Science Greta Thunberg Megathread - Dax Herrera says he wouldn't have a day ago (I somewhat doubt that)

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? How can a 16-year-old girl in plaits, who has dedicated herself to the not-exactly sinister, authoritarian plot of trying to save the planet from extinction, inspire such incandescent rage?

Last week, she tweeted that she had arrived into New York after her two week transatlantic voyage: “Finally here. Thank you everyone who came to see me off in Plymouth, and everyone who welcomed me in New York! Now I’m going to rest for a few days, and on Friday I’m going to participate in the strike outside the UN”, before promptly giving a press conference in English. Yes, her second language.

Her remarks were immediately greeted with a barrage of jibes about virtue signalling, and snide remarks about the three crew members who will have to fly out to take the yacht home.

This shouldn’t need to be spelled out, but as some people don’t seem to have grasped it yet, we’ll give it a lash: Thunberg’s trip was an act of protest, not a sacred commandment or an instruction manual for the rest of us. Like all acts of protest, it was designed to be symbolic and provocative. For those who missed the point – and oh, how they missed the point – she retweeted someone else’s “friendly reminder” that: “You don’t need to spend two weeks on a boat to do your part to avert our climate emergency. You just need to do everything you can, with everyone you can, to change everything you can.”

Part of the reason she inspires such rage, of course, is blindingly obvious. Climate change is terrifying. The Amazon is burning. So too is the Savannah. Parts of the Arctic are on fire. Sea levels are rising. There are more vicious storms and wildfires and droughts and floods. Denial is easier than confronting the terrifying truth.

Then there’s the fact that we don’t like being made to feel bad about our life choices. That’s human nature. It’s why we sneer at vegans. It’s why we’re suspicious of sober people at parties. And if anything is likely to make you feel bad about your life choices -- as you jet back home after your third Ryanair European minibreak this season – it’ll be the sight of small-boned child subjecting herself to a fortnight being tossed about on the Atlantic, with only a bucket bearing a “Poo Only Please” sign by way of luxury, in order to make a point about climate change.

But that’s not virtue signalling, which anyone can indulge in. As Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and their-four-private-jets-in-11-days found recently, virtue practising is a lot harder.

Even for someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, some of the criticism levelled at Thunberg is astonishing. It is, simultaneously, the most vicious and the most fatuous kind of playground bullying. The Australian conservative climate change denier Andrew Bolt called her “deeply disturbed” and “freakishly influential” (the use of “freakish”, we can assume, was not incidental.) The former UKIP funder, Arron Banks, tweeted “Freaking yacht accidents do happen in August” (as above.) Brendan O’Neill of Spiked called her a “millenarian weirdo” (nope, still not incidental) in a piece that referred nastily to her “monotone voice” and “the look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes”.

But who’s the real freak – the activist whose determination has single-handedly started a powerful global movement for change, or the middle-aged man taunting a child with Asperger syndrome from behind the safety of their computer screens?

And that, of course, is the real reason why Greta Thunberg is so triggering. They can’t admit it even to themselves, so they ridicule her instead. But the truth is that they’re afraid of her. The poor dears are terrified of her as an individual, and of what she stands for – youth, determination, change.

She is part of a generation who won’t be cowed. She isn’t about to be shamed into submission by trolls. That’s not actually a look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. It’s a look that says “you’re not relevant”.

The reason they taunt her with childish insults is because that’s all they’ve got. They’re out of ideas. They can’t dismantle her arguments, because she has science – and David Attenborough – on her side. They can’t win the debate with the persuasive force of their arguments, because these bargain bin cranks trade in jaded cynicism, not youthful passion. They can harangue her with snide tweets and hot take blogposts, but they won’t get a reaction because, frankly, she has bigger worries on her mind.

That’s not to say that we should accept everything Thunberg says without question. She is an idealist who is young enough to see the world in black and white. We need voices like hers. We should listen to what she has to say, without tuning the more moderate voices of dissent out.

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? Because of what she represents. In an age when democracy is under assault, she hints at the emergency of new kind of power, a convergence of youth, popular protest and irrefutable science. And for her loudest detractors, she also represents something else: the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.

joconnell@irishtimes.com
https://twitter.com/jenoconnell

https://web.archive.org/web/2019090...certain-men-1.4002264?localLinksEnabled=false
Found this thought-provoking indeed.

