Netflix Original: Bill Nye Saves The Earth

[Craizie]

I love when one person can't see the others side of the argument so the other side goes straight into calling that person a fucking moron.

I've got no dog in this race, but instead of having a discussion you all are yelling 'no you're stupid".

[jdgregory84]

I love when one person can't see the others side of the argument so the other side goes straight into calling that person a fucking moron.

I've got no dog in this race, but instead of having a discussion you all are yelling 'no you're stupid".

I agree. I felt it was an equal reaction though. That's kinda the funny thing...apparently if you believe in global warming you're a moron, snowflake, hippy...whatever.

The best way I can relate this is this. A lot of Christians say "We'll if God does exist, me believing it means I'm going to Heaven." Which...whatever. So let's get to global warming. If we believe in it and make adjustments, maybe we keep a bunch of things from going to shit. Maybe.

[naynay]

There are plenty of private companies trying to alleviate the problem. There's no solving it. Just minimizing it.

I can't believe people are this dense. Fucking morons.

to be fair, if you look at any of the four main proponents to this factual information, you will instantly see the reason behind caveman thought process.

[Craizie]

I agree. I felt it was an equal reaction though. That's kinda the funny thing...apparently if you believe in global warming you're a moron, snowflake, hippy...whatever.

The best way I can relate this is this. A lot of Christians say "We'll if God does exist, me believing it means I'm going to Heaven." Which...whatever. So let's get to global warming. If we believe in it and make adjustments, maybe we keep a bunch of things from going to shit. Maybe.

Without research and strictly based on opinion I can see both parties points.

With research I can see the average global temperature is trending upwards. Does this mean doomsday for humanity? That I am unsure of.

[naynay]

Without research and strictly based on opinion I can see both parties points.

With research I can see the average global temperature is trending upwards. Does this mean doomsday for humanity? That I am unsure of.

depends really on how long you expect or want humanity to last, and how far you are willing to aide in research and technology.

i posted this because i found it interesting. i dont know enough about bill nye to have ever paid any attention to him other than in passing, but the netflix series was cool.

i know strychnine said he watched it and got triggered within the first 10 minutes.

i wonder if anyone else watched it.

**disclaimer, the main part i liked were the round table discussions, and the fact that he had steve aoki on the show.

if you didnt enjoy it, you got your blinders on. open up and live a little.

[jdgregory84]

Without research and strictly based on opinion I can see both parties points.

With research I can see the average global temperature is trending upwards. Does this mean doomsday for humanity? That I am unsure of.

It doesn't have to mean doomsday. I mean, we have air conditioning. If it's too hot outside, a machine will make it better. Go indoors.

Then it gets hotter, and because the thermostat in the a/c reacts...it kicks on more often. As a result it breaks. Soon enough, the a/c systems we have break frequently because they can't keep up.

Fuck it, right? We used to live without AC. We can do it again. The greatset thing about humans is our ability to adapt. But wait...we're fat, slow, lazy. Some of us will be fine but most of us won't.

Now, I'm not saying going green will fix it, but why not try? It's like if you have diabetes...not sure if exercise will fix the problem, but it's worth a shot.

[mschmoyer]

Without research and strictly based on opinion I can see both parties points.

With research I can see the average global temperature is trending upwards. Does this mean doomsday for humanity? That I am unsure of.

I don't think folks (not you, just in general) don't give a damn about something until they can see an immediate effect on them. It makes sense. That means our likely extinction will come from a problem that stealthily sneaks in over time and is too late to reverse once it's hit a critical threshold...

[SS Junk]

It doesn't have to mean doomsday.

Your boy disagrees:

That means our likely extinction will come from a problem that stealthily sneaks in over time and is too late to reverse once it's hit a critical threshold...

No fear mongering there! It would be interesting to know what everyone who thinks this way in this tread are doing to reduce their own carbon footprint. Imagine if all the car enthusiast, conscientious heroes would sell their big V8 cars for four cylinder vehicles. That would surely make a difference!

[BP]

The planet earth is a gigantic ball of molten rock of which we live on the cooled crust. It's about 4.5 billion years old and has supported life of some sort for 3 billion or so years.

Around 70 million years ago there was a mass extinction event that killed off nearly every living thing. Some birds and fish survived along with a few plants but 80% of everything else went extinct. This was the 5th major event of it's kind that we know of.

Modern humans may date back as far as 2 million years with cognitive abilities being developed around 50k years ago. Humans started writing around 6k years ago. The industrial revolution was around 250 years ago.

So in 250 years humans have caused global warming and are dooming the planet? What caused the previous 5 mass extinction events? Never mind that our sun is actively expanding and will consume our planet at some point in the future. We can't possibly predict when that will happen or what life will be like during that time but go ahead and buy those carbon offsets and pay extra for wind/solar power because it's probably your fault.

