Houston-area school board votes to remove 13 chapters from state-approved science textbooks, citing controversial topics

Zaha Torte said:

I am with you. You have been very clear. Please continue.

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Zaha Torte said:

I don't give that Accord much credence because every country sets their own standards and there are no methods of enforcement.

Basically - it does not require the biggest polluters to really do anything.

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BCP1928 said:

A consensus based on a hoax to act as a slippery slope leading to one world government, I think is the MAGA reasoning. And we know that there is no greater threat to a Christian America than one world government. (except maybe drag queens reading to children)

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Bradskii said:

I'll agree with you that it doesn't do enough to ensure that all signatories do the necessary to ensure we limit the damage. But that wasn't the reason I brought it up, was it...

The reason I brought it up was to show that we have the most comprehensive consensus about acknowledging a problem that the world has ever seen. And you completely ignored that. So I'll ask you again if you could please address it. And explain why you think you're right and all the experts in all the countries of the world (bar 3) are wrong.

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rambot said:

I'm pressed right now but I'll follow up tomorrow with another longer one.

Now, given that the carbon cycle, has been for HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of years, continuing to cycle along and continues to provide "short/medium term" stability, we know that the increases we are seeing cannot be due to natural variations. Naturally sourced variations would show up (thought BARELY...unless the event was....astronomically huge) in measurements of atmospheric co2 in punctuated events and (before the Industrial revolution) would have had the natural "feedback systems" (eg: the Northern hemisphere forests) to mitigate those punctuated events and it would return to a regulated state in short order.

Again, you will note that the trend line for CO2 is upward. And not exactly "slowly"....but it is, undeniably upward. We know there are 0 natural explanations for that increase in CO2. We know that even Volcanic eruptions that spew out HUGE amounts of CO2 (but ALL of the volcanic activity on planet earth are only 1/60th of the amount of CO2 humans create in a near (https://www.climate.gov/news-featur...-carbon-dioxide-volcanoes-or-human-activities...first sentence). So even a HUGE volcanic eruption (like the ones in Iceland a few years ago) would barely be more than a blip.

Most importantly, what the dark trendline in the background is telling us is that CO2 is getting added to the atmosphere, and the atmosphere (and biosphere) itself does not have the ability to regulate that amount of CO2 that is being taken from deep below the earth and put into the carbon cycle. So that's the second piece of bad news:

Our planet cannot maintain stasis (equalibrium) due to the CO2 humans are putting into it's natural cycles.

Our first piece of bad news was way back in the first post where we both accepted that CO2 molecules (technically the bonds...which can change their orientation slightly) can hold infrared heat.


That's all I have time for now. Let me know if this is all still okay and then i'm gonna move on cause I think my main points about co2 I wanted to get across are done.


All of this (and everything I've said so far) does not even take into consideration other greenhouse gases like methane and water vapour. Just focussing on co2.
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EDIT:
Super super super sidebar. Thanks a lot for this opportunity to force me to think through this a little better; it's been a LONG time and I've never had the challenge of trying to teach this stuff directly to a person.
I don't teach climate change as a topic in junior high but I love it (it gets brought up but that's it).

I can see you are a Christian. I am delighted to continue to try to explain AGW to you but if you want to hear from a truly awesome, reputable, CHRISTIAN climatologist, Katherine Hayhoe is a really great person to listen to.

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Zaha Torte said:

I understood your reason for bringing it up. I was only pointing out that that was not enough to convince me that there is an imminent threat.

If everyone in a house agrees that the house is on fire - yet they don't decide to really do anything about it - either there is no fire, or they don't consider the fire to be an imminent threat.

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Zaha Torte said:

I understood your reason for bringing it up. I was only pointing out that that was not enough to convince me that there is an imminent threat.

If everyone in a house agrees that the house is on fire - yet they don't decide to really do anything about it - either there is no fire, or they don't consider the fire to be an imminent threat.

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1. smoking is not a health issue because a lot of people continue or even start to smoke - it's just the experts saying so.
2. obesity is not a health issue, because a lot of people are not trying to lose weight, obesity is even increasing - it's just the experts saying so.
3. fentanyl is not an issue because still more and more people are dying from - it's just the experts saying so.

