Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Inquisitor on December 08, 2009, 04:44:39 pm
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This is actually pretty interesting. I like this approach:
I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources. Why? Because I wanted to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online
Well worth the 5 to 10 minutes it will take to look it over. Pretty good summation from what I can tell.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/climate-change-deniers-vs-the-consensus/
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It's pretty good, although quite heavily simplified look into this discussion. Which I personally find ridiculous: science is based on decades of work that build on each another; not all resources are freely available to everyone; and such a complex field will sometimes dive into discussion that is absolutely incomprehensible to laymen - which doesn't make it any less valid.
But it is really important to remember that many primary sources are not freely available to everyone. This is a really important thing to realize. This will also necessarily skew the debate and has nothing to do with the validity of arguments!
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His approach was intentional. Its what a non-expert can find out on the Internet. Which explains some of hte confusion and argument IMHO.
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Yeah, but explaining why it seems so weirds could probably also be in place.
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can we start nuking the icecaps now?
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I thought nuking population centers would be more fun. :p
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you know how many population centers are along costlines. it would be awesome to melt the icecaps with nukes and drown them. after that then we can nuke population centers. that said we could also use nukes to knock ice dwarves out of orbit and put em on a collision course for earth.
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we can do the nuking later, so that the nuclear winter can cancel out the global warming.
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Ah, but that's a myth too.
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I dont understand climate change stuff much at all. I just trust people who don't believe the earth is only 6000 years old more than I trust people who do.
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That chart is a good summary of both "sides" of the debate, in fairly simple terms. Its as good a place as any to start understanding it :)
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That chart is a good summary of both "sides" of the debate, in fairly simple terms. Its as good a place as any to start understanding it :)
Unfortunately, it's less helpful for judging the relative merits (or lack thereof) of the arguments in play...
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Hence the word "start" ;)
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I always found the looking at the consequences of action/inaction to be a lot more straightforward. The results of doing nothing and having climate impacted severely seem a lot worse then the economic consequences of doing something and it not having been a big issue.
The crisis that would result from the the Himalayan glaciers that supply lower Asia with water disappearing would be on a scale we have never encountered before. Seriously if the second most populous country in the world couldn't feed and provide fresh water to its people what a FUBAR scenario that would be? Not to mention the inevitable wars that would start from the need to fight over diminishing available resources. We already kill each other over silliness about religion, race and simple greed, but war for basic survival over water and arable land? It's a bloody Road Warrior scenario :P
On the other hand if we actually committed to cutting down pollution and making preventative measures what do we lose? Money, possibly a stretch of bad economic times. Sure would it suck to not be able to easily sate the need for materialism? Yeah but quite frankly I think striving towards a common goal through hardship would a better society make. To be honest even if there isn't some climate Armageddon around the corner cutting down the amount of **** we put into the air, water, or disperse into the land can't be a bad thing.
Not to mention I'm not to cheered by the fact that the nations most responsible would be the ones with the resources and technology to adapt while those who made the least impact are probably going to be the ones hardest boned.
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the only real way to fix it is to mass murder huge sections of the earth's population. i dont see any way around it.