Feels odd that the effort is against misinformation and not the root cause itself. Quite often it feels like misinformation is more important, or at least talked about more
The big negotiation going on in COP29 is funding for mitigation and adaptation, not the root cause, not stopping/lowering fossil fuel emissions, but if you get hit by a superstorm you get financing on repair of the broken infrastructure.
That is throwing the towel in my book. Nothing will be done so at least we can try to rebuild something after it got destroyed/sunk/whatever, and it doesn't deal with the middle or long term consequences of this keeping going on and worsening.
You gotta carve a path through the Meat Shield o' Mooks before you can effectively battle their Boss.
Unless the Boss reanimates them faster than you can carve through them...
I think a some of the opposition in the US is simply people who hate East Coast values, so they oppose it to the degree that coastal elites push it. Having spent some time in New England, I can understand that even if I that is foolish way to act: New England seems to be pretty self-righteous in their views of how things should be, and everyone else is just wrong and it's them, those unrighteous people who oppose our views that are holding back society, and we should fix it by passing laws to force them to do it our way. (Colin Woodard calls this "Yankeedom" in his book "American Nations" and posits that American politics is historically the Yankees (which includes places settled by Yankees, so the West coast and the mid north to Minnesota) trying to push something and everyone else resisting it.)
If I'm correct in this, then one would find less opposition by talking about it less and trying less to force people to change. A lot of Red states are adopting wind and solar because it's more cost-effective; every time I visit Oklahoma I see more wind farms, despite conspiracy theories being the local truths. And I've never heard anyone complain about the wind farms, either. If electric cars were noticeably cheaper, I think even conspiracy-theory Republicans would find a way to justify purchasing one.
Misinformation is the clearly the most important power.
It's not odd at all. It's just the method by which they plan to criminalize their political opposition. They don't talk about the root cause because they are all liars themselves, and the only thing they care about persecuting their enemies. Addressing the causes will hit uncomfortably close to home.
Brazil's president, the exact same guy who this article claims is "leading the new international effort against climate change", has literally admitted in front of cameras that he goes to events like these and just makes up numbers on the spot. He goes to places, preferably places filled with foreigners, and just starts spouting nonsense statistics. This event was probably no exception. His ministers also engage in this healthy tradition, not too long ago one of them was claiming a hundred million brazilians were dying of hunger. They'll say anything if it gets them what they want.
I don't even have any particular objections to their pathological lying. They're politicians, that's what they do. It gets ridiculous though when they start accusing their opponents of "fake news", when they start trying to criminalize it. To me it's just beyond absurd to watch this particular guy and his people object to "misinformation" of all things.
The rest of the world will have to pick up climate leadership now that US is not going to be there.
Leadership?
I guess it was sacarstic
hopefully, though I doubt that much can be done without US
Yep, if US decide to pump CO2 for their AI overlord, it is going to be no use even if China pump more green energy to the grid...
It puzzles me why the rest of the world would even bother with this.
We impoverish ourselves when we chase climate goals by restricting our own industries and economic activities. Meanwhile the US puts a couple more centuries of distance between itself and developing nations.
What, exactly, are 'climate lies' in this context? My position is that there is no 'climate emergency' but a possible 'climate challenge' independent of whether any change in climate is mainly caused by human activities or is the result of natural phenomena. It is more or less comparable to what Shellenberger writes in Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All [1] or Koonin in Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters [2], i.e. the challenges posed by a changing climate can and will be met with technological and economical means and will only marginally affect potential future economic development all over the world. As it stands I have yet to see any evidence which negates this position. Will I be allowed to voice this opinion or will activists in the name of this 'international effort' accuse me of 'climate lies'? This is a rhetorical question since I suspect I already know the answer and that answer is affirmative: those who go against the desired narrative will be accused of 'climate lies'.
