At current rates of consumption, the U.S. has at least two centuries of oil, report says

[DaisyDay]

Absolutely. We have a responsibility to take care of out planet. However, this requires accurate information and not scaremongering. The boy can only cry wolf so many times before people ignore him. Constant claims of climate cataclysm that fail to predict real world outcomes make it easier to write the wolf off as fiction. "When will this happen" is an important question. Answering that it will happen soon, and it doesn't happen soon, can hurt the cause as much as saying there's no threat to the environment.

It's one thing to show the effect of humans on climate over time. It's quite another to suggest that New York City will be underwater by the year 2000.

What year was Sandy? That was the time businesses and hospitals had to rethink having generators and air systems located in their basements.

 

[SimplyMe]

It doesn't affect the climate. The climate is going to fo whatever the climate does. We aren't going to stop it. Like I said we could all go back to horse and buggy and the climate is still going to change. Its been warming since the ice age. Our cars are super clean. We have regulations on all.our factories. We are constantly making improvements. I think we are good. What we should be doing is looking into ways to mitigate tge effects of change. It's goingvto happen. We can't stop it. What are we going to do to mitigate it? Adapt to it. If we are smart we would be working hard to find ways to adapt to the changes instead of putting so much effort into trying to alter something we have no control over.

If your car is so super clean, put yourself and your car in your garage, close all doors, and let the car run for awhile -- then tell me how clean it runs, if you live through it. While cars exhaust is cleaner than they were a few decades ago, that does not make them clean.

 

[RileyG]

We are stewards of the earth, right?
At some point our bumble-headed way of doing this “stewarding”, there’s going to be a blight that threatens the cocoa bean plant and by shear luck, (bad), that generation would have lost our (major/only?) source for making chocolate. They’ll make “substitutes” which will taste pretty good but it won’t be “chocolate“.

I can live in the world without chocolate and I thank [Whomever] that I have the choice.

Let’s preserve chocolate!

In all seriousness, we need to keep our flora and fauna thriving so future generations can use it.

 

[Miles]

What year was Sandy? That was the time businesses and hospitals had to rethink having generators and air systems located in their basements.

The worst hurricane to hit New York was in 1938. Sandy was bad, and happened in 2012, but we're talking about hurricanes. Hurricanes have flooded NYC before and since. The prediction was that NYC would be underwater, not merely subjected to storms, by the year 2000.

Environmentalism is good when it is based on facts. For instance, human activity is proven to influence the climate, pollution poisons humans and wildlife, etc. For what it's worth, I rarely have a problem with climate science. Attention is paid to actual data, and there is incentive for competing computer models to align with reality to the extent that they are able. Climate reporting and activism, on the other hand, are another matter. They tend to play fast and loose with the facts, playing to emotion rather than logic. This is dangerous, as failed alarmist predictions give credence to those who think it's okay to pollute and waste precious resources.

 

[Bradskii]

But yeah, it's mostly political identity coloring one's perception of science.

And it's a nonsensical position. 'It's the left trying to make political capital out of it'. Completely ignoring that every political system on the planet in any country you could name, from North Korea to Sweden, from China to the US, is saying 'Yeah, there's a problem. We need to do something about it'.

 

[iluvatar5150]

And it's a nonsensical position. 'It's the left trying to make political capital out of it'. Completely ignoring that every political system on the planet in any country you could name, from North Korea to Sweden, from China to the US, is saying 'Yeah, there's a problem. We need to do something about it'.

And it was the right who tried to make it partisan in the first place. We fixed acid rain and the ozone hole because Limbaugh’s deriding it as stupid liberal nonsense hadn’t gotten enough market share to undermine it yet.

 

[rjs330]

There's a little bit of religious fatalism woven in there: God is going to rapture the Christians and destroy the world, so there's less incentive to keep the place nice.

But yeah, it's mostly political identity coloring one's perception of science.

See post #35. That should dispel your "Less incentive" silliness.

 

[rjs330]

Science > attitude

Thats basically all they have left: attitude.

Nope, science hasn't proven that we do affect the climate, especially to any degree that is significant.

 

[BCP1928]

See post #35. That should dispel your "Less incentive" silliness.

A lot of hyperbole that doesn't dispel anything. The climate is clearly behaving in an unusual way, but it is also clear that it is very important to some people that human activity not have anything to do with it. Exaggerations and conspiracy theories do not dispel the suspicion that there is something merely self-serving behind that denial.

 

[iluvatar5150]

Nope, science hasn't proven that we do affect the climate, especially to any degree that is significant.

What would it take (i.e. what sort of evidence would have to be provided to you) for you to abandon that belief?

 

[rjs330]

What would it take (i.e. what sort of evidence would have to be provided to you) for you to abandon that belief?

Proof that man has caused the change. Of course that can't be proven since the climate has been changing for all time. Even when man wasnt here.

They've been predicting total disaster for sometime now.

50 years of predictions that the climate apocalypse is nigh

Climatoligists have been wrong a lot.

Some actual evidence would be nice.

 

[Pommer]

Proof that man has caused the change. Of course that can't be proven since the climate has been changing for all time. Even when man wasnt here.

They've been predicting total disaster for sometime now.

50 years of predictions that the climate apocalypse is nigh

Climatoligists have been wrong a lot.

Some actual evidence would be nice.

If 50 years of folks proclaiming that the “climate apocalypse is nigh”, shows that it’s bogus, what does that portend for that other apocalypse?

 

[Estrid]

This sounds like the arguments I hear from people, particularly young people, about bad habits like smoking. Basically, they are going to die anyway and the bad effects are decades in the future, and they can always quit if it becomes a problem.

Personally, I think we need to do as God commanded in the Bible, to be good stewards of His Creation, the Earth.

Unfortunately it's a mixed message, as easily taken as
essentially the opposite.