It did end. Haven’t you been paying attention. Your prophecy is unfolding.
Peace J
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I don’t know if it ended but right around Y2K my glass went from half full to half empty I just didn’t know it yet but by September 11, 2001 at 8:14 AM sitting at work watching a small TV in our meeting room I did.
After the reality set in my mind became consumed with if people hate us that bad to fly 4 airplanes to their deaths to hurt us my world is going to change rapidly. I started thinking as if I were a terrorist what type of things could I do that would cost little and hurt us the most. Again it was a devil’s advocate position. I came up with a 100 things so evil and so simple I hate to even post them on a public forum in fear someone will get ideas. Our governor and hometown boy was put in charge of homeland security and I thought ok good. Tom will think of all these things too. After all he grew up in the same time and place as I did. First thing will be to really watch who we let into the country and keep an eye on those we don’t know until we get to know them. We would never let 5-10 million people in from 100 different countries that’s for sure. Living on Lake Erie I thought so much for going 10 miles out to fish. The lake will be swarming with patrol boats. What about polluting the lake I thought that would cause millions to panic and cost trillions. I pictured armed soldiers at ever east/west trestle as tanker trains of chemicals cross them many times each day. Working in the rail industry I knew how simple it is to derail a train. I thought about our drinking water and our supermarkets, and I thought about wildfires.
Truth is not that much changed for me. It’s harder to get on an airplane and I can’t carry my pocketknife. But life tried very hard to go back to normal but never quite made it.
In an attempt to bring this back on topic I heard yesterday that something like 40% of wildfires are intentionally made by mankind around the world. Makes me wonder if the 40% number is low. Forest management is not doing what nature would intend but it sure seems logical to me. Our sky has looked off this whole summer and there is a smell that’s just not right still.
I would say my glass is right around three quarters empty as of today.
It has always been the case that the majority of what we call civilization relies on a majority of people sharing and operating on the same assumptions about what is permissible and what is not. Events like major wars always upend a lot of those assumptions at least in a region. And subsequently we all seem to assume that things will revert to operating on the same day to day assumptions as before the event that shifted things.
The only societies that can operate without these unstated assumptions are ones that create conformity by aggressive policing of peoples’ lives. Otherwise known as dictatorships, facism, autocratic religious governments etc. They all share the attribute that daily lives are aggressively policed in order to maintain those assumptions.
I agree that in the US and many societies considered to be modern democracies, there seem to be more people willing to go beyond bounds than when I was younger. How much of this is better access to news than year ago and my own awareness as an older person I don’t know. But it is not a comfortable feeling. Absolutely.
So do what you can in the corner of the world where you do have some control and try to keep the rest of the world out of your sleep at night. Best I can do.
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Politicians of all stripes have known for a very long time that fear, especially of the unknown, is a powerful motivator. Admittedly, it’s not always easy to distinguish real threats from simple political fear-mongering, but the pictures posted by @castoff of a small river in a relatively unpopulated state suggests to me that human-caused environmental degradation is real.
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My dad was born in 1916 so if he were still alive he would be 107. Unfortunately I only had him for my first 20 years. You are very lucky to have shared so many great years together and I’m not telling you anything I’m sure you don’t know. Being born in 1955 I often remark the same as you being a boomer was by far IMO the greatest time to live thru, and I believe our parents were truly the greatest generation. Us boomers spanned so much change. In my case it was log table books and slide rules and drawing boards and notebooks full of long hand computations, to calculators and computers and CAD, FEA, CNC.
I remember my dad getting his Popular Science every month and dissecting it page by page at the kitchen table, calling me over every few minutes telling me look at this. Remember like yesterday him coming out in the back yard yelling for me to get in the house right now. I thought I was in trouble but he told me to sit down and that a guy was going to walk on the moon and we could watch it on TV. It was pretty amazing for me but can’t even dream of what it was to him where not that long before that another guy flew across the Atlantic and he heard the news later on radio. He loved TV so much and the 25” color TV sat about 2’ from the wall so he could almost daily tweak the adjustments on the back looking into the mirror on the opposite wall.
Someone that is now 100 wow they have seen so much change.
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I see. Deep dive including back reports no longer easily accessible on the normal pages for the IPCC. Agonize about how hard it is to know just what to have confidence in. But just accept the easy hits on clearly biased websites without any deep diving and share it uncritically. Got it.
You know where to find me when you want to actually talk about the science.
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Condescension is so convincing.
Well the guy is an MIT educated professor of theoretical physic. He worked in the energy business and was selected to be under secretary of science for the department of energy by Steven Chu under Obama. Chu has a Nobel prize in physics. These are a couple fairly smart guys, and you can hardly say Obama is a climate science denier and he worked for him. Now nether of them were on the board of directors of Burisma or anything like that so we could doubt their aptitude I guess.
The old IPCC reports have been showing up on some conservative pages kind of a fact check on their conclusions at the time and what the data shows 10-20 years later. It might have something to do with making them harder to locate that I do not know.
Did you watch the full YouTube video I linked by Steven Koonin? I posted it as a starting point for exactly what you are saying “Talk about the Science”. What I liked about it is he isn’t denying the science. He is talking about the big picture and who gets benefits and who gets hurt the most by trying to stop something that likely can’t be stopped, both in the 1st world as well as the 3rd world.
