(06-03-2017 11:29 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(06-03-2017 11:07 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(06-03-2017 10:49 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(06-03-2017 10:23 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(06-03-2017 09:57 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  When I first read this line:

"Obama and Kerry bribed the rest of the world into signing a meaningless piece of paper, in order that they could claim to have done something about climate change."

I thought about the Iran agreement first. But then it would have to read like this:

Obama and Kerry bribed the Iran into signing a meaningless piece of paper, in order that they could claim to have done something about Iran's nuclear program.

But I was wrong. Different meaningless piece of paper. Apologies.

Everybody seems to agree this was meaningless, so why withdraw? I wonder, if this was meaningless, why the furor over withdrawing? It is like five year olds breaking their promise to marry each other.

In any case, nobody has come forward with any statement of what the climate goals of the GW actions should be. I know, things were perfect when I was 10 - is that the goal? Can't be - we had cars that belched smoke and factories that did the same. So maybe another goal would be better. How about 1492, before white men messed up the Western Hemisphere. But they were messing up Europe already, mining coal and all. Maybe 12,000 BC, befoe ANY humans immigrated to the Western hemisphere? How about 200,000 BC, before protohumans discovered fire? As one of our number says, if you don't know where you are going, any path will get you there.

You know, 500 or 1000 or 5000 or 10,000 years ago, if climate change threatened us, we just moved the village. Not so easy to do that now. Who is going to move Miami 50 feet back from the shore? i guess we could ask the Anasazi how they coped, if we could find them. Or we could ask the mammoth hunters how they coped with the disappearance of their food supply.

I think the emphasis should be how to deal with change more so than how to reverse it. That doesn't mean I am what some here would call a climate denier. I readily agree the climate is changing. I disagree on on what the goals should be or how to attain them.

I think you're proposing a fallacy that suggests the methods for reducing our impacts aren't also coping methods, and that their only benefit lies in the reduction of green house gases.

One way to cope with climate change and other potential issues of future population growth is to try and reduce our consumption of energy resources and utilize those materials in another manner.

You're also not recognizing that there already is a lot of emphasis on and work going into studying and understanding climate change impacts and evaluating potential mitigators. The problem has become that, with the politicization of the words "climate change" a lot of that research became politicized. But luckily in the past few years the word resiliency has started bouncing around, and American conservatives have not started attacking that phrase, in the same way they did climate change.

I am not sure what the fallacy is. Just tell me the goal, and we can be done here. All I hear from the environmentists is reduction this, reduction that. Sure that buys time, but how does it help to 'cope' with the inevitable rises in temperature that will occur later rather than sooner if we don't use that time for anything but more "reduction this, reduction that? If an asteroid were heading for Earth, should the focus be on slowing it down so it hits 20 years later? Of course, that buys time, but should we use that time just to find ways to make it hit us 40 years later? That is the way I see the environmental movement working.

I haven't seen the word 'resiliency" in this context until today. what does it mean? what is the contextual definition?

and why would you assume american conservatives would attack it? I for one would be happy to see the problem defined and an approach to solving it/handling it laid out. It will take more than Kill Coal or Kill Oil. Especially since 90%+ of the world is not cooperating. It is like having 100 smokers in a room, and 7 of them quit and declare they have made progress toward a smoke free room.

I think the attacks, as you term them, are skepticism against Global Warming as a boogeyman and the solutions put forward. I have yet to see any environmentalist call the changes natural or inevitable. I do attack this approach as a "Chicken Little" approach. BTW, when did the left switch from Global Warming to climate Change, and why?

All I want is a reasonable statement of the problem followed by a reasonable statement of the goal, followed by a reasonable statement of how the world can get there.

I know, not much, but i have never heard any of the three.

OO, you probably haven't heard of these things because you aren't looking. I'm tangentially related to a field that is deeply involved with resiliency, which is the term that started being used because of the political context of climate change (which started being used after global warming was being attacked, but it is more accurate), combined with it being an accurate description of the content.

I mean, I doubt you go to the annual AGU conference...

Here seen some links I found that help touch on resiliency.

http://www.wri.org/our-work/topics/climate-resilience

https://news.agu.org/press-release/ameri...gy-policy/

https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/...plete_.pdf

In the academic community (especially overseas) a significant amount of research in the civil, structural, geological, and ecological realms is going into how to adapt and develop more resilient communities that can continue to function as side effects of climate change emerge.

Read all three. Nice to see somebody is preparing for disaster, even if it is limited and local. But I don't see it as yet being a key and major piece in the environmental movement, which seems to be focused on staving off the inevitable through reductions. If it was key, maybe I would have heard about it before today.

True, I did not go looking for something that I had never heard of before today. Still have not heard two environmentalists mention resiliency. (You, Lad, are #1).

My personal beliefs, stated here and other places previously, is that availability of fresh water is the biggest problem facing us, and most of that, if not all, is not related so much to climate change as to increased population. We are outgrowing this world. The aquifers are draining. A solar powered car will not slake anybody's thirst.

You want communities to survive, get them water out of nowhere.

yes, I think it is a very bleak assessment. If you have a nicer one that is realistic, I would love to hear it. I don't hold out much hope for the Earth of my great-great-great-grandchildren, and not because we didn't shut down oil. More because we spent the first 100 years solving all the wrong problems.

Water is needed for much more than drinking. It is used for growing food. No irrigation, less food. No water, no cattle.

and, just to quibble, climate change was the catch all the global warming people shifted to when recent data did not support them. It really doesn't matter whether we call it this or that, as the policies urged are always the same.

Your concern about water is a perfect example of the fallacy I was talking about, and how a lot of GHG emissions have multiple benefits. If we can reduce the amount of oil, gas and coal we use for energy production and switch to alternatives like wind, I'm 99% most lifecycle analysis show we reduce water consumption.

And cattle - those are some of the largest contributors to GHG emissions and a huge source of water consumption.

It sounds like a big issue is that you and other get hung up on the climate change aspect and miss the forest for that tree.

And by the way, in serious environmental circles, resiliency has been a focus for a while, it is not a fringe idea or topic.