New report on climate change released today

[angelo]

Activists, as can be seen in the Hong Kong riots are not at all well tolerated in closed societies such as China. I'd love to see the Swedish brat's reception in China. But then again, there's no interest in protesting there as it's already a communist nation.

 

[bilby]

In other words, the science is far from being settled, right? Alarmists use modeling to argument their case, while real scientific methods are rarely used!

Science is never "settled" - there's always room for refinements. But the amount of room rapidly diminishes.

Gravitation was formalised by Newton in the seventeenth century. But the science wasn't "settled" - it turns out that Newton was wrong, as anyone could observe by making sufficiently accurate observations of the orbit of Mercury around the Sun.

However, despite the fact that the science of gravity wasn't settled, a person who tried to argue that the discrepancy between Newton's predictions and Mercury's actual orbit meant that sometimes rocks might fall upwards, was still a blithering idiot with zero grasp on reality.

That we don't know every tiny detail about what is happening to n decimal places is not permission for fuckwits to declare that we cannot possibly know anything, and that therefore their crazy nonsense is just as plausible as the scientific consensus.

 

[Elixir]

In other words, the science is far from being settled, right? Alarmists use modeling to argument their case, while real scientific methods are rarely used!

Science is never "settled" - there's always room for refinements.

B-b-b-but conservotards NEED things to be settled! It either is or it isn't and that's that!
OTOH, nearly every discrepancy touted by the foolish pawns of fossil fuel as proof of the 'unsettled' nature of climate science's predictions and projections, can itself be predicted by the same science that made the original predictions. IOW, the predictions are correct:

What the science says

If the so called "skeptics" (aka science denyers) took longer than their breakfast to actually look at the facts instead of the spin put out by fossil fuel advocates, they could learn why their complaints are foolishness.

 

[lpetrich]

In other words, the science is far from being settled, right? Alarmists use modeling to argument their case, while real scientific methods are rarely used!

Science is never "settled" - there's always room for refinements. But the amount of room rapidly diminishes.

Gravitation was formalised by Newton in the seventeenth century. But the science wasn't "settled" - it turns out that Newton was wrong, as anyone could observe by making sufficiently accurate observations of the orbit of Mercury around the Sun.

However, despite the fact that the science of gravity wasn't settled, a person who tried to argue that the discrepancy between Newton's predictions and Mercury's actual orbit meant that sometimes rocks might fall upwards, was still a blithering idiot with zero grasp on reality.

That we don't know every tiny detail about what is happening to n decimal places is not permission for fuckwits to declare that we cannot possibly know anything, and that therefore their crazy nonsense is just as plausible as the scientific consensus.

"Wrong" is a very strong word for Newtonian gravity, because it is a good approximation in most places in the Universe. Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong explains such limited wrongness in the context of another result: the shape of the Earth's sea-level surface or "geoid". It is a function of the Earth's gravitational field, and that can be measured to exquisite precision by tracking satellites in low Earth orbit.

The same thing applies to climate predictions. Our modeling is good enough to predict the present-day temperature rise -- it was even that good back in the early 1980's.

 

[lpetrich]

How a 26-Year-Old Activist Forced the Democratic Party to Get Serious About Climate Change - VICE - Nov 16

Sunrise Movement leader Varshini Prakash said the group’s greatest success has been getting away from the ‘pathetic incrementalism’ that’s shaped the climate debate.

... She hated Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth when she saw it as a 14-year-old, precisely because it seemed to leave people out. (And also, as she would later tell me with a laugh, because she thought it was a bad movie.)

VP and seven fellow activists organized the Sunrise Movement in 2017, and the movement made its first big splash in late 2018, with its sit-in at Nancy Pelosi's office, a sit-in that AOC visited.

In my time with Prakash, she always had time for another conversation, another photo, another interview, and never showed any signs of flagging energy. She had the self-assurance and charisma of a veteran politician, but talking to her felt like talking to a friend—a good one, who doesn’t bullshit.

