In a just world, this is the sort of statement that would be so deeply embarrassing that you would never live it down and people wouldn’t ever take you seriously again.
It’s true though! I had a glass of ice water that I accidentally left in the garage for about 3 months. When I finally noticed it sitting there, the glass was EMPTY. Hexagons!
Ice, how does it work?
It’s not just the refugees and migration problems that climate change is causing, but the fact that desertification and e.g. droughts create political weakness and opportunistic neighbors leap in to increase the chaos and exert influence and war. Syria was mentioned, but also Yemen is in the middle of what has been called a 100-year drought event and people there have been starving for 3+ years. They are dependent on food imports through a few key portals mostly controlled by “powerful neighbors”. The natural disasters are not the bonfire, but they are the spark that ignites the existing animus and local political predation.
It makes you realize just how optimistic the Command and Conquer games portrayed the change in environment and climate.
More analysis to brighten your day:
A few weeks ago, as the IPCC report loomed, I had lunch with a prominent climate scientist who’d been involved in earlier reports and has done considerable work on local preparedness as well. I asked if he thought New York would eventually build a sea wall or surge barrier to protect the city from sea-level rise and flooding. Yes, he said, Manhattan will be protected, at any cost. But major infrastructure projects like these take decades — typically about 30 years. Even if we began building today, he said, the barrier would not be finished in time to save Howard Beach and other parts of southern Queens and Brooklyn.
That was a cheerful read.
I want to know if that scientist had children.
You’re like the guy that sees an environmentalist accidentally forget to turn a light off after leaving the room and then calls him a total fraud, or the one that insightfully asks “did these scientists take planes to have their meetings hmm?” after every climate change headline.
There are many valid reasons why a climate scientist might have children : the kid was conceived while they still thought there was a good chance of stopping all this, their spouse really wanted one, they know that well off people will be spared the brunt of many of the consequences, or I don’t know, people are complex and aren’t always 100% consistent in their thoughts and decisions. It’s also completely irrelevant.
The argument behind what you’re saying is essentially “these scientists write these things based on ‘evidence’, accept them through peer review, and then publish them in journals, but they don’t actually believe anything they’re saying otherwise the whole discipline would be childless.” It’s not moral philosophy, it’s not like finding Jesus beat up a leper in a back alley just for kicks right after he gave the sermon on the mount. You could always just evaluate the actual arguments and the evidence behind them and then do whatever you want based on that.
No, I’m the guy who wants to know how much I should be freaking the fuck out. If the climate scientists stop having kids, then I will probably stop sleeping ever.
But I see why you read my post the way you did, and would apologize for being vague, except your post was excellent and I am glad you wrote it. Thank you!
I saw this site, DrawDown.org linked in the comments of that article. If you want to have some hope, check there. It has a list of things to do ordered by how much they’ll help. Best part is, lots of things to do (“Educating Girls”) make sense to do even outside the context of global warming.
Thank you for that link!
I would have thought that if you were looking for a signal on how probable event X is, you would be better off evaluating the evidence and arguments for event X being probable, not details of the personal lives of those arguing event X is probable. But wherever works for you.
You’re welcome, I can’t take all the credit though as your initial comment was very noteworthy. It’s been a joy communicating with you!
It sounds like you wish that I had apologized, so I do. My original statement was hyperbolic and vague. As you said, I would be wiser to establish for myself the probability of X by weighing the evidence.
That being said, if climate scientists stop having kids, and say it’s because they fear for the future too much to subject kids to that fate, then I am not sure who wouldn’t put that in the evidence bucket.
Mate no need for any apologies, I was just challenging your statement. The imperfect private lives of environmentalists somehow has become one of the leading excuses people use not to care about the environment.
The fact that you’ve brought up this kid thing multiple times in the thread signaled to me that you shared this attitude, but if you don’t that’s fine probably shouldn’t have assumed it.
I still don’t see why the fertility of climate scientists has any bearing on evidence. They don’t have secret knowledge that we must infer from their behavior, all of their findings and methodology is public and just as valid/invalid irrespective of whether they have 20 or 0 kids.
Oh well, agree to disagree.
And I completely agree that this excuse is lazy and idiotic.
The good news is that fracking, even if done wrong, really only posesa threat to the humans, and folks in Wyoming pretty much voted for this.
