Belief and Knowledge and Humans and Nature:
Belief and Knowledge and Humans and Nature:
Revised: 20120703
I am starting this entry from a previous blog, Rhetoric Again - Cycles. I got some interesting comments as well as a couple of letters for that entry. To set the tone, here is a thought from the end of that blog.
There is little doubt that humans are the dominant life form on the planet today. We shape every ecosystem. We consume all forms of energy. Like the balances between plants and animals in the past we change the atmosphere and the ocean. Not only are we a dominant life form, we have this amazing ability to extract rocks and liquids and gas from the Earth and burn them. We have the ability to push around land, to make concrete, to remove mountains, and build islands. We are, therefore, not only biological, we are geological.
With this notion, I place humans as a force of nature – as part of nature. Because we have the ability to remember, reason, develop and accumulate knowledge, then unlike other parts of the natural world, we have the ability to make decisions that influence our future. Therefore, our role in nature, in the natural world is unique. To be clear, that uniqueness is not in our ability to change the environment, but in our ability to understand the consequences of those changes and the ability to anticipate and influence the future.
I bring up this idea of humans as a reasoned biological and geological force for several reasons. First, I believe that to set the world into two divisions, that which is natural and that which is human, is both a false and dangerous division. Focusing on climate change, it is a division that sits at the foundation of those who argue that the climate is full of natural cycles, and that the current warming is just part of that natural cycle, and hence there is no need for us to be concerned. Or alternatively, there is no need for us to modify our behavior because it is all a force of nature, and we don’t have any influence over nature. (see also).
This is a belief – mine, that humans are part of nature. But many others see humans as outside of nature. The outside perspectives are not simple. For example, there are those who see humans as a disturbance to nature, and there are those for whom humans have divine providence over nature. That is the second point I want to make, the very foundation of how we think about climate change, our environment, and our place in nature is belief based. It is a belief base associated with our personal identity.
I have been motivated to think about what we believe and how this impacts our behavior on climate change for many years. For the sake of this blog, that motivation rises from how do we communicate climate change? Some scientists spend a lot of time thinking about how to communicate their work; in fact, research sponsors often require plans for communication, outreach and broader impacts. Many scientists, trained in a discipline of evidence-based knowledge generation, fall naturally to presenting evidence-based arguments, with the idea that ultimately the evidence-based argument will be convincing beyond reasonable doubt. In many ways this invites an argument more suitable to our approach to legal problems. We the scientist will present the evidence base. This will stand in contrast to the arguments of the non-scientist. There will, ultimately, be judgment in favor of the evidence base, because, well, it becomes self evident. This form of argument does not recognize that we often look at evidence and make decisions that deny the existence of that evidence. We make decisions that align with, our desires, our beliefs and what we want to believe.
I have written about some of these communications issues, and they are compiled here in What to Do? What to Do?. What I want to state more explicitly than I have stated before is the importance of the recognition of the belief-based argument. First, I naturally contrast the belief-based argument with the knowledge-based argument, which is not really the right contrast. The belief-based argument is, in fact, informed by knowledge, but it does not give high weight to science-based knowledge. Hence, it is not especially useful to pose a belief-based versus a knowledge-based argument. I have already stated that both sides of the argument are belief based and that both sides on the argument are informed by knowledge. Hence, it is easy for these arguments to fall into an attack on identity – I the scientist work from the foundation of knowledge and the ability to generate knowledge. You do not. This is not useful.
Second, I have used belief-based argument with the idea that it might be viewed as a politically based argument or even a religion-based argument. I have often referred to the politically based argument in my blog entries, and I have stated that once in a political argument, where the foundation is not primarily science-based knowledge, there is really little purpose in arguing over facts and evidence-based knowledge of the Earth’s climate. There is even evidence that introduction of science facts increases the polarity of political arguments (here). In such an argument, people may be working from a different base of facts. This is especially evident in the arguments over biological evolution, divine creation and, say, the observation-based scientific description of progression of Earth’s life and climate.