“The funny thing about her coming from communications is that in some ways she was amazing at it: She’s super smart and organized and on top of everything,” Sara Blazevic, another one of Sunrise’s co-founders, told me on the phone a few days later. “In other ways, she wasn’t the best at it. So much of comms work is figuring out how to spin something. Varshini does not like to spin things.”

From one of her speeches for a climate-strike Friday:

“Striking is how we can stop the worst of climate change and win a Green New Deal,” Prakash shouted, her voice trembling slightly. “But I gotta be honest with you—we gotta be honest with each other if we want to win. We gotta be honest with each other if we want to survive. There are not enough of us here yet. There are four million people out in the streets today, but there are not enough of us yet.”

VP first thought of becoming a doctor, but she got involved in divestment activism in college, and she has been an activist ever since. Divestment activism is getting organizations like universities to divest of stock that the activists consider morally tainted, like fossil-fuel-company stock.

But climate activism did not seem very effective, at least at first. VP recalls the low turnout for climate-activist demonstrations around 2015.

But climate activism has become very big, and the Sunrise Movement has been a part of that. The Green New Deal is a collective name for several proposed massive responses, like a certain resolution in the US Congress.

Prakash argues that the Sunrise Movement’s greatest success has been shifting the conversation around climate change away from “pathetic incrementalism.” People have begun to talk about climate change as a global crisis that demands a response at the level of systems and institutions, not just the individual. And there’s an emerging recognition that addressing it means fighting for other forms of social justice, including racial and economic justice.

Like avoiding dumping adverse environmental effects onto people who are not in a good position to fight back. Like rerouting DAPL from near Bismarck ND to near the Standing Rock Indian reservation.

VP is annoyed by those who claim that the SM came out of nowhere, but it must be noted that its founders did a lot of study of previous activist movements. Also by those who call the SM "AOC's movement".

Thinking small is anathema to her—which is why, reflecting on it now, Prakash realizes she wasn’t cut out to be a doctor.

“You’re only going to save like, what, 100 people in a year? Maybe less?” she’d said at breakfast. A systematic response to climate change, though, could save “literally millions of people on this planet. And every single decimal point of warming you can avoid, you do save millions of people’s lives on this planet.”

AOC also wanted to be a doctor, but she decided that she wasn't going to do very much good by being one. So after her first year in college, she got into economics and international relations.

 

[Trausti]

 

[lpetrich]

Sunrise Movement: youth climate change activists are angry, and effective - Vox

The three-bedroom apartment in Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood is one of a handful of so-called movement houses around the country where Sunrise Movement activists live and work together. Their mission is twofold: trying to force politicians to act on one of the most dire issues facing humankind and building an army of young people to send the message.

...
This small group is part of a much larger national organization whose members are disproportionately in their teens or 20s. (The Sunrise Movement doesn’t have formal membership.) But its core leaders — a small group of activists in their mid-20s — estimate that 15,000 young people have showed up to in-person actions across the country and that 80,000 have participated in less direct actions such as emailing and calling their representatives. As of this month, the group has 290 small, autonomous chapters of activists (called “hubs”) across the country. In November 2018, there were just 11.

...
Their methods are straight out of the playbook of the civil rights movement of the 1960s: Frequently, they sing protest songs. They stand quietly as police officers zip-tie their hands behind their backs and lead them into vans for civil disobedience. Their eyes pleading, they carry signs, including ones that say, “The Youth are Coming for You.”

...
Some of those effects are already apparent. Hurricane Dorian wreaked devastation on the Bahamas, and wildfires are raging worldwide, from the Amazon to Siberian forests and the western United States. It can also be felt closer to home; the day I interviewed the group in early September, it was a sweltering 96 degrees in Washington, DC, a new heat record for that date.

That may be why climate-change activism has become so prominent. We are seeing some very nasty effects of it -- heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, big hurricanes, ...

AOC dropped in on the Sunrise Movement's sit-in in Nancy Pelosi's office last November, a sit-in with about 200 activists. There was a bigger demonstration, some 1000 activists, a month later.

