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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Well, it's pretty easy to explain why humans are getting fatter, it's because we're eating too much. In fact the changing fad diets all seem to be based on the idea that you can somehow eat your way into not being fat. I suspect this idea might hold some blame as to why people are getting fatter.

Regardless one and two does indeed imply three and adapting to a warmer planet has no bearing on whether the planet is warming, on the contrary it kinda requires it.

(1) and (2) does imply (3) but it’s not always true. Natural systems can have mean reverting systems (or breakout) systems. The amount of food you eat does not strictly translate to getting fatter because most people’s metabolism increases when they eat more so there is a naturally mean reversion. Especially since the AGW story was sold on runaway temperature rises and not something that would have system in place that could cancel out a rising temperature.

You actually do need a nearly flawless model of the earths system to make prediction on more CO2 leading to runaway temperature growth and I have not see evidence that we have really good models on the earth.

I am just point out that (1) and (2) does not mean problematic climate change. That actually takes far more complicated science.

I think it'd be really difficult to fairly test, but the correlation between increasing global CO2 and BMI strikes me as a potential causation that would, if nothing else, be funny. "We're getting fat because average CO2 concentrations have increased 50%" isn't something I've seen tested, even if the linkage isn't understood. IIRC someone here once linked to a study showing that lab mice on the same controlled diets get fatter than they did decades ago.

I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it. As far as I can see if it wasn't dug out of the ground and burned then it doesn't contribute to global warming in a meaningful way. Main reason I'm skeptical about the agriculture stuff on that pie chart I linked.

“ I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it”

  • Besides from that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play?

Which is why I said initially (1) and (2) don’t really matter but (3) which the model. How the system interacts with itself is all that matters.

That being said for decades it seemed like the real goal of climate activists was drawing in communists/degrowthwers as an angle to attack western civilization. The actual climate models and whether we should be concerned I believe is past human IQ to figure out. So the entire debate was a capitalist-communists fight played out in climate science indirectly that no one understood.

Regardless one and two does indeed imply three

They don't really say anything about the magnitude of three though -- unless you have a good model of the system as a whole, which we don't.

Luckily with that you can just check vs reality to see the magnitude. CO2 levels are currently at 427 ppm over the 280 is was before the industrial revolution, and temps are at about 1.5℃ above pre-industrial. So pretty damn close to 0.01 degrees per ppm.

You... think that global temperature (whatever that even means) has a direct linear relationship with (average) atmospheric CO2?

I'm fairly sure that's an oversimplification...

I don't mean to be glib, but intuiting a linear relationship from correlation in a complex system is famously unreasonable.

Whenever this debate comes up i'm just reminded of so called technical analysis and all the fallacies that come up in it. Just substitute temperature for the price of a stock and you got them all:

  • price is doing this, which means it's going to keep doing this
  • price is doing this in a short time frame, which means it is or will do this in a long time frame
  • price followed this pattern in the past, which means it's going to follow this pattern this time
  • price did a move after this event, so it's going to do the same move after the event repeats

And so on and so on. People just don't seem to have the humility to accept that complex systems are hard to model. That's not to say the climate scientists are necessarily wrong, but it's tremendously difficult to actually make a valid argument either way, and such a small proportion of the debate is that.

No we can't just eyeball it, for the same reason you can't just eyeball your options strategy unless you want to donate all your money to Wall Street.

Yes linear is silly. A lot of it depends on the model which we are not good at. I think some had like Russia permafrost melting and releasing a lot of carbon buried under it which would accelerate heating. I have no idea if that is true. But you could have a model where some natural thing starts happening when temperatures rise which cancels out more carbon.

So the model which is (3) is the dominating part of the equation and without a doubt the weakest part of the science.

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