Where am I planning to take this blog? The first place I want to take it is that the communication of climate change is complex and individual. If we mash together evangelical, conservative, and Republican as dismissive of climate change and view a concern for climate change as secular, liberal and Democratic, then we do disservice to all. It does not take much effort to reveal evangelical, conservative, Republican organizations that are concerned about and vested in ways to address climate change. That is why in the 2012 political environment, a focus on exposing those seeking solutions is a more useful way forward than perpetuating the political arguments and despair over the political response. There is no simple key that will be uncovered by a compelling presentation of knowledge; there is no single approach to communication that will be universally effective. Successful communication is purpose-based and recognizes the valid points of view brought to the table by all constituencies. It often requires overcoming barriers of prejudice.
The next place I want to take this blog is to return to the idea of natural cycles – climate variability. We have been faced with many environmental challenges. I am sitting in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in a region that was largely deforested many years ago, on the Mississippi River, which has too much nitrogen-based nutrients in the water. A few miles back I saw a bald eagle, a species that was endangered by DDT. We eliminated the use of DDT, and we have seen the return of the bald eagle and the ospreys. Why can we make that decision? Lot’s of reasons, and an important one is the easy identification of cause and effect and seeing the return of the eagle over one’s lifetime after DDT was banned. Climate change does not have that easy cause and effect.
Responding to climate change does not have the narrow focus of regulating an insecticide and saving a grand bird. It is not easy to see the benefit of regulating carbon dioxide emissions. Those benefits are many years in the future, and the near-term cost is high. It is like people not taking a medicine that has a 90% chance of curing them from a slowly progressing disease because they don’t understand how the drug they ingest might work; they don’t want to introduce alien chemicals into their body. They seem to be doing okay right now. And if we look at the consequences of climate change, they are frightening, threatening, and they are our fault. We don’t accept fault easily; we have a mandate to feel that we are right. We don’t like change forced upon us, either individually or collectively. We fall back to our beliefs, our identity.
After the blog Rhetoric Again – Cycles, I was asked whether or not I considered man part of nature? Yes, I am saying that man is part of nature. But I don’t think that nature proceeds as a completely unrestrained force. We are many, and we influence nature. In fact, we are at this time the most dominant force of nature. However, we are also able to investigate nature, develop knowledge, and anticipate scenarios for the future. Therefore, we can influence the course of nature. My belief is that we have the responsibility to act on this knowledge. And like people who get caught in cycles of behavior, perhaps trapped by psychological pitfalls, with recognition of our role in nature, we have the ability and the opportunity to take advantage of our knowledge.
To my students I try to teach that they separate what is known from what they believe and what they want to believe. Advocacy needs to be recognized by the advocate, and advocacy changes one's role in decision making. The advocate identifies with an issue and is trying to elevate one position relative to other positions. The convincing advocate for addressing climate change is anchored in a knowledge base that is drawn from scientific investigation. With a separation of what is known, from what is believed to be known, and what is desired based on belief, the climate-change advocate becomes more effective in the decision making process. It is then easier to incorporate climate knowledge into planning and policy and societal response becomes possible.
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That being said, observations and data continue to support climate change predictions. In fact there is nothing that would make me feel it is not important or not happening. And everything about observations, whether it be the non-mangrove species die-offs or vegetation shifts associated with increasing drought frequencies or just wacky phenology such as last year's heat and drought causing the earliest cypress leaf drop observed in a roughly 35 year history of environmental proffesionals working in our neck of the Big Cypress basin. In fact, these data and observations only suggest that the RATE of change has increased or is at least faster than predictions I learned years ago at SNR. The droughts, higher temps, increased ET and resulting shorter hydroperiods certainly seem to support the scenario in the Everglades National Park's 2008 review of literature and the IPPC 2007 models for our area.
So the purpose of this comment? JUST TO THANK YOU! It is extremely depressing to be surrounded by a population which considers anyone who mentions climate change to be a "whacko". Your blog at least legitimizes what we continue to document in the REAL world. And somebody needs to speak up and speak out. Quite frankly I can barely keep up with my job so reading your blog and Master's blog helps me keep going when surrounded by the "belief" that global warming is a joke. I think Naples FL must be the capital of denial... at least I hope so... because if the rest of the world is this blind we will never cut emmisions.
