Hey look, it's a climate change thread!

[masterpanthera_t]

(01-17-2017, 02:36 PM)hollodero Wrote: Yeah that's what I meant.
People who acknowledge rising temperatures but claim it's solely because of sun eruptions or solar spots are deniers to me, too.


The problem... well, many Americans, as I see it, are not the most nuanced people, more the black and white fraction. Which comes with advantages and disadvantages; as does our European way of compromising. Regarding climate change, our compromises are rotten to me. You either acknowledge there's a problem or you don't. Acknowledging it and fighting it with hollow phrases and avoiding any responsibility is pointless; flatout deniers are more honest as I said.
But that's the issue. If you see man-made climate change as a problem, you need to take measures. Gas guzzling vehicles are part of the problem, and I have no problem taxing those who drive it with the highest amounts. Carbon offsets might be a good idea in principle, too (although being highly compromised in reality, I figure). But accepting climate change comes with accepting policies and measures addressing climate change, or it's not worth accepting in the first place. And the energy saving lamp might not be quite enough.
And if you're on that side of the argument, you do not have much wiggle room to accept the stances of the "other side" - so addressing it also comes with opposing those who don't. Or else you compromise in doing just very little, which is quite meaningless.

I usually at least try not to ramble in a thread (not that it always works out that way), but simply from observing how threads have become hijacked in P 'n R lately (or probably always), I'm going to take a bit of leeway and ramble on many topics in this post, but hopefully still keep the comments interesting and relevant instead of purely emotional and knee-jerk which makes rambling not too much fun to observe nor with much substance behind it.


First off, kudos to you for resurrecting this conversation, albeit seemingly without much fruition, in a more organized manner.  Atypical of most posters on this board, you tend to come off more open minded, and able of arguing the merits of a topic (from a self aware perspective) and again atypically flexible on changing your views when logically consistent counters based on plausibility are presented, without an emotional attachment to your previous views (or at least it's well disguised if it exists).  For the most part you seem able to focus on a topic and the point of debate, immune from another's intentional or unintentional attempt to derail or alter the point of debate in a thread.  So, keep it up.

Now, the point of the above paragraph is to show that in general, this type of comportment doesn't generally exist in U.S. politics nor in this forum (which as a subset of the U.S political realm of views and opinions, wouldn't be expected to diverge too much from the larger political spectrum), and therefore as you're probably aware, based on the mentioning of "nuance" in your post above, clear, logical and detached debates are not necessarily possible.  By detached, I mean emotionally detached from the outcome, as long as the outcome is arrived at from "truth", even if the outcome is detrimental.  Having said that, it probably doesn't differ too much from the political spectrum of most, if not all places in the world in terms of the lack of understanding or sympathizing with the "other" side, so I guess that is just the nature of where society is as a whole.  Probably, you may have experienced this type of environment in your part of the world as well.  Now the problem or the cause of this IMO, in the U.S., is that while the system of government was originally set up in a great way to represent the people in its intent, the politicians do not seem to have much of an incentive to do so.  Especially because policies that may be in the best interest of the nation as a whole may not be popular with your constituency.  While this is always part of the system, lately (or maybe I suppose for a long time), politicians are very good at playing the game of pitting groups against each other to the point that policies are neither discussed "honestly" with an assessment of strengths and weaknesses and NUANCE, but much rather in a my side vs. your side emotional ranting, with intentional obfuscation of topics on both sides (it almost seems that arguments are held on both "sides" against the imaginary other "side" with its imaginary "points", rather than a true discussion on actual points of contention).  Add in the monetary consequences of the industries which actually drive the arguments and the politics, it's no wonder that "real" discussions are never really even allowed to be had.  Things are made more "Black and White" with strawman arguments and conflations than actual merits following the line of thinking of various points.  

To relate this to a point about climate change, I will use this example.  I could be wrong, but typically when climate change/environmental impact is discussed, I don't think there's a deeper discussion on how to transition into alternative energy sources into areas where fossil fuel related industries exist, without throwing the economy in those areas into a tailspin.  There doesn't seem to be political discussions that actually focus on the strengths and weaknesses of different energy sources, both from a scientific standpoint and from the practical considerations on how their implementations can be phased in so that the populations which currently rely on fossil fuel energy sources can be transitioned into a new economy in a fairly seamless manner.   And the political environment turns any attempts at having these nuanced discussions into an opportunity to pit one group against another without allowing the real depth of the conversation to be brought to light.  Add in the opportunity for people to be easily misled for whatever reason (on both sides), be it not having time to be knowledgeable on the topic due to having barely enough time to make ends meet, an intentional campaign by industries and politicians to obscure facts and conflate arguments and to tailor them in a way that is intentionally false or at least misleading by omission,  accountability never taken while wrongly assigned to some other group etc., it seems neither "side" can actually accomplish anything meaningful or useful for the citizens as a whole anymore.  

Finally, to complete this rambling, I want to mention that I am not as well versed on the technical points of contention when it comes to the climate change debate, so atm, I'm neither a believer nor a denier.  That is obviously something I need to change, as I'd rather be informed than possibly another one who silently yet unwittingly aided in the propagation of whichever is the wrong side.  But I suppose once we hash out the "correct" view, then it's at least possible to take the next step and focus on how to implement things which will eventually be good for the U.S. (I know you're not American), and maybe eventually by example, good for the world.  So, how does one go about informing oneself with the right knowledge?  I am guessing if I googled this I would probably see enough opinions on both sides that to my untrained eye would just make it impossible to judiciously form an opinion.