It’s the same argument with measles, polio, and tuberculosis. Who’s ever heard of anyone having those diseases, this vaccination talk is bullshit. Things have been so good in America for so long that most people in America have a very limited frame of reference on what bad really is.
The people in charge of the majority industrial nations listened to science advisors and lo it was improved, acidification is still happening but much slower. CFCs is another one, and the most successful piece of intergovernmental legislation ever. The holes stopped growing and started closing 😲
Yeah: allot of Republican rhetoric is this sort of "stop hitting yourself" deceit. Part of that is them just being awful people, but when it comes to successful programs like this it's also ideological: their worldview is built on the idea that Community cant solve problems, only Special Individuals
Maybe my education was different but during my health class (and later science) we were shown the horror show of past diseases and some of the ways we tried to treat them.
we were even supposed to do reports on some (i didnt because i hate homework)
There has been a decades long effort to create systems to circumvent traditional information channels and create distrust in education with zero pushback from those in power to do so.
Maybe that's why people keep trying to assign overly simplistic explanations to these outcomes.
Global warming has significantly more foundation than weather forecasts because weather forecasting has tens of thousands of variables. The warming effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is a quantifiable fact that is just simple physics. We don’t have acid rain bc we cut most NOx/SOx emissions.
When the SawStop controversy was going on, I (on a hunch) looked up discussions from when sealtbelts became mandatory. Shocking nobody, the exact same discussions were being held, that they would add money to the cost of the car, that they were a federal overreach, etc etc.
I've become increasingly convinced our main problem is not that our society and institutions have failed, but that we have succeeded so wildly that no one remembers the work it took to prevent bad things. Covid for instance killed a lot of people but it didn't put the fear of god into the rubes.
This is the real cause behind the saying about hard times making strong men and good times making weak men. It's not lack of strength or will to work. It's taking for granted what we have and not believing the complexity and constant uptake are actually required b/c bad things are impossible.
the education system is just obedience training with erstaz job training on the side. if you doubt me, look at the parts we willingly fund vs the parts we don't
You misunderstand me. In what time have more people been educated and where prosperity has been more widespread? This isn't to say there aren't still poor and vulnerable people, but if your theory is correct our politics should be getting better, not worse.
I would bet my paycheck on a weather app. Imagine if I do events outside and the probability of rain is high. These dudes cannot even build a proper strawman.
I remember visiting the Smoky Mountains as a kid. Nearly 40 years ago, the highest point in the chain was surrounded by denuded pine trees. To this day it’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen—but it was also completely reversed when we banned CFCs
The CFCs caused the hole in the ozone layer, not acid rain... but they were banned around the same time as SO2 scrubbers started to get installed in smokestacks, so the timeline still tracks.
They're also keen on bringing it back via "geoengineering" aka fucking with atm composition. Sulfur oxides being the new panacea (it even sounds nasty ffs), the mantra now is that if you really care about climate change you should be spraying it up in the stratosphere as if there was no tomorrow!
Part of my morning meeting in grade two is putting up the expected temperature high for the day. The kids ask their parents, who check their phone apps before school. The different apps are rarely different from each other by more than 1⁰, and they always match the thermometer that closely.
Acid rain, the ozone layer, COVID are all overwhelmingly success stories that show that humanity can get it's act together, work together, decisively and acheive positive outcomes for everyone.
It's maddening that so many people are brainwashed and only see division.
He said that “millions of kids” were transitioning with hormone blockers in the US every year but it’s less than a thousand. And that was supposed to be his whole thing that he made a “documentary” about.
OH MY GOD global warming has been broadly known of since at least the 1890s, when Svannte Arrhenius wrote about the impact of coal on the atmosphere. And he wasn't the first! Eunice Foote was doing experiments in the 50s.
These people are not only unserious, but tragically incurious.
It's gonna be impossible to mitigate climate change at this rate. If things start improving because of policy, you'll find people yapping off "see! climate change was never anything to worry about!". If its too late, they'll shrug their shoulders and resign to their fate.
