As a species we took on some climate debt to improve our standard of living, and we’ve been talking bigger loans every year. Those loans are coming due in the form of larger and more frequent weather-based disasters as well as health problems for millions. If we start paying off the loan more aggressively now, we can help prevent harsher payment plans for the next 50 years.
You don’t pay off a house all at once, but you’ll thank your future self for paying it off earlier rather than later.
> I don't see why current generations' lives should be tougher just to help out future generations.
Most people want a good life not only for them but also for their children, and their children's children. I don't have children, but I still want a good life for future generations. Is that not simple basic human decency?
Note that the longer we wait, the more difficult we make it ourselves to change things, and the more tough even our own lives are going to be, even ignoring future generations.
> There needs to be a healthy balance.
Yes. The status quo is not a healthy balance (or arguably any kind of balance).
Missouri and Florida were won by Trump and both passed constitutional amendments to guarantee abortion access.
> think vaccines cause autism
I don't think this is a partisan issue. I've spoken to plenty of liberals who believe similar things. Basically the "crunchy mom" stereotype.
Oh god, you're one of them, aren't you?
It's not like there's literally decades of evidence showing climate change to be objective truth...
Sigh.
Great job.
I'm not denying climate change as a whole or in absolute, I just want to point out that there's enough evidence to think that the world as we know it won't actually end in 2012 as some studies indicate.
What you probably mean is how humans influence this cycle; whether accelerating or delaying it, in effect disrupting it. For that, there's no evidence; however, there are many politician lobbyists (and yes, also scientists taking advantage of juicy grants to deliver what was ordered) going to capitalize on the fear that it might be.
Le sigh.
Do you get it?
To be less punchy: Most of the data on the graph is on a scale of 500 years and the data is filled in with dashed lines. Starting the late 1800's we suddenly have real data(what is the update frequency?, how does that compare to previous data?)
Here is the note on the graphic: "Limits of this data: Short warming or cooling spikes may be 'smoothed out' by these reconstructions but only if they are small enough or brief enough"
What is small enough? What is brief enough?
We know, with absolute certainty for an undeniable fact, that Exxon's own climate scientists skillfully and accurately predicted climate change as a result of increasing fossil fuel use [1].
And we know that Exxon's response to that was to systematically sow doubt for decades, using tobacco-lobby style FUD tactics.
And yet you want us to err on the side of apocalypse. "What if we create a better world, and it was all for nothing".
You've been conned. I know how difficult it is to show someone they've been made a fool of, and I won't try. In fact, I agree with you that in many cases science ought to be questioned - lobotomies, mockery of germ theory, racism presented as science based, Daszak's infamous Lancet paper, etc.
On climate change though, there's very little to respect on the side of deniers. I would argue that, at this point, denying anthropogenic climate change amounts to treason against life.
0 - https://phys.org/news/2021-10-humans-climate.html
1 - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
Red herring, whataboutism, false dilemma, straw man, tu quoque, hasty generalization, moral equivalence, and appeal to extremism.
And with a dehumanization cherry on top.
My secondary concern is your refusal to acknowledge/engage with the data which was presented to you, both in text and in interactive graphs.
And that's more than enough concern for me to refuse further engagement.
... Also, yes, the West is responsible for the vast majority of CO2 release. It's not remotely close [0].
* The United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions [at 4% of world population].
* This is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor [18% of world population].
* The 28 countries of the European Union (EU-28) – which are grouped here as they typically negotiate and set targets on a collaborative basis – is also a large historical contributor at 22%.
* Many of the large annual emitters today – such as India and Brazil – are not large contributors in a historical context.
* Africa’s regional contribution – relative to its population size – has been very small. This is the result of very low per capita emissions – both historically and currently.
People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds, which Parent obviously struggles with.
I don't deny anthropogenic climate change, on the contrary, I'm believe it's real and there's evidence for it.
I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
> I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
Then say that. Poe's law is rampant on this topic. If you want to be understood, then you need to write clearly and plainly.