The net effect of this 'international effort' will be an increase in polarisation but that may just be the desired effect. If this is the case the supporters of this type of effort should have a good hard look at the outcome of the last election in the USA as well as recent elections in Europe to see whether this strategy is effective in gaining political support - it isn't. All it does is increase the distance between where these activists stand and where the general public - for lack of a better term - think they should go. The net effect will be for the cause espoused by these activists to be tainted by affiliation with their movement and with that something which can be used by populist politicians to gain support by denouncing the activists. In case of 'climate activism' this is not a bad thing in and of itself but since 'climate activism' has been inserted into real issues like environmental and wildlife protection those causes will suffer as a consequence.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50173134-apocalypse-neve...
Koonin's book is basically a strawman attack on climate science, he attacks the position that the science is settled while climate scientists don't ever take that position. The consensus of climate science states quite clearly their findings, there's nothing "untold" as even the fringe 3% out of the consensus have published their studies but they go against the grain and so are drowned by the science which shows that yes, climate change is real, yes, it's caused by human activity, and yes it might have unforeseen disastrous effects. Another strawman is trying to pin "climate science denialism" to "Holocaust denialism" which is frankly absurd.
Of course given the scale of the challenge and potential negative effects there will be technologies to try to mitigate it, and necessary economic changes but the whole point is that even with those humanity will suffer through immense hardship if we don't act timely. The issue is never if there will be a magical solution to it but if we can avoid the more extreme side-effects to diminish as much as possible the suffering and hardship.
I invite you to stop just looking for the contrarian position and do deeper research on what the consensus is, what are the current gaps in knowledge the consensus is trying to remedy with research. I personally know quite a few PhDs in climate science who did their studies at Stockholms Universitet in different fields: physics, biology, marine biology, biochemistry, through them I was able to see what is the current state of the field, and very smart people have been studying it for quite long, dismissing all of that just because you read a couple of books giving voices to the contrarians is just that: contrarian.
Unfortunately a lot of climate scientists have toned down the actual alarmism they face on their research, exactly to not ruffle feathers like yours to become even more contrarian, the actual current understanding of how bad it will be is quite worse than the public discourse. So if you feel there's alarmism in what you read through mainstream channels, don't fret about the alarmism, it seems to be way worse than that given our current most up-to-date models.
In a way, yes, you've fallen into climate lies, and the danger is exactly what you exposed here: you'll believe it and feel you are more correct than 97% of the consensus because you found a cozy contrarian position to lean into.
> Unfortunately a lot of climate scientists have toned down the actual alarmism they face on their research
Science and alarmism do not go together, the recent unpleasantness around SARS2 is a good example of where it leads.
So no, I have not 'fallen for climate lies', I just do not agree with your position. There are many others who do not agree either, reports about 'consensus' among '99% of scientists' notwithstanding. I do have my reasons and did not just 'read a few books' - I studied meteorology and read a number of the IPCC reports (not just the media summary) so I do have some background in this material, i.e. I'm not just aping whatever loud voices are out there on the 'net.
Let's just agree to disagree here and leave the term 'climate lies' to those who are intent on using it as a club to keep dissidents at bay. A club, I should add which has the opposite effect of what its wielders intend.
China gets it. There'll be little action unless renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. When EVs are cheaper than ICE cars. The cost and availability of goods is a powerful force.
Solar panels are the cheapest form of energy, half the price of US panels. EVs are cheaper than ICE cars in China. EVs already make majority of new cars sold. If US allowed tariff free imports of BYD, they'd be the best selling cars in US.
Yeah China had to subsidize and get their industries jumpstarted. They're flourishing now.
Economic policy ultimately dictates action.
Biden tried and Trump is likely to reverse it. China has a blessing and a curse of being able to plan and execute long term.
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WTF
The event alone probably costs more than a few million USD in transport and security.
I don’t think it’s fair to downplay this since there are very few countries in it. We should shame countries outside these initiatives
I think it's fair to feel outraged.
20 million wouldn't fix emissions in a single city. Let alone make a dent in the world.
Contrast that to the military budgets that together surely surpass billions USD.