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anonymous

Climate Change Is Making the Whole Planet Tip - 0 views

  • The Earth is a ball that floats in space, and the Earth’s surface—the tectonic plates that make up the land—are like a shell that floats on the mantle below. Just like the hard chocolate coating can slip and slide on your soft serve ice cream, the crust of the Earth can slide over the mantle. This is different than continental drift. This is the whole surface of the planet moving as one. The rotation axis of the Earth stays steady, the land masses shift around it. The idea is known as “true polar wander,” and its occurrence is a part of the planet’s history.
  • The Earth is not a perfect sphere—it’s kind of fat at the middle—and changing how the mass on the surface is distributed changes how the tectonic plates sit in relation to the planet’s rotation axis.
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    "Climate change is changing the planet. Yes, it's doing it in all those ways that you already know about: rising seas, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, more extreme weather. But climate change is changing the planet in another dramatic way, too: It's actually causing the entire crust of the Earth to shift. According to new research by Jianli Chen and colleagues, climate change-induced glacier melt and sea level rise have thrown the whole planet off-kilter."
anonymous

Conspiracy Theorists Are More Likely To Doubt Climate Science - 0 views

  • It's called "motivated reasoning"—and was described at length in Mother Jones (by me) back in 2011. Here's the gist: People's emotional investments in their ideas, identities and world views bias their initial reading of evidence, and do so on a level prior to conscious thought. Then, the mind organizes arguments in favor of one's beliefs—or, against attacks on one's beliefs—based on the same emotional connections. And so you proceed to argue your case—but really you're rationalizing, not reasoning objectively.
    • anonymous
       
      *clears throat* - "Duh."
  • Conspiracy theorizing. Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, who studies conspiracy theorists. So what's the relationship between the two?
  • motivated reasoning and conspiracy mongering are at least in part separable, and worth keeping apart in your mind. To show as much, let's use the issue global warming as an example.
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  • In a recent study of climate blog readers, Lewandowksy and his colleagues found that the strongest predictor of being a climate change denier is having a libertarian, free market world view. Or as Lewandowsky put it in our interview, "the overwhelming factor that determined whether or not people rejected climate science is their worldview or their ideology."
  • This naturally lends support to the "motivated reasoning" theory
  • a conservative view about the efficiency of markets impels rejection of climate science because if climate science were true, markets would very clearly have failed in an very important instance.
  • But separately, the same study also found a second factor that was a weaker, but still real, predictor of climate change denial—and also of the denial of other scientific findings such as the proven link between HIV and AIDS. And that factor was conspiracy theorizing.
  • "If a person believes in one conspiracy theory, they're likely to believe in others as well," explained Lewandowsky on the podcast. "There's a statistical association. So people who think that MI5 killed Princess Diana, they probably also think that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act by himself when he killed JFK."
  • This makes conspiracy theorizing a kind of "cognitive style," one clearly associated with science denial—but not as clearly moored to ideology.
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    "Here's the gist: People's emotional investments in their ideas, identities and world views bias their initial reading of evidence, and do so on a level prior to conscious thought. Then, the mind organizes arguments in favor of one's beliefs-or, against attacks on one's beliefs-based on the same emotional connections. And so you proceed to argue your case-but really you're rationalizing, not reasoning objectively."
anonymous

A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming - 0 views

  • The Middle East's oil reserves have served as the flashpoint for conflicts, and military leaders are keeping a close eye on Yemen these days, as the country suffers through instability related, in part, to water shortages, which are expected to worsen with climate change.
  • Corell said Asian countries, including China and South Korea, are already plotting new navigation routes and building cargo ships that can push through seasonal ice. The shift would eliminate some travel that now passes through the Straits of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia, where piracy remains active, but it could also enable Asia to take firm control of global trade.
  • Long-term drought in Sudan contributed to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, he added. The conflict also exposed how poorly prepared the international community is to respond to such scenarios.
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  • The Navy's Task Force Climate Change fears that floods or food shortages in Bangladesh could trigger mass migrations to India, increasing ethnic conflict and repression in the region as families compete for resources and survival.
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    Energy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world. Some scientists have linked the Arab Spring uprisings to high food prices caused by the failed Russian wheat crop in 2010, a result of an unparalleled heat wave. The predicted effects of climate change are also expected to hit developing nations particularly hard, raising the importance of supporting humanitarian response efforts and infrastructure improvements. Here's a look at several geopolitical hotspots that will likely bear the unpredictable and dangerous consequences of climate change and current energy policies.
anonymous