Zaha Torte said:

I can see that. There are many things we could do to mitigate potential damage - but not everyone agrees on what to do.

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Zaha Torte said:

You are doing very well and I am still very interested if you are willing to share more.

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Bradskii said:

So you think that some countries aren't doing enough, so therefore there can't be a problem. Is that seriously the basis for your position? Maybe you can point to any country who has done literally nothing. You must have a list handy as you're basing your very position on the fact.

I've already checked out North Korea and the smallest countries in Africa, South America and Asia so you can skip those.

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driewerf said:

By that reasoning:

1. smoking is not a health issue because a lot of people continue or even start to smoke - it's just the experts saying so.
2. obesity is not a health issue, because a lot of people are not trying to lose weight, obesity is even increasing - it's just the experts saying so.
3. fentanyl is not an issue because still more and more people are dying from - it's just the experts saying so.

See where this is going?

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Pommer said:

No more “houses made of sticks”.
Quarried rock and cement or straight up concrete for most residential housing.
Only the very very rich and the very very poor will have “wooden houses”.

If we line more areas with some sort of heat-sink paving we could keep the oceans from over-heating while our kilns bake in Sol’s golden glow?

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rambot said:

OK.

Earlier I spoke about the carbon cycle and I alluded to the difficulty maintaining stasis and the slow increasing we are seeing in atmospheric co2.
Ultimately increasing co2 is not across the board problematic for humans. As has been brought up before higher co2 levels increases plant productivity. That's can't be denied. Of course that is a separate issue from the possible effect on temperature and it's own discussion so im leaving that issue for now.

Within those cycles of carbon we can remember that all of those molecules of carbon were also trapping heat. For hundreds of millions of years those co2 molecules contributed to maintaining a homeostasis in the biosphere; a warm comfortable temperature for terrestrial animals to develop and live and evolve. Other molecules also worked to trap heat and they also contributed to that homeostasis. And all of these molecules existed in amounts that were basically stable. Simply put, thr planet and biosphere could never exhibit an event major enough to quickly destabilize anything; only outside forces would be able to do that. Slow changes occurred over hundres of thousands to millions of years except with certain events. Even comparing co2 records with asteroid/ major space events definitely shows warming events and spiked co2 levels that, in time, come back under control (thanks again to the plants) but that out took millions of years for plants to do.

But it is telling that it was a force outside of nature, a comet that would create these profound and relatively sudden changes.

All still good?


I was thinking that it seems that your biggest hangup seems to be the "imminent threat" argument.

I was planning to now move toward the quality of modern evidence that we have and what we have seen. But if you prefer I can shift to discussing imminent threat

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essentialsaltes said:

But it's not just one neighbor. Everyone in your town is haphazardly shooting guns off, and you are too!

At the moment, the people of the town have barely been able to come to the agreement that everyone gets to shoot 10 bullets a day and no more.

But more than half the town is disregarding the agreement.

How would you start punishing them?

--

Here's another relevant metaphor:

Tragedy of the commons​

The tragedy of the commons is a metaphoric label for a concept that is widely discussed, and criticised, in economics, ecology and other sciences. According to the concept, should a number of people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to over-use it, and may end up destroying its value altogether. Even if some users exercised voluntary restraint, the other users would merely supplant them, the predictable result being a tragedy for all.

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essentialsaltes said:

Your attitude seems to be, "Why should I do anything, If my government isn't doing anything?"

When maybe it should be, "Why isn't my government doing anything, when something needs to be done?"

Rather than passively accept the situation, you could work in some tiny way to tell your representatives in government to do something.

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Zaha Torte said:

Imminent threat.

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rambot said:

Fair enough.
There are a lot of ways increases in thr atmospheric nrg could be threats to people living in certain areas.

Which of the reported imminent threats do you take exception to and want to address first.


Sea level rise
Arctic stream collapse
Sea acidification
Localized heating trend
Localized drought trend
Localized increase in high energy weather output events or severity (lightening)

There's others but lets start with one of those.

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Zaha Torte said:

Start from the top and we will work our way down.

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