 

[cecograph]

Worrying about the state of the world a hundred years from now is mostly bizarre when you try to imagine those fears back over the last half millenium. A little over a hundred years ago, those adorable fuckers had no idea they were in for two wars which brought the full power of heavy industry and then nuclear physics to bear on the problem of levelling cities and killing a shit ton of people and basically snow-globing the world order.

I suspect climate change will prove to be a fucker in a hundred years, but given our history, and being a Brit, I have full faith we can figure out way more expedient and impressive ways to fuck ourselves up in the meantime.

 

[Sheryl Nome]

CO2 is plant food so I am surprised that a vegan would be against more plant food.

For fucking real though, the interplay between photosynthesis and cellular respiration is one of the core components of the entire biosphere. It blows my mind that people can call CO2 a pollutant when it is vitally necessary for the continuation of most life on Earth.

It can be both, if we're producing more CO2 than the plants can intake(we are, significantly), the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will go up. Increasing CO2 levels, which is a greenhouse gas that causes increased heat retention, leading to an increase in global temperature over time. Plants can only do a finite amount of work.

I'm not going to tell you to eat bugs bigot, but I don't think its that insane to say that humanity should try to limit its impact on the earth's environment if possible.

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

It can be both, if we're producing more CO2 than the plants can intake(we are, significantly), the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will go up. Increasing CO2 levels, which is a greenhouse gas that causes increased heat retention, leading to an increase in global temperature over time. Plants can only do a finite amount of work.

I'm not going to tell you to eat bugs bigot, but I don't think its that insane to say that humanity should try to limit its impact on the earth's environment if possible.

One science teacher said to once my class when climate change was brought up and one student argued that climate had changed before humans too “Yes that’s true and it’s also true that we don’t know what level human activity affecting. But we do know that humans are affecting so it’s better if try to control that part best of our ability because we benefit from stady climate and clean nature.” I think that’s pretty reasonable position to take.

 

[Stoneheart]

I'm not going to tell you to eat bugs bigot, but I don't think its that insane to say that humanity should try to limit its impact on the earth's environment if possible.

Building a wall is the best way to lessen the impact, americans produce way more CO2 than mexicans on average.

 

[The Great Citracett]

Lawsuit Gremlin vs. Climate Goblin:




HOW DARE YOU UPSTAGE ME AND MY PLIGHTS!

Maybe he'll sue.

 

[TowinKarz]

Carl Sagan admitted that the data on "nuclear winter" was deliberately falsified to scare world leaders into disarmament (which is hilarious because the Soviets absolutely didn't give a fuck, they only went to disarmament talks because the west, by which I mean the US, kept coming up with better, more advanced, more accurate weapons).

Also, ironically, the USSR came to the table for SALT I in part because they suffered a massive crop failure and the US was willing to ship them a billion (with a "B") bushels of grain to cover it if they just showed up and at least acted in good faith for a couple days.

Oh, and don't forget the tapping-out of world oil supplies, that would kill us all.

And so would nuclear war, famine, morals breaking down to Mad Max levels of street violence because kids these days didn't respect their elders and listened to rock n roll...., killer bee swarms, cosmic convergences of celestial bodies causing superquakes, incurable strains of the flu, the moon cracking in half and causing cataclysmic tidal waves, meteorites (the "meteorite did the dinosaurs" theory had just been widely accepted, so naturally, if it happened once, it'll happen AGAIN, maybe TOMORROW!) or the sum total of humanity just up and blinking out of existence because next week was Judgement Day according to some random televangelist, there was a different flavor of Armageddon every week growing up in the 80's, you kids have NO idea.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

One science teacher said to once my class when climate change was brought up and one student argued that climate had changed before humans too “Yes that’s true and it’s also true that we don’t know what level human activity affecting. But we do know that humans are affecting so it’s better if try to control that part best of our ability because we benefit from stady climate and clean nature.” I think that’s pretty reasonable position to take.

That's my point exactly. What's so wrong with getting our shit together? Do you fuckers want to fill the gulf with oil every other Thursday? I really don't understand why so many people are against cleaning up after ourselves and not turning every fucking part of the country into some polluted shithole like in Ching Chong land.

