Bill Gates Warns Against Denying Climate Change (usatoday.com) 366
Reader JoshTops shares a USA Today report: Bill Gates warned against denying climate change and pushed for more innovation in clean energy, during an event Friday at Columbia University in New York. The billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder joined friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett for a question-and-answer session with students. "Certain topics are so complicated like climate change that to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult and particularly when people take that complexity and create uncertainty about it," Gates said. The planet needs to find reliable, cheap and clean energy, "the innovations there will be profound," Gates said. In December, Gates announced that he and a group of investors would invest more than $1 billion in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that aims to finance the development of affordable energy that will reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions.
But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody has to be trampled by the jackboots of your authoritarian scientific "facts" anymore, Bill Gates! People are free to choose their own facts in Trump's America!
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not dependent on your facts! I make my own facts! With Blackjack! And Hookers!
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I'm not dependent on your facts! I make my own facts! With Blackjack! And Hookers!
Comrade, those are patriotic servants of Mother Russia!
Sincerely,
Vlad
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I'm not dependent on your facts! I make my own facts! With Blackjack! And Hookers!
FAKE NEWS! FAKE NEWS! The hookers were never proven.
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is starting to grate on me. You realize that by not debating the factual nature of these facts you're saying "yes, these are facts". Literally alternative fact just means facts that support a different narrative than the one a particular group wants. If the alternative facts are, in fact, not facts, then debunk them as such, and that they are not facts, but lies. Don't refer to them as facts at any level, you just give false credence. As it is, you're just mocking an alternative narrative that is in no way less true than your own.
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He said, you are free to choose your facts. Enjoy!
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Insightful)
Literally alternative fact just means facts that support a different narrative than the one a particular group wants.
No, my post was satire in case I triggered the Poe effect. "Alternative facts" are lies. The "alternative fact" that Trump's inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama's was a lie. People tried to debunk the lie with clear photographic evidence but Trump and his goons continued to push the lie, so the only tool left in the arsenal now is mockery. The "alternative fact" that the ~375 gigatons of CO2 released into the atmosphere isn't having an effect far greater than any natural variation is a lie. And I'm mocking it.
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Alternate facts" is a phrase developed by post-truth politicians and their advisers. When you find some inconvenient truth that contradicts your narrative, simply present some alternate "facts" to support it. These "facts" can be distortions or simply made up, it doesn't matter. People assume all politicians are lying all the time anyway, so just say anything because people care about the message, not if it is true or not.
Thing is, they aren't supposed to use this phrase in public. It's one thing to lie, it's another to tell people "I'm lying to you". Even so, it doesn't actually seem to have damaged Trump very much.
Confirmation bias (Score:2, Insightful)
People assume all politicians are lying all the time anyway, so just say anything because people care about the message, not if it is true or not.
No, people assume politicians that oppose their ideology are lying all the time. They tend to assume their guy is "a straight talker" or some other baloney. Exhibit A is the irrational believe on our political right that Hillary Clinton is some sort of pathological liar and crook. This in spite the the actual objective evidence that she is not at all outside the range of normal for a high profile politician. In actuality she is relatively honest [motherjones.com] among that crowd. (a low bar I know) The same people see
Re:Confirmation bias (Score:5, Insightful)
(Do you realize that only once since 1988 has a Republican candidate actually won the popular vote? That's 6 of the last 7 elections. Talk about evidence of a screwed up election system...)
That means the democrats are doing a horrible job of selling their message to half the states and republicans are hated in the cities. News at 11. There has always been (and probably always will be ) a divide between the country and city. There was compromise between those groups just to even start this nation. I think it shows wisdom that that divide is the primary contention we have at the national level. The populated cities can't rule over the country-side in the Congress or the Executive and the more that democrats think they are mandated to do so because 'muh popular vote' will continue to alienate smaller states in the elections.
A democratic nation must have compromise or else it will fail. The government was structured to accommodate the division and needs between rural and urban states which was contentious even during the Constitutional Convention. One cannot rule over the other and both must agree to have a functioning nation of independent free states.
If you think the Senate is a good idea, why would that idea not be good when applied to a different branch of government?