Thank you for your work.
$3.51 trillion.
And that's just one city in America. Multiply that by all the cities and towns and other populated areas in all the coast-possessing nations that will be affected by climate change. You'll see that there are already trillions of dollars of assets and many millions of people at risk--with many tens of trillions of dollars worth of property and perhaps a billion people expected to be at risk by 2070.
$3.51 trillion.
It sorta makes the constant nonsensical denialist mewling--how doing anything now about climate change will cost too much--look even more selfish and short-sighted than it already is, doesn't it?
Excellent comment, by the way...
SwampBarry, welcome, and kudos to you and your diligence. It's scientists like yourself that will be the torch of enlightenment in a nation where science illiteracy reigns supreme. Keep up the good work!
RawStory.com
Brave New Oceans (Green Slime)
Professor Jeremy Jackson (B.A., M.A., Ph. D)
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
ScrippsNews
Brave New Ocean
Welcome back! Hope you had a good time on your trip.
Your sanity as well as your knowledge about climate change has been sorely missed in the past few weeks.
Welcome, your insights into the impact climate change is having in the marine environment is important to help expand the knowledge base of this blog.
Come on over to Texas if you want a taste of Denialism. After visiting here, you might think of Naples, FL as being a part of the Scripps Institute or Woodshole campuses.
lightweight er summary, for lack of a better word, in popular science about the global warming debate
When the "denialists" begin to threaten scientists and their families and do everything to block research, they are in actuality committing crimes against humanity.
NOAA is out with its June climate report, and it shows some interesting things.
--If you think it's been toasty this year here in the U.S., you're right:
That's not just an anomaly; it's practically another dimension.
--Meanwhile, the 12-month period from July 2011 through June 2012 was the warmest such period in U.S. history:
The July 2011-June 2012 period was the warmest 12-month period of any 12-months on record for the contiguous U.S., narrowly surpassing the record broken last month for the June 2011-May 2012 period by 0.05°F. The nationally-averaged temperature of 56.0°F was 3.2°F above the long term average. Every state across the contiguous U.S. had warmer than average temperatures for the period, except Washington, which was near normal... During the June 2011-June 2012 period, each of the 13 consecutive months ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time in the 1895-present record. The odds of this occurring randomly is 1 in 1,594,323.
--But worry not, denialists; Washington state was "much below normal" in June--so maybe the cooling on which you're pinning your hopes and dreams has started. (But probably not.)
By Joel Achenbach Washington Post
Saturday night I hung out in my sauna. Actually I just sat on the front porch. It was 101 degrees at 8:15 p.m., according to the Post website; while weather.com reported that it was 99 degrees. In such situations I prefer the front porch because of the veneer of civilization suggested by the street, the cars, the other houses. The back porch views nature, which, we now know, is not our friend.
We seem to have suddenly jumped from the Holocene back to the Eocene. Soon there will be ferns and palm trees in Greenland.
It’s not climate change that worries me. It’s climate change denialism, and all other forms of anti-scientific thinking, and solution-deferring, and the covering of the eyes in hopes that it will create invisibility.
On “This Week,” George Will blamed the current heat wave on “summer,” which is certainly technically true. He seems to believe that only hysterics get concerned about climate change when the thermometer is stuck at 100 for two weeks and all-time temperature records have fallen in much of the country, and all this coming after a bizarrely winterless winter:
“You asked us -- how do we explain the heat? One word: summer. I grew up in central Illinois in a house without air conditioning. What is so unusual about this? Now, come the winter, there will be a cold snap, lots of snow, and the same guys, like E.J. [Dionne], will start lecturing us. There’s a difference between the weather and the climate. I agree with that. We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.”
