In your opinion, what is "the right thing"?

This isn't a flame, just an attempt to understand your perspective.

My reason, and perspective, is because for many years I've seen what actions that Israel has taken, even through the American rose-colored-lens of media, as oppression-bordering-on-genocide. I also sincerely doubt that the Palestinian media has such a subversive hold on American media that it could launch as much propaganda as what I've seen over the last couple decades.

The US appears to have an unspoken mandate to support everything that Israel does. Even when I research US and world history, I don't fully understand why the US has taken this stance.

Regardless, terribly, ironically, the US seems to be supporting an organized regime of the like since we have not seen since the early 19th century. I try to listen to all channels of media because I feel it's healthy to be exposed to contradicting viewpoints, but I've never heard a single positive action that Israel has done in the name of its geographical area, history, or government, that wasn't entirely selfish in the name of biblical righteousness.

Anyway, I originally viewed this post because I was actually surprised that the US would condemn an action of Israels because I'm so used to the US government loading up the state of Israel with arms and supporting their militant actions. I've no idea what "WochIT" media is, but it would be a nice turning point for the US if their channel portrays a legitimate perspective.

In the meantime I won't hold my breath.

I don't know of any country or organization in world history who doesn't say they want peace. Hitler marched under the banner of Peace, it's just peace within certain parameters. Same with Defense, I don't know of a country that attacks another without invoking their right to defend themselves. It's bullshit. It doesn't matter what books Islamic people read or Christian people read. People are going to justify the actions they want to take any way possible.

This is sort of like the argument that lays a Billion peoples deaths at the feet of Communism. It doesn't much matter what the "Communists" actually believe, only what they say they believe and what they do.

This is sort of a completely pointless argument anyway, the West has been waging horrific wars against the Islamic world for the past century, and we blame them? When you attack a country and destroy it you are responsible for all the carnage that follows even when not committed by you, because you created the conditions in which they could happen. That's called waging a War of Aggression. It's the crime that the Nazis were guilty of in the Nuremburg Trials and is considered the supreme international crime.

@bcglorf, I've skimmed through this conversation, and I think that this is the most succinct expression of your position on global warming:
>> ^bcglorf:

Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.


I think John Cole still has the perfect description of the conservative/denier shtick on global warming:

You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic.

Now, to your credit, you have executed this script in a more thoughtful, reasoned, honestly skeptical way than most do, but ultimately you're following it to a tee. Hell, you even made a swipe at Al Gore along the way.

I think this comment of criticalthud's is pretty much speaking to why I posted the video in the first place:
>> ^criticalthud:

and I would add:
we have a psychological issue at hand.
the human species thinks it's entitled, and it's OUR planet. We think we're special.
This kind of psychological issue hides reality from us.
We have shown ourselves to be very poor stewards of the planet. How many species have we wiped out? How else have we affected our environment? What sort of poisons have we created, what scale of trash heap? Mindlessly fattening ourselves.
This makes me think it is quite likely that we are the frogs in the slowly boiling water.
So, we can argue about this and that, and whether our governments should act. But in actuality, it is up to each and every one of us to stop being energy and consumer gluttons, feasting during the oil orgy.


Human psychology isn't wired properly for dealing with things like climate change. We have trouble with making connections between our actions in the here and now, and consequences to people elsewhere in space, and in time. We're also weird about our assessment of risk. Some people are deathly afraid of flying, but have no problem driving around in a car, even though driving a car is vastly more likely to result in your death than flying on a plane.

The science isn't certain on exactly what's happening, but then science isn't certain about anything. Everything has a fucking error bar on it. We won't be certain it's gonna kill the human race until the human race dies. We won't know it's not going to be a big problem until it's already stopped...and it's showing no signs of stopping on its own.

Environmentalism at its most basic level is about trying to lessen the impact humanity is having on the natural systems we rely on for the basic necessities of life. It's about not felling forests, not poisoning our water, not blighting our soil, and in this case, it's about trying to get people to stop giving a big fucking shove to the equilibrium of our atmosphere when we don't know exactly how it works (and what we do know suggests doing that could possibly be very bad for us).

The basic disagreement here is about what our default position should be in the absence of certainty. Mine is that we should be humble, and curtail our CO2 emissions rather severely. Yours seems to be that as long as the science isn't yet 100% definite, we should just ignore the problem and just wait until scarcity of coal and oil pushes us off them.

>> ^criticalthud:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^criticalthud:
just out of curiosity, in the midst of global warming doubters promoting the theory that the earth is warming through solar/cosmic/natural means... has there been much consideration into the idea that the earth is currently in a cooling phase -- enormously offset by what we're doing to it?
second,
one large concern i have with global warming is "system adaption" - that being that it generally takes the ecosystem a bit of time to adjust to whatever is happening to it (ie: glaciers don't melt immediately). Meaning that the damage we caused 10 years ago is being felt now. Meaning also that even if we were to cease mucking about right now, we could expect continued and possibly even escalating ecosystem problems in the years to come.
so, is it time to panic? dunno. could be.

