Comments 1 - 7 of 7 Search these comments
Rew
2016 Aug 17, 10:31am
Last paragraph is well said. I think unfortunately it has to get worse, before we start to try and fight it. Too many people still think this is purely a "political issue", or worse, a hoax.
Something bigger needs to happen, and by then, I'm not sure what we can do to un-ring the bell. I also don't have any good answer to how we tell emerging economies to "do as we say in the name of the human species". That's going to be a really tough sell. We probably go to war over dumber shit before that even happens.
zzyzzx
2016 Aug 17, 11:02am
However, it is a cold, hard scientific fact that climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and severity of environmental disasters like the recent flooding in Baton Rouge, LA.
Dan8267
2016 Aug 17, 12:40pm
I'll take the word of NASA and dozens of other reputable scientific organizations around the world over a cat's any day.
There is growing empirical evidence that warming temperatures cause more intense hurricanes, heavier rainfalls and flooding, increased conditions for wildfires and dangerous heat waves.
"Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000"
"Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas."
"we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small."
There are literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers showing the connection between climate change and flooding and other natural disasters. How many Grump Cat pictures does it take to supply an equal weight of counterevidence?
Dan8267
2016 Aug 17, 12:42pm
Since actual evidence means nothing to conservatives, I suggest we try to convince them by renaming the problem "Islamic Weather". It will scare the shit out of them. You have to speak to conservatives at their level, a frightened five-year-old.
Rew
2016 Aug 17, 1:23pm
renaming the problem "Islamic Weather". It will scare the shit out of them. You have to speak to conservatives at their level, a frightened five-year-old.
"Islamic Weather" - forces you to dress certain ways, may or may not let you outside, and sweeps unchecked across the nation.
You sir ... are onto something.
Ceffer
2016 Aug 17, 2:56pm
I thought Global Cooling caused the recent weather disaster in Louisiana.
No individual event can ever be definitively linked to or separated from climate change. However, it is a cold, hard scientific fact that climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and severity of environmental disasters like the recent flooding in Baton Rouge, LA. Selfish business owners and corporate executives have won the battle of preventing climate change by stopping cost cutting measures that pollute the Earth. However, the actual cost of pollution far exceeds the savings of the businesses that pollute to reduce their operating costs, and this actual cost of pollution ultimately must be paid by someone.
Either we pay for the cost of pollution by making a massive investment in infrastructure to deal with flooding, fires, changing crop yields, disease spread by mosquitoes, etc. or we will have to pay an even far greater cost in the terms of the loss of life and economic productivity. Have the savings of large corporations by polluting exceeded the loss of productivity and the real estate damage in Baton Rouge due to climate change? Certainly such costs are going to continue to rise unless we have strong policies to mitigate climate change. However, the failure of capitalism to deal with large, long term problems that affect everyone has ensured that we will not mitigate climate change and its costs. So now our only choices are to spend a massive amount of tax dollars on infrastructure improvements or lose capital goods and productivity over and over again as more severe natural disasters occur.
Climate change is an example of the failure of capitalism to deal with wide ranges of very important problems. Climate change is primarily caused by the short-sighted and greedy incentives of a capitalistic economy. The very economic system encourages cost shifting from private owners to the public and that's what we are seeing right now. In effect, our tax dollars have to be spent to clean up a mess caused by businesses that pollute to increase their profit margins. Privatized profits and socialized costs that you pay regardless of whether or not you buy a business's products. How is that a free market?
#politics #economics #environmentalism