I’m not sure that advanced the conversation. Yes, climate and weather are different, but E.J. didn’t argue that the heat wave is due to climate change, he merely argued that it would be prudent to assume that climate change is going to create problems for us and we should take precautions. You can argue solutions all you want, and there is abundant room for disagreement about how to respond most effectively to climate change. But to say it’s just summer is too much like the Black Night in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” saying it’s just a flesh wound.
At some point we should stop litigating the basic question of whether climate change is happening. Climate change is a fact. The spike in atmospheric CO2 is a fact. The dramatic high-latitude warming is a fact. That the trends aren’t uniform and linear, and that there are anomalies here and there, does not change the long-term pattern. The warming trend has flattened out in the last decade but probably only because of air pollution from Chinese coal-fired power plants or somesuch forcing we haven’t fully discovered (smog is hardly the long-term solution we should be seeking). The broader patterns are clear.
Models show the greatest warming spike down the road still, decades hence. Thus in a sense, saying that “this is what global warming is like” whenever we have a heat wave actually understates the problem. Having spent much of my life in Florida, I can tell you, what kills you in summer is not the temperature but the duration of the season, which lasts basically forever — into November or even December in South Florida. So, yeah, 100 degrees in July gets my attention here in DC, but so will a stretch of 85-degree high temperatures in October.
Let’s say it’s April 1999 and you’re watching a baseball game, and a guy comes to the plate who is built like the Pentagon. He is so huge he has muscles not yet described by science. His neck is as wide as his head. He swings the bat so violently that the fans hear a sonic boom. He swings and misses a lot, but when he finally connects, he hits the ball completely out of the stadium and into the players parking lot. Question: Does this mean baseball players are using steroids?
It’s an unfair question, clearly. Babe Ruth used to hit home runs like that, and he wasn’t on steroids, he was on hot dogs and beer. But the scenario I’ve described is consistent with steroid use by baseball players.
Seems to me it’s not the heat, it’s the temerity that’s our real problem – the temerity to think that we can go, quickly, from about a billion people to 7 billion, on our way to 9 billion, with dramatic increases in resource usage and energy consumption and carbon emissions and so on, without it having dramatic consequences for the planet.
My suspicion (and others will recoil from this) is that the planet in the future will have to be managed the way you run a nuclear power plant – lots of engineers, risk assessors, government oversight, a public-private partnership of sorts, with a steady eye toward low-probability but high-consequence events.
This isn’t the Thoreau view of nature, and it will incite objections from those who say we need to just pull back and stop putting so much stress on natural systems. But I think we need more science, more research, more engineering, more innovative solutions, and most of all more political leaders who understand that individual choice and free markets, though essential to modern society, by themselves will not protect the commons from long-term exploitation.
Or maybe the heat has gotten to me. I am retiring now to my fainting couch.
By Joel Achenbach | 09:29 AM ET, 07/09/2012
Full Article Here
When my wife and I were driving home from our vacation two weeks ago, we saw first hand some very withered looking cornfields in the NE corner of Louisiana. Some fields that obviously had no irrigation were brown, shriveled and not more than 4 feet high.
As the old protest song goes:
"When Will They Ever Learn?????"
DO YOU WANT A CURE FOR THE PLANETS FEVER?
The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during June was 71.2F, which is 2.0F above the 20th century average. The June temperatures contributed to a record-warm first half of the year and the warmest 12-month period the nation has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1895. Scorching temperatures during the second half of the month led many cities to set all-time temperature records.
Link
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The DC blackouts and global warming
The whole planet contributes to global warming, but the world's poor are facing the consequences.
Full
Article Here
Link
Correct and not outlandish at all Dr. Willoughby and a very smart idea you have there. Regulate those temperatures and you got something like this to get us back on track with our climate........
I Quit!!...I'm done!!
In the past month, both Bob Wallace and I have tried to give you constructive advice and our professional opinions. Mr. Wallace, whom I respect greatly, has given you advice from a scientific perspective and I have given you advice from a "real world" perspective of engineering development, production planning, government procurement, contractor selection and cost estimating.
Your responses sir, have been an insult to our intelligence, expertise, professionalism as well as our sincere desire to let you down gently.
