Federal Government Confirms Nearing Apocalypse -- it's very hard to dismiss this. - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14969882
Doug64 wrote:Ever heard of Bjørn Lomborg? Here's his take on the media reaction to the US global warming report:

The media got it all wrong on the new US climate report

    Activists tend to exaggerate the impacts of climate change while underestimating the costs of tackling it. The reception to the new US climate assessment was instructive. The report largely attempts to remain soberly scientific, and follows the even more careful global report by the United Nations’ climate-science panel, known as the IPCC.

    Sadly, accurate science doesn’t make for good television; predicting the end of times does.

    Among many others, widely quoted climate scientist Michael Mann talked up the report to NPR and CNN, saying its predictions are already borne out in today’s “unprecedented weather extremes.”

    Actually, the assessment, and science, tell a different story. “Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”


Actually, that is not what the report says.

Here is what the report actually says:

    Across much of the United States, surface soil moisture is projected to decrease as the climate warms, driven largely by increased evaporation rates due to warmer temperatures. This means that, all else being equal, future droughts in most regions will likely be stronger and potentially last longer. These trends are likely to be strongest in the Southwest and Southern Great Plains, where precipitation is projected to decrease in most seasons (Figure 2.5, right) and droughts may become more frequent.101 ,108 ,109 ,110 ,111 ,112 Although recent droughts and associated heat waves have reached record intensity in some regions of the United States, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event in the historical record, and though by some measures drought has decreased over much of the continental United States in association with long-term increases in precipitation (e.g., see McCabe et al. 2017113 ), there is as yet no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics. Further discussion of historical drought is provided in Wehner et al. (2017).101

So, certain areas of the US have had even worse drought conditions than the Dust Bowl, and droughts have not actually declined, so Lomborg got that wrong.

On flooding, the assessment accepts the IPCC’s finding, which “did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic [human] influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration or frequency.”


These phrases do not seem to exist at all in the report.

    Even more dramatic was CNN’s headline, screaming that “climate change will shrink [US] economy” by 10 percent, a figure also repeated on The New York Times front page.

    Actually, the UN’s climate scenarios envision US GDP per capita will more than triple by the end of this century, so this 10 percent reduction would come from an economy 300 percent larger than it is today. A slightly smaller bonanza, in other words.

    But the 10 percent figure is itself dodgy. It assumes that temperatures will increase about 14 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. This is unlikely. The US climate assessment itself estimates that, with no significant climate action, American temperatures will increase by between 5 and 8.7 degrees. Using the high estimate of 8.7 degrees, the damage would be only half as big, at 5 percent.

    But even the 8.7-degree warming estimate is unrealistically pessimistic. This stems from an extreme high-emission scenario that expects almost the entire world to revert to using massive amounts of coal: a five-fold increase from today.

    That, in turn, assumes a much higher amount of fossil fuels than are plausibly available for use, according to one study. Another study likewise found the scenario “exceptionally unlikely.”

    So, even a 5 percent reduction in the size of the American economy only follows from picking unlikely worst-case scenarios.

    Moreover, two-thirds of the purported 10 percent damage to the economy comes from just one category: heat deaths.

    While it is true that more people die when it is unusually hot, it is not true that lives are shorter in hotter places. That’s because people adapt. And studies of migrants show people do so very quickly, within weeks.

    Conjecturing that the temperature-mortality relationship in the US would remain constant over a century is ludicrous. This assumes that even if temperatures were to increase by 14 degrees, people would die in masses, ignoring the fact that people have been shown to adjust over time to temperature changes. Then, too, over the 80 years until 2100, people can make many additional changes that reduce this risk, from getting air conditioners to changing how they build structures.

    So, the well-reported idea that warming will shrink the economy by 10 percent disregards huge economic growth, assumes twice the damages of the worst-case temperatures the report itself expects and even then only finds such high costs stemming almost exclusively from easily preventable heat deaths.