> People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds
We're so, so far from a healthy middle ground on the discussion around climate change; and comments like yours above push in the wrong direction.
Questioning "what we are told" on climate change without differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying, is guaranteed to receive clapback from any right minded individual.
So, don't act surprised when there's pushback. It's not "small-minded", it's people responding sensibly to the words you wrote.
My tone is, after all, pushback, precisely because we didn't start from a middle ground to begin with (parent's comment). I am pushing in a direction. You might disagree with it, and that's fine.
> differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying
Even if what scientists say can be inaccurate, as has happened throughout history, the point is rather that I question what politicians or the industry says, based on Science, because while the science might be correct, the message is easily corrupted.
How is that avoidable?
200,000 BC, were we still humans? 2 mya? 20?
Or for individuals, why care about a fertilised egg rather than (as per Monty Python) "every sperm is scared"?
No matter what we pick, it's arbitrary.
At what level of development is a human foetus anatomically distinguishable from a cow foetus?
There's no fact-based reason to draw the line in any particular place. We, humanity, don't know what "personhood" really is beyond the laws we write while guessing and the just-so stories we tell each other to justify those laws.
That's why I'm vegetarian, and why I'd become vegan quickly as soon as someone can get milk from GM bacteria. (And sell it in supermarkets).
It's also one of two reasons why I try to be nice to LLMs: just in case. (The other reason takes it as read they have no experience of existence: by being trained on humans, they'll do better and worse exactly when real humans would do better and worse, and that means worse on holiday season and when getting insulted).
It's self-awareness, at least in general and as considered by a court when granting it to a chimp.
It's also why I would likely never go vegan, although I do advocate for a drastic overhaul of animal welfare standards.
* or 5, if this list also has "personhood" in it
No, not really. It has pretty standard definitions in philosophy and science, or it wouldn't have been able to be tested for over several decades. I suggest spending some time reading the wiki, it gives a pretty detailed overview.
The only point you have is about consciousness, and we don't need to understand the entire thing to understand parts of it or observe it, just like gravity.
• The ability to recognise one's own body as distinct from that of others, as demonstrated by plants.
• The ability to pass the mirror test, which some AI pass, but whose relevance is widely debated in animal psychology both on the grounds of sensory chauvinism and because it may cause both false positives and false negatives owing to us not being able to converse with the animals we're testing.
• Introspection, except that now we've got LLMs responding much the same way Turing hoped they would when outlining his eponymous test and suggesting that a "viva voce" interrogation would have us know if the machine was innovative or "learnt it parrot fashion"*.
As humans are also demonstrably great at confabulating reasons for their acts (see: split brain surgery, specifically experimental research on patients' cognitive functioning after surgery), it is unclear whether humans score any differently than LLMs in this test irregardless of if LLMs do or don't count as people in any other sense.
• Qualia: nobody knows.
• Mindfulness, meditation and spirituality: arguably only those who explicitly practice the appropriate mental techniques, e.g. Buddhist monks and similar.
• Public/social awareness of self-standing in community: everyone who is "cringe" fails.
* fun fact: AI critics have been stochastically parroting the stochastic parrot criticism since at least 1949
Like I said, it's actually very well defined because it's been being studied for decades at this point. Just because it can sometimes be an overloaded term in colloquial usage doesn't negate that.
I again suggest you give the wiki page a read. It's quite in-depth and detailed with plenty of good references.
That makes it not well defined.
I did in fact read the Wikipedia page, and also have an A-level in philosophy, which means I've written more about this in three homework esseys than the total length of the English Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
It's absolutely well defined it's just a complex topic. Most of the examples you gave in your last reply are never defined as self-awareness in an academic paper, e.g. qualia is always separate and the mirror test has always just been an indicator not the thing itself.
Besides, if you believe animals are not self-aware, why d you care about "welfare"?
Most medical professionals and ethicists consider 24 weeks to be the reasonable cutoff for abortion because this is when the fetus starts to develops sentience.