Which is why it's so important to understand things better. Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.

you seem to mistake me as someone who is arguing with you. i'm really only interested in insights.
I'm certainly not a climatologist. I work with spines. But in answer to your proposition that it would be chaotic if we cut back, I think the strength of the human species is in their ability to adapt, and as far as i'm concerned, the ballooning world population combined with a worldwide contracture in resources makes this inevitable (not to mention the growing climate change issue) - but it's up to us on how painful we want it to be.
Our entire economic system and our culture of consumerism needs to be revised. We are mindless automatons, with little awareness to our impact on the earth as a species. Our daily lives are almost entirely self-centered.
Secondly, as to "the" question of human contribution, I would offer the microcosm of the forest fire, in which carbon is suddenly released into the atmosphere. The overall effect is, clearly, very warming, almost suffocating. On a grander scale, the species is continually burning and releasing carbon into the atmoshphere all over the planet. How that would fail to warm the planet escapes me. but, like i said, it's not my field. peace out.


Sorry if my tone comes off as combative, it's not really my intent so please don't take my vehemence on issues personally. Maybe I'm just getting older but I'm of the mindset that the fastest way to know where I'm right and wrong is to be forward and assertive with how I understand things and allow the opportunity to be corrected where I'm wrong.

My thoughts on the human contribution are tempered by a few things. From the very top, that CO2's contribution is small compared to H2O(I count this an uncontested fact). Annual CO2 emissions are small(5%) compared to natural CO2 emissions(I again count this an uncontested fact). The experts do insist that the human CO2 emissions are building up and still driving the natural CO2 levels significantly higher each year. We don't understand the natural CO2 emission and absorption processes very well, so poorly in fact our margins of error on them are larger than the human contribution. There is evidence that CO2 levels are rising in the last 100 years, and there is a correlation there to human emissions. What we don't have strong evidence for yet is what impact that has on climate. We DO know it is warming effect, but the magnitude of it is still poorly understood. As I've outlined above the understanding of temperature trends over the last 2k years is still a work in progress with large margins of error(even systematic ones that are being worked out). The computer models we have by definition are no more reliable than that data, which places us without a strong correlation or confidence in what magnitude of change the CO2 will have when all other variables are considered.

As a side point, if you look at the IPCC or listen to certain climatologists, you may hear it sounding like they disagree and believe my last statement is disproven. What they have studied is the impact CO2 increases should have overall with the assumption of all other variables being equal. It's a useful figure to have, and the confidence in it is better than my last statement described. That is because I was talking about something different, I stated that CO2's impact, with all other variables being considered NOT equal, is still poorly known and has very low confidence levels. In the real world the impact of one climate variable impacts the role of all the others, and often significantly. The IPCC and a select few climatologists talk about CO2 projections that ignore that interaction as a base assumption and somewhere along the line between them and the public or them and Al Gore, that base assumption gets dropped off. That base assumption is central and vital, and it's why as our climate models improve we will see predictions for CO2 that fall outside the error margins of the IPCC models with that assumption. That doesn't invalidate the IPCC's work, it is an advancement of it and improvement upon it. Remembering the base assumptions is vital for the public to maintain faith in the integrity and reliability of scientific research. People need to know WHY the predictions they were told by the IPCC a few years back have changed so much and yet the IPCC insists they weren't wrong. The truth is simply that they were misunderstood.

As yet another rabbit warren, there is an even smaller set of people within the climate community who actively encourage that misunderstanding. They do it firmly believing that the impact of CO2 with all else ignored is still indicative of CO2 with all else considered. Which is even a reasonable and normal expectation. The trouble is it falsely communicates the level confidence and margin of error of current known facts. I can't abide that kind of thinking, it's what is supposed to differentiate scientists from priests and politicians, they are supposed to refuse to make that kind of compromise when presenting what they do and do not know is demonstrably true.

>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^criticalthud:
just out of curiosity, in the midst of global warming doubters promoting the theory that the earth is warming through solar/cosmic/natural means... has there been much consideration into the idea that the earth is currently in a cooling phase -- enormously offset by what we're doing to it?
second,
one large concern i have with global warming is "system adaption" - that being that it generally takes the ecosystem a bit of time to adjust to whatever is happening to it (ie: glaciers don't melt immediately). Meaning that the damage we caused 10 years ago is being felt now. Meaning also that even if we were to cease mucking about right now, we could expect continued and possibly even escalating ecosystem problems in the years to come.
so, is it time to panic? dunno. could be.