    While activists overstate the costs of climate change, they suggest its reversal is simply a matter of political will. In fact, there are significant costs to climate action: It often involves replacing relatively cheap, efficient fossil fuels with still-uncompetitive green-energy sources.

    Climate economist William Nordhaus has shown that a globally coordinated and gradually increasing carbon tax could cut temperature rises to 6.3 degrees from 7.4 at a cost of $20 trillion in lost productivity, but more than pay for itself by lowering climate costs.

    Yet this requires a very well-designed, coordinated global policy. In the real world, climate policies are typically less effective and much costlier.

    Nordhaus shows that more ambitious policies like the Paris Agreement target of 3.6 degrees would cost some $134 trillion, much more than the associated climate benefits. Such prescriptions for climate change are worse than the disease.

    Yes, we need to speed up the transition from fossil fuels by investing in green R&D. Even so, reporting on climate change needs to be grounded in reality. Exaggeration is understandable but dangerous, because it risks wasting resources on the wrong policy answers, and gives ammunition to those who would ignore this real challenge.


Considering that the first two claims about the report are incorrect, I decided not to look into any of the others, as they are probably incorrect as well.

Here is the report for those who wish to read it:
https://nca2018.globalchange.gov
#14969903
blackjack21 wrote:Well, if 90% of humans die, they won't have to worry about AGW.
... snip...

This is the best reply you could think of?
This is like saying that after 90% of Russians were killed by the Mongols, the survivors didn't need to worry abut the continuing presence of Mongol warriors.

That is after AGW has done its thing, the survivors will think about it a lot. The effects will be around for a thousand years. Or more.
At least this is how I see it.
#14969992
One Degree wrote:Wait a minute. Global warming is going to devastate us but the US economy is only going to shrink 10% by 2100? What’s wrong with this picture? :)


Trumpsters don't seem real good with math. The economy has grown about 16% over just the past 7 years. That's 2%+per year. Now ….. here's where it gets really deep for the folks with little red hats. If it actually shrinks by 10% over the next 80 years …… that means the hypothetical 2% per year in growth that we have become accustomed to does not happen. :eek:
#14970003
Pants-of-dog wrote:Actually, that is not what the report says.

Here is what the report actually says:


So, certain areas of the US have had even worse drought conditions than the Dust Bowl, and droughts have not actually declined, so Lomborg got that wrong.


:knife: Drought has declined, there just hasn't been a detectable change in [long-term] U.S. drought statistics . Lomborg got it exactly right.

the report says:

and though by some measures drought has decreased over much of the continental United States in association with long-term increases in precipitation (e.g., see McCabe et al. 2017113 ), there is as yet no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics. Further discussion of historical drought is provided in Wehner et al. (2017).101
https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/2/

Here's Wehner et al. (2017)

While by some measures drought has decreased over much of the continental United States in association with long-term increases in precipitation, neither the precipitation increases nor inferred drought decreases have been confidently attributed to anthropogenic forcing.

The human effect on recent major U.S. droughts is complicated. Little evidence is found for a human influence on observed precipitation deficits
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/we06100q.html
Last edited by Sivad on 07 Dec 2018 06:36, edited 1 time in total.
#14970012
Steve_American wrote:This is the best reply you could think of?
This is like saying that after 90% of Russians were killed by the Mongols, the survivors didn't need to worry abut the continuing presence of Mongol warriors.

That is after AGW has done its thing, the survivors will think about it a lot. The effects will be around for a thousand years. Or more.
At least this is how I see it.

Obviously, I'm not worried about it. I think you deliberately missed this part of my retort:

blackjack21 wrote:How many of you people who believe in this global warming claptrap have put your money where your mouth is and bought solar panels?

I think you missed that part, because my suspicion is probably correct. By right, I am probably the most environmentally sound person on this board. I have probably put the most money toward "green energy" of anyone here. I do it, because I KNOW it is a scam. I'm slashing my electricity rates and my tax rates. Since they keep going up every year, my savings keep going up every year. Meanwhile, people like you are getting fucked by voting cap-and-trade shit into law, where only well-capitalized people like me can engineer our way around it.

