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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   39553 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Incidentally, people have speculated (and I agree with them) that climate change will reduce the US to a regional power at best, that will no longer be able to sustain its status as the world's sole superpower.

How? The northern hemisphere is going to get a boost in crop yields.

Studies that separate out climate change from other factors affecting crop yields have shown that yields of some crops (e.g., maize and wheat) in many lower-latitude regions have been affected negatively by observed climate changes, while in many higher-latitude regions, yields of some crops (e.g., maize, wheat, and sugar beets) have been affected positively over recent decades. https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/

The US will likely continue on its trajectory, losing power relative to the rest of the world, but not because of climate change.

I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.

The world trends on energy, resource usage and ecological degradation I think tend to support the conclusion.

You mean trends like this:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maize-production?country=~OWID_WRL

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-output-dollars

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production

Are your beliefs falsifiable?

Can you give me something shorter than a book?

My links are just the straight line of constantly increasing food production through time. This is concrete, things you hold in your hand and put in your mouth. Not models and speculation. You say there's erosion, ecological degradation, but it has not seriously affected us . Every year people warn of peak oil and limited resources, and every year the line creeps upwards as always.

Am I understanding you right, you think the IPCC is too optimistic? Because I think it's too pessimistic.

I'll listen to one podcast/youtube vid. Which do you pick?

I went with "1: The mineral supply crisis that's rarely talked about ."

So as I thought, it’s the old malthusians, peak oil, peak copper, Paul ehrlich crowd. I’m sure my grandchildren will be having the same argument against those people, like my grandparents before me, and their grandparents before them.

“That can’t go on forever”

The old argument from infinity at the heart of the doomer mindset. It goes: Limited resources, unlimited growth. The sleight of hand here is that you can’t go from an argument to infitinty to a prediction of the near future. Limited resources, unlimited growth was valid 2000 years ago, 200 years ago, 20 years ago. Does it mean our ancestors were running out of resources and should have embraced de-growth?

“the conventional reserves of oil are decreasing between 5 and 7% per year’

Reserves grow faster than production. In 1980, we had 30 years of oil reserve left. In 2020, so ten years after we were supposed to have nothing left, plus all the increase in consumption, it’s 54 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left?time=earliest..2021&facet=none

“Paul Ehrlich was right”

The man who predicted that in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death, and all major marine wildlife would be extinguished? Those people will never update.

We shouldn’t have said ‘we’ll have peak oil at a particular date’ . We should say ‘the macro trend shows we’ll have a problem sometimes in the future‘. Instead of focusing on a date, we should focus on a trend.

Ah good, they almost admit they were wrong. Their solution for the constant humiliations they suffer is to make the theory less falsifiable.

This is a pointless comment. Why don't you make the point yourself and cite the data you refer to, and I'll answer that in detail.

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