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Informative)
Which started with CNN running a comparison of Obama's crowd during the inauguration compared to a picture of Trumps inauguration 3 HOURS PRIOR to the inauguration start.
False. Your statement is a good example of a fake fact. When you get your news from "alt" fact sources and blogs, that happens a lot.
The photo from the Washington Monument was time stamped 12:01: right at the moment of inauguration. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com] Not "3 hours before". There's also a photo time-stamped 11:49:43, and even a time-lapse photo of the whole event here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru... [pbs.org]
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The photo from the Washington Monument was time stamped 12:01: right at the moment of inauguration. Not "3 hours before". There's also a photo time-stamped 11:49:43, and even a time-lapse photo of the whole event
Out of curiosity, do you think the threat of violent protests had anything to do with suppressing the turnout? Even if that were not the case, it's no surprise that Obama's inauguration crowds were larger, since they were more historic.
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Informative)
The news is not the size of the crowd but the fact the President can't accept a fact contrary to his personal narrative and move on. It's more important that the a hit to the man's ego is assuaged than something of substance be done.
It's newsworthy that the President, commander in chief of the world's most powerful military, is so petty and thin skinned. There's absolutely no need for the press to give the President some sort of leeway for their first days and weeks in office. The job of the press is to bring information to the people, not kowtow to the government.
Politicians will lie by very rarely will they straight up deny an easily demonstrated fact. If you allow straight up fiction to become the historical record then you're allowing someone to write their own history.
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Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Informative)
Literally alternative fact just means facts that support a different narrative than the one a particular group wants.
No, literally alternative facts are exaggerations or opinions proclaimed to be facts by those who continue to circumvent the free press in an attempt to mislead the public. The first use of the term (in nationwide media anyway) was by Kellyanne Conway when she defended the flat out lies told by Sean Spicer about attendance during Trump's inauguration.
Your post is actually a good example of alternative facts. Your commentary on this topic would be insightful if any of your facts were actually true.
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Actually, it started in academia with postmodernism which was a reaction against ideologies and philosophy and the general march of progress, those being suspect and hence skepticism of everything was thought to be the cat's whiskers.
Then they went a step further and started applying it to science. Not being scientists, they failed to understand the proper relationship between science and the real world.
After that, the alt-right picked up on it and it translated into "we get to determine our own facts".
In s
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The alternatives have been debunked, what's bunk is your inability to accept the debunking.
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Literally alternative fact just means facts that support a different narrative than the one a particular group wants.
No - what you re talking about, is called alternative interpretations. Facts are observations that can be reproduced independently; when the aerial photos of the crowds attending Obama's inauguration clearly show there were far more people there than at Trump's, then it is something that can be verified independently - and quite easily as well. There are loads of reports from many different sources that all confirm that Obama had more people in his crowd; if there was only 1 photo, you might brush it off, b
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Informative)
Acutally, I would argue that many "alternative facts" don't even rise the level of lies. A lie has the pretense of representing a particular untrue scenario.
A lie needs to be part of a network of other lies that present a consistent picture. This means you can unravel the whole skein of lies. You can't unravel "alternative facts" that way, because they don't make any pretense to consistency. There is no skein to unravel. So a better word for them is "bullshit [wikipedia.org]":
"Bullshit" is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
People justify their belief in bullshit because of the way it makes them feel. This isn't just a fault of education, it appears to be wired into our brains' [wikipedia.org] mechanisms for social identification and reward seeking. That's why bullshit is so effective politically.
Probably the purest piece of political bullshit in living memory is the President's assertion that we should have "taken" Iraq's oil, and his suggestion that he might try to do it. I trust I don't have to explain why a country's oil reserves can't simply be looted, like an art treasure. That particularly bullshit hits both the reward and social identification notes, the exact way that anti-Semitic rants about "Jewish Bankers" did in 1930s Germany: the promise of easy riches from looting a hated alien. Hitler claimed that Jews were greedy bankers who promoted Bolshevism. Chew on that for a moment. The sheer idiocy of believing those things together didn't stop some very smart people [wikipedia.org] from buying it. Even the people manufacturing the bullshit believe it, and that's very different from lies.