Yet, you won't answer my question, will you? It's because the resident skeptical right winger on this forum is the one who has taken the most personal action and has benefited from it financially in both tax credits and much lower electricity costs. It probably drives you crazy doesn't it? ...knowing that my rates are half of what you pay, and I got $10k knocked off of my taxes to boot! ...and I don't even believe in global warming. :muha1: It has you seething, doesn't it? Repeating this global warming nonsense is how you feel better about yourself for not having taken any action, isn't it? Meanwhile, people like me who think the whole thing is bullshit can play your virtue signaling game better than you can. :p
#14970025
jimjam wrote:Trumpsters don't seem real good with math. The economy has grown about 16% over just the past 7 years. That's 2%+per year. Now ….. here's where it gets really deep for the folks with little red hats. If it actually shrinks by 10% over the next 80 years …… that means the hypothetical 2% per year in growth that we have become accustomed to does not happen. :eek:


So what? Obviously, you don’t believe climate change is going to be that drastic if this is the limit of economic damage. We actually need an economy that does not grow. Why do you think Wal-Mart can’t continue to exist on the same sales every year? Mom and pop businesses have done it forever.
#14970026
blackjack21 wrote:How many of you people who believe in this global warming claptrap have put your money where your mouth is and bought solar panels?


They should all be donating about $5,000(based on the recommended $200 per ton carbon price) of their annual net income to climate change charities. That's what they're asking the most of world to do and if they don't do it then they're just hypocrites.
#14970055
One Degree wrote:So what? Obviously, you don’t believe climate change is going to be that drastic if this is the limit of economic damage. We actually need an economy that does not grow. Why do you think Wal-Mart can’t continue to exist on the same sales every year? Mom and pop businesses have done it forever.

What I would expect from the little red hat people. Let's see …… over a period of 80 years the economy shrinks and the population increases …….. whooo boy … having trouble getting my thinker around that one. Food crisis? Housing crisis? Lack of jobs? Beats the shit out of me.... :?: . Well, to quote the Best President Ever: “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” The Daily Beast on Wednesday reported Trump as telling senior officials in early 2017 who attempted to warn him of the impending debt crisis.
#14970061
jimjam wrote:What I would expect from the little red hat people. Let's see …… over a period of 80 years the economy shrinks and the population increases …….. whooo boy … having trouble getting my thinker around that one. Food crisis? Housing crisis? Lack of jobs? Beats the shit out of me.... :?: . Well, to quote the Best President Ever: “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” The Daily Beast on Wednesday reported Trump as telling senior officials in early 2017 who attempted to warn him of the impending debt crisis.


Maybe we should shrink the population by 10% and your problems would not exist. How long do you think we can keep increasing our population to support an economic model? At some point, we must pay the consequences.
#14970067
One Degree wrote:What do you expect the result to be of this agreement? Do you honestly believe these elitists have any intentions of doing anything other than taxing and requiring the lower classes to tolerate more hardship? They won’t do anything to make a difference. Just distract you into paying more for nothing while they consolidate more centralized control.


That is the maybe the most important thing that keeps me a skeptic on the whole argument of human caused global warming/climate change. Disclaimer: skeptic is NOT the same thing as denial. I simply remain interested but unconvinced.

But that most important thing is that those sounding the alarm most loudly are not living their lives as if they were alarmed. Al Gore, for example, has been described as consistently leaving an individual carbon footprint the size of Godzillas. Bernie Sanders, one of the most persistent current voices on the subject, spent almost $300,000 flying on a chartered private jet to various campaign stump locations in October 2018 alone.

You would think in today's modern age of lightning fast computers and video conferencing capability, the scientists and policy makers would utilize that, but no. Instead they travel all over the world to gather together to plot their remedies that generally include onerous taxes and regulations on those doing the best on reducing greenhouse emissions--such as the USA--that accomplish little more than increasing control of the people. And meanwhile they live their own lives as if there was no problem at all.