 

[heathercho]

“The global economy does not serve all people equally. Under the current configuration of policies, rules, market dynamics and corporate power, economic gaps are likely to increase and environmental degradation intensify,” said Richard Kozul-Wright, director of UNCTAD’s division responsible for the report.

Well, what do we have here? The UNCTAD declaring a need for communism AND a one world government.
Shock imagined! Thanks, Greta!

Bold action required to finance a global green new deal and meet the SDGs
25 September 2019

UNCTAD's Trade and Development Report 2019 recasts the Depression era's signature policy on a global scale - a Global Green New Deal - as the right policy framework to make a clean break with years of austerity and insecurity. It would help bring about a more equal distribution of income and reverse decades of environmental degradation.

We can meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, but only if we find the political will to change the rules of the international economic game and adopt policies that scale up the resources needed for a big investment push led by the public sector and set the global economy on an expansionary course, says UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report 2019, launched today.
“The global economy does not serve all people equally. Under the current configuration of policies, rules, market dynamics and corporate power, economic gaps are likely to increase and environmental degradation intensify,” said Richard Kozul-Wright, director of UNCTAD’s division responsible for the report.
The report recasts the Depression era’s signature policy on a global scale – a Global Green New Deal – as the right policy framework to make a clean break with years of austerity and insecurity following the global financial crisis, help bring about a more equal distribution of income and reverse decades of environmental degradation.
It proposes a series of reform measures to make debt, capital and banks work for development and finance a deal.

Related link: Trade and Development Report (Series)
A changing climate is already causing severe damage across the world and posing an existential threat. Decarbonizing the global economy will require a significant rise in public investment especially in clean transport, energy and food systems. This will need to be supported by effective industrial policies, with targeted subsidies, tax incentives, loans and guarantees, as well as accelerated investments in research, development and technology adaptation.
The report argues for a new generation of trade and investment agreements to support these policies along with changes to intellectual property and licensing laws. But more specific measures and dedicated financial support will be required in developing countries to help them leapfrog carbon-intensive development paths.
The report sets out a roadmap that can lead to growth rates of GDP in developed economies of 1% to 1.5% above those generated by current patterns of global demand. For developing economies, excluding China, the gains will be larger, ranging between 1.5% and 2% per annum, but more moderate in China.
Can we really have our cake and eat it in a world already under severe environmental stress?
Projecting an annual increase in total green investment of 2% of global output - around US$1.7tn or just one third of what is currently spent by governments on subsidizing fossil fuels – could, UNCTAD economists estimate, generate a net increase in global employment of at least 170 million jobs, with cleaner industrialization in the South and an overall reduction in carbon emissions by the target year of the 2030 Agenda.
But the report also contends that widening the investment challenge to eradicate poverty and meet nutrition, health and education goals will impose unsustainable financial burdens on many developing countries, requiring deeper reforms to the international trade, financial and monetary system if the 2030 Agenda is to be met on time.
Since the global financial crisis, market-friendly solutions to these global challenges have failed to push economies in a more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable direction. This year’s report casts doubt on proposals to do more of the same: to finance the SDGs by maximizing development finance through blending public and private sources using products and techniques taken from the playbook of banking conglomerates. These have routinely failed to boost productive investment and were instrumental in the boom-bust cycle that led to the 2008 global financial crisis.
Instead, the report sets out a series of measures and reforms that would give the lead in financing a Global Green New Deal to the public sector and calls on the international community to find the political will to advance such an agenda.
Reversing the decades-long loss of labour income to profits and the shrinking public realm and ensuring corporations pay their fair share (Figure 1) is key for the global package to work, due to the positive effect of increased public investment and higher wages on consumption and private investment.

Figure 1: (a) Breaking the social contract​

Figure 1: (b) Not so taxing times (for some)
Average statutory corporate income tax rates, selected country groups, 2000-2018​

Source: UNCTAD secretariat calculations, based on the OECD Corporate Tax Statistics database.

The appropriate policy package will vary from country to country, but all will involve fiscal stimulus, public investment in infrastructure and green energy, and measures to boost wages (Figure 2).