@castoff mentioned his dad is closing in on 100, and all the great achievements that generation made and that they couldn’t have known all the problems those advancements would have caused. I don’t see it quite like that. Everything moving forward in technology will have unintentional consequences sure but they will also have vast good consequences as well. All this industrialization is likely why he is still alive at 100 rather than gone by 50-60. Per his plastic bottle example. We all see a nasty bottle floating in the river and curse it. But when we need an MRI and we see that big machine with plastic parts and we have plastic tubes feeding our bodies lifesaving drugs from plastic bags we are all saying thank God for plastic. How much more fuel would it take to ship everything in heavy glass bottles and then use energy hauling them back and cleaning them. How much energy does it take to make paper for paper bags from cutting down a tree, rather than a plastic bag when the stuff the bag comes from is the part of the crude oil that isn’t good for fuel. There is more than one way to view a plastic product. Plastic is not the enemy the enemy is the person tossing it out the window.
For me an open talk about any topic involves different opinions. If everyone felt the same about everything why would we need to talk about it?
Is Koonin just making stuff up in this hour long presentation? If so what was made up?
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Well I haven’t seen any scorpions in Michigan but having temps above freezing the entire month of January was noteworthy. Is it normal to see oak leaves falling in July?
Last years good, this years bad.
In my previous post you will see how I characterized his video. Shrug, I am not interested in discussing his statements that go against the very wide consensus of the scientists studying climate change…until we first discuss the science that does have broad support.
Fortunately, I am retired, so I get to choose what I discuss and with who I do that with. You said earlier that it was hard to understand the science and know what to have confidence in regarding climate change. I was interested in helping, if I could, no promises, just a sincere desire to help you understand, if I could. You handled yourself well at first. Now, you sound like someone with strong confirmation bias.
I was born about when you were. Seen many of the same things you have over the years. My father was able to regale me with the changes he has seen. I regale my younger colleagues and children with the changes I have seen.
I love science and understanding the world. I live to be a team player and help people out. I am not a climate scientist, just a wildlife biologist who has had to understand enough about climate science in order to recommend management decisions to others. Find someone who enjoys debates. I am not that person.
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Bud, like the balance of nature, modern civilization is a balancing act. It is rather obvious to many that that balance is out of whack. I’m not sure if whack is a correct scientific term or a biased political one, but it does adequately describe what we are observing.
Bud, you posted “Everything moving forward in technology will have unintentional consequences sure, but they will also have vast good consequences as well.” I see the slant you but on your perspective. I suppose that justifies polluting the ocean.
I think we can realize we can have plastic and not pollute with it. However, all advances in technology are a double-edged sword. I can reply that those “vast good consequences” can also have vast unforeseen bad consequences which cost may not be payable in any form of currency but time, and even time cannot pay the bill of extinction. It’s the failure to balance growth with the reality of its impacts that is biting us in our posteriors.
“pulled back in.”
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Okay. For me one river in one spot is not enough to make the jump to point a finger at the whole human race and world wide environmental degradation. I personally require evidentiary based scientific studies and so far have seen no legitimate ones that contect human activity to climate changes. Fact is, climate change is too large a subject to do valid studies. It has radically changed throughout geological time and we don’t know why. So, the mere fact that climate change exists does not support the presumption that our activity caused such. I wait for methodologies to be developed that can do so.
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“… one river in one spot”? You cannot be serious! (apologies to John McEnroe)
As a trained research scientist myself, I trust science and respect scientific inquiry. I believe science is - or at least can be - a powerful force of good, and I believe science bashers and deniers do America and Americans great harm.
Although I might formulate an hypothesis as to why you’ve not seen any legitimate studies connecting human activities to climate change, I’ll not do so here because it’s beside the point. If you’ll read my post, you’ll see that it suggests human-caused environmental degradation is real. It says nothing of climate change or of the human influence thereon.
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Wow, sorry, I do not mean to make you so angry. Just for the record, I am not bashing science. Quite contrarily, I depend on science for some proof of what self interested politicians and biased media claim. Starting in the early 1960’s those folks would have us believe a direct link existed between climate change and human activity. This is an assumption, never proven by the scientific method. These 2 things are now synonymous in most people’s mind, but there exists no scientific technology (methodology) that proves such. It is an intriguing assumption, but not science. Many claim scientific proof, but in the end assumption creeps in at some point.
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What I find interesting is the doom sayers were using the term global warming……until science could not promulgate that term, then it became “climate change”. The climate has been changing since the beginning of time, and we do have the science to back that claim up.
Just call me skeptical
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Interestingly enough, good science requires skepticism not consensus.
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Oh my, no apology necessary! I intended to convey surprise, not anger. It takes way more than lively message board dialogue to raise my blood pressure.
Mr. Koonin has a book on this topic which is a fairly good read. I read it when it came out, so I should likely read it again, unless it is trash. It lists sources etc. Should give plenty of material for you guys to keep arguing… er discussing. It is from 2021, so maybe it is out of date? Has the science changed that much in 2 years?