Wouldn't you think those who presumably are the most concerned and who are sounding the alarm would walk the walk themselves?

I remain a skeptic.
Last edited by Foxfyre on 07 Dec 2018 16:59, edited 1 time in total.
#14970068
Sivad wrote::knife: Drought has declined, there just hasn't been a detectable change in [long-term] U.S. drought statistics . Lomborg got it exactly right.

the report says:

and though by some measures drought has decreased over much of the continental United States in association with long-term increases in precipitation (e.g., see McCabe et al. 2017113 ), there is as yet no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics. Further discussion of historical drought is provided in Wehner et al. (2017).101
https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/2/

Here's Wehner et al. (2017)

While by some measures drought has decreased over much of the continental United States in association with long-term increases in precipitation, neither the precipitation increases nor inferred drought decreases have been confidently attributed to anthropogenic forcing.

The human effect on recent major U.S. droughts is complicated. Little evidence is found for a human influence on observed precipitation deficits
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/we06100q.html


OMG.

You actually quoted evidence!

Hallelujah! Let everyone know! Drink up and celebrate, as this rare occurrence shall not haplen again in a long time!

Congratulations, Sivad. You are learning!

But Lomborg still got it wrong when he said drought statistics show a decline.
#14970093
One Degree wrote:Maybe we should shrink the population by 10% and your problems would not exist. How long do you think we can keep increasing our population to support an economic model? At some point, we must pay the consequences.


I agree completely and am hardly a proponent of endless baby production. BTW, it's not my problem. Like Donald so astutely observed: "I won't be here."

Shrinking the population will not happen. Be realistic. Pay the consequences ……………? Does this mean that there is some slight recognition of maybe, perhaps a tiny problem of humankind having a small, tiny adverse effect on Mother Earth :eek: ? You realize, of course, that this may mean that you are a ………… liberal ( :eek: ) since wrecking the environment has somehow been made into a political problem.
#14970101
jimjam wrote:I agree completely and am hardly a proponent of endless baby production. BTW, it's not my problem. Like Donald so astutely observed: "I won't be here."

Shrinking the population will not happen. Be realistic. Pay the consequences ……………? Does this mean that there is some slight recognition of maybe, perhaps a tiny problem of humankind having a small, tiny adverse effect on Mother Earth :eek: ? You realize, of course, that this may mean that you are a ………… liberal ( :eek: ) since wrecking the environment has somehow been made into a political problem.


I have always been an independent. There is no reason to bother arguing with people who want to label me otherwise. Most of my views could be considered more liberal than the liberals as I believe they result in greater choice.
#14970105
blackjack21 wrote:Obviously, I'm not worried about it. I think you deliberately missed this part of my retort:


I think you missed that part, because my suspicion is probably correct. By right, I am probably the most environmentally sound person on this board. I have probably put the most money toward "green energy" of anyone here. I do it, because I KNOW it is a scam. I'm slashing my electricity rates and my tax rates. Since they keep going up every year, my savings keep going up every year. Meanwhile, people like you are getting fucked by voting cap-and-trade shit into law, where only well-capitalized people like me can engineer our way around it.

Yet, you won't answer my question, will you? It's because the resident skeptical right winger on this forum is the one who has taken the most personal action and has benefited from it financially in both tax credits and much lower electricity costs. It probably drives you crazy doesn't it? ...knowing that my rates are half of what you pay, and I got $10k knocked off of my taxes to boot! ...and I don't even believe in global warming. :muha1: It has you seething, doesn't it? Repeating this global warming nonsense is how you feel better about yourself for not having taken any action, isn't it? Meanwhile, people like me who think the whole thing is bullshit can play your virtue signaling game better than you can. :p

My wife and I have retired to SE Asia. We live on just our 2 Soc. Sec. checks. They total about $1300/mo.
Here there are no tax breaks for solar.
I changed my whole life starting in 1973. I gave up the 6 figure income and lived on far less for 45 years. This means I spent less and had a much lower carbon footprint.
I bet I have had the lowest carbon footprint of anyone here for the last 45 years.
Last edited by Steve_American on 08 Dec 2018 01:29, edited 1 time in total.
#14970130
jimjam wrote:I agree completely and am hardly a proponent of endless baby production. BTW, it's not my problem. Like Donald so astutely observed: "I won't be here."