Which is why it's so important to understand things better. Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.


you seem to mistake me as someone who is arguing with you. i'm really only interested in insights.

I'm certainly not a climatologist. I work with spines. But in answer to your proposition that it would be chaotic if we cut back, I think the strength of the human species is in their ability to adapt, and as far as i'm concerned, the ballooning world population combined with a worldwide contracture in resources makes this inevitable (not to mention the growing climate change issue) - but it's up to us on how painful we want it to be.
Our entire economic system and our culture of consumerism needs to be revised. We are mindless automatons, with little awareness to our impact on the earth as a species. Our daily lives are almost entirely self-centered.

Secondly, as to "the" question of human contribution, I would offer the microcosm of the forest fire, in which carbon is suddenly released into the atmosphere. The overall effect is, clearly, very warming, almost suffocating. On a grander scale, the species is continually burning and releasing carbon into the atmoshphere all over the planet. How that would fail to warm the planet escapes me. but, like i said, it's not my field. peace out.

>> ^criticalthud:

just out of curiosity, in the midst of global warming doubters promoting the theory that the earth is warming through solar/cosmic/natural means... has there been much consideration into the idea that the earth is currently in a cooling phase -- enormously offset by what we're doing to it?
second,
one large concern i have with global warming is "system adaption" - that being that it generally takes the ecosystem a bit of time to adjust to whatever is happening to it (ie: glaciers don't melt immediately). Meaning that the damage we caused 10 years ago is being felt now. Meaning also that even if we were to cease mucking about right now, we could expect continued and possibly even escalating ecosystem problems in the years to come.
so, is it time to panic? dunno. could be.


Which is why it's so important to understand things better. Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.

As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.

I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.

Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.

Currently we produce enough food for everyone in the world to eat about 2700 kCal per day. The main reason there are still starving people is that, either they don't have the money to purchase said food, or they don't have the land to grow it on. >> ^Peroxide:

Recently heard on the radio, there is more than enough food for everyone, distribution is the only problem, probably equity too.

>> ^Boise_Lib:

He has a very euro-centric view of world history.

Makes a change, doesn't it.

He has a very euro-centric view of world history.

Not to put too fine a point on it - but his essential point is quite correct. No one was really called a "Palestinian" except in very recent world history. Certainly not within the context that the term is being used today.

However, that doesn't really matter much. The modern Jewish state also did not exist until recent modern history. They had a history as a nation until the Romans sacked the place, but after that point their identity was not that of a people/state, but simply as a 'race' which was scattered. Does that mean they did not exist? Of course not, and the Palestinians may not have had a state either, or necessarily an identity linked to a specific nation - but they were there.

As always - this whole discussion is pointless. The world should forcibly relocate all Jews to an island like Sicily. Then relocate all the "palestinians" to an island on the other side of the planet. Then build a big fence all around the disputed territory and turn it into an international museum run by the Swiss and no one else is allowed to live there. Problem solved.

Your conflation of islam with judiasm and christianity not-withstanding, the explanatory power therein describes no less than, the condition of man, the nature of truth, world history, the natural world, all of the fundemental questions of life, and how to know God personally. Quite a lot of explanatory power, I would say.

But I'm not going to waste my time/energy on you

Or perhaps you just don't have anything intelligent to say because you don't understand the subject matter as well as you portray yourself to, so you weakly justify your cop-out by attacking me instead of the argument.

>> ^hpqp:
@shinyblurry said: blah blah blah same old non-arguments blah blah blah
It is rather hilarious that you go on about "explanatory power", of which the Abrahamic faiths have none. But I'm not going to waste my time/energy on you.

>> ^heropsycho:

Before I share my opinion about this, I want to share I have a Master's Degree in history, specializing in 20th Century US and World History.
History doesn't back this up. Show me the world war that started post 2008. 2002? 1987? 1970's...
Why was there a 20 year pause between the end of WWI and WWII when the US economy went to crap just after WWI ended?
This is sheer utter, 100% steaming pile of horsecrap "history".
>> ^Duckman33:
LOl keep your heads in the sand guys. Can't wait till we can say "We told you so." I find it laughable that history backs this up and you guys still vehemently deny this is a possible scenario.



Yeah it's cherry picking.

Before I share my opinion about this, I want to share I have a Master's Degree in history, specializing in 20th Century US and World History.

History doesn't back this up. Show me the world war that started post 2008. 2002? 1987? 1970's...

Why was there a 20 year pause between the end of WWI and WWII when the US economy went to crap just after WWI ended?

This is sheer utter, 100% steaming pile of horsecrap "history".

>> ^Duckman33:

LOl keep your heads in the sand guys. Can't wait till we can say "We told you so." I find it laughable that history backs this up and you guys still vehemently deny this is a possible scenario.

YES! world history before 1500, my faaavorite!