Climate change also does not describe individual event outcomes but the cumulative effect of changing outcome frequencies on the environment. It sounds neat but would get you a 1 on an AP Stats exam
In my younger days I remember hearing that Sowell was a leading conservative intellectual, and, wanting to know as much as I could about the world, I picked up a couple of his books at the library. Within a chapter I realized that this kind of dishonest or insufficient thought is foundational.
It's called "climate change" for the "mentally challenged" aka GOP. I love how these ijits think starting up more coal burning & fracking will solve anything other than putting us first in the entire world in front of Bangladesh who's currently #1 for high pollution levels.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer and how the united states and other countries significantly reduced aerosol spray and other stuff to close? I do. Does this mean I can get my AquaNet back?
I'll be honest, I got so on the Thomas Sowell hate train (Because he somehow decided to exist in my Twitter feed) and I was incredibly angry that people had the gall to call him an intellectual, so I just debunked him in every post from this account.
Honestly I remember acid rain coming up a lot in media during the 90s but sadly usually in a way that never directly stated it was the result of pollution. Like little baby Eugene thought that clouds just did that in certain places kinda like tornadoes are problem in some regions but not others.
Same with COVID. Masks worked, but you can’t prove a negative. It reminds me of hiking when my clothes are treated with permethrin: “oh, no bugs here after all. I guess I didn’t need this.” See also, MMR vaccine.
It's difficult for people to grasp the idea of the "counterfactual". That is, the state of affairs that didn't happen but would have happened had you not done the thing that led to the current state of affairs.
Tricky. Have we avoided a terrorist attack because of TSA and the post 9/11 security state? Was John Roberts right that the Voting Rights Act wasn’t needed anymore because there was no voting discrimination? (No and no, but idiots abound).
I am proud to have been part of this project when I was a baby lawyer. The absolute open animus against Black and brown people voting was never something that was going to go away merely because its results were being kept in check.
With no disparagement intended for serious meteorological scientists, that has to be a very averaged number with a lot of desert in it.
Great Lakes region weather is wild. They do a decent job, but it's where the jet stream suddenly dips south, and it's just hard to predict.
former coworker told me that the odds of it raining are always 50/50 because it either rains or it doesn’t so I bet him a hundred bucks it wouldn’t rain in Phoenix the next day and he got mad
also, I probably would bet my paycheck every pay period on a weather forecast for tomorrow. if it's epsilon more predictive than a coinflip then statistically I'm coming out ahead in the end
The first quote is stupid anyway. We make bets on weather forecasts all the time. From "shall I evacuate my home?" to "should I cancel my trip to the beach tomorrow?" and also what does he think insurance is.
As someone who works in compliance carbon markets, I find it maddening that many people are too ignorant — I’ll excuse those who are too young — to recall that Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments (1990) helped us reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions through cap-and-trade.
Same with the ozone layer. We banned CFCs and reduced emissions by 97% and now the hole is shrinking and will eventually disappear. Idiots and grifters on the right pretend it was never a problem at all.
"Would you bet your paycheck on a nuclear attack tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on "nuclear deterence" predictions that have even less foundation?"
Actually yes. George Bird Grinnell recognized that the glacier that now bears his name in Glacier National Park was receding because of a warming climate a century ago.
People have known about the heat trapping properties of CO2 for a long time.
Was getting run over by a bus something anyone in North America worried about before your mom told you about it and made you hold her hand crossing the street?
and the ozone layer. And lead paint. Leaded gasoline. Asbestos building materials. Low-flow toilets. Sewage treatment. Catalytic converters. Airbags, backup cameras, antilock brakes. And, and, and. Problem solving is a liability, which is the action philosophy of the modern Republican party.
The ozone layer isn't even that fixed, the hole just stopped getting bigger. (And it will start growing again now that somebody is letting satellites burn up in the atmosphere in an unprecedented rate)
(This isn't to downplay the effectiveness of the fix nor collective action everybody took on it btw, we did stop it after all, and quickly. So capability for quick large changes is there, it is just that some damage is not easy to undo).
Why did you include backup cameras in the list of unarguably good things? Backup cameras are neutral, not good. What we need are smaller, lower vehicles
Good for me. I would have run over a kid once--or at least knocked him down-- if the car I was driving (not my car) had not had one, so it's personal. We can have lower vehicles, too, but that isn't a problem solved yet.
