Let's Call It 'Climate Disruption,' White House Science Adviser Suggests (Again) 568
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "First there was 'global warming.' Then many researchers suggested 'climate change' was a better term. Now, White House science adviser John Holdren is renewing his call for a new nomenclature to describe the end result of dumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into Earth's atmosphere: 'global climate disruption.'"
I gotta better name (Score:5, Insightful)
Pollution.
The simple goal should be to spew as little as possible, regardless of the potential issues.
Eh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Thats a good name (Score:5, Insightful)
Global warming was always a terrible name because the imagery was all wrong.
Global climate change is more accurate, but still nebulous.
Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening. I personally liked the name "Santa's revenge" from this winter's breakdown of the polar vortex. Melt the north pole, and you'll all get a taste of the cold!
Fourth options (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems sensible to me. Replacing coal plants with nuclear has a lot of other benefits, too.
Re:Shut Up (Score:0, Insightful)
Disruption sounds temporary ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening.
Disruption sounds temporary, change sounds more permanent. Change seems a far better word to use.
Re:Let's just jump to the obvious ending (Score:4, Insightful)
Just make it obvious... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:so the hockey stick graph is bullshit after all (Score:1, Insightful)
with scientists they have this disclaimer thingy
It's called admitting new evidence even if it contradicts previous "settled" conclusions. I know you bible-thumper types seem to view that as a bad thing, that you must instead bull-headedly stick to your original notion no matter what new evidence surfaces against it, but it really isn't.
Re:Shut Up (Score:4, Insightful)
Pollution? Corporations.
Global climate grant change? Scientists.
How bout we get back to the pollution issue which has been attenuated by climate discussion.
Pollution is not under dispute.
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i... [vrx.net]
Re:Shut Up (Score:3, Insightful)
Devil's Advocate here:
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor. None of those folks trading in carbon credit are professors. Professional 'Greenwashers' (read: marketing folks who make companies look pretty to the public and environmental orgs) are not professors. The environmental orgs themselves (who often take in some rather healthy donations from corporations, well-heeled individuals, etc).
Also consider that profit does not always mean money. To the average and otherwise-obscure prof or environmental organization, it also means prestige, fame, name recognition, and influence (see also Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc.)
Re:I gotta better name (Score:5, Insightful)
What? Don't throw junk into the environment? What is this madness?!
On a serious note, that's what it should really come down to. Don't toss junk into the environment, whatever it is. We should always be trying to reduce the amount of pollutants we produce. You can even find trace amounts of antidepressants [webmd.com] and other prescription drugs in our water supply.
There's reasonable steps that society can - and does - take to reduce pollutants, but there's still a lot of things we could be doing more about. Plastics, for example. So much is packaged in giant wads of hard plastic or shrink wrapped plastic. Is it really necessary to keep piling this crap into our landfills? What is wrong with packaging something in paper or paperboard with a bit of natural glue to hold it shut?
Re:Thats a good name (Score:4, Insightful)
Please stop using the slow-boiled frog meme. It's false. [snopes.com]
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The real reason (Score:2, Insightful)
The only loss is the general American public being too stupid and too lazy to read the scientific research. Issues about carbon cap-and-trade and possible solutions are politics, not science. If everyone is so damned convinced that the scienctific data do not support the hypothesis, then get off their lazy butts, learn some damned math, and write some scientific refutations. Nobody would ever have a gardener work on their car, or trust their open-heart surgery to a writer, so why on earth does everyone trust a bunch of idiots who know nothing about science screaming that scientists are wrong?
Re:so the hockey stick graph is bullshit after all (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Another name change? What are we at now, lets see. First it was global warming, then climate change and now global climate disruption? Did I miss any? Sound like the equivalent of three card monte.
It turns out that as things get studied more, scientists understand them better. Over a few decades of study, our understanding of climate change has improved, and it has been suggested that some terminologies be changed to best reflect the state of the art understanding of what is happening. This seems entirely reasonable to me.
After all, this is what happens in every other area of science. I mean, physics hardly uses the same terminology that it did a century ago. As our understanding of that field changed, so did certain terminologies. Its not because physicists are running some scam on you, its because our understanding of the details of the science can change slightly as a function of time (something that creationists and global warming deniers can never seem to grasp), which might lead to changes in terminology.