“I’m incredibly excited. I think the youth mobilization and the mobilization of environmental activists and frontline mobilization as well, that kind of activism is what’s actually moving a lot of the legislative agenda on climate and making it much more pressing,” Ocasio-Cortez told Vox. “I think their work has been invaluable, there’s no way we’d be in this moment without groups like Sunrise and Climate Justice Alliance.”

The group has also done electoral work that has paid off, especially in state and local elections. They and other local activist groups helped elect progressive politicians to the New York state legislature, which passed the wide-reaching Climate & Communities Protection Act this summer (many view the state law as a precursor to a Green New Deal).

"Their message is clear: If older generations won’t do anything, we will."

Elizabeth Warren on Twitter: "The best part of the #ClimateTownHall was getting to see all of the incredible young activists who built a grassroots movement to make it happen. That's how we'll stop climate change—by dreaming big, fighting hard, and organizing together! https://t.co/D59Pz5sXl7" / Twitter

“The best part was who was in the audience; it was a bunch of young people who made it happen,” Warren said, comparing youth activists to generations of civil rights marchers, suffragettes, and LGBTQ activists that came before them. “They’re going to make their voices heard in 2020.”

Older environmentalist groups seem like they have been left behind.

What’s been missing, according to Leonard, is a mass movement to galvanize public sentiment on climate change. Older groups have historically pursued their own projects, such as land conservation, protecting endangered species, or trying to ban plastic bags. Few have been as overtly political as Sunrise, and few have been able to offer as succinct a tagline as a Green New Deal for their proposed climate change solution.

The Sunrise people compare themselves to activists like the Occupy movement or Sixties activist movements.

Part of the reason Sunrise has been so effective is the way it communicates the scale of the crisis. This component is important because Republicans and fossil fuel companies successfully muddled the message for years, claiming climate change either wasn’t happening, or wasn’t manmade. The environmental movement thought science would convince the public, but that hasn’t worked, in part because scientists aren’t the best messengers.

“They’re not very effective,” said Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, who studies environmental movements. “Scientists trade on uncertainties and caveats. We needed a voice to say climate change is happening now, and get that into the media and public consciousness.”

That's what the activists have been doing.

But Sunrise’s hopes for enacting a Green New Deal rest on everything going right for Democrats in 2020. Democrats would need to win the White House, keep the House, and win the Senate (where they would either have to win by a large margin or abolish the filibuster to get big pieces of legislation through).

“I think that getting climate change legislation done is doable,” former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who supports abolishing the filibuster, told Vox recently. “If we have a Democratic Congress and president that will make it a lot easier, and that’s an understatement.”

But a Democratic trifecta in 2020 may be too optimistic. I'm sure that the Dems will hold on to the House, but the Senate and the Presidency are rather iffy.

 

[lpetrich]

These Activists Are Training Every Movement That Matters - VICE

It's Momentum

Momentum is a nonprofit for nonprofits. The group calls itself a community, an incubator of movements, a Hogwarts for organizers. It was founded by alumni of protest movements like United We Dream, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the fossil fuel divestment campaigns—young people who’ve come of age in a time of political crisis.

It's trained activists in the Sunrise Movement and other recent activist organizations.

Momentum teaches activists how to fuse huge, seemingly spontaneous uprisings like Occupy with traditional structures of labor unions and community organizing. That means deploying dramatic demonstrations, since a simple march or rally isn’t always enough for people to pay attention, and to claim victory so the opposition can’t downplay their effectiveness. To hear Momentum’s leadership tell it, activists emerging from their training could significantly reshape politics through disruptive nonviolent protests that will chase people out of a passive middle ground, and ramp up pressure to break stalemates on issues like immigration and global warming. They disregard what is considered politically possible in favor of what would be ideal. The approach in many ways takes its ethos from what Franklin Delano Roosevelt supposedly said when the labor leader A. Philip Randolph asked him to act on civil rights: “Go out and make me do it.”

“We’ve always been told if you play nice, you play by the rules, you have a good report with some data that backs up your claims, maybe you can move some policy, and the thing is: It doesn’t work for our community,” explained James Hayes, a Momentum trainer from Columbus, Ohio. “We don’t have the amount of money to play ball in the current system.”

