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by _vdpp 1377 days ago
Downvote away, but the fearmongering is so tiresome (and has been for 30 years). The carbon emitters they want to eliminate are people.

On geologic time scales the CO2 level has been way way higher than it is today and the planet was still teeming with life.

Hey, speaking of tipping points, wasn’t climate change supposed to mean a constant stream of cat 5 hurricanes crashing into the eastern seaboard? And yet we just had a very quiet start of our hurricane season. Ah, but that’s weather, not climate. And yet whenever a bad weather event occurs, that’s evidence of climate change. Absence of bad weather is also evidence I guess. Almost like the whole thing is unfalsifiable. The climate changed before we ever got here and it will continue changing well after we’re gone.

Just as the petrochemical lobby has an interest in downplaying effects, there are plenty of other people with a profitable interest in the fearmongering as well. Their salaries depend on you being terrified and they’re doing a great job of it. They use your tax money to fly to climate conferences in Bali, Singapore, Paris, Rome. I’d take them more seriously if the conferences were held via Zoom or in places like Cleveland or Houston.

The politicians who keep telling me that this is a huge problem still fly their private jets everywhere and still own plenty of beachfront property. I’m more worried about a True Believer funding some kind of bioweapon to “heal the planet” and kill us all.

2 comments

I'm sick of armchair climatologists like yourself. It's amazing people who have just read maybe a book or two and some youtube videos think they know better than an entire scientific community full of people doing this full-time for their entire adult lives. Get your ego checked.
I’ll continue to use my critical faculties and exercise my own judgment as I see fit.
Now bear with me...

https://shellenberger.org/

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (HarperCollins 2020).

He’s been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the pro-human environmental movement for his work.

Michael has broken major stories on crime and drug policy; homelessness; Amazon deforestation; climate change; eco-anxiety; fracking; and California’s fires.

He is a leading energy expert who testifies and advises governments around the world including in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.

He is founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent nonprofit research organization that incubates ideas, leaders, and movements. Michael And he is cofounder of the California Peace Coalition, an alliance of parents of children killed by fentanyl, parents of homeless addicts, and recovering addicts.

Michael is currently writing two books. In Spring 2023, Carus Books will publish The War on Nuclear: Why It Hurts Us All. In Fall 2023, HarperCollins will publish the third and final book in the trilogy Shellenberger is writing about threats to civilization from within.

He has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road.

In the 1990s, Michael helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies. In the 2000s, Michael advocated for a“new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015.

https://www.lomborg.com/about/

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg researches the smartest ways to do good. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel Laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.

For his work, Lomborg was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He is a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media, for outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, FOX, and the BBC. His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents.

He is a best-selling author, whose books include "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet", "The Skeptical Environmentalist", "Cool It", "How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place", "The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030" and "Prioritizing Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis of the UN's SDGs".

https://www.energy.gov/seab/contributors/steven-e-koonin

He previously served as the U.S. Department of Energy’s second Senate-confirmed Under Secretary for Science from May 19, 2009 through November 18, 2011. As Under Secretary for Science, Dr. Koonin functioned as the Department’s chief scientific officer, coordinating and overseeing research across the DOE. He led the preparation of the Department’s 2011 Strategic Plan and was the principal author of its Quadrennial Technology Review. Dr. Koonin particularly championed research programs in High Performance Simulation, Exascale Computing, Inertial Fusion Energy, and Greenhouse Gas Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification. He also provided technical counsel on diverse nuclear security matters.

He joined the California Institute of Technology’s faculty in 1975, was a research fellow at the Neils Bohr Institute during 1976-1977, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow during 1977-1979. He became a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 1981 and served as Chairman of the Faculty from 1989-1991. Dr. Koonin was the seventh provost of Caltech from 1995-2004. In that capacity, he was involved in identifying and recruiting 1/3 of the Institute’s professorial faculty and left an enduring legacy of academic and research initiatives in the biological, physical, earth, and social sciences, as well as the planning and development of the Thirty-Meter Telescope project.

As the Chief Scientist at BP from 2004 to early 2009, Dr. Koonin developed the long-range technology strategy for alternative and renewable energy sources. He managed the firm’s university–based research programs and played a central role in establishing the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Koonin is a member and past chair of the JASON Study Group, advising the U.S. Government on technical matters of national security. He has served on numerous advisory committees for the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, including the Defense Science Board and the CNO’s Executive Panel. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former member of the Trilateral Commission. In 1985, Dr. Koonin received the Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award and, in 1998 the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award for his “broad impact on nuclear many-body physics, on astrophysics, and on a variety of related fields where sophisticated numerical methods are essential; and in particular, for his breakthrough in nuclear shell model calculations centered on an ingenious method for dealing with the huge matrices of heavy nuclei by using path integral methods combined with the Monte Carlo technique.”

These three authors (among many others) are critical of the concept of a "climate catastrophe". Are they people who have just read maybe a book or two and some youtube videos as well? I guess you would not given the mountain of evidence against such a claim. Now image one of them had posted a critical reply to this thread, what would your response be? 'Get your ego checked'?

Imagine making this post in the middle of China being in historic drought conditions. Historic flooding in Pakistan. Drought in the American west. Historic flooding in Kentucky. All of this in the past month.

Also, please cite that Hurricane study. Your strawman private jet flying climate scientists should also be named. Two faced politicians aside, you do realize that people like Joe Biden have been riding the train for years to get to and from DC? Bernie Sanders doesn't own a private jet. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn't own a private jet, heck she was vilified in the media for upgrading to first class once.