It's over - Ivor Cummins discusses the data (Let's stick with COVID) - this title got UNfiddled

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(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #164

Yes, this is a similar argument to the one the political conservatives in Australia made during last year’s devastating megafires. They claimed, without any evidence, that the “greenies” had prevented backburning before the fire season.

Of course, fire season is basically all year around nowadays in places like CA and Australia, and there’s no environmental campaign to prevent backburning. So for anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge, it’s a spurious argument to make. It’s the adult equivalent of saying, “Hey, look over there!”

Fire chiefs themselves are saying the fire season is now longer because of climate change, the fires are getting orders of magnitude worse because of climate change, and this is irrespective of any “overgrown” forests or lack of backburning. In fact, the fire chiefs will tell you that backburning doesn’t do anything at all when you have megafires.

Don’t believe me? Listen to some fire chiefs. I’ve linked the following video to the 2 mins where a fire chief explains exactly the causes of these megafires, though I urge you to watch the whole video. Just press play to get to the relevant section though.

This has been talked about for years. Remove subsidies for harmful industries (monoculture crops, fossil fuels). And then invest in renewables and other clean tech. It’s extraordinary to me how hard people will fight for the air in their cities to remain dirty. Clean energy is a win/win, and it also happens to be cheaper in the long run than filthy old tech.

I think people on this forum should be putting their politics aside and examining the science. Just as we should be doing with Covid-19.

#165

@gabe
No doubt humans are poisoning themselves with air pollution but climate change is due to farming grains and animal enslavement. CO2 levels were much higher when dinosaurs roamed the earth yet vegetation flourished.

#166

Hazard reduction (as opposed to backburning which is done during a fire to prevent spread) is done wherever and whenever it is safe - those days are increasingly few and far between due to climate change.

Yes they are but nobody is listening.

(Doug) #167

Plants use CO2. In fact, it’s made a noticeable difference - some plants are growing faster/bigger now. But they tend to be less nutritionally dense, so usually not a net gain.

(John) #168

You make excellent points here but there are firemen in California that do talk about the overgrowth being part of the problem. I am saying part as I am not disputing climate change. I know one large area in norther California specifically that was very overgrown and burned. It happens to be in an area that a long time ago was a big logging area. It is still a logging area but no longer is a major logging area and so its not maintained as well as it was. Not just because there is less logging but less forestry management. Did it burn as bad because of climate change or lack of logging and management. I don’t have the answer but they had fires before and they didn’t seem as bad as they do now. Again not arguing. I just ask alot of questions

(John) #169

I will give that video a full watch tomorrow. Thanks

#170

Here in Australia we have an issue with the logging companies not responsibly managing the land they log. They leave a LOT of crap behind and that does indeed contribute.

#171

So, in your world view, the 200,000+++ dead of Covid in the US and the more than 1 million dead in the world of Covid so far, still counting, are to be properly thought of and described as “dry tinder”?

Really, you think this is okay?

(bulkbiker) #172

Not in the slightest just that there were a significant number of people who avoided death in 2019 who have likely since died. This will certainly have boosted the number of COVID deaths however you have to look at the total deaths in context.
How many people die daily across the globe?
Over 150,000
So 6 months in to a “deadly pandemic” to use the MSM words this deadly disease has added about one extra weeks worth of deaths so far.
Almost 3,000,000 people die every year in the USA so the 200,000 in 6 months has certainly added to the toll but by how much?
Looking at reported COVID deaths (and we can’t even be sure they were all due to COVID) in isolation without context is meaningless.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #173

Just a minor correction here: the last dinosaurs were finished off about 66 million years ago. The climate only stabilized and agriculture/civilization only emerged in the past few thousand years, 10,000-20,000ish. Human civilization is built on this exquisite climatic balance.

The world will certainly survive the immense damage humans are causing. It is rather unlikely, in my view, that many animals will survive it, including humans. We are now officially in the Anthropocene, a geological era characterized by massive changes to the planet’s habitability by humans. And we are living through the planet’s Sixth Extinction.

You can ask questions, and please feel free, but most of what I’ve said about (apart from a bit of editorializing) is just plain fact. You can’t compare climate and CO2 from the dinosaur era, it’s just not relevant to what’s happening in terms of the habitability of the planet for humans.

(bulkbiker) #174

You do realise that plants require CO2 to grow don’t you Gabe?
They weren’t installed to “clean the air” they have evolved because of CO2 not despite it.

Also a gas which composes 0.04% of the earths atmosphere is pretty unlikely to have a significant impact on what happens to that atmosphere don’t you think?

(bulkbiker) #175

Greening of earth from a really dodgy source… NASA

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth

(bulkbiker) #176

More plants will of course utilise more water and retain more which might just be an explanation as to why the sea levels haven’t gone up either…

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #177

Listen, I’m not responding to facile climate denial arguments like this any more. In this case, the answer is quite obvious: a tenth of a gram of arsenic can kill a human. The human body naturally contains far fewer parts per million of arsenic than the atmosphere contains of CO2.

Quite obviously, small fluctuations of substances that constitute a small portion of a system can have radical consequences.

I won’t engage further on this; as with your views on Covid-19, you are at odds with the preponderance of scientists in the field. The hubris it requires to make folk arguments about such subjects must be rather substantial.

Perhaps someone will post something about Covid-19 below that will re-engage me, but I think I’ve said what I need to say about these subjects. It seems to me that the majority of people on this board will make up their own minds by following the science, not crank internet theories and conspiracies.

(bulkbiker) #178

Which after all is what we should all do.
But after doing some research first maybe?
Lets face it questioning the orthodoxy is exactly what has brought most of us here in the first place.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #179

Nutritional “science” has been, as Gary Taubes points out, quite uniquely immature, neglected, and rife with BS. That’s not the case with many other a areas of science. It’s not the case with climate science nor pandemic epidemiology.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Unfortunately, this attitude has now led to the widespread self-discrediting of people who were unquestioningly regarded as low carb “experts.” My hope is that this experience will now cause the low carb community to raise their standards. I don’t care if you’ve written a book or if you have a big Twitter following; there needs to be higher standards for getting on a low carb platform.

As for climate and these other areas of science; I see no evidence to “do research” first. Do you think we should all go out and get PhDs in these fields? I haven’t seen a single compelling reason to doubt the preponderance of evidence that has led to scientific consensus on anthropogenic global heating, nor any reason to doubt the myriad epidemiologists and medical experts driving policy during the pandemic.

Similarly, I see no reason to do several PhDs in astrophysics to challenge Flat Earthers or to argue with Creationists about the sheer size of the physical universe. Cosmology is cosmology. The science is sound.

So the answer is that if we are satisfied that the science is operating properly, then no, we do not individually need to spend the time researching each of these fields in order to be quite comfortable with where we are.

Believe what you want to believe, but if you want to go around arguing that “how could a substance that makes up only 500 parts per million in the atmosphere affect the climate” then really, I don’t think your views deserve to be taken particularly seriously.

(bulkbiker) #180

Which is of course exactly how it should be… you can believe what you like as will I.
It’s called “freedom of speech” and should be protected at all costs.

#181

Cripes.

I’ve only been at work for one day and come back to find this.

Might be time to close the topic?

Seems we have gone right around the world. Like the atmosphere or a pandemic.

#182

:rofl:

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(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) closed #184