[Mysticcobrakilla]

Lol

[CWO]

I declare a stalemate. "One for the ages"

[Strychnine]

Believe it or not, I had a lot more typed out (there are three posts inbound, I was on a plane again), but then thought better of it. Here are some more thoughts though.

New point of view, remove old point of view. The issue itself is another debate.

Historical revisionism:

identifies the re-interpretation of the historical record. It usually means challenging the orthodox views held by professional scholars about a historical event, or introducing new evidence, or of restating the motivations and decisions of the participant people. The revision of the historical record reflects the new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which produce a revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments about heroes and villains.

At a basic level, historical revisionism is a common and not especially controversial process of developing and refining the writing of history. Much more controversial is the reversal of moral findings, which the heroes, good guys, or positive forces are depicted as villains, bad guys, or negative forces. This revisionism is quickly challenged by the supporters of the old view, often in heated terms. It becomes historical negationism, a form of historical revisionism that presents a re-interpretation of the moral meaning of the historical record. The term "revisionism" is used pejoratively by people who charge that revisionists are deliberately distorting the true historical record.

With the current cultural implications of the discussion, and the virtue signaling that surrounds the issue… yeah, I’d say they had very clear motives when removing the segment for the re-broadcast, and that level of dishonesty should worry people. On at least one controversial issue "the other side" is revising their history to make it seem like they’ve been consistent and “right” all along, demonstrating a lack of character.

Do you believe in the greenhouse effect?
Do you believe c02/methane heightens greenhouse effects?
Do you believe the figure is currently 400ppm, up from the naturally occurring 250ppm (mildly fluctuating)?
Do you believe humans are releasing c02/methane into the atmosphere with cars, coal, and cows?
Do you believe the temperature of the Earth is rising right now?
Do you think the temp is rising due to a cycle?
Do you think greenhouse effect from c02/methane could be causing the rising temp?

Correlation ≠ causation. “Could” is not exactly a strong stance. “Could” it be? Sure. “Could” it NOT be? Yup. Do you think there’s a chance the rising temp could be caused by something other than CO2/methane?

You didn’t ask if anyone thought humans were causing climate change. You asked if humans are releasing CO2, if CO2 is rising, if temps are rising, and then you want to tie those together to get a roundabout answer to what you really want to ask: “Do you believe humans are the direct cause of a global temperature rise?”




You realize Al has a solid point here, right?

let's ignore any scientific fact that doesn't support our leftist and very fascist foregone conclusion while simultaneously criticizing people who ignore these chosen scientific facts that support our bullshit. These people have an agenda and it has nothing to do with saving the planet.

If the planet is going to warm substantially, to the point of affecting all life on Earth, which could kill us all… why the fuck are governments not desperately pouring money into fission and fusion? Why can we not get a nuclear plant built without putting Westinghouse into bankruptcy? (new nuclear is basically dead after that announcement… BIG things will have to change to bring it back), but no one is that serious about the statistically safest – 40% safer than even wind – source of energy we have.

Looks to me like it’s not that serious of an issue if they’re not willing to mandate the only 100% carbon free solution that is also 100% baseload capable. We were serious about going to the moon and that got done… are we serious about ending CO2 emissions or are we just fucking around for the gain of a few?

[Strychnine]

But like I said earlier, and what mcshmoyer and others won’t directly address (or maybe I missed it?) is this:

The whole climate change thing is utter bullshit but my biggest problem with it is the intellectually dishonest way that it is sold.

What if the temps aren't actually rising in a catastrophic manner???

Proxies

• To reconstruct global average temperatures in the era before instrumental measurements were made on a global scale, scientists use proxies that respond to changes in climate, such as the widths of tree rings and certain elements of the geological record, to estimate temperature variations in the past.
  
• The first IPCC report (1990) contains the following graph of average global temperature changes over the past 1,000 years based upon proxies. It shows a “Medieval warm period” that was warmer than the present era and a “Little Ice Age” that was cooler. The report states that:
  

  some of the global warming since 1850 could be a recovery from the Little Ice Age rather than a direct result of human activities. So it is important to recognize that natural variations of climate are appreciable and will modulate any future changes induced by man.
  
  

• The second IPCC report (1995) states that “data prior to 1400 are too sparse to allow the reliable estimation of global mean temperature” and shows a graph of proxy-derived temperatures for Earth’s Northern Hemisphere from 1400 onward with different details but a similar overall trend to the first report.
  