So consider the standard response whenever a piece of ominous environmental news comes out: this is the work of the alarmists. Consider the implicit reasoning here: this cannot be true because if it were it would be scary. The word for this kind of thinking is "denial".
Now this doesn't mean there isn't climate alarmism, but what the alarmists are predicting is something very few scientists would agree with: the imminent extinction of the human race. What the evidence points to something in between the denialist and alarmist scenarios: one in which we are forced to confront and deal with unpleasant facts. Alarmism and denialism are pretty much the same thing.
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This doesn't work either. Anyone who disagrees with the alt facts are "fooled by" or "in the pocket of" big pharma/the left wing media/the globalists etc.
Deport Trump to Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeh, and while Trump is denying basic science, you're not looking at what he's actually doing. It's the magicians trick of distraction. When you see him do some big shouty thing that you're supposed to look at, look at the *other* stuff.
So the anti EPA stuff co-incided with his CIA visit. The one, he stuffed the meeting with spotters, to watch the faces of the CIA staff to see who would swallow the pee he was spraying. And the one that resulted in two American spies getting arrested by Putin (but Putin says he arrested people who might have hacked the US election...... (!!)). Gee I wonder which traitor gave Putin the names? Nobody asks because Trump is busy signing every anti-environment contract he can find and you're paying attention to that instead.
Currently it's "ban everyone from these Muslim countries", but you're missing the fact he's written a law here, something Congress does, The Federal Court has already said it wouldn't likely stand at trial, and yet there are some border officials are following Trump and not the law. In effect he's faced down the Republican congress and won. He writes the laws, they have their meetings. He doesn't need them to write laws, he does it, they pretend to follow it in order to pretend to have a role.
What happened to the calls for him to divest his businesses and stop accepting foreign money? Lost in all the other stuff he's done.
What about his tax returns? The fake numbers he gave in the election filing? Forgotten.
You see how he sets the agenda by doing something really extreme, and what you miss is what he's doing at the same time. Really important stuff like blocking the head of Defence from security meetings, banning the US Director of National Intelligence from security meetings.... i.e. removing Congregational approved roles from basic government, so that Congress doesn't appoint anyone who has any role.
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I'm very much aware of Trump's proclivity for using the Dead Cat Technique by now. I'm aware of all the issues you've mentioned except the arrested spies. Unfortunately most of the US population who aren't fervent Trump supporters has to understand this. Then there will be some effect.
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while Trump is denying basic science, you're not looking at what he's actually doing. It's the magicians trick of distraction.
Would be helpful if the media wasn't in full 'everything he does is literally Hitler' mantra. An argument for voting for him over Clinton was the simple fact that the media doesn't like him and were in bed with Clinton. It is much easier for the electorate to get informed when you have the government and media at odds. Is it really Trump doing the magicians trick or is it the media convinced of their own hyperbole that they lost all perspective? It takes two to tango and they would rather argue about audien
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Predictions of the future are not facts.
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to nitpick, a set of facts about the present can predict a future condition which cannot be denied without denying the facts. A dropped brick will fall. A closed container receiving a constant stream of water will overflow. A human fed through a woodchipper will die. An increase in greenhouse gases will lead to an increase in heat retention.
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It's 2017 and we're supposed to be living in an oil-stripped wasteland with flying cars and hoverboards.
Look around, there are hoverboards everywhere. That's what they are called. They might not actually hover, but that's just a science-nerdy detail you should not worry about. What the current hoverboards do is just an alternative-truth version of hovering, which is equally valid as the old notion.
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Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay...
A valid opinion.
I'm sorry, but just because somebody slaps the word 'fact' on something does not make it so. Climate may be ever-changing but if we're making it change too much one way or another, it's bad news for us. We can't survive in almost constant -50C or almost constant +50C. We are fragile creatures and so are the plants we rely on to exist.
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Insightful)
You are assuming "climate change" and "the climate changes" mean the same thing. That is not the case, and would explain your confusion...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yes, I'm assuming GP meant temperature actual readings of +/- 50C, as opposed to suggesting that AGW will change temperatures by +/- 50C.
Re:But, but, we have alternative facts! (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is, the climate is changing because the climate is never and has never been static..