In post 142 above, I spent hours thinking about what to say on each point. I could have easily been dismissive or sarcastic. No, I picked the points more obvious to me, not that there aren't many more flaws in your concept or issues that needed to be addressed. You have blown me and Mr Wallace off by responding to only the most minor of our concerns.
In summary here are my conclusions:
1. You have no clue about what is entailed in a Preliminary Design Review Process.
2. You have no clue about what is involved in a Critical Design Review Process.
3. You have no clue about how to determine or mitigate technical, cost or schedule risks.
4. You have no clue about how the government or commercial procurement processes work, even in war-time or extreme national emergency conditions.
5. You have no clue as to what is involved in designing anything that can be manufactured in a reasonable time frame.
6. You have no clue about selecting contractors or sub-contractors for every step of any process.
FINALLY
In this post alone, you have shown your silly, two-dimensional cartoon, with "birdies", "fishies" and the "Yellow Submarine" at least 5 times. You are wearing out even the most patient of your friends.
Come back in 6 months with 3 dimensional simulations of your contraption in a variety of sea-states.
Come back with simulations of your "tubes" conducted at a major university by someone who has a PhD in Fluid Dynamics.
Come back with ROM (Rough Order of Magnitude) Costs from every potential vendor or manufacturer of your major subsystems or components, including maximum surge production rates.
Until then, Best of Luck!!
I mean How many Oil Rigs around the world do we have?
It aint a Jules Verne kinda world Pat.
Let it go.
Thanks brother, I will!!
Hey OLDLeatherneck guess who's on your side on all this? I already did all that in my head. You know how long it took me to even think of this Idea? OVER 5 YEARS.... After hurricane Hugo hit I started thinking of ways to do this the most efficient way. Then after hurricane Andrew blew my house down like the BIG BAD WOLF I had enough of it. What matters is the concept is valid and works.I already built a scale model and showed it works. The idea works and people such as you and many of the professionals that come here should be scrambling to help me with this no matter what it takes. Get off your hands and do something if you want to help..........
The Huffington Post | By Joanna Zelman
Posted: 07/09/2012 4:10 pm Updated: 07/09/2012 4:18 pm
Yes, it really is getting hot out there. A new report finds that the past 12 months have been the warmest on record for the mainland United States.
According to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center's "State of the Climate: National Overview for June 2012" report released Monday, the 12-month period from July 2011 to June 2012 was the warmest on record (since recordkeeping began in 1895) for the contiguous United States, with a nationally-averaged temperature of 56.0 degrees, 3.2 degrees higher than the long-term average.
According to the report, every single state in the contiguous U.S. except for Washington saw warmer-than-average temperatures during this time period. The period from January to June of this year also has been the warmest first half of a year on record for the U.S. mainland.
For a large portion of the contiguous U.S., these first six months were also drier than average. The U.S. Drought Monitor showed that as of July 3, 56 percent of the contiguous U.S. is experiencing drought conditions. In June, wildfires burned over 1.3 million acres, the second most on record for the month.
As for that brutally hot June? More than 170 all-time warm temperature records were broken or tied last month.
Not all states were feeling the heat: the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast experienced some cooler-than-average conditions, but the Southeast still saw record-high temperatures near the end of the month.
For 13 consecutive months, temperatures ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time on record. As NOAA points out, "The odds of this occurring randomly is 1 in 1,594,323."
The report comes on the heels of growing awareness that the increase in heat waves, wildfires, droughts and some other weather extremes the U.S. is experiencing may indicate what climate change holds in store for the future.
"It's hard to pinpoint climate change as the driving factor, but it appears that it is playing a role," National Climatic Data Center scientist Jake Crouch told Reuters of the long-term warming trend. "What's going on for 2012 is exactly what we would expect from climate change."
Seth Borenstein recently wrote for the Associated Press that according to climate scientists, recent U.S. weather reflects what many experts predicted would come with climate change. "In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we've seen that in the last few summers," said NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt.
And as Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer declared on a press call, "What we are seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like."