Some of Sowell's comments are pretty hard to take issue with on their face, but this one is kinda dumb. The weather tomorrow is not in the least consequential, catastrophic global warning is existential.
Actually, *most* of Sowell’s quotes are dumb, because they mostly translate to something “everybody knows (& says”, but was proven absolutely wrong by decades of researchers.
Conservative acquaintance of mine mentioned that the Ozone layer “fixed itself” as evidence that we don’t need to do anything about climate change. I noted that it was “fixed” by a broad international agreement to limit the use of aerosols and he just kind of shrugged it off.
I've got a parent who came to LA a few times in their college days and they talk about not being able to see the mountains. They are right there. Like, huge, sharp, west coast kill you if you aren't paying attention mountains. Maybe two miles away.
Not the reason for your quote, but weather predictions are astonishingly accurate given the level of precision they require. Climate models have to hit the average of conditions over extended periods of time in given regions. Weather prediction tells you what it's going to be like outside in 3 days.
Yeah, I'm confused, I would absolutely bet my paycheck that tomorrow's weather forecast will be reasonably accurate. Low of 32, high of 52, sunny with some clouds? Yeah, sounds about right.
Variations of this Sowell quote have been floating around online for years. I assume it has its origin in a quip he started a long time ago when weather prediction wasn't as accurate as it is now. Still, the main problem with the reasoning is not understanding how they are modeling different things.
It always feels like bit, left over from 40-50years ago. “The weather guy is never correct, amirite! Har har har.” Not only is weather prediction surprisingly accurate these days, if folks read or watch a whole forecast they are incredibly good at explaining why there may be variations.
If an engineer had thought to reinforce the pilot door on the 9/11 flights and the event therefore never happened, would the engineer have even been recognised?
People failing Chesterton's Fence & the Preparedness Paradox & there being an entire industry to exploit that makes my opinion of the future very grim, to where every gain is temporary, 30-40 years tops then back to another 100 of solutions undone.
Comments
As ever, "everything is a conspiracy when you have no idea how anything works"
If the weather is within 5 degrees of the forecasted temp tomorrow, your house will burn down. Would you shell out your paycheck for insurance?
we were even supposed to do reports on some (i didnt because i hate homework)
did other people not have to do that?
Maybe that's why people keep trying to assign overly simplistic explanations to these outcomes.
*the dumbest subset.
People are very stupid.
https://www.weathercompany.com/blog/complete-guide-to-accurate-weather-forecasting/
Education plus good times makes strong, thriving people.
Scientists fix something, idiots claim magic fairies did it
Short-term unpredictability does not imply long-term unpredictability. Everyone with any knowledge of basic statistics should know this.
Acid rain, the ozone layer, COVID are all overwhelmingly success stories that show that humanity can get it's act together, work together, decisively and acheive positive outcomes for everyone.
It's maddening that so many people are brainwashed and only see division.
Presumably because he was too young to remember the banning of CFCs and didn't bother looking it up.
These people are not only unserious, but tragically incurious.
Because when we listen to the experts we can FIX THE GODDAMN PROBLEMS
Like acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer
http://www.papergreat.com/2012/10/an-unfortunate-1940-advertisement-for.html
These inane tactics will impress the stupid and infuriate those in the know.
It's as deliberate as it is morally and intellectually bankrupt!
Actor Ronald Regan, "Texan Cowboy"Bush Jr, and Reality T.V Star Donald Trump:
That's who they admire. The real tough guy deep-state operative? They spit on.
https://voting.law.umich.edu/
You would reach more people, when you add a good description into the Alt-text field.
That is pretty easy, especially, when your image just contain text.
This way, you support visually impaired people and everyone else, who rely on a good filled Alt-text.
#accessibility
Great Lakes region weather is wild. They do a decent job, but it's where the jet stream suddenly dips south, and it's just hard to predict.
I mean, he probably is
People have known about the heat trapping properties of CO2 for a long time.
https://www.openculture.com/2021/11/carl-sagan-warns-congress-about-climate-change-1985.html
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/are-starlinks-satellites-depleting-the-ozone/
I mean, for as long as we keep the NOAA.
We'll be using CFCs & lead gas in my lifetime.