That argument is true, but completely facetious. Compare People are dying because people have never not been dying. There is no reason to do anything about that guy with the AK-47 taking potshots on the street, or to do anything about the lead in the drinking water, or to ensure that there is no botox in your tomato cans.
Yes, climate has always changed, and species have always died off. But not at the speed it currently does and they currently do. I'd much rather not be part of one of the species dying out. You sound like a guy in a life boat who insists on getting fresh water by drilling a well...
Terminology and Bait-and-Switch (Score:3)
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In nutrition there's this funny thing where, if you actually add up the calories burned in exercise, it becomes factually silly to think exercise has anything to do with weight loss, and yet, word + dog + medical establishment + science, all keep advising people to exercise more to lose weight. Yet it factually is quite silly to anyone with a calculator who actually thinks to add it up.
I mean, that's just one of those things, where people don't talk facts, they talk on account of what message they think the
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Fallacies. More than one.
Re:Terminology and Bait-and-Switch (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea is to stop *further* warming other than what is locked in. And yes we can make a huge difference.
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Meanwhile, back on planet earth there's more than enough wind to run the planet.
http://landartgenerator.org/bl... [landartgenerator.org]
Note the area required is smaller now because the technology has improved and there's still lots of potential for further improvements.
Did he fly to NY on a private jet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did he fly to NY on a private jet? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Having that kind of wealth tends to lead to having the kind of power to make change. It's self-serving for oil tycoons to become solar tycoons; yet it also is beneficial to society. As well, there's plenty of supply and suppliers to go around: if they didn't do it, then someone else would--which is a valid point.
If somebody's going to get their hands dirty either way, it may as well be you--and if getting your hands dirty puts you in a position to change the situation in the future, then you're a fool
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Having a vested interest in the product your peddling doesn't make you a hipocrite, it makes you intelligent. Biased maybe, but quite irrelevant to the topic. Hell he's probably done more for his carbon footprint through pumping investment capital into these firms than his jet could possibly produce.
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Somehow I think a person investing $1bn to reduce their carbon footprint and that of the rest of the world gets a pass for flying around in a private jet. Especially in a world where people don't want to spend $10 on an LED lightbulb.
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No, it is an important point. Imagine someone said - we all need to share food better and not eat as much or the world will not be able to support us. But that person eats far more than anyone and has no plans to stop eating. This person wants everyone else to change behaviors when they are not willing. This person wants people who are "harming" society much less than him to make collective reductions so that he can continue his gluttonous behavior. This person wants the common man to reduce his quality
Hypocrite Billionaires (Score:2, Insightful)
Two hypocrite billionaires who's carbon footprint is more than dozens of families combined living their lavish lifestyles lecturing people who just want to work their shitty job so they can earn their check and try to live a decent lifestyle. When they tone down the way they live by several orders of magnitude, then maybe I'll listen. Until then, they and the climate religion zealots can go fuck themselves.
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Even if they try to not be hypocritical and "go green", it's nontrivial to copy their "green" lifestyle.
"Going green" isn't easy, and by fuck it ain't cheap. Yes, electric cars are "greener" than the old gas guzzler I drive but ... guess what, the gas guzzler costs 10k, the electric equivalent 40k. Easy for Mr. Gates to "do the right thing" and buy the e-car, now try that as a single mom working 2 jobs to make ends meet.
If you want people to "go green", you have to make it affordable. Put your money where y
False equivalency (Score:3)
es, electric cars are "greener" than the old gas guzzler I drive but ... guess what, the gas guzzler costs 10k, the electric equivalent 40k.
You are comparing a used gasoline powered car with a new electric vehicle. The average NEW car in the US is $33,560. You can purchase a new Chevy Volt for $33,220. A Tesla Model 3 is supposed to be $35,000. A Chevy Bolt costs around $36,000. And these are MSRP prices, not what would actually be paid. Furthermore electric/hybrid vehicles will be available for steep discounts on the used marker as well going forward.
If you want people to "go green", you have to make it affordable.
Ok, done. What are you waiting for?
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Then how about giving out subsidies that spread the TCO of electric cars over the ownership period?
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Poor people (and even rich people, but that's another story) tend to lease/finance cars instead of buying them outright.
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Is that Trump-tax on cars already in? My KIA cost about 15k new.