Recent reports suggest it's going to get a lot worse. Climate change not only has been tied to weather extremes, but also linked to rising sea levels. A study released in late June by the National Research Council found that much of California can expect a sea level rise of six inches by 2030, while a report by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) government scientists found that rates of sea level rise in a "hotspot" along the U.S. Atlantic Coast are increasing about three to four times more than the global average. A study published in Nature Climate Change last month found that human activities have played a large role in global ocean warming.
The West is on fire, dozens are dead from the most recent heat wave, and the mainland U.S. has just felt its warmest 12 months on record. Welcome to the future?
"Some ideas aren't so outlandish. Willoughby at one time thought placing current-driven pumps on the bottom of the Gulf Stream to drive cold water to the surface might starve storms of their warm-water fuel.But on reflection, he said, he realized "messing with the Gulf Stream" might alter the Earth's climate patterns and trigger another ice age."
Looks like Mother Nature was messing with the controls,
or if you like the blame game, early prehistoric humans with the assistance of residual megafauna.
Woodroffe et al. used multi-beam sonar, coring, and dating to examine a relict reef discovered in water about 20-25 meters (65-82 feet) deep around Lord Howe Island in the southern Pacific Ocean.
They found that the reef thrived from about 9,000 to 7,000 years ago and covered an area 20 times larger than the modern reef, which is the southernmost Pacific coral reef. About 7,000 years ago, the reef was drowned, probably due to abrupt sea level rise, and then shrunk to its modern extent.
The observation shows the extent to which reefs grew 9,000 years ago. Today coral reefs exist mainly in shallow seawater with sea surface temperatures greater than 18 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit), at latitudes near the equator. The relict reef shows that corals previously existed at southern latitudes farther from the equator.
Link
Yeah, somehow his pipe dream has a place on the blog - just fits somehow, at least occasionally. I keep hoping he'll post the next step in it's development. Maybe try it out on kickstart.
If nothing else, it I enjoy the 'pipe dream' pun.
You bet it fits Greentortuloni. If we can alter climate and SST's with GHG'S in a negative way then isn't it prudent to lower SST's a bit? Regulating SST's downward anywhere we want to between 70 and 90 degrees in the Gulfstream allows us to control our climate and get control of our Northern Arctic summertime sea ice. Right now we have run away warming.........
There's a large area of concentrated ice all lined up for transport to melt-land.
It's also very warm in the Northwest Passage area and there is considerable in-place melting. After early season speculation that the NWP might not open this year things have turned around and we could see early opening.
Link
Has the Arctic Dipole anomaly returned?
Has anyone figured out who 'Steven Goddard' really is? Or who is behind him?
I can only assume someone alerts "Goddard" to every thing people write in support of AGWT. One of my comments he ridiculed was something I posted in another blog forum that contained a typo. I corrected that typo within a minute or two, but not before someone took a screen capture and sent it to Goddard, who reproduced it on his site to demonstrate how "ignorantly alarmist" I am.
Such denialist desperation tells us at least one thing: they know the gig is up. The truth is coming out, and all their useless blathering has amounted to absolutely nothing.
No need to worry about those folks. The Northern Arctic Ice extent/mass is proving them wrong everyday.......
Posted by: Patrap, 5:02 PM CDT on July 10, 2012
I watched Dr. Master's presentation live. He gave a very professional and educational presentation and was perfectly framed for the audience it was intended. The insurance industry, who face dealing with mounting financial losses due to our changing climate may be our natural ally in getting government to take action.
Or how about insurance companies looking for solution to such a problem?
A weatherman with whom I was having a discussion about his non-acceptance of climate data told me that Goddard had "spoken" about me.
I checked it out. Quite interesting. I had posted on WU that if the Arctic ice volume continues to decline as it has we could see a summer melt out by 2015.
Goddard turned that into Bob Wallace has gone on record as predicting a 2015 meltout. (Something close to that.)
That's the sort of junk that gets said about AlGore - inventing the internet, etc.