When Geography Changes - 0 views

  • Geography is enduring, but it does occasionally change.
  • The extent and effect of climate change is still unknown, but it has the potential to make significant changes to what we think of as immovable geographic realities.
  • To be clear, we are not debating the causation of this warming trend, nor are we discussing measures aimed at limiting its impact. Rather, we would like to use this opportunity to discuss how climate change could impact geopolitics. Agriculture remains a key piece to this new puzzle; changes in the location of water and of land suited for food production could alter traditional geopolitical dynamics. Geography and climate shape regions and countries. If we accept that there will be changes to temperature, climate and perhaps weather, then there will also likely be variations in the availability of arable land that can support large populations and agriculture.
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  • Climate, rainfall and land quality are key determinants of state power.
  • A country with significant amounts of arable land and easily traversed territory has an automatic advantage over other states.
  • changes in access to arable land can have profound effects on a country's ability to take care of its domestic population and to participate in global markets.
  • Brazil is a good example of this. Its coastal geography makes building roads and railways from the interior to the coast quite difficult, but its climate is perfectly suited to sugar cane growth, which has allowed the country to develop an impressive ethanol industry that has made Brazil's energy sources among the most diversified in the world.
  • China, which faces extreme population pressures and increasingly relies on foreign sources of many commodities, is using agricultural land in the Northeast -- specifically in Heilongjiang province -- to develop a state-controlled agricultural heartland to supplement the rest of the country's agriculture, which is for the most part family-run. China's population exceeds 1.3 billion, which makes food security a critical issue of state stability.
  • Russia's massive grain belt, which has in centuries past allowed the country to support outsized domestic armies, lacks adequate infrastructure, complicating the process of moving grain across the country's expanse.
  • The United States is an example of success anchored in favorable geography. The overlap of a wide swath of farmland and a large navigable river system has allowed the nation to thrive. Enough food is grown in the Midwestern farm belt and along the Mississippi River system to not only sustain the population of the United States, but to also make it the largest exporter of grain in the world.
  • Over the course of history, warmer eras have also been wetter ones, but we can expect rain patterns to fluctuate in ways we do not fully understand right now.
  • With increasing temperatures, we could very well see a shift in the location of the temperate zones in which agricultural development flourishes. As tropical zones expand to both the north and the south, the temperate zones shift north toward the Artic and south toward the Antarctic.
  • Warming in higher latitudes can affect glaciers, initially speeding and then slowing the runoff feeding streams and rivers. Arable land will increase for some regions and decrease for others. This could fundamentally change the hand of geographic cards a specific nation has been dealt.
  • The specific effects of climate change remain uncertain. When geography does change meaningfully -- whatever the nature of the change -- the parameters of analysis and human action change in profound ways that can be difficult to predict.
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    "A new study on global temperature trends will be published in the March 8 issue of Science. The study observes cyclical temperature patterns over the course of the last 11,300 years and determines that current temperatures have yet to exceed previous peaks. However, the study suggests that by 2100, temperatures will exceed those of any previous time period."
anonymous

OSU climate researchers discover 1,800-year-old 'Rosetta stone' ice cores - 0 views

  • The Thompsons realized that the Peruvian cores were similar to other ice cores they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. When they found matches in ice cores taken from opposite sides of Earth, they knew they had “Rosetta Stones” with which to compare other climate histories from tropical and subtropical regions.
  • “Looking at ice cores from the tropics has been especially important in allowing us to understand how this very stable climate system has changed over time,” said Daniel Schrag, a Harvard University climatologist.
  • The Quelccaya ice is important because it is perched on a wide flat shelf in a region with clearly defined wet and dry seasons. Each year’s ice is separated by a thin layer of dust, which is blown there during dry months. Researchers can estimate changes in ocean temperature by measuring the ratio of different oxygen isotopes in frozen water molecules. The glacier’s flat perch also keeps each layer straight, which makes it easier to compute annual changes in snowfall, said Ian Howatt, an OSU glaciologist and ice core study co-author.
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    "Ice cores taken from a remote South American glacier are revealing a year-by-year tropical climate history over nearly two millennia. "
anonymous