Of course, the core idea of climate change has remained the same over time - the average temperature of the planet will likely increase in the intermediate term due to greenhouse gases from humans - but there are so many other details involved that "global warming" doesn't really cover it all. For example, the variance in temperatures is also expected to increase (essentially, there will be more extreme cold spells and more extreme hot spells), but explaining a prediction of more cold spells under a theory called "global warming" got old, so it seemed like it was a time for a terminology change. Once again, this seems entirely reasonable to me.
Re:The real reason (Score:4, Insightful)
And that "Climate Change" is often met with "The climate has ALWAYS changed".
So because climate has changed before, we should just keep doing what we're doing, indefinitely, without worrying about consequences? Sure, climate has changed before, but not to this degree in this short of a time frame.
When losing an argument, stick your head in the sand so you don't hear the argument
There, fixed that for your side. You're welcome.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed the global cooling scare of the 80s, don't forget that one. Back then we were headed for another ice age.
That was never actually a thing, except in the media:
Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. (source [wikipedia.org])
Peer-reviewed scientific literature overwhelmingly referred to warming, even back then:
A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). (source [skepticalscience.com])
Re:Shut Up (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of the global warming "solutions" proposed by a politicians may well be exploitative power grabs, but that's true of a lot of *everything* they propose. That doesn't mean the problem isn't real, just that they're power-hungry bastards trying to exploit a very real problem for personal gain.
The way I see it there are two possibilities :
(A) There's a global conspiracy of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of climate researchers to "manufacture" a story of one of the largest crisis our species has ever faced for the benefit of political power grabs.
(B) The problem is real, but a lot of scientifically illiterate politicians and social action groups around the globe are more interested in creating non-solutions that serve their own ends than actually addressing the problem efficiently.
Re:Shut Up (Score:4, Insightful)
How can you possibly believe that the massive environmental changes we are creating both for living our daily lives and for powering our cities and running our factories, that the chemicals we're synthesizing that had never been seen on planet earth prior to us, are NOT having an effect on the climate? Is it such a stretch that those changes aren't, necessarily, bad for life as we've known it, given that life as we've known it was adapted to the environment that existed prior to us?
You don't need a PhD or hi-falutin intellectual elite pedigrees to see the obvious. The only questions should be "How bad is it?", and I might agree with you that there's enough money on the table for all parties that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and a realization that most of us would rather perish than go back to living in caves.
Re:I gotta better name (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair enough, but the equilibrium temperature where this happens does change.
"Greenhouse effect" is accurate enough. The energy entering and leaving a patch of plants is going to be equal (on average), but if you build a greenhouse around it the inflow and outflow of energy will still be equal, but the temperature where they are equal will be higher. (The flow isn't just radiative, of course, but as far as analogies go it's far better than mot.)
Re:Thats a good name (Score:2, Insightful)
Because polar vortices are not a result of AGW
Absolutely! Indeed, the kind of temperatures we saw in the US because of the polar votex used to be normal a few decades ago. So I guess that answer your questions: North America. Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com].
Other valid answers:
- Western Europe (here [wikipedia.org] are the years in which winters were severe enough to hold an outdoor skating contest in the Netherlands; making a graph is left as an exercise to the reader)
- Australia [wikipedia.org]
- The antarctic [wikipedia.org] (yes, the ice is melting overall [skepticalscience.com])
- Greenland, where ice sheet decline [wikipedia.org], is a boon for agriculture [wikipedia.org] - Pretty much any place that has seen shifts in habitat [livescience.com] (here come West Nile Virus [scientificamerican.com] and Malaria [theguardian.com])
- Pretty much anywhere where there are glaciers [wikipedia.org]
A better question would be: "can you name any area of the world that didn't have its climate disrupted as a result of global warming?"
Re:I gotta better name (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result* -- they're two different things. We could make the Earth hotter by putting giant mirrors in orbit that send more sunlight our way ... that would cause climate change but would not be an example of the greenhouse effect at all.
Realistically, the problem with a name change is that politics more than anything else -- calling it by yet another name will make the conspiracy theorists think that you're trying to hide or obfuscate something [stumbleupon.com] (the link talks about Benghazi, but the ideas apply to climate change too), and while that's not true, the end result is still that it overall causes people to take the problem less seriously. I think we should stick with "climate change".
Re:The real reason (Score:4, Insightful)
When losing an argument, change