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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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it obviously doesn't mean

It obviously DOES mean to cause distress and prompt significant actions right away.

It's not a gish gallop, it's a collection of hysterical failed doomsday predictions. Of course doomsday predictions don't come to fruition, they never do. The point is to remind everyone how long the same kind of tactics have been used, and how false every manipulative claim really is.

There's no way for you to sweep this away in that manner. Just read it:

The earth has entered a period of climatic change that is likely to cause widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century if emissions of heat-trapping gases are not reduced, according to experts advising the world's governments.

We're there. We're in a period of climatic change. No hedges, no if-only. We're there, we're in the middle of the period of change.

Except....they go on to describe some of the problems:

At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.

Balderdash. Complete phooey. Made up out of whole cloth. No beach has lost sixty feet in the intervening thirty years.

Or this one predicting an ice free Artic well over ten years ago:

How long do we have before the Arctic summer sea ice disappears?

Given present trends in extent and thickness, the ice in September will be gone in a very short while, perhaps by 2015. In subsequent years, the ice-free window will widen, to 2-3 months, then 4-5 months etc, and the trends suggest that within 20 years time we may have six ice-free months per year.

And yet, what do we actually see? Over ten years later and we're still waiting for the first ice free day.

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