2,000 Years of Continental Climate Changes - 1 views

  • Thirty-year mean temperatures for the seven PAGES 2k continental-scale regions arranged vertically from north to south. Colors indicate the relative temperature. The most prominent feature of nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is the long-term cooling, which ended late in the19th century.
  • North America includes a shorter tree-ring-based and a longer pollen-based reconstruction.
  • Each color band represents a 30-year mean temperature found on each continent.
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    "Climate change is a complicated, and sometimes controversial, global topic.  I really like this data visualization of 2,000 Years of Continental Climate Changes that was included as part of the report published by the "2K Network" of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) Past Global Changes (PAGES) project."
anonymous

Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal - 0 views

  • the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down.
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    The Wall Street Journal's editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 "scientists."
anonymous

How close are we to catastrophic climate change? - 0 views

  • As you may have noticed, scientists remain convinced that humans are altering the global climate with an excess of greenhouse gas emissions—soot, methane and the ever-present carbon dioxide we pump out from our lungs and coal-burning power plants. The question is: how bad is said climate change going to get?
  • The interviewed experts don't expect to be any more able to understand clouds and the other uncertainties by 2030—even if funding for such research were tripled in the next 20 years. That matches real world results, since the experts interviewed back in the 1990s were just as uncertain about clouds and the like as when re-interviewed in the 2000s. Or, as climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, one of the experts interviewed this time and last, told me last year: "We don't know much more than we did in 1975" about climate sensitivity.
  • Fortunately, as investor Vinod Khosla is fond of saying (about himself and others): "Experts are usually wrong" when it comes to forecasting the future. Let's hope he's right about that at least, in this case.
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    By David Biello at Scientific American Observations on June 28, 2010.
anonymous

Better ways to engineer Earth's climate to prevent dangerous global warming - 0 views

  • Keith, a global leader in investigating this topic, says that geoengineering, or engineering the climate on a global scale, is an imperfect science. "It cannot offset the risks that come from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If we don't halt man-made CO2 emissions, no amount of climate engineering can eliminate the problems – massive emissions reductions are still necessary."
  • Keith suggests two novel geoengineering approaches–'levitating' engineered nano-particles, and the airborne release of sulphuric acid
  • In his study–published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top-ranked international science journal–Keith describes a new class of engineered nano-particles that might be used to offset global warming more efficiently, and with fewer negative side effects, than using sulphates.
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  • Keith stresses that whether geoengineering technology is ever used, it shouldn't be seen as a reason not to reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions now accumulating in the atmosphere. "Seat belts reduce the risk of being injured in accidents. But having a seat belt doesn't mean you should drive drunk at 100 miles an hour," he says.
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    "There may be better ways to engineer the planet's climate to prevent dangerous global warming than mimicking volcanoes, a University of Calgary climate scientist says in two new studies." At Lab Spaces on September 7, 2010.
anonymous

Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Pie Chart - 0 views

  • I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles. See methodology.
  • Of one thing we can be certain: had any of these articles presented the magic bullet that falsifies human-caused global warming, that article would be on its way to becoming one of the most-cited in the history of science.
  • Global warming deniers often claim that bias prevents them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But 24 articles in 18 different journals, collectively making several different arguments against global warming, expose that claim as false. Articles rejecting global warming can be published, but those that have been have earned little support or notice, even from other deniers.
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  • Anyone can repeat this search and post their findings. Another reviewer would likely have slightly different standards than mine and get a different number of rejecting articles. But no one will be able to reach a different conclusion, for only one conclusion is possible: Within science, global warming denial has virtually no influence. Its influence is instead on a misguided media, politicians all-too-willing to deny science for their own gain, and a gullible public.
  • Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. These are known facts about which virtually all publishing scientists agree.
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    "Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming. The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature."
anonymous

