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The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

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    Good grief. "water vapor monopolizes the overall greenhouse effect" is particularly special. It shows either a remarable failure to understand the problem, or an equally remarkable disingenuousness if you do understand it and are using it as an argument.

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      I still find the stupidity vaguely entertaining, which is why ignore poster isn't in place yet.

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        I'm just waiting for the chemtrails screed.

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          Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
          Linus all worried about CO2 emissions.
          As ever with climate change liars, sorry, deniers, sorry, sceptics, sorry, just asking questions, Linus is able to hold at least four different contradictory points of view as long as they bolster his bullshit.

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            Oxygen squared

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              Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
              That ignore poster function is quite the thing....
              What about the "ignorant poster" function?


              CO​2 FFS.

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                And another thing

                The first time you use an abbreviation (abbrev.) or acronym in a post you spell it out in full, then put the abbrev. in brackets.

                (It's in the house style guide along with the mandated "Oxford comma")

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                  https://twitter.com/mark_lynas/status/1145977972849033216

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                    Ah yes, K.C. makes a living out of publishing the blindingly obvious in Nature.

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                      This one is particular genius. They got loads of funding to go to a coral reef, pump it full of acidic water for a couple of years, and then come back to discover that, hey, the corals aren't so happy.

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                        Well done Ethiopia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-49151523

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                          [URL]https://twitter.com/ericholthaus/status/1155864528183279616?s=21[/URL]

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                            Originally posted by Nocturnal Submission View Post
                            Breaking news that popped up on that is that last Thursday broke the all time UK temperature record.

                            But hey, pictures of kids frolicking in fountains, dogs eating ice cream and scantily clad young ladies in the park all round!

                            (Not in the BBC article in fairness)

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                              "Breaking news that popped up on that is that last Thursday broke the all time UK temperature record."

                              Be careful with sentences like that. The all-time UK temperature record is only really a couple of centuries old at most. And even then the granularity of readings has been increasing massively in the last few years. Number of stations, time between measurements, processing of measurements, etc. From before the modern age we only really have average annual or even average century temperatures depending on how far back you go. But even then, some of these have been warmer in the past than things are right now - it's actually quite likely that Britain was warmer many times in the past than last Thursday.

                              What man-made global warming is is a wild and unprecedented rate of change (yer hockey-stick curve).* It's not (yet) about absolutes. And overclaims through sloppy language are dangerous, because they get seized upon by people with bad motives.

                              * - even here is a bit dubious. How can you be sure you are avoiding aliasing? Can you prove that rapid 10-20 year spikes in the past are not being smoothed out of the dataset by unavoidable limitations on your sampling rates for previous epochs compare to the vast amount of time-accurate data available for the present day? One for anton pulisov there... (n.b I hold with the scientific consensus, just interested in how you deal with this!)
                              Last edited by Janik; 29-07-2019, 18:36.

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                                I don't think they can prove that, no, But they amass more data all the time, and the continual refinement of climate modelling tends to reveal previous models as erring on the conservative side (I think).

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                                  https://twitter.com/jscarto/status/1157049407088599047

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                                    Arctic permafrost melting will aggravate the greenhouse effect.

                                    https://m.phys.org/news/2019-08-arct...se-effect.html

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                                      I thought that this was interesting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49567197

                                      I must confess that I hadn't come across sulphur hexafluoride before.

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                                        The industry has, though...

                                        Fuck it, can't embed the Tweet properly and the editor doesn't seem to allow me to remove it. Just look up what Ketan Joshi has to say.
                                        Last edited by Eggchaser; 15-09-2019, 16:11.

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                                          Here you go.

                                          [URL]https://twitter.com/KetanJ0/status/1173087544642297857[/URL]

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                                            Ta.

                                            Just like all the silver bullets to the heart of green tax thievery, it turns out to be more in the nature of a flag that unfurls to say "Bang!"

                                            But another zombie myth is born, no doubt.

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                                              If you're tired of shouting at the old men who shout at the clouds, here's an Oniony take on the terrible takes on Greta Thunberg:

                                              http://www.thecivilian.co.nz/jeremy-...ts-to-herself/

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                                                I find that sort of analysis not particularly helpful, and arguably counterproductive. It's not like most of those companies are actually contributing all that much in terms of emissions themselves. For the most part, it's the people buying their oil and gas and coal and burning it that are putting out the emissions. If we were to shut the 20 companies down, those emissions would be replaced pretty quickly.

                                                That's not to say the individual companies haven't made some horrific contributions to the climate crisis, through lobbying, misinformation etc, and to a certain extent through emissive extraction methods, shipping and so on (10% compared to 90% for end-users, according to the article). But the data just isn't very meaningful in terms of policy options. All it really tells us is that the global fossil fuel industry is highly concentrated. Which is not exactly a surprise.
                                                Last edited by Ginger Yellow; 09-10-2019, 15:17.

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                                                  Well, to be fair, a large number of those companies are state owned, so if the focus is on the companies, then I'm not sure it says much about capitalism. Another reason I don't think it's a helpful frame.

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                                                    It lies (primarily) with our dependence on and profligate use of fossil fuels (and two plus decades of political inaction after the consequences became perfectly clear). Which is to a certain extent a function of capitalism (it has historically been cheaper to use dirtier fuel sources, for instance). But I don't see what that has to do with the individual companies (as I say, lobbying etc is another thing entirely) doing the extraction. If there's demand for those carbon intensive fuels, and it's legal, someone will extract it. We've got to deal with the demand. That can be through a carbon tax, subsidising green alternatives, or whatever, but we've got to look at it at a macro level.

                                                    To put it another way myself, a more interesting and useful data analysis would be to look at the 20 biggest actual emitters, ie the end-users burning the fuels or the makers of products that burn them. That would tell us at least something about what we need to do to reduce the use of oil/gas/coal, rather than just saying - these companies are the biggest oil/gas/coal companies, which is not very interesting..
                                                    Last edited by Ginger Yellow; 09-10-2019, 16:00.

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