Great. You should also read through https://www.nature.com/collections/prbfkwmwvz to understand how fallible science as practiced today is. It's 100% politics and money generation.
I am not familiar with all of the reports listed, but with some of them. Science today has problems, but it had similar problems before. (gaming the system for self benefit is hardly new) And science still got done (otherwise we wouldn't be using computers or internet or electricity for that matter)
If after reading that you came up with:
> It's 100% politics and money generation.
Our world view is so different, that I am not sure that further debate has much point.
The US has lowered it's CO2 emissions 10% since 2000. Thanks to the "right" and fracking. 16% in the EU.
If you eliminated US/EU production of CO2, atmospheric CO2 levels would still rise. The slight warming that would take place as China and India modernize their life will still happen.
If you eliminate US/EU production of CO2, atmospheric CO2 levels would rise 24% slower. If you added in a carbon tax that it levied on imports from countries that don't implement an equivalent system you can bet that China would lower its emissions too. If you're very fancy you can also offer to install alternative energy in foreign countries at cost price.
>If you eliminate US/EU production of CO2, atmospheric CO2 levels would rise 24% slower.
Thank you for confirming my point.
>If you added in a carbon tax that it levied on imports from countries that don't implement an equivalent system you can bet that China would lower its emissions too. If you're very fancy you can also offer to install alternative energy in foreign countries at cost price.
So the pitch here is... Let's risk war with a Nuclear power with a tariff stick and for a carrot offer a way to a worse standard of living then US/EU. This sounds real viable.
It might expand the available land for agricultural use, but that land is not going to be in the same spots as our agriculture is now. What do you think China will do when agriculture becomes harder in China, but there is all this Russian wilderness that used to be frozen and is becoming fertile? Or the US with Canada? Where do you think hundreds of millions of Africans will go when equatorial regions become uninhabitabe without AC?
Comparing urban and rural and using per-capita numbers is a fallacious argument. You must control for land area. For example a square mile that is labeled “urban” vs square mile labeled “rural” the numbers per-capita tilt homicides way in favor of urban areas... and its not even close.
I fail to see how "per capita per square mile" is a useful measure.
_Anything_ measured in that way would show densely populated area vastly outnumbering rural areas, perhaps with the exclusion of things that essentially don't exist in cites, such as "number of farms per capita per square mile".
The measure appears to be concocted specifically for Lying With Statistics™.
The "murders per capita per square mile" metric really gets to the heart of the question on every American's mind: what percentage of face-to-face interactions are murders?
If you wanted to track that you'd need to do the opposite of what GP is suggesting.
That is, a dense urban area would have more face-to-face interactions than a sparse rural one. Given two areas with equal levels of per-capita violence, it would then follow that the more sparsely populated one would have more violence per face-to-face interaction, not less.
Right, I guess you'd actually want a measurement like "murders per population density" or "murders per (person per square mile)". Or, as it's more commonly known, murder-hectares per capita.
Murder-hectares per square capita? Murder-capitas per hectare? I'm not actually sure how the dimensional analysis works out.
This is absolutely absurd. We're talking about the US here, so it would be murder-acres, and that just sounds like a country club you really shouldn't join.
Wouldn't that assume that murderers do some kind of random walk, and randomly kill some person they happen to get close by?
I'm sure there are those, too, but IIRC in most violent crime the attacker and the victim know each other. Do people have substantially bigger social circles in cities?
Why per capita per square mile instead of per capita? Why do the miles enter into it? Because of more interactions? I'd like to see just the numbers per capita. I suspect they're fairly close.
Because violent felonies such as homicide proximity is the requisite factor in victimhood. ie The victim must be located near the killer.
Given 1 homicide in 100k for 100sq miles called "rural" vs
1 homicide in 100k for 5 sq miles called "urban", your odds of being in proximity of a homicide are much higher in the urban area. 20 times more likely.
I live in lower Manhattan, and there have been many shootings within a mile of me in the past year, even a few within two blocks of me, but because the per-capita numbers are so low, I'm pretty unconcerned about being shot, and so it doesn't really bother that I'm near the shootings. I don't really see how standardizing by (people * area) does you any good in capturing public safety, or even perceived public safety
> Because violent felonies such as homicide proximity is the requisite factor in victimhood
This doesn't stand up. Crime statistics are measured after the crimes happen; whatever effect might be due to proximity has already taken place.
Consider: in your example you say two places have equal per-capita homicide rates but one is 20x denser. It follows that the denser area will have 20x more people "in proximity" to any given homicide, and therefore that P(victim|proximity) must be 20x lower compared to the rural place.
The way you've done the math only makes sense if everyone "in proximity" of a homicide was equally likely to be a victim, but given equal per-capita rates that can't be the case.
Although I don't know, I do know that distance or location matters a lot. Statistically, one can avoid murder easily just by location. Sometimes not even very far away from hotspots.
If you first ask why CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem, then you'll find the answer. It's the same time scale at which the change in atmospheric CO2 is a problem. It's only a problem because it's changing rapidly. It would be OK if it happened slowly enough for species to adapt or at least for human activity to adapt without too much disruption to our daily lives. Ultimately, it's rapid disruption to our daily lives we don't want. We don't want to have to move somewhere else, have less spending power of our wages, get a different job, or change our eating habits. But if it happens gradually generation by generation, so we hardly notice it, then it'll be OK.
This is very much not true. Look at Venus, which was (we believe) subject to a runaway greenhouse event. Also, the Permian period ("Snowball Earth"). Climate change can be catastrophic whether it occurs fast or slowly.
But he has a point. The real answer is more complicated. Slow change gives natural selection several generations to evolve a complex solution to the problem and our minds the time to come up with a technological solution.
Life exists within the boundaries of available sunlight and liquid water. Changes that occur slowly within these boundaries don't necessarily have to be catastrophic. However if the changes exceed these boundaries whether fast or slow then yes the change will indeed be catastrophic.
Venus possibly has no liquid water and snowball earth doesn't have much water either, hence the catastrophe.
Venus had oceans at the time. They boiled off. The Permian Earth had oceans too, just ice capped ones. Microbial life and the simplest algae-like life survived, but that’s it.
I just don’t think it’s all that correct or useful to say the equivalent of “life will adapt” when life has never adapted to changes this fast, and we are hurtling towards changes so extreme as to wipe out complex life entirely.
On earth there is life capable of existing in water far hotter than boiling. Not little bacterias either. Actual multicellular animals.
Catastrophic change will leave pockets of deviants in some dark corners of the earth that will remain protected somewhat. These deviants will go on to populate the world.
There was one such catastrophic change that happened before. A meteor. Wiped out an entire class of creatures called dinosaurs, now replaced with mammals. Mammals at this time lived as tiny rodents underground.
There is no life anywhere on Earth that is able to survive 90 atm and 500 deg C, like the surface of Venus. And fwiw, the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs is one of the milder mass extinction events in Earth's history. We are on trajectories in excess of those that predated the worst mass die-offs in Earth's history, and more resemble the lead-up to Venusian conditions.