Climate Change and Systemic Volatility - 0 views

  • What struck me about this chart, though, is the amount of blue in two of the world's emerging great powers (China and India). The next three to four decades seem likely to witness challenges to the political status quo by at least two rising powers just as those nations are experiencing extreme domestic socio-economic volatility caused by the compounding effects of climate change. To me, this is extremely worrying, because it means that the ruling regimes of those nations will be under intense domestic pressure, leading to potentially volatile and risky foreign policy behavior in order to either preserve domestic unity or seek the resources and geostrategic position to mitigate internal difficulties. Doesn't bode well for those who hope for those states to rise in non-disruptive ways.
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    "There are a few obvious reactions here. One is to note how many of the worlds major emitters of greenhouse gas (so far) are in the "low risk" zone, proving definitively that mother nature has no sense of justice. Another good point is made by Yglesias, who notes that despite reasonably direct lines of causation (greenhouse emissions cause climate shifts which further immiserate already-desperately-poor farmers in already-desperately-poor parts of the world), "free market" boosters seem willfully blind to the negative externalities of polluting behavior; morally this is very weird. " Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on October 22, 2010.
anonymous

Exclusive Excerpt: Hack the Planet - 0 views

  • Extending this common trope of American environmentalism to the question of climate engineering would be writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who views geoengineering as the “junkie logic” of a culture addicted to technological solutions.
  • In The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Brand wrote of humanity’s responsibility as Earth’s gardeners and caretakers, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Recently he updated his thinking. “Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: ‘ We are as gods and have to get good at it.’”
  • Perhaps climate stewardship simply won’t work, and tinkering with the atmosphere won’t be available. Or it will — and we’ll kill one another over the thermostat. Now we contemplate wielding global powers previously imagined only in science fiction. Maybe the biggest question we’ll face may be how changing the planet will change ourselves….
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  • Advanced societies control the weather as a matter of course in the worlds of Star Trek and Dune. When it comes to our air and rain, our control fantasies are strong.
  • We may have to try, but attempting to dictate how much solar energy strikes the planet is a dangerous endeavor, perhaps involving just as much chance as our current course.
  • Succumbing to the illusion of control would mean replacing one burden — navigating the dangers of today’s climate crisis, and overhauling the world’s energy system — with the much more risky burden of revolutionizing our relationship with the sky itself. The illusion of control — “Everthing’s okay, the scientists have fixed the problem” — could engender apathy at a time when we desperately need to stop pouring carbon dioxide into the sky. It could drive nations apart during a planetary emergency, when they most require unity. It might work in unexpected ways or not at all.
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    This is an exclusive excerpt from "Hack the Planet" by Eli Kintisch. It's featured at Wired Magazine.
anonymous

What Is Geoengineering and Why Is It Considered a Climate Change Solution? - 0 views

  • Some scientists are calling for more study of technological interventions to forestall catastrophic global warming. Why?
  • When a report on climate change hit the U.S. president's desk, the suggestion was not to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, scientific advisors counseled intervention via technology in the climate system itself—a practice now known as geoengineering. And the president was not Barack Obama, George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton—it was Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
  • Typically what people call geoengineering is divided into two major classes.
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    From Scientific American on April 6, 2010.
anonymous

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science - 0 views

  • In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience [5] (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia [6] of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
  • But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum.
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  • a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing.
  • That's not to suggest that we aren't also motivated to perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do. It's just that we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.
  • Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation.
  • people's deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider "scientific consensus" to lie on contested issues.
  • In Kahan's research [13] (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either "individualists" or "communitarians," and as either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" in outlook.
  • The results were stark: When the scientist's position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a "trustworthy and knowledgeable expert." Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist's expertise.
  • people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views—and thus the relative risks inherent in each scenario.
  • head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.
  • A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. "It is quite possible to say, 'I reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,'" explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick [21]. Indeed, there's a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly "rational." In certain conservative communities, explains Yale's Kahan, "People who say, 'I think there's something to climate change,' that's going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well."
  • people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information
  • a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue.
  • one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues.
  • It all raises the question: Do left and right differ in any meaningful way when it comes to biases in processing information, or are we all equally susceptible?
  • Some researchers have suggested that there are psychological differences between the left and the right that might impact responses to new information—that conservatives are more rigid and authoritarian, and liberals more tolerant of ambiguity. Psychologist John Jost of New York University has further argued that conservatives are "system justifiers": They engage in motivated reasoning to defend the status quo.
  • What can be done to counteract human nature itself?
  • Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
  • Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.
  • You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.
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    In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
anonymous

