Climate talks fail

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I don’t believe in the doom scenarios presented by extreme climate-change advocates.

Saying this:

There’s been desertification in Africa and Australia for many years, though it has accelerated in recent years.

I wouldn’t buy a house within about 500 yards of the coast, unless it is on a big hill.

It saddens me that governments around the world have taken little or no action on climate change. We have more floods, hurricanes and bush fires around the world and governments are not doing enough to stop climate change.

Governments world wide have failed their people

and democracy is a scam.

What is needed are central governments that comprise the best people instead of bumbling idiots like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump as political leaders.

I wouldn’t buy a house within about 500 yards of the coast, unless it is on a big hill.

What evidences do you need? If there is not enough evidences for you now, there never will be.

I don’t believe in the doom scenarios presented by extreme climate-change advocates.

Saying this:

There’s been desertification in Africa and Australia for many years, though it has accelerated in recent years.

I wouldn’t buy a house within about 500 yards of the coast, unless it is on a big hill.

National Review columnist Kevin D. Williamson has a perfect specimen of this tendency, of which hundreds could be found. Williamson’s recent column is devoted to the alleged hypocrisy of actress Emma Thompson, who agrees with leading world scientific authorities about the dangers of greenhouse-gas emissions yet still traveled to a climate-change conference via airplane, which of course emitted carbon. Williamson argues that the fact Thompson bought a ticket on an airplane shows she does not, and cannot really, believe climate change is as bad as she says. Apparently, taking her views on climate change seriously would mean boycotting climate conferences not located within a short distance of her home.

Obviously, Williamson’s charge of hypocrisy is manifestly insipid. In general, individual choices have an infinitesimal impact on collective-action problems like greenhouse-gas emissions. In this particular case, Thompson’s choice has either zero, or close to zero, impact. If she decided to avoid buying a plane ticket, either the seat would have been sold to another customer, or the plane would have flown one fewer passenger (perhaps sparing a tiny bit of fuel by reducing the plane’s weight by 110 pounds or so), but either way, it would have burned jet fuel. Williamson argues that she should have boycotted the conference because, “If Emma Thompson fails to show up for the party, there are a thousand celebrities ready to take her place.” He does not seem to realize the same reasoning applies to her failing to show up for an airplane flight. The other side of the equation is that attending climate conferences draws more attention to the issue of climate change, and the general logic of working to build political action by gathering and publicizing ideas is not one in serious dispute by either right or left.

While Williamson’s argument with Thompson here is picayune and self-evidently false, it is certainly the case that many celebrities do say genuinely wrong things about climate change. The world is a big place. It is always possible to find somebody on the other side of a problem saying something silly. Conservative media is filled with columns attacking celebrities, activists, or perhaps backbench members of Congress for overreacting to climate change. This is a whole genre of right-wing column. It is a very appealing one for conservatives who would rather not antagonize their allies. Conservatives might disagree on the small matter of whether the release of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere traps heat, but they can agree on the big question that environmentalists annoy them.

What evidence do you have?
Have you ever undertaken any effort to verify its authenticity or do you blindly accept what you have been told ?

What evidence do you have?
Have you ever undertaken any effort to verify its authenticity or do you blindly accept what you have been told ?

I'm hearing about record heatwaves due to global warming causing massive fires in Australia. But looking at weather charts for November and December, the temperature looks pretty normal for summer to me. Quite mild in fact compared to Las Vegas, Nevada standards (where I grew up). It looks to me like any record breaking heat occurred in a single day two or three times. But overall looks pretty normal.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/au/melbo ... ?year=2019

We have more floods, hurricanes and bush fires around the world

The Guardian is now claiming that Climate change denial was defeated in 2019.

Methinks that, like their past predictions of doom-and-gloom we're-all-gonna-fry 'Climate Crisis', this too will be shown to have little or no basis in fact.

But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the “illusory truth effect,” a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias—which perhaps you have become more familiar with lately.

President Trump is a "great businessman," he says over and over again. Some evidence suggests that might not be true. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-beli ... le-repeat/

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Abraham Lincoln

Repetition is what makes fake news work, too, as researchers at Central Washington University pointed out in a study way back in 2012 before the term was everywhere. It's also a staple of political propaganda. It's why flacks feed politicians and CEOs sound bites that they can say over and over again. Not to go all Godwin's Law on you, but even Adolf Hitler knew about the technique. "Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea," he wrote in Mein Kampf. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-beli ... le-repeat/

I have yet to see climate deniers showing any convincing arguments or evidences; they only say that for some reasons scientists are lying, or stupids by saying they didn't take into account elements that they did took into account.

The effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources. But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality—so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It's so familiar that it starts to feel right.

"When you see the fact for the second time it's much easer to process—you read it more quickly, you understand it more fluently," says Vanderbilt University psychologist Lisa Fazio. "Our brain interprets that fluency as a signal for something being true"—Whether it's true or not. In other words, rationality can be hard. It takes work. Your busy brain is often more comfortable running on feeling.

As with any cognitive bias, the best way not to fall prey to it is to know it exists. If you read something that just feels right, but you don't know why, take notice. Look into it. Check the data. If that sounds like too much work, well, facts are fun.

So really the term "Climate Deniers" (which is borrowed from "Holocaust Deniers") should be changed to a more accurate term like "Catastrophe Deniers".