The curve was flattened and then it spiked again and un-flattened because re-opening happened too quickly. I can't speak to your local area's situation, but as for the national situation, look at a graph once in a while! The slope representing rate of growth in new cases parallels the slope before re-opening now. https://twitter.com/EricTopol/...

The reason we have these regulatory bodies, collectively like a fourth branch of government, is that Congress always hyperfocuses on the most controversial parts of its agenda (implementing Obamacare, repealing Obamacare) first immediately upon taking office. It leaves the details of regulation to a committee of experts who aren't lobbyists, which works until someone comes into office who appoints lobbyists. If these agencies weren't there, Congress probably wouldn't pick up the slack.

This post is completely and utterly wrong, neglects how coral numbers dwindled to almost nothing during major extinction events related to temperature, and makes the common mistake that it isn't just the temperature, it is the rate of change. Thrived when the environment changes quickly when, exactly? Not the Ordovician extinction event! Extinction is what happens when species fail to adapt to changes in their environment. Never has the Earth been warming more rapidly than it is now. https://climate.nasa.gov/evide...

It's unfortunate that the GP post says "every prognosis has come true". There are many metastudies about global warming that look at different studies' predictions and average the expected temperature change graphs, so it stands to reason that some fraction of them have to be somewhat less accurate than the others. Nevertheless, here is a link that summarizes global warming and other changes, like ocean acidification, since 2000. https://climate.nasa.gov/evide...

Frankly, global warming has a metric which can be used to test whether it is bad, whether it will cause a net loss for the global economy rather than the impact of any particular issue. Yes, it can be bad whether the Earth becomes drier or wetter as a whole, because if Earth's climate were becoming more suitable for human habitation, it has to outweigh the economic cost of adapting to the climate change locale by locale. That is the nature of change, in the way that you have to expend some energy reacting by putting on or taking off a jacket.

No one said Earth's climate was stable, far from it. Quit setting up strawmen arguments. If you had bothered to look into the state of the research, you'd see that 1) The annual amount of CO2 emissions released is 100 times more than the amount of CO2 released by volcanism, although it is true that a supervolcano can wreck that at any moment. Everything else, solar irradiance included, is consistent across thousands of years. You are trying to have it both ways. It is precisely because the factors like albedo, cloud coverage, etc so massively outweigh everything else that a change in these characteristics caused by a drastic enough change in temperature can cause a significant negative feedback loop. The two things to investigate are how CO2 increase affects temperature and how an arbitrary temperature increase of X degrees would interact with these processes. 2) Unlike previous extremes, these changes are taking place while humans are around. Just because these temperatures existed a few thousand or million years ago does not mean that any of those environments are optimal for humans or that everything will be fine. You say "It's a perfect theory: no matter what happens, it can be interpreted to be bad, and it's humans' fault." but do you really expect there to be winter headlines about how global warming means fewer deaths from cold exposure among the homeless and the elderly? The point is that global productivity will be negatively impacted. This is like expecting the media to report "The good news is that the traffic congestion problem has improved" during a viral outbreak. Earth's climate will inevitably change over thousands of years. We should take every opportunity to prevent drastic changes from occurring over decades so that countries won't have to react to those changes so suddenly. 3) The temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide aside, the most important thing is that the rates of change are unprecedented, as far as scientists can tell. Species go extinct because they are unable to adapt quickly enough to changes in their environment. 4) You pretend that just because Earth has had life while enduring temperature extremes for so long, this means that it implies the system is not at all sensitive to minor changes in climate forcing. The past incidents are recognized as mass extinctions, with the Permian extinction's rise in CO2 being related to volcanism (see point 1).

Grandparent post is +10 insightful

I have seen the exact same person (Canadian pundit J.J. McCullough) switch from "Why should we clean up our ways when China is pumping out x times more crap than us?" to "The rest of the world is going to clean up whether we do it or not, so why should we bother?" I figure it will be even easier for people who don't have to have their justifications on record to switch to the opposite one.

For a while, I've been hearing about people talk about /r/the_donald as being highly botted in order to get posts to the front page of /r/all. Announcements rise really there, and nearly every post on /r/all is from the_donald. People think that the admins are going soft on them because the community brings in too much revenue. Reddit administration is definitely no longer neutral. A lot of important people have posted on Reddit. This is sad and a blow to the integrity of centralized, anonymous social media.

The rate is also a factor; extinction results from the failure of a species to adapt quickly enough to its environment. Notice that the narrowest trough coincides with the second major extinction event.

Why is this modded +5 insightful while the anonymous coward was modded down? Anyone who knows the slightest bit what they were talking about would know that iron STOPPING pulling the oxygen out of the oceans was one of the events for the way life evolved on the planet. There are these rocks called Banded Iron Formations, made from a mineral siderite (FeCO3) which can only form in the absence of oxygen, and hematite (Fe2O3), covering wide swathes of areas like the American Midwest and western Australia.

The reason they're banded is because the iron exposed to the ocean water would use up all the oxygen in the sea as it was converted, and then after a while enough oxygen would reach the area again from oxygen-producing microbes for it to precipitate. This didn't progress at the same rate worldwide; areas with lower circulation would have been the last to have any free iron to convert.

In contrast, due to increased dissolved CO2, nutrient runoff, and rising average ocean temperatures, algae blooms are increasing, leading to increased occurrence of deoxygenated zones. Due to the increased abundance of algae, things have been happening like a population explosion of algae-feeding sea urchins, and then a huge crash as they became crowded enough to be more prone to disease. In addition to coral bleaching from the temperature itself, the algae smothers coral reefs.

Aside from their importance in the food web, coral reefs are an important for maintaining the state of the environment itself: you have powerful waves smashing up against the coral, and mixing of ocean water increases the dissolved oxygen. In areas serving as bellwethers, areas where coral reefs were healthy but had a history to suggest some other factors could disrupt them (i.e. increase in sediment blocking out light), coral reefs are reverting to the more primitive algal state and becoming devoid of much other sea life.

"You gotta stop with the doom and gloom crap, we already know the path between the beginning of time and this point in time had points that were FAR fucking worse than ANY prediction about global warming ... and yet ... here we are."

"But the 'threat' of 'climate change' doesn't sound nearly as big bad ass scary when you look around and say 'no ... this isn't really anything new, we just haven't actually been here for the previous times its been like this'"

such as the Permian extinction. It involved outgassing of CO2 with flood basalts from the Siberian Traps, +10C change and massive drops in dissolved oxygen, which wiped out some 99% of marine species. We don't know how quickly that happened because the accuracy on dating that far back is +/- 10,000 years. Certainly there have been times with higher CO2, but it has never been rising this quickly: http://news.nationalgeographic...

So, your post has highlighted that yes, it isn't anything new, because there are obvious comparisons with major extinction events and our understanding of the development of complex life, running backward.

"If you were working on Wall Street, the same version of your story would be 'Amazon from running the smaller businesses and competition out of the market .. we'll have another great depression!!@#~!@$~!$@~'"

To suggest that the viewpoint of a climatologist and a Wall Street executive are just morally relative because climatologists want to keep their jobs is to speak against the value of scientific expertise altogether. Climatologists are concerned with facts, not delivery. People here like to speak about celebrities that have spoken out against global warming, but that doesn't make it true any more than if I trolled here by accusing people here advocating evolution of believing it just because Bill Nye does.

My perspective is that I'm glad I only got a bachelor's in geology, because it means there's still time to go into something else and actually make money instead of making less wanting to help the world and being accused of lying for it.