• The third IPCC report (2001) states that the latest proxy studies indicate “the conventional terms of ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ appear to have limited utility in describing … global mean temperature changes in past centuries.” The report contains the following graph of average temperature changes in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, showing higher temperatures at present than at any time in the past 1,000 years
  
  
  
  
• This graph is called the “hockey stick graph” because the curve looks like a hockey stick laid on its side. The red part of the curve represents modern instrument-measured surface temperatures, the blue represents proxy data, the black line is a smoothed average of the proxy data, and the gray represents the margin of error with 95% confidence.
• The IPCC’s hockey stick graph was adapted from a 1999 paper in Geophysical Research Letters authored by climatologist Michael Mann and others. This paper was based upon a 1998 paper by the same authors that appeared in the journal Nature. Multiple versions of this graph appear in different sections of the IPCC report, including the “Scientific” section, “Synthesis,” and twice in the “Summary for Policymakers.”
• This graph has been the subject of disputes in scientific journals, congressional hearings, and legal proceedings including a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Just Facts presently does not have the resources to conclusively assess all the competing claims on this issue, but the facts we have verified are as follows
  

  • The visual accord between the red instrument-measured surface temperatures and the blue proxy-derived temperatures is the result of statistical operations, not concurring data.
  • The authors used a statistical operation to generate the graph that does not yield a simple average of the proxy data but emphasizes any data with a hockey stick shape, placing up to 390 times more weight on some data than others.
  • When this statistical operation is not used, the hockey stick shape does not appear in the statistical measure that shows the “closest fit” to the data. The shape appears in measures that show subordinate trends in the data.
  • The gray areas representing the margin of error “fail to account for model uncertainty.”

• The fourth IPCC report (2007) states that “there are far from sufficient data to make any meaningful estimates of global medieval warmth,” and shows the following graph of temperature changes for the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,300 years. This graph, which is called a “spaghetti graph,” is constructed with data from 12 proxy studies spliced with instrument-measured surface temperatures (the dark black line):
  
  
  
  
• * The fifth IPCC report (2013) states that challenges persist in reconstructing temperatures before the time of the instrumental record “due to limitations of spatial sampling, uncertainties in individual proxy records and challenges associated with the statistical methods used to calibrate and integrate multi-proxy information.” This report contains the following spaghetti graphs of proxy studies spliced with instrument-measured surface temperatures (the black lines):
  
  
  
  
• The following are sources of uncertainty in proxy-derived temperatures:
  • “[V]ery few” proxy “series are truly independent: There is a degree of common input to virtually every one, because there are still only a small number of long, well-dated, high-resolution proxy records.”
  • A 2011 paper in the Annals of Applied Statistics found that “the most comprehensive publicly available database” of “proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature."
  • “[T]he raw data are generally subjected to some form of statistical manipulation, through which only part of the original climate information can be retrieved (typically less than 50%).”
  • “[M]ost” proxies respond to “seasonally specific” temperatures, not to average annual temperatures.
  • The margins of error depicted in graphs “do not reflect all of the uncertainties inherent in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions based on proxy data.”
  • The authors of the IPCC report and the papers cited in it select which proxy data to include, exclude, adjust, and extrapolate.

[Strychnine]

And lastly (for now), mcshmoyer, I notice that there was no commentary on the link/story earlier about Obama’s staff manipulating climate messages to affect public sentiment, so maybe this will drive the point home:

In 2009, an unknown individual(s) released more than 1,000 emails (many dealing with proxy studies) from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The materials were authored by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and accompanied by the following note

We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

These emails (commonly referred to as the ClimateGate emails) show IPCC scientists and authors:

• proposing to conduct an “honest” study about the “uncertainties” of proxies and then “publish, retire, and don’t leave a forwarding address,” because “what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show” that we “honestly know fuck-all” about temperature changes in the Northern Hemisphere over more than a hundred years…
• writing, “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
• writing, “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same.”
• writing, “In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.”
• planning to have the editor of a scientific journal “ousted” if he exhibits skepticism of global warming.
• instructing each other to delete emails relating to the 2007 IPCC report.
• planning to evade Britain’s Freedom of Information Act.
• planning to boycott scientific journals that require authors to release all data and calculations used in their published papers.
• writing, “I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also unreviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions). … Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent which might mine the IPCC credibility, and I am a bit uncomfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this.”
• writing, “it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm period], even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back.”
• planning to shorten the timeframe of a proxy data series so “it would do what we want.”
• creating a diagram of raw proxy study data to see if it “provided” an “obvious” picture of “unprecedented warming over the last millennium or so”—and then burying this diagram over concerns that it could “dilute the message about the strength of 20th century mean warming.”
• writing, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” (Click here for comprehensive facts about this email.)

[CWO]

It's the greatest threat of our lifetime. I saw it on CNN.