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Department of "Huh"?
Articles and blog posts often have comment sections now. Which is a good thing, because it allows and inspires conversation, feedback, and interaction. Those in turn can make people more interested, learn things more, point out flaws, ask questions, etc.
And sometimes it reveals how completely people can miss the point. In this case? Comments I've seen on articles about global warming. One strain of argument I've seen occasionally is "Scientists are wrong sometimes, how do we know they're not now?" Which would be a fair enough question. The poster could learn about the process of science, repeatability, peer review, fake think tanks, astroturf campaigns, and lots of other stuff. Usually, they're not interested in actually finding out how scientists decide what's true, they're trying to discredit science and scientists.
But what makes some of these comments so unintentionally ironic, and reveal the poster's ignorance? I've seen a bunch saying "Yeah, but what about the ozone hole? Science said that'd kill us!" or even "What about how the Y2K bug was supposed to kill us?"
What makes those two in particular really terrible examples for the "global warming's not humans' fault and we can't do anything about it anyway and why should we bother it'd cost too much and China!" crowd?
Because both ozone depletion and the Y2K bug are examples of how reducing CO2 emissions could work. Scientists and engineers identified a problem, and showed how it could hurt us, government and industries took action on a global scale to address it, and it WORKED. Thanks to treaties and monitoring, CFCs were mostly phased out, and are rarely used any more and are fairly well contained. For Y2K, millions of man-hours were invested in checking and fixing code, old programmers were brought out of retirement because nobody else spoke FORTRAN, and after a lot of work, the fixes WORKED.
Y2K and the ozone layer are both examples of how large-scale major changes and fixes can actually work, and even work so well that people can look back and laugh at how scared we were of the problem. I don't think that's the point the "It's not our fault and it's too hard to fix anyway!" crowd quite intends to make.
And sometimes it reveals how completely people can miss the point. In this case? Comments I've seen on articles about global warming. One strain of argument I've seen occasionally is "Scientists are wrong sometimes, how do we know they're not now?" Which would be a fair enough question. The poster could learn about the process of science, repeatability, peer review, fake think tanks, astroturf campaigns, and lots of other stuff. Usually, they're not interested in actually finding out how scientists decide what's true, they're trying to discredit science and scientists.
But what makes some of these comments so unintentionally ironic, and reveal the poster's ignorance? I've seen a bunch saying "Yeah, but what about the ozone hole? Science said that'd kill us!" or even "What about how the Y2K bug was supposed to kill us?"
What makes those two in particular really terrible examples for the "global warming's not humans' fault and we can't do anything about it anyway and why should we bother it'd cost too much and China!" crowd?
Because both ozone depletion and the Y2K bug are examples of how reducing CO2 emissions could work. Scientists and engineers identified a problem, and showed how it could hurt us, government and industries took action on a global scale to address it, and it WORKED. Thanks to treaties and monitoring, CFCs were mostly phased out, and are rarely used any more and are fairly well contained. For Y2K, millions of man-hours were invested in checking and fixing code, old programmers were brought out of retirement because nobody else spoke FORTRAN, and after a lot of work, the fixes WORKED.
Y2K and the ozone layer are both examples of how large-scale major changes and fixes can actually work, and even work so well that people can look back and laugh at how scared we were of the problem. I don't think that's the point the "It's not our fault and it's too hard to fix anyway!" crowd quite intends to make.
no subject
You know, a lot of the debate that swings in this direction is also from the conspiracy crowd, as well as from people who are just plain uninformed. I mean, Global Warming only really effects the average person if he or she can see the big picture. Otherwise, they have no way of knowing that, say a tornado cluster in the winter, is anything other than a freak weather occurance. And really, all we have to put Global Warming against are past records of weather patterns from all around the world, so we can't conclusively say that "Global Warming caused X to happen."
But you will always have folks who can't see beyond that. They fail to grasp that Global Warming can have a hand in things without necessarily being the direct cause thereof. And they lack the foresight to acknowledge that things could get any worse than they are currently.
We're already seeing some response to GW in the form of a new push in the automobile industry to reduce drive emissions. It's also in part with the push to increase MPG from the fuel crisis. However, I'm thinking it will take a while before we start seeing the effects of this (or any real implementation for that matter), and even then, I doubt people will be able to just dismiss Global Warming like the Y2k bug.
no subject
Well, a LOT of the "debate" about climate change,(global warming, people fucking up the climate so we're gonna screw our civilization, whatever you want to call it) comes from astroturf orginizations run by coal and oil companies. There's lots of "science" out there that isn't, and lots of Foundations and Committees with important sounding names that are funded and run by the energy companies. Kind of like the tobacco companies all over again.
There is fuzzy room in the science, in part because weather's incredibly complex, and we really only have one set of data, and one source from it. But all that data points to one direction, that the world is getting warmer, and that the amount of carbon dioxide (and other chemicals) people have pumped into the air has contributed to it.
There is some response going on, thanks to Katrina, and An Inconvenient Truth, and things getting so obvious that even the doubters and uninformed are being convinced. We could have been here years ago though. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof, Reagan tore them off. Or imagine if in 2000, Al Gore had included one of the biggest issues he really cared about, instead of barely mentioning it?
The worrying thing though is that this kind of accumulation of energy in the atmosphere has a long lead time. Changing the percentage of a chemical in the ocean of air we live in takes a LOT of carbon dioxide, and global temperatures add up slowly. We may already be near or past a tipping point. And to get things back to where they've been most of our civilization, we have to actually cut the amount of CO2 in the air. That means we have to release less than we trap. THAT will take a lot.