POG Politics Thread Version 3
Come on in! Since Dustin is taking his ball and going home, it's time to start a new politics thread.
No I saw something on that it said he was making I think it said violent advances on some dude despite missing a leg and being half in a coma.
another example of the fair and balanced complete bs is climate change.
like 99.9% of scientsts would stake their career on climate change being caused by human behavior.
this is not accurate
you're confusing caused with accelerated
the disagreement is not whether or not it's happening, but rather to what degree we are influencing it
climate change is a tale as old as time
this is not accurate
you're confusing caused with accelerated
the disagreement is not whether or not it's happening, but rather to what degree we are influencing it
climate change is a tale as old as time
ai response to "history of climate change denial" (emphases added):
Climate change denial has its roots in the mid-20th century, with fossil fuel industry leaders aware of the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels as early as the 1950s. Internal documents show that companies like Exxon, Shell, and Mobil conducted research confirming the link between CO₂ emissions and global warming by the 1970s and 1980s.
Despite this knowledge, the fossil fuel industry launched a coordinated campaign to cast doubt on climate science. Starting in the late 1980s, organizations like the Global Climate Coalition (GCC)—funded by oil, automotive, and manufacturing industries—worked to challenge climate science and block regulations. Tactics included manufacturing uncertainty, funding contrarian scientists, and promoting disinformation.
Conservative think tanks and political groups adopted climate skepticism as a core issue, particularly after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute amplified denial narratives, framing climate action as a threat to free markets and economic freedom.
Denial arguments evolved over time: from denying warming altogether, to claiming it was natural, not harmful, or that climate policies would cause more economic damage than environmental benefit. These efforts were supported by a network of industry-funded reports, op-eds, and media campaigns.
By the 2000s, as scientific consensus became overwhelming, outright denial shifted toward dismissal and delay, with political figures like Donald Trump promoting conspiracy theories and rejecting climate science. However, legal and investigative efforts—such as the Climate Deception Dossiers—have since exposed decades of deliberate misinformation by major fossil fuel companies.
Today, while public acceptance of climate change has grown, the legacy of this denial campaign continues to influence policy debates and public perception, particularly in the United States.
tale as old as time
not happening --> not our fault --> too late now
Did you ever watch The Mclaughlin Group?
It was a crabby guy who shouted at people on PBS way before Rush Limbaugh ever thought of it.
Anyway, one time some lady was talking about this and made the mistake of saying "a climactic event" and John shouted at her "It's a climatic event, we're not discussing climax on my show!"
Cuba's power grid has collapsed.
The theocratic US Regime probably gonna try to roll in there soon to take th island from the people. Rip Cuba.
jfc you are stupid
we were talking specifically about the scientific community
time and time again you miss the point entirely and don't even know what is being discussed but still want to contribute some ai slop anyway - the irony of course is if you just copy pasted the ai wouldn't have made the same mistake you did because you're genuinely that dumb that you can't even be trusted to not copy paste a one liner because you'll still get it wrong in transition
off to the ignore list, that's the 3rd strike
I'll miss your constructive and thoughtful responses, but I totally understand your frustration. I don't spend enough time reading or writing, given the gravity of all this stuff, and it's easy to take things personally here.
"Geh mit Gott", as my grandfather would say.
That is a long swim through shark infested waters but I remember when Diana Nyad did it.
O'Leary has really been a blow to the Kevins. Doing all right up to that.
The Kevins are a strong group.
for example, with trickle-down:
we should lower taxes on the rich fine. But what you cannot do is say "lowering taxes on the rich is going to help the middle class and poor". That is factually incorrect.
if you operate on the presumption that capital is (1) rational and (2) interested primarily in internal reinvestment, then the logic of trickle-down starts to make more sense
Abstraction aside, we have decades of empirical data that shows it does not help the middle class and poor people. That is what I mean about facts.
another example of the fair and balanced complete bs is climate change.
like 99.9% of scientsts would stake their career on climate change being caused by human behavior.
this is not accurate
you're confusing caused with accelerated
the disagreement is not whether or not it's happening, but rather to what degree we are influencing it
climate change is a tale as old as time
lol the most distinction without a difference there ever was
There were people dying every day in Hiroshima of old age and terminal illnesses. You are confusing caused with accelerated. The US did not cause death in Hiroshima, just accelerated it! It is not a question of whether it happened or not, just the degree to which the US influenced it.
