02-25-2020, 08:07 PM
(02-25-2020, 06:02 PM)David Horn Wrote:(02-25-2020, 04:56 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Yep. AOC could most likely be wrong. Am I wrong about so called global warming and Al Gore making a fortune off it before it was switched to climate change. So, how long will it be before Minnesota becomes more like Missouri? We had a decent winter this year compared to last winter which was much colder.
AGW is about as established a scientific fact as we're likely to see in an earth-science scenario. You might do well to understand what happens when the forests die, because northern forests need the hard cold, and won't get it. Further south, it will be insects and disease. That will come to you too, because trees don't just pull up their roots and move. Think: the American Chestnut, but for the entire forest. That's one of many negatives you AGW deniers seem to ignore.
My reference to her being possibly wrong is Civic X'er characterizing her (probably wrongly) as saying that we will all be gone in 12 years. Global warming is a different matter. Unlike Donald Trump, who seems to listen to the pseudo-scientific 'wisdom' that emerges from the mouth of "Rash Libel" (anyone still smoking cancerweed products in any form is betting against scientific evidence, which is far worse odds than anything in Vegas). Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez seems to have studied the scientific evidence.
The only question that anyone legitimately has about AGW is the severity of its consequences. The upside is milder winters. The downside is that Michigan and Minnesota farmers need the winter blizzards to prevent too-early germination of plants and to protect ground water that tender young seedlings need if they are to grow into nice, tall, rich crops of grain.
I do not need to be an expert on cancer to eschew cancerweed products. The statistical evidence is strong enough for me. I do not have to be a liver specialist to recognize that excessive drinking can mess up my liver and make life terrible. I have known someone who died of cirrhosis of the liver, and it was unpleasant. This man was shown as an example to medical students while he was dying -- and from what I understand, he was heavily mocked. (I remember him talking about his drinking binges by places... "I went to Kansas City, and oh, did I get plastered". It was the same with Chicago, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Denver. If I am to visit a giant city I want to remember if for something other than where I got drunk. I know that riding a motorcycle is a thrill -- but it is too dangerous for my taste.
As with all economic and political experiments that go awry, AGW will hurt the poorest people of the world -- the people with the least political clout and the least mobility. A policy that starves twenty thousand Bangladeshis or Chinese is no less evil than mowing down such people with machine-gun fire or with driving such people into gas chambers in which they are compelled to breathe Zyklon-B. Six million people? Then Adolf H. congratulates you from Hell!
Donald Trump is simply irresponsible, but so are those "deplorable" people who like what he says. As much of my favorite non-fiction reading is philosophy (I probably should have been a philosophy major in college, and then gone on to law school, which I figure is the best application of philosophy) I understand consequences well. I have related global warming to geography, but mostly to food production. Nobody has developed a good technological fix to crop failures and the hunger (and other political and economic distress) that such causes. Maybe Humanity can adapt to shifting zones of climate and cultivation (those are strongly linked) -- but that will take time for soil profiles to develop in nutrient-poor soils that get longer and warmer growing seasons that are now subarctic. Maybe there will be wheat fields around Hudson Bay if the planet warms slowly and perhaps inevitably -- but not fast enough to offset desertification and inundation of current crop-growing areas with changes over fifty years or so. Three hundred or so? Humanity can cope with some migrations to places with new and desirable opportunities. Fifty years or so? People will die in numbers that make the horrors of the Stalinists, Maoists, Nazis, Atlantic slave trade, and the Mongols look mild.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.