The reason this is relevant is because that is the first stage of development capable of having an identity relationship with the future person that fetus/infant will become.
Animals don't have to be self-ware to suffer. Not introspectively self-aware at least.
Also, why is bacteria life on mars but a clump of cells is not life on earth? ;p
There's no winning this. That's why it's actually smart to let the states decide this - that way Trump has no say in it.
That is conflating life (the ability is eat, shit, reproduce, and the potential to late become sentient) with actual sentient life, which is not correct.
Also, no one is planning to ban antibiotics because bacteria is considered life so we can't do anything to save the host by killing it.
“Can the fetus survive without the host body?”
That’s a medical question that will slowly move toward not aborting ever. And it solves the medical issues as well. “This fetus is killing the host” always allows for removal, because we can either keep them alive, or it can’t survive.
Then the folks who want more babies to reach term can focus on improving medical technology instead of getting involved with the mess that is people’s love lives.
It's a question of ignorance and nothing else.
A zygote is not a life, period.
Do you also think neurons, muscle cells, etc are also not alive?
The abortion debate is not about whether or not the thing that gets removed during abortion is life--I doubt you can find any competent biologist who would say it is not--but rather whether that particular cell or group of cells should be treated different than other cells or groups of cells in your body.
E.g., why should abortion be any different from removing tonsils or from circumcision, both of which also involve the removal and death of living cells from the body?
There is a difference between something being 'alive' (although I think the examples you give are dubious), and being a 'life'.
That does not mean that it is necessary a tool for genocide; conversely almost anything can be a tool for genocide depending on how it is used.
My comment was about people misusing the terms life and alive. The correct way to argue that abortion should be legal is not to redefine life and/or alive so that some living cells or collections of living cells do not qualify rather than trying to redefine common terms used by biologists.
The correct way is to argue that we only only protect some cells or collections of cells and not others and then to argue that fetal cells belong in the not protected group. The question then comes down to deciding what it is that makes some groups of living cells protected but not others. Probably the best argument would be something along the lines that before that collection of cells has grown and developed to the point that it has a brain that can think and feel it is not really different from a tumor or other collection of cells that we don't protect.
Most conservatives are willing to compromise on early abortion. Many places around the world agree that abortions in the first trimester should be possible under some circumstances.
We are not willing to agree to abortion free for all where you can just kill a fully formed baby at nine months like you can in Walz's Minnesota.
See? Ignorant, and I say that not as an insult but as an absolute statement of fact.
No woman 9 months pregnant can just go get an abortion at 9 months. The only reason that is allowed is for cases where it is medically necessary, that's it. Even in those cases, the doctor would do everything possible to save both lives wherever possible.
This is the inverse of laws like in Texas where women are dying due to not being able to abort a baby that isn't even viable at 5 months or so. Take some time to read up on these things, PLEASE.
We really have people voting because they think women can just voluntarily terminate a pregnancy a few days before they are due to give birth? What in the hell has happened to the average ability to think critically in this country?
Not voluntarily, only due to medical necessity. As I said.
> It seems to me you like to substitute what you want to be true for reality. That's the opposite of critical thinking.
The irony here.
Not trying to continue a political flamewar as per dang, but correcting blatant misinformation like the above should be everyone's social responsibility.
You probably meant "human life".
> You probably meant "human life".
No, I said and meant and exactly what I meant to say.
Interesting. What makes a bacteria "a life" and zygote not "a life"?
Because the bacteria on Mars would plausibly exist on it's own. On a different planet.
A newborn by literal definition can exist on its own. It has been born.
A newborn can breath, metabolize foods, and does not depend on being connected to another life giving organism.
The more appropriate work you're looking for is "care". You need to care for a newborn for it to survive.
You can provide care specifically for a newborn. You cannot specifically provide care for a fetus, you are providing care for the mother.
I know all of this is falling on deaf ears though.
Does any reasonable person believe that zygote at that stage is truly equivalent to a human life?
Next up no one should be masturbating because each sperm is potentially the next Mozart or Einstein.
Compromises must be made!