Figure 2: (a) Repairing the social contract: Income from Employment as percentage of GDP​

Figure 2: (b) Total investment growth (private and public)
constant 2005 US$, ppp, year-on-year percentage change
Developed Economies​

Developing Economies, excluding China​

Fiscal expansion, to be paid for with progressive tax increases and credit creation, also becomes more powerful when coordinated, making it more capable of paying for itself. Critical to its effectiveness is the extent to which private investment is stimulated (crowded in) by the initial fiscal impulse. With many economies currently experiencing insufficient demand, the report expects that the fiscal stimulus will boost private investment and, consequently, productivity growth.
According to Mukhisa Kituyi, UNCTAD’s Secretary-General, “meeting the financing demands of the Agenda 2030 requires rebuilding multilateralism around the idea of a Global Green New Deal, and by implication a financial future very different from the recent past.” The report proposes a series of reform measures to make debt, capital and banks work for development, including:

• An expanded role for special drawing rights as a flexible and scalable financing mechanism that goes beyond liquidity provisioning to support long-standing calls for a global environmental protection fund providing predictable and stable emergency funding without strict policy conditionalities or limiting eligibility criteria.
• A global SDG-related concessional lending programme for low- and lower-middle-income developing countries combining a refinancing facility designed to allow participant countries to borrow on concessional terms and an additional lending facility designed to cover the external share of gross financing needs of the public sector until 2030.
• A global sustainable development fund capitalized and replenished by donor countries paying in their unfulfilled commitments to the official development assistance target of 0.7% of gross national income and providing dedicated resources to compensate for what was only partially delivered over past decades (estimated at over $3.5 trillion since 1990)
• Stronger regional monetary cooperation to refinance and promote intraregional trade and develop intraregional value chains, moving beyond simple regional reserve swap and pooling agreements to bridge liquidity constraints towards the more full-scale development of regional payment systems and internal clearing unions.
• A rules-based framework to facilitate an orderly and equitable restructuring of sovereign debt that can no longer be serviced according to the original contract, governed by a set of agreed principles and body of international law.
• Curtailing tax-motivated illicit financial flows through a unitary taxation system that recognizes that the profits of multinational enterprises (MNEs) are generated collectively at the group level and combined with a global minimum effective corporate tax rate on all MNE profits set at around 20% to 25%, which is the average of current nominal rates across the world.
• Making capital controls a permanent policy tool while keeping capital-account management out of the purview of regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements but providing multilateral coordination and oversight, including of capital outflows from developed countries.
• A network of leading central banks to aggressively promote climate financing by moving away from a narrow focus on price stability and inflation targeting and to backstop support for green finance in dedicated public banks and through more general guidance mechanisms, such as quantitative easing;
• Giving development and other public banks more capital so that they can scale up finance for development; directing resources of sovereign wealth funds, whose assets under management have reached $7.9 trillion, towards developmental needs, including through supporting development banks; coordination of the new generation of south banks to establish stronger south-south financing ties.

unctad.org | Bold action required to finance a global green new deal …

archived 27 Sep 2019 23:47:17 UTC

archive.li

 

[redcent]

Didn't the bro talk about the same things Greta talked about?

David blasts Australia

Yet nobody cares.

When a 16 year old girl talks though everyone shits their pants

I'm on the fence on climate change yet when it comes to blasting this kid I think the people who bash her are bullshit

 

[neverendingmidi]

That's my point exactly. What's so wrong with getting our shit together? Do you fuckers want to fill the gulf with oil every other Thursday? I really don't understand why so many people are against cleaning up after ourselves and not turning every fucking part of the country into some polluted shithole like in Ching Chong land.

Because they're barely talking about dealing with actual pollution. Unless you think bulldozing every building on the planet and rebuilding them as efficient "green" buildings where everybody gets 200 sq feet per person in their concrete studio apartments is a great idea, ala the Green New Deal.

 

[los pepes]

That's my point exactly. What's so wrong with getting our shit together? Do you fuckers want to fill the gulf with oil every other Thursday? I really don't understand why so many people are against cleaning up after ourselves and not turning every fucking part of the country into some polluted shithole like in Ching Chong land.

Because for some bizarre reason every solution that comes out of warmer weirdos ends up with the rest of us eating bugs.