Hard to say what could be going on here!
this isn't climate denial
climate change is real and it has always been real, long before humans showed up. that's actually the whole point I'm trying to make.
there is however, a genuine, serious disagreement in the scientific literature that almost never makes it into mainstream coverage, and I think that gap is the actual reason we can't agree on what to do about it
two well-respected, peer-reviewed modeling frameworks reach completely opposite conclusions about our role. one set of models says we're accelerating a natural warming trend, another set says the earth would actually be cooling right now if not for us, which means we're not just causing warming, we're responsible for more than 100% of the observed change, because we first had to cancel out a natural cooling before we could push temperatures up. Both positions have serious scientists behind them. neither belief is fringe
the reason you don't hear about this disagreement is pretty straightforward. ,ost people who cover climate science professionally believe that acknowledging this level of uncertainty hands ammunition to bad-faith actors who want to use it as an excuse for total inaction - ie what would mark do with this info??? so they don't mention it. the nuance gets sanitized out before it reaches you
then there's the chart problem. that cute little 2,000-year temperature chart that gets cited constantly in these discussions is essentially meaningless at the scale we're talking about. looking at 2,000 years to understand earth's climate is like looking at your last orbit of poker hands to determine your actual win rate. that sample size is a rounding error on a geologic timescale but it looks cool on social media so it gets shared a lot as if it were meaningfull
when you actually zoom out and look at a legit sample for things of geological scale, sudden and dramatic temperature shifts are not an anomaly. greenland has experienced temperature jumps of 8 to 16 degrees C in a matter of decades, with no human involvement whatsoever. these are called dansgaard-oschger events, and they happened roughly 25 times during the last ice age alone. the younger dryas, which was a sudden cold snap that ended just as abruptly as it started, saw global temperatures shift several degrees in what amounts to a human lifetime. The African Sahara was lush grassland and lakes as recently as 5,000 years ago, and then flipped to desert in about a century due to a minor shift in the Earth's orbital tilt hitting a tipping point in the monsoon system. none of this involved a single coal plant.
so it's hilarious to go "omg look the temperature never changed before and now it's 1 degree different over a 150 year timespan"
but i digress, the point isn't that humans have no effect. the point is that the earth is a chaotic, non-linear system that has always been capable of violent, rapid change without our help.
with that knowledge, the question of how much of the current warming is us versus background noise is genuinely hard to answer, and the honest answer is that the scientific community doesn't fully agree either
IPCC, which is the body most people cite as the consensus, runs something called the CMIP6 model ensemble, which is about 100 different climate models from labs around the world. but that obscures that they individually do not agree with each other. a lot of them "run so hot" that the IPCC's own AR6 report had to manually downweight a third of its own models because they were producing temperatures so high they were labeled 'implausible.' When your consensus document has to throw out a third of its inputs for being too extreme, that's not consensus
we had several models in our lifetime claiming there'd be no polar ice remaining by 2014 at latest - when you google search model accuracy you tend to get survivorship bias of the good models which were good so people still talk about them all the time - you don't get those ones mentioned which would get laughed out the door like "there's probably not going to be any ice left by 2010"
the political deadlock on climate action isn't primarily caused by bad faithed people like mark, though there's plenty of that too. it's caused by a genuine mathematical problem beyond the scope of optimizing deals at outback steakhouse and olive garden. if you don't know whether the natural baseline is trending up, trending down, or flat, you can't calculate how much any specific intervention will actually move the outcome. if the earth was headed for natural cooling and we cancelled that out, reducing our emissions might just let the natural cooling resume, which is a very different calculation than if we're purely adding heat to a system that was stable. the policy math is different depending on which model you believe, and nobody has definitively settled that question
i'm not saying do nothing. i'm saying we should be honest about what we know, what we don't know, and why reasonable people looking at the same data can reach different conclusions. pretending the uncertainty doesn't exist doesn't make it go away. it just makes the argument more tribal and less solvable
if you were serious about solving climate change, you wouldn't attack people who tried to approach it with rationality - you aren't you're treating it like a zealot
I changed my mind here is a meme
amp you should consider contacts
The guy in the meme is the great bodybuilder Nasser El Sonbaty. He passed away a few years ago. It is highly suspected that he posted as GH15 on the internet. I learned everything I know about blasting and cruising steroids from GH15 and was a "wizard" on his steroid forum 🫡 you can imagine what you get access to as a wizard of a steroid forum.
You need to organize your thinking, rick.
I could dissect all the issues with that post you made, but I think you would just ignore me so probably not worth it.
amp did you buy any of his underwear?
I was panicking this morning worrying if it was morally ok to live in the usa
what did you do this morning mark?