Momentum's founders drew on experience with earlier activist movements. One of them describes coming up with activist songs - familiar melodies with new words.

In just five years, momentum has trained more than 1,500 young activists in at least 30 states who’ve gone on to be at the center of protests that have ricocheted throughout the nation.

...
Change happens when it’s “costlier for politicians to support the status quo than to oppose it,” the group’s co-founders wrote in a Resistance Guide in 2017, which distills what they think makes social movements successful. Movements can continue only if they have broad appeal, and can self-replicate by adding more activists and trainers to combat burnout and continue growth. “I learned that in the DREAM movement,” Saavedra said. “You have to multiply yourself by 100. So IfNotNow learns from Cosecha, Sunrise learns from IfNotNow, and so on.”

...
“This is actually how we have won anything in our history; making these things visible doing boycotts, doing marches—this is a revival more than anything else,” said Nicole Carty, a Momentum core team member. “When times were hard, when things were tough, when things were in crisis, this is what has worked to get us out of crisis.”

That's what it will take to get out of Gilded Age II -- massive efforts.

 

[lpetrich]

COP25: UN climate change talks have stalled. Countries are blaming the US. - Vox

Chloé Farand on Twitter: "Costa Rica's environment minister Carlos Rodriguez says negotiations on carbon markets (Article 6) are stalled. He names Australia, Brazil and the US for trying to undermine the environmental integrity of the market. Those positions are "unacceptable" he says. #COP25" / Twitter

There were some bright points for climate campaigners, however. Earlier in the week, the European Commission announced its European Green Deal, a plan to make the 28 countries in the EU “climate neutral” by 2050 and to halve its emissions by 2030.

“We have entered in a totally new conversation,” Tunbiana said. “Six months ago I would not have bet that this can happen. I will not have bet that we open with a Green New Deal, a new climate law.”

Europe’s Green Deal aims for the EU to be “climate neutral” by 2050 - Vox noting A European Green Deal | European Commission


Greta Thunberg: why the right’s usual attacks don’t work on her - Vox

In September, in response to Thunberg’s coruscating, impassioned speech to the UN, President Trump tweeted sarcastically, “he seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” (Thunberg promptly edited her Twitter bio to read: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”)

Greta Thunberg on Twitter: "I honestly don’t understand why adults would choose to spend their time mocking and threatening teenagers and children for promoting science, when they could do something good instead. I guess they must simply feel so threatened by us. ->" / Twitter

Greta avoids the trap of recommending specific policies

It is evident that business as usual has become disastrous, but what to do about it?

And so for the most part, opponents of action — generally far-right coalitions fueled by a mix of fossil-fuel cronyism and populist ethnonationalism — don’t assail it. They do everything they can to distract from it.

That almost always involves attacking the messengers (“Al Gore has a big house”) and their proposed solutions (“the Green New Deal will take away your hamburgers”). The scientists are after grant money; the activists are undercover socialists; the leaders are hypocrites; the marchers litter. Casting doubt on the motives and authenticity of people fighting for progressive causes is the right’s primary political tool, with efforts now led out of the White House.

Attempts to personally smear Greta have backfired

Right-wing media’s first instinct is to smear the messenger, to find some behavior on which to hang a charge of hypocrisy or some venal motive that allegedly undercuts moral authority. They have done it to everyone who has stuck their head up on climate change (beginning, famously, with Al Gore) for many decades now, snooping through stolen emails, filing lawsuits, and ruining careers.

...
For one thing, it is virtually impossible to watch her speak for any length of time and maintain a good-faith belief that she is responding to social pressure from adults. She is manifestly authentic, direct in a way unique among public figures, no more subject to flattery than to coercion.

It's like those people who believe that AOC is an actress.

When Greta disregards social cues, it sends a social cue

The right has established a social environment in which speaking up on climate change leads to bullying and shaming, but those tactics just don’t seem to work on Thunberg. And without them, the right has nothing to fall back on (not one of the hundreds of attacks launched at her has the courage to directly dispute the IPCC report she submitted).