Shrinking the population will not happen. Be realistic. Pay the consequences ……………? Does this mean that there is some slight recognition of maybe, perhaps a tiny problem of humankind having a small, tiny adverse effect on Mother Earth :eek: ? You realize, of course, that this may mean that you are a ………… liberal ( :eek: ) since wrecking the environment has somehow been made into a political problem.


Of course humankind has an effect on Planet Earth.

When Jesus of Nazareth was born, the population of the Earth was an estimated 300 million.
1804 years later, about the time of the Industrial Revolution, the population had added 700 million people and reached 1 billion. That's an addition of an average of roughly
3800 people per year.

It took only 123 years to reach 2 billion people in 1927. (Average 810,000 new souls per year)

In 1974 we reached 4 billion (now averaging 42.5 million new souls per year.)

In 1999 we reached 6 billion (now averaging 80 million new souls per year.)

In 2017 we reached 7.5 billion (now averaging 84 million new souls per year.)

Though population growth has slowed somewhat, at the current rates of population growth we will be in the neighborhoods of 8 billion by 2025 and 10 billion by 2060.

All that human activity must have impact on our environment where large population centers exist just as such massive increase in any other species would have impact on the environment where that occurred. Possibly it may also affect climate change but I don't think there is yet compelling evidence for that except that claimed by people who have interest in their own pocketbooks and/or who want increased control over large populations.

But certainly we should be concerned with management of the world's resources as populations increase as such massive increase in humans on Earth will have significant impact on those.
#14970209
Pants-of-dog wrote:OMG.

You actually quoted evidence!

Hallelujah! Let everyone know! Drink up and celebrate, as this rare occurrence shall not haplen again in a long time!

Congratulations, Sivad. You are learning!


:knife: I post evidence by the shit ton, you just ignore any evidence that doesn't fit your bullshit because you're just trolling. Your goal is to spread bullshit and confuse people. I don't think you're really fooling anyone though, not anyone who doesn't want to be fooled anyway.

But Lomborg still got it wrong when he said drought statistics show a decline.


See what I mean? You just completely ignored the evidence. The paper clearly states that drought has decreased, that's the statistic. Over the short to mid term there has been a statistical decrease in drought. It's only the long term statistical trend that doesn't show a decline.

It's crazy that has to be spelled out for you but there you go.
#14970219
Eauz wrote:This is a manufactured crisis from the environmental lobby.



The environmental lobby is funded by the malthusian globalist superclass. They're always looking for ways to throttle the poor and working classes. They've been doing it for centuries now. They definitely don't want the third world to become developed functioning democratic societies because then they won't have helpless backward populations to prey on. That's what their wars, their neoliberal economics, their mass immigration policies, and their carbon despotism are all about.
#14970223
Steve_American wrote:I gave up


I find the global warming deniers rather interesting. When temperatures rise beyond a point …. ice melts.....

When President Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it was home to an estimated 150 glaciers. Since then the number has decreased to fewer than 30, and most of those remaining have shrunk in area by two-thirds. Fagre predicts that within 30 years most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear.

And, yet, global warming deniers claim that, in spite of rather obvious massive ice melts, global warming is a con job. Perhaps taking their que from the world's #1 con artist, Donald, who claims that global warming is a scam created by China. Now, I can understand Trump denying the obvious because he does this on a daily basis and he, essentially, works for the fossil fuel industry in this case. But these other Bozos are just kind of locked in and it is pointless to attempt to explain to them that warming temperatures tend to melt ice.

I could spend the next few hours listing evidence of warming global temperatures from dozens of unrelated world wide sources that have nothing to gain money wise but …… as I say, global warming deniers are interesting studies.
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