If there's an e-car with that price tag, please inform me!
Keep the comparison fair (Score:2)
The average new car may be $33k, but that's in a world where a new Tesla is $100k. . You can get a Hyundai Elantra for $17k
Why are you comparing a high end luxury car to an econobox? If you want to compare with a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt, fine but don't insult our intelligence with stupid and irrelevant comparisons.
Call me when I can buy an electric car for less than $15 grand.
Nice job moving the goal posts. If it isn't cheap enough for everyone then nobody should bother? What a stupid argument.
Oh and to address your challenge to get an electric car for under $15K, here you go [marketwatch.com].
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If there was a reliable, cheaper, and cleaner alternative then the switch would happen regardless of what anyone thinks about climate change.
In my case charging an e-car with power from a coal plant would just be trading one pollutant for another since I don't have an option to choose an alternative power company.
No cheap second-hand electric cars (Score:2)
An electric car with a useful range, say 300km on a single charge requires a battery pack that will cost five thousand bucks US, minimum. Add in the cost of the rest of the car and it's not going to be cheaper new than 20-25 kbucks even for a subcompact.
The really bad news is that a battery pack's cost holds up the second-hand cost of an electric car. I can buy a usable petrol or diesel car or a small van second-hand off Gumtree or Craigslist for a thousand bucks which would last me for a year with minimum
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Green energy is actually a great way to help the poor and developing nations. A solar panel is low maintenance and will keep generating electricity for decades, compared to something that requires a constant supply of fossil fuel. It will do it without damaging their health too.
Voltaire said it (Score:2, Interesting)
"To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize."
Urgent Issue (Score:5, Interesting)
The Gates/Buffet adventure (Score:5, Informative)
An interesting article [nytimes.com] on the Gates/Buffet adventure. They are investing in a start-up that is trying to build transportable burner nuclear reactors, IFR lite IIRC
Asimov's quote (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole debate about climate change is because of three specific groups:
Those who want to suppress the science because it might interfere with them making a profit, those who don't want to admit climate change because they believe having to change will interfere with their way of life, and those who think being ignorant and ignoring the facts is the way to go.
This was summed up quite nicely by Asimov:
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
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What about me?
I believe the climate is changing. It's always BEEN changing, but yeah, it seems like it's warming.
I believe that humans are likely making it worse.
I believe that the 'science' of climate change is about as 'science' as psychology: observations, reasonable inferences, but no replication, no null hypothesis. I believe that the FUD about global warming have led to a truly ridiculous universality (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html) to the point of uselessness as
Bill gates could do 10x as much (Score:2, Informative)
He's friggen rich, no commitees, no government oversight, little respect for the common idiot.
DO NUCLEAR RIGHT. Even if it's just pebble bed or another of the safe ones it's still miles ahead of renewables.
And it creates GOOD jobs. Not manufacturing installation maintenance crap jobs but real jobs for 2nd tier geniuses.
It's frikken cheap, it's clean, it doesn't use a whole lot of scarce resources. What's the hold up Bill? Why invest in something that's already popular and bei
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By investing in Nuclear.
He's friggen rich, no commitees, no government oversight, little respect for the common idiot.
Thanks for the advice voice on the internet. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1... [nytimes.com]
And please stop CAPITALISING random words. It makes you look desperate for believe, which is kind of ironic given your suggestion and Bill Gate's current investment portfolio.
NOW i am GOING to HAVE DINNer.
"reliable, cheap and clean" energy? (Score:2)
Fine. Just spend your own money on it. (Score:2)
Here's the thing: Gates must absolutely spend his own money to develop this without any government subsidies or grants whatsoever. He must create a solution that costs less than current forms of energy in both the short term and the long term. None of this cheap now but costs a crap-ton to replace later bait-and-switch b.s. The production solution needs to compete in the marketplace without any government assistance. The solution must be manufactured in-country. Using cheap third-world labor is out. T
First Step (Score:2)
Eliminate the red tape and regulation that hampers our building of zero emission Nuclear power plants for our electricity needs. Then replace all coal plants with Nuclear plants.
Until you do this step, stop hectoring me about climate change because if you don't do this step you are NOT serious about fixing Anything, you are just trying to enact legislation to control people's lives....
