I have no control over the future". If you focus only on the present let me tell you that in the present always happens something that prevents you on focusing also on the future, a war, an economical crisis, a tornado or something other. I can not think of a single period of my life where in the world was not happening something that had to be addressed in that "now". From the Cuban missile crisis, that I was to young to remember, to the present times.
And I suspect (but this is a very personal opinion of mine, and if you or others don't agree is perfectly fine) that some if not the most of the crisis are planned by who has the real power, the economical one.
Lets take as example the Iraqi crisis, when and why all that begun? It begun with Iraq attacking Iran, sponsored and helped by the western countries, including yours and mine. Who gave to Iraq the lethal gas that was used on the solders of Iran, in violation of the international law? Western countries and corporate.
The same powers that 20 years later pushed so hard to invade Iraq, using blatant lyes on mass destruction weapons that where never be found, and to have Iraq's leader killed for using something that they gave to him years before. By the way some of those western countries HAVE an huge amount of mass destruction weapons, one of them has also used 2 thermonuclear bombs to kill civilians. How we dare to judge other people and break into their own homes because we suspect that they have a gun, when our own cellar is filled with machine guns, bombs and cannons?
This about when, about the why I suppose that the real answer is simple, oil.
And don't get me wrong, I am a citizen of a western country, I am not Muslim and I am deeply worried about the Muslim fundamentalism, I consider it a real treat to the freedom of the people as I see that where it controls a land in that land there is no more freedom, you have to become Muslim yourself or you die. I have tons of arguments against the Muslim fundamentalism.
I am only saying that if the the Muslim fundamentalism is so strong in the present days is also if not mainly because of the interference from the western countries. And the western corporate had huge proficts from all that followed, both the oil companies and the ones that build weapons. The two strongest lobbies in your country. Is hard for me to believe that all this was not planned, even if maybe some part of the plan went out of control. Again I talk of Mickey Mouse wizard's apprentice.
The researchers were attempting to find a series of chemical reactions that could turn CO2 into a useful fuel, when they realized the first step in their process managed to do it all by itself. The reaction turns CO2 into ethanol, which could in turn be used to power generators and vehicles.
"By using common materials, but arranging them with nanotechnology, we figured out how to limit the side reactions and end up with the one thing that we want."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a23417/convert-co2-into-ethanol/
I still have some doubts, the page in the link given tells "it works at room temperature, which means that it can be started and stopped easily and with little energy cost" but, if the thermodynamic principles are not proven false, energy can not be created from nowhere. Ethanol have more energy than CO2, so, even with that revolutionary catalyzer, more energy must be introduced in the system than the energy that can be obtained burning the ethanol. So probably an incredible amount of energy is needed to convert enough CO2 in ethanol to have a relevant effect on the climate changes.
Probably the invention is true and will be useful, but not to solve the climate changes and have new energy doing it.
Obviously then, it's a far better plan to use the ethanol to make cocktails.
But we should accept to convert parking lots in forests to have it possible, and we are destroying forests, not increasing them
I live in a wooden house, I make things with wood, things made to last, I have built and restored wooden houses, but even when I burn trees in my stove to heat the house the balance is positive.
If I would use plastic dishes and bowls instead of the ones that I do myself in wood I would use carbon that was sequestered ages ago, not carbon sequestered recently by trees that leave place at other trees that will take that carbon again. A perfect, environment compatible cycle, propelled by solar energy.
And I am even reverting to traditional hand tools instead of energy consuming electric machines for my woodworking, that together with playing music and BG is one of the things that I enjoy the most in life.
Of those things seems that playing BG and participating at those boards is the less environment compatible, but don't expect me to shut it, I am not ready for that
So we're still gonna be waiting on the cessation of fossil fuel usage, but it seems like an awesome thing to try out once that's happening!