No thanks.

 

[neverendingmidi]

I always say I'll take global warming seriously when the people shrieking about it act like they believe in what they're saying. Going on around the world air trips to 45 countries, living in their four homes that suck up more energy/resources than ten standard houses each, eating everything they demand I drop, yeah, hard for me to take any of the hypocrites seriously.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Speaking of terrifying movies, there was one about Nostradamus that kept me awake for weeks. I was around six when I saw it, and it was terrifying. Movies like these aren't odd. There's always been an attempt to keep us scared, movies only portrayed the doom, but before movies, you got prophets going around saying the world is ending. A scare population is easy to control.

That's my point exactly. What's so wrong with getting our shit together? Do you fuckers want to fill the gulf with oil every other Thursday? I really don't understand why so many people are against cleaning up after ourselves and not turning every fucking part of the country into some polluted shithole like in Ching Chong land.

Pollution and Global Warming are different things, though. I feel like there is a lot of things runing at the same time and I'm not so sure exactly what's even the goal. If Greta wants to clean the planet, then take a broomstick and start.

 

[Sheryl Nome]

Pollution and Global Warming are different things, though. I feel like there is a lot of things runing at the same time and I'm not so sure exactly what's even the goal. If Greta wants to clean the planet, then take a broomstick and start.

Pollution and Global warming are extremely related. Not all pollution contributes to global warming, but a lot of it does.

 

[BlueSpark]

What's so wrong with getting our shit together?

Getting our shit together, aka giving more tax money and power to governments and leftist activists.

These people don't give a fuck about the environment, it's just another call to action for simpletons who will bend over to these moral guardians at a hint of alarmism.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Pollution and Global warming are extremely related. Not all pollution contributes to global warming, but a lot of it does.

I get that, but both need different solutions. This is something that people have pointed out as a problem: many rally and protest, but give no solutions.

 

[AnOminous]

I get that, but both need different solutions. This is something that people have pointed out as a problem: many rally and protest, but give no solutions.

A major issue is we can do every reasonable thing that is within our own power, but what used to be called the Third World, now the "developing world," actually is developing, and when they have their own Industrial Revolution it isn't going to be clean in the least. If they don't have such a development, though, they're going to have mass starvation instead.

I suppose we could nuke them or something but I don't think people would find that a very moral solution.

 

[TowinKarz]

A major issue is we can do every reasonable thing that is within our own power, but what used to be called the Third World, now the "developing world," actually is developing, and when they have their own Industrial Revolution it isn't going to be clean in the least. If they don't have such a development, though, they're going to have mass starvation instead.

I suppose we could nuke them or something but I don't think people would find that a very moral solution.

Globalism was "sold" in the late 90's partially on the idea that it would be helpful for the environment if we just shipped all our modern manufacturing to the 3rd world and let them "skip" that Dickensian soot-and-flame-factory stage of industrial development, and all the factory workers could then just get new jobs at Starbucks or whatever....

Surprise, the companies just set those kinds of places up anyway since it was cheaper and there weren't any laws against doing it and coughed their way out of the smog, and then laughed the rest of the way to the bank.

It was only when the 21st Century rolled around and they started offshoring all the white-collar tech jobs under the same premise that people started to question the wisdom of the system at all.

 

[Gender Affirming Surgery]

A major issue is we can do every reasonable thing that is within our own power, but what used to be called the Third World, now the "developing world," actually is developing, and when they have their own Industrial Revolution it isn't going to be clean in the least. If they don't have such a development, though, they're going to have mass starvation instead.

I suppose we could nuke them or something but I don't think people would find that a very moral solution.

So why not give them nuclear and let them lead the way into WOW THIS DOESN’T SUCK clean energy?

Seriously we have the Abyssal Plains of the ocean, which are literally sterile—dump the toxic shit there, or the Moon—Jesus Christ.

 

[AnOminous]

So why not give them nuclear and let them lead the way into WOW THIS DOESN’T SUCK clean energy?

Seriously we have the Abyssal Plains of the ocean, which are literally sterile—dump the toxic shit there, or the Moon—Jesus Christ.

That's a myth and there's a bunch of shit down there including shit we know next to nothing about, including whether it connects to the stuff higher up in some critical way.