In ignoring social cues, Thunberg has become one: A signal to other young people around the world that, yes, this really is an emergency, and yes, they really can and should speak up.

Greta’s power will be in making more Gretas

So far, Thunberg has played her game expertly — mostly by being almost entirely oblivious to the other games being played around her — and I hope she does this as long as possible. I hope she continues to refrain from policy recommendations, live a low-carbon life, and drag the spotlight back to science. She has pulled off something like a political miracle, and I don’t want it to end any more than anybody else.

I think that her biggest legacy will be the climate-strike movement, and it looks like it will continue even if GT fades from publicity or gets overshadowed by some other prominent activists.

 

[angelo]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

 

[Elixir]

The most convincing argument I've seen yet from a climate science skeptic.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

Nah, your side will be shamed for decades to come. You're operating right out of the playbook used by the cigarette companies--doesn't that suggest you're in the wrong?

 

[lpetrich]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

Nah, your side will be shamed for decades to come. You're operating right out of the playbook used by the cigarette companies--doesn't that suggest you're in the wrong?

Caleb Hull on Twitter: "On Instagram live, AOC just compared climate change and the world ending in 12 years to the civil rights movement and people protesting against African-Americans... https://t.co/6fcC74h5ny" / Twitter
She said that climate-change deniers will look to future generations like how opponents of the civil-rights movement look today.

 

[repoman]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

I find Thunberg annoying and don't like the leftism that her adult influencers are ensconced in.

But it has no effect on the facts on the ground and the airtight theory of AGW.

So I ignore her. I never needed her to convince me of these facts anyway.

 

[angelo]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

Nah, your side will be shamed for decades to come. You're operating right out of the playbook used by the cigarette companies--doesn't that suggest you're in the wrong?

Wrong by a long shot! Climate alarmist has been around for many decades with not a single Apocalypse event happening, or eventuating. Cigarette warnings about health were there and happening from day one!

 

[angelo]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

I find Thunberg annoying and don't like the leftism that her adult influencers are ensconced in.

But it has no effect on the facts on the ground and the airtight theory of AGW.

So I ignore her. I never needed her to convince me of these facts anyway.

This brat is nothing more than a pawn used by the left to re-distribute wealth to the third world. Why doesn't the likes of Soros donate their billions directly to them in the first place!

 

[repoman]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

I find Thunberg annoying and don't like the leftism that her adult influencers are ensconced in.

But it has no effect on the facts on the ground and the airtight theory of AGW.

So I ignore her. I never needed her to convince me of these facts anyway.

This brat is nothing more than a pawn used by the left to re-distribute wealth to the third world. Why doesn't the likes of Soros donate their billions directly to them in the first place!

The money should be spent now evacuating people living on coastlines and lreparing to deal with the fact that all ports will be submerged.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How Dare You will be laughed at for decades to come. Especially come 2100 and the Earth and it's climate will have changed little, because inter-glacial periods don't just take a century or two, but thousands of years.

Nah, your side will be shamed for decades to come. You're operating right out of the playbook used by the cigarette companies--doesn't that suggest you're in the wrong?

Wrong by a long shot! Climate alarmist has been around for many decades with not a single Apocalypse event happening, or eventuating. Cigarette warnings about health were there and happening from day one!

Despite numerous requests you have yet to come up with an example of the scientists (not reporters!) making a prediction of doom that has failed.

 

[angelo]

This brat is nothing more than a pawn used by the left to re-distribute wealth to the third world. Why doesn't the likes of Soros donate their billions directly to them in the first place!

The money should be spent now evacuating people living on coastlines and lreparing to deal with the fact that all ports will be submerged.

Surely you can do better than that! This shit has been around for decades and ALL coastal areas are just like they've always been.

 

[angelo]

Wrong by a long shot! Climate alarmist has been around for many decades with not a single Apocalypse event happening, or eventuating. Cigarette warnings about health were there and happening from day one!

Despite numerous requests you have yet to come up with an example of the scientists (not reporters!) making a prediction of doom that has failed.

Not again! I've posted numerous examples of failed forecasts. You have not yet provided a single event that's eventuated!