The Technium: The Average Place on Earth - 1 views

  • I describe this global system of technology deployed around the planet as an emerging superorganism. It consists of roads, electric lines, telephone cables, buildings, water systems, dams, satellites, ocean buoys and ships, all our computers and data centers, and all 6 billion humans. But while this superorganism of new and old technology operates at the planetary scale, and reaches all continents, and spans the oceans, and reaches into orbital space, it is a thin and uneven layer on the globe. In fact most of the planet, on average, is in a very primitive state.
  • Let's draw a grid around the globe with lines that form a square approximately every 100 km (at the equator). At every intersection of these grid lines we'll take a picture for inspection. There are about 10,000 intersections over the land part of this planet. They will give us a very good statistical portrait of what this planet looks like on land. Shown are 6,000 images of a possible 10,000 degree intersections on land.
  • The imaginary grid is the longitude and latitude grid, and somewhat remarkably, over 6,000 of the 10,000 intersections have already been photographed. Intrepid volunteers sign up at a web site called the Degree Confluence that is half art-project, and half adventure storytelling in order to select an intersection somewhere on the globe to visit --no matter how wild -- and record their success with photographs including a legible snapshot of their gps proving a bonafide "even" lat-long reading with lots of zeros.
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  • The resultant grid of photos is very revealing (below). Here is a portion of southern China, one of the most densely settled regions on the planet. Each image is one degree intersection. There is hardly a building in site. And for a place that has been intensely farmed for centuries if not millennia, there is a surprising lot of wildness. What it does to show is urbanization.
  • Projections for the year 2050 predict that most of the 8 billion people on the planet will live in megacities, with populations over 30 million. And these megacity clusters will form a network made up of smaller cities over 1 million in population. But these incredibly dense clusters will weave through a countryside that is emptying. It is already common to find entire villages in China, India, and South America abandoned by its inhabitants who fled to the swelling cities, leaving behind a few old folks, or often, no one at all. This is the pattern on Earth. Extremely dense and vast populations in a network of megacities connected to each other with nerves of roads and wires, woven over an empty landscape of wild land, marginal pastures, and lightly populated farms. By 2050 and beyond, Earth will be a urban planet, while the average place on the planet will be nearly wild.
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    "Technology and human activity are so global that they operate together as if they were a geological force. Civilization is altering the climate in the same way that volcanoes do and have done; our agriculture alters the biosphere the way climate has in the past; and now megacities are altering the planetary balances of heat and sea level. The technium is a planetary event."
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    That opening paragraph is a keeper.
anonymous

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature - 0 views

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    "We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."
anonymous

Geoengineering (Wikipedia definition) - 0 views

  • The modern concept of Geoengineering (or Climate Engineering) is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions.
    • anonymous
       
      I was brought to this page after reading a Wired Magazine excerpt of "Hack the Planet" on March 24, 2010. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/03/24/wired-excerpts-hack-the-planet/
anonymous

Two incontrovertible things: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Real, and the Wall Street ... - 0 views

  • That second list of scientists, much longer than the first, is attached to a letter about the shoddy and ignorant ways in which science is being treated by the press and by climate change denialists. That letter was sent to the Wall Street Journal but rejected. The letter was later published in Science.
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    The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.
anonymous

99 One-Liners Rebutting Denier Talking Points - With Links To The Full Climate Science - 0 views

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    "Progressives should know the disinformers' most commonly used arguments - and how to answer them crisply. Those arguments have been repeated so many times by the fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign that almost everyone has heard them - and that means you'll have to deal with them in almost any setting, from a public talk to a dinner party. You should also know as much of the science behind those rebuttals as possible, and a great place to start is SkepticalScience.com."
anonymous

Geoengineering: The Most Important Technology Nobody's Heard Of - 0 views

  • As Leinen put it, even if the proposals on the table at Copenhagen had been adopted, we’d still end the century with an atmospheric carbon dioxide of 700 parts per million–more than enough to cause climate upheaval, raise seas dramatically, and so forth.
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    "The reason scientists and policymakers are increasingly thinking about geoengineering is clear: Major climate change now looks increasingly unstoppable." By Chris Mooney at The Intersection (Discover Magazine) on August 5, 2010.
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