Because everyone switching to electric cars is pretty useless (yes yes they're more efficient, but thats marginal) until th
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That's 1 / 2 the North American problem. The other half is stop using fossil fuel burning vehicles. (bikes, post-grid-update electrics, stay at home, maybe hydrogen)
Of course, my boss claims solar based on mirrors (not the chemically polluting photovoltaics) can displace nuclear in places where hydro isn't feasible. But I say build out the nukes first then worry about something better. We know fossil fuels are going to end us, I'd rather lose a couple cities every 200 years than the entire human race.
Again with that fake quote... (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that it is often repeated does not actually make it true. I am all for making fun of mr. Gates or mr. Balmer aka Developers Developers Developers, but perpetuating this particular quote that is almost 100% false AFAIK is not the way to do it...
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Show us the citation (Score:2)
This particular quote was accepted by the world as fact for at least two, possibly three decades. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, we were told it wasn't true anymore. I don't believe it.
So just because a falsehood was repeated for a long time you refuse to acknowledge that it was false all along when there is no actual evidence? Hope you aren't in the sciences because you'd be rather terrible at it. If you think it is true then please go and cite the source of the quotation. Otherwise you are just passing along what is nothing more than an old wives tale with no actual evidence to back it up. Just because people couldn't be bothered to question a quotation for a long time (after all it
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. . . from Mr. "640K is all you'll ever need" (grin)
(and yes, I go back to DOS 2.x and Windows 1.x)
Brrrr.... I'd rather go back to Linux release 0.01.
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. . . from Mr. "640K is all you'll ever need" (grin)
(and yes, I go back to DOS 2.x and Windows 1.x)
I was thinking perhaps go back to those days when United States was the United States ain't so bad after all. Hey there was usenet and a simple DOS machine is perfectly adequate for us to get on the forums and tell others what we really think.
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No. But repeating a lie over and over again does give it a certain gravitas. Now, I wonder where else I can spread something as being "settled" without any attribution ....
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Actually, as I recall, Mr. Gates' credibility is in software development and marketing. I don't see any particular expertise in atmospheric physics or meteorology. . .
Why we trust the opinions of people with no proven expertise in a subject is beyond. . .
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Well, he is a billionaire after all. Aren't Americans supposed to listen to what billionaires and movie stars say?
Prejudice (Score:2)
When you need a doctor do you instead ask anyone on the street for medical advice? After all, there is no reason to assume that they may not be a doctor.
If I don't know what I'm doing then yes I'm going to ask if anyone around me for help. First question will be "are you a medical professional?" I won't assume they either know something or don't until I bother to find out.
Dismissing someone as uninformed about a subject without any evidence either way is idiotic. Bill Gates may know nothing about climate change or he may know a quite a bit about it. But to dismiss him as "software guy" and presume he couldn't possibly be anything else because of a job h
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The problem is, you can't. It's still illegal to shoot them when they climb my hill trying to escape drowning.
Change the law and we'll talk.
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You need to move here to Arizona.
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Disagree? Oh no, you can disagree all you want!
But stay on your beautiful beach real estate. After all, since there is no climate change, why would you want to leave it?
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Don't know, don't care, not the topic of this subthread.
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Hell, give it time, we're working hard on rising that rising.
It's not easy destroying a climate that's been built over millennia, that can't be done over night!
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Science now dictated by party (Score:2)
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism. Listening to criticism from non-climatologists about climate change would be like having a hospital janitor criticize a team of heart surgeons during surgery. While there is no guarantee the surgeons would never make a mistake, the janitor's opinion is still irrelevant.
Scientists will continue to debate the impact and magnitude of climate change forever. Public discourse should be about how much to invest in fixing the problem, not whether the problem exists in the first place.
"Difficult" means: study before disagreeing (Score:5, Insightful)
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism.
Yes, Gates didn't say "your ideas are too good for criticism." What he said was "to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult."
OK, it's difficult. That means you need to do some work to gain a basic understanding.
If people would actually study what we actually do know, and how well we know it before making their "criticism" based on reading one blog post, maybe then they would do criticism on a level that people would pay attention to, rather than continuously re-assert things that are already well studied and known to be false.
