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Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 2) 37

The kids should cross the street at normal crossings like everyone else, not just anywhere a huge yellow beast stops and flips out a sign.

I'd say the safest place to cross would be in front of a huge, impossible to miss bus, with a flipped-out sign reading "STOP" and with flashing lights.

Comment Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score 1) 113

Of course they overplayed their hand, it was the only way to get funding. One side of this debate got funded and the other didn't.

For years the oil companies were heavily funding people to create doubt about climate science. They eventually got publicly outed for paying for bad science, and stopped because it looked bad.

As for atmospheric science, the main funding for atmospheric science is in improving weather models, including hurricane path predictions and aviation weather. Climate predictions are pretty much just another application of the models made for other purposes.

As for the oil companies, they shifted their strategy to funding "think tanks" pushing libertarian ideas, funding advocacy that the government needs to avoid taking any action on climate change.

Comment Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score 1) 113

You're full of shit; I remember sitting in school watching a video about how the world was going to freeze over ( in 2nd grade no less. Wild times ) by 2000.

I remember when my second grade teacher told us that the earth was hotter in summer because it was closer to the sun!

The lesson is, maybe you should learn more science after 2nd grade.

Comment Re:We screwed up, but we're still right (Score 1) 113

I don't know what the definition of "accountability" is in climate research, but a threefold error is terrible science, it should have been caught in peer review, and everyone involved owes the scientific world an apology.

To be more accurate, this was an error in an economic study. Economists might think their field is a science, but scientists don't.

Comment Re:They deniers were right all tge time .. (Score 1) 113

.. there is no disastrous climate change, just normal cycles. The climate-fanatics almost convinced me that there is some disaster incoming, but thanks for I have still have some brainb capacity left.

The normal cycles-- known as "Milankovitch variations"-- happen on a time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. The current climate change is much faster than that.

Comment Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score 1) 113

Long before industrial age there were massive CO2 dumps (super volcanoes, asteroid impacts, etc.) that we know spiked CO2 past even current levels and it did not result in effects these models predict.

Nope.

Volcanoes can dump large amounts of carbon dioxide, but for short periods of time. Cumulative, no, volcanoes produce less CO2 than humans do. (And supervolcanoes are more of a problem with ash deposition, not CO2.)

Asteroid impacts, on the other hand... the Chixulub asteroid impact killed every species of life larger than a squirrel (and a large amount of smaller life). Do you really want to say "no worries, carbon dioxide is no worse than a mass extinction?

...
There is even a technical term for it - interglacial period. Which we are entering now.

The interglacial started about eight thousand years ago. The interglacial sea-level rise finished about four thousand years ago. You're way behing

Comment Re:Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbait (Score 1) 113

Let’s say climate change is real, fine, but some of these papers are drifting into doomsday fanfic territory with a few equations stapled on. Are we meant to treat every climate-catastrophe model like holy writ now?

No, of course not. The idea is to look at the information and learn as accurately as we can.

The idea that humans in 2100 will politely sit on their hands while the planet burns is genuinely adorable. Humans invent things.

The whole point of the discussion is deciding what to do. Your statement "surely we will do something!" is more or less useless.

But your implication that we can just wait until 2100 and then do something (the path the oil companies want us to take)-- do keep in mind that a lot of climate change will have already happened. The earlier we implement these innnovations, the less bad the problem will be. And, the earlier we fund the research to make these innovations the earlier we will be able to start implementing them.

AI is already chewing through research faster than half the committees publishing these forecasts.

I am not a fan of the "don't worry, we don't have to do anything, AI will solve all our problems" approach.

Comment Re:This is a MAJOR problem (Score 2) 113

but the media has an addiction to reporting on the findings that are weird outliers. But those weird outliers are the most likely to be incorrect, which feeds a cycle of mistrust.

Was "we're going to have an ice age because of pollution" in the 70s an outlier or broadly agreed upon "scientific consensus"?

Turns out to it was mostly media hype. The media love catastrophe scenarios. The American Meteorological Society did a review of it a while back, which you can find here: https://journals.ametsoc.org/v...

...
It's very difficult for someone not in the field but with enough intelligence and intellectual curiosity to simply accept the current version of this consensus.

Worse than that, it's difficult for somebody not in the field to even figure out what the consensus is, because the media love stories of the type "new theory overturns scientific consensus!"

The solution, by the way, is to get your science from actual science sources, rather than from popular media.

Comment Correction noted [Re:My honda does that now] (Score 3, Insightful) 247

The link in the summary to the CAFE standards specifically mentions it includes light trucks.

Looks like the standard must have changed, and my information is out of date. In the past, there hadseparate standards for cars and light trucks (e.g., https://afdc.energy.gov/data/1... ).

I stand corrected.

Comment Re:MAGA? (Score 1) 76

Trump is transactional. All he cares about is money and ego.

* glances over at the combined fiscal and narcissistic worth of the Pelosis, Clintons, and OBidens * Maybe if it were only slightly less blatantly fucking obvious..

Out of the list of the ten richest politicians in America, 3 are Democrats and 7 are Republicans. So looks like Republicans have the edge. https://247wallst.com/politics...

Biden and Obama would need to be about an order of magnitude richer to make the list.

Comment Re: Too late. (Score 1) 76

China is falling apart from within. Demographics bomb,

That's happening across the world. It just hit China and Japan a few years earlier than it's hitting us.

serious civil unrest, currency manipulation, a host of problems.

Here too.

Be careful of quitting the field when your enemy is losing.

Unless you're losing faster.

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