I feel privileged.... ;o)
Speaking of denialist clowns, I saw a tweet from Bastardi just a while ago trumpeting the fact that 2012 Arctic sea ice area was "crawling back into the pack". Of course, nevermind that SIA fell below 6 million km2 the earliest it ever has yesterday, or that 2012 has been the lowest ever most of the last month, or that it's pretty likely 2012 will set a new maximum low record, or that there's 106 square kilometers less ice at the moment than there's ever been on this date (that's an area larger than the state of Kentucky). No, in their desperation, denialists somehow misinterpret any news that isn't entirely catastrophic as being "good". It's as though a patient with terminal cancer is told he has four more weeks to live instead of the three the doctors previously thought, and he takes that to mean he's not going to die.
Sad, really.
http://www.munichre.com/en/group/focus/climate_ch ange/default.aspx
Bob Wallace and Neapolitan are moving into a rather "rarified" space in the AGW/Climate Change blogosphere. If memory serves me correctly, both Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., were villified for their morally justified stances.
KUDOs to both of you for being on the right side of the debate.
They both got shot as well....
A number of years ago the insurance industry openly recognized that climate change was happening and that it was going to cost them money.
I wish I'd saved a link.
BTW, all the major oil companies have recognized/admitted climate change and the role of CO2 from fossil fuels.
As far as I can tell the only industry still in denial is coal. And I'm 100% sure they know what is happening, they are simply lying in order to maintain their income stream as long as possible.
You know that if you've got a bunch of money in the game you have sent out your best and brightest engineers/scientists to see if there is any possibility that human caused climate change isn't happened. And those specialists would have had to come back with "Sorry, happening".
Otherwise fossil fuel interests would be stepping up with scientific proof rather than FUD.
They would save trillions if they built my idea.
The Atlantic
Gulfstream Sinks
Wiki "Viscoelasticity"
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy">
By 1995, insurance executives attended the Berlin Climate conference and began considering the merits of this (climate change) argument. (2) Frank Nutter, President of the Reinsurance Association of America pointed out that in the U.S., twenty-one out of the twenty-five largest catastrophes (in terms of insurance claims paid) had occurred between 1985 and 1995. Of these, sixteen involved wind and water, mainly in the form of hurricanes. (3) Richard Keeling, a former Lloyds of London executive at the 1995 Berlin meeting said,
"Every major economy in the world where we have significant exposure has had a loss . . . we started getting concerned about this problem, and we got our experts to look at the reasons for these losses. They turned around and said 'well, we can't prove that we have a definite global warming problem, but by the time we can, you chaps are in real trouble."
On May 19, 1997 John Browne, British Petroleum's Group Chief Executive, broke with the oil industry's position on greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change with these words.
"There's a lot of noise in the data. It is hard to isolate cause and effect. But there is now an effective consensus among the world's leading scientists and serious and well informed people outside the scientific community that there is a discernible human influence on the climate, and a link between the concentration of carbon dioxide and the increase in temperature. The time to consider the policy dimensions of climate change is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously by the society of which we are part. We in BP have reached that point."
Link
It would be very profitable for the insurance industry to get into green energy power production by using some of their capital. They would save trillions in payouts in the future due to climate change. They would be smart to use Gulfstream kinetic energy and regulate its temperature simultaneously.
A while ago I half heartedly tried to get In Trade to open new bets on the artic. They have one but I was hoping if they added ones about the year when sea goes, and other bets involving other variables thatit would raise interest and be a place where denialists could put their money. But I should have thought about the insurance industry which is essentially doing that everyday.
(Interesting to see that a lot of trades on temperatures have opened up.)
I never bet with In Trade becasue they didn't open any of the bets I suggested. I SO wanted to call people out and get them to bet their own money. I'd love George Will, for example, to post a bet on his positions, or ony of the others. Right now they are betting on poor people's lives but they have the money and the contacts to protect themselves - at least unless it gets really bad. I was hoping that by monetizing the issue in a legitimate forum, it would get picked up in newspapers similar to how the DJ, NYSE, footsie (and spread here in Italy) are reported each day.
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