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Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism. Listening to criticism from non-climatologists about climate change would be like having a hospital janitor criticize a team of heart surgeons during surgery. While there is no guarantee the surgeons would never make a mistake, the janitor's opinion is still irrelevant.
I'd have to clarify your example in that a janitor's opinion could be relevant; however, if the janitor's opinion includes replacing the surgeon's knowledge of surgical technique with faith healing and shaman rituals, then it is right to ignore the janitor.
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Re:Because Climate Science is inherently political (Score:5, Insightful)
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
You're confusing two totally separate issues. There is no problem with people who discuss the politics of how to reply to man-made climate change. It's perfectly consistent to answer that someone else should pay it, or claim that it won't affect me so I don't pay more, or taxes should not be raised and our children should suffer the consequences, and so forth. There are many ways in which the effects could be countered, you could for example propagate massive investments in possible technical solutions, or you could urge for faster development of nuclear fusion reactors. Moreover, there is nothing wrong *at all* with green energy per se and other solutions like substituting certain emissions with others, and it's kind of bizarre to ignore these options for diffuse political reasons.
But the point is that is all politics and has nothing to do with climate science. What's so appalling are the repeated attempts to deny that there is scientific consensus on some facts, and deny this for obvious political reasons. This kind of thinking is fallacious, no matter how you put it, it's just wishful thinking and make-believe, and is a disgrace to all people who do the actual science such as those at NASA. It's also ridiculous to mix up the scientific matter which is pretty much settled by now with political issues about possible responses, and this is embarrassing the political right of the US internationally, since the phenomenon to ignore science for dubious short-term political gain is pretty much limited to the US. Everywhere else people are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the current state of the art in science and political issues that may or may not result from it.
Wasn't political the last time consensus changed (Score:3)
The disgrace is that the Climate Science community uses terms like "Consensus" which is not a thing in Science.
Consensus is how all competing models of reality are evaluated. It's not a part of Science so much as a part of how humans collectively interpret sensory data. And in point of fact, there was once a consensus against the theory of CO2-induced warming. It remained scientifically controversial up until the mid-1950s, until various better measures of the oceans and atmosphere were made. Not only did no one lose their jobs when the scientific opinion shifted, but there have been contrarian scientists publishing
The universe does not care about your politics (Score:3)
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
I have no problem if you disagree with the proposed solutions. That's fine: propose other solutions, or propose that we should just live with it. That's fine, no problem.
I have problems with people who say the science is wrong because they disagree with one or more of the proposed political solutions.
Guess what: whether the science is right has nothing to do with your opinions about the politics.. Quit criticizing science to score political points.
But here we have a Science which presumes to control our behavior, our society, and our politics.
The science does no such thing. The science says adding mo
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Be uncertain about things that are uncertain (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when a topic is really, really complicated the most important thing is not to be uncertain about it.
The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about, and to not be uncertain about things on which the science is pretty clearly not uncertain.
If you actually read some of the review articles summarizing the science-- the IPCC Working Group 1 report [www.ipcc.ch], for example-- you will notice that there is extensive discussion of uncertainties: what we know, how well we know it, what we don't know, and what the error bars are.
One interesting thing about the real science: the uncertainty goes in both directions. The denier community says "but look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is on the low side of the range that the best science we currently have is predicting." But the opposite uncertainty is also there: "look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is going to be much higher-- it could be on the high side of the range that the current science predicts."
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Steam roll over them.
That is precisely how we ended up with Trump as president with Republican majorities in the House, Senate and most state legislatures and Governorships despite Democrats having a lead in voter registration.
Skipping the consensus building phase will cause backlash.
LK
Citation needed (Score:2)
Enough said.
Except that there is no evidence that he actually said it [wired.com]. Go ahead. Find an irrefutable citation that he actually said it. We'll wait.
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The problem is global warming being used as an excuse for wealth transfer from rich nations to poor ones.
Work to make our use of energy more efficient. Work to find cleaner sources of energy. Quit using it as an excuse to advance the "one world government" agenda.
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When you will stop transferring CO2 from rich nations to poor ones, you may have a point.
But rich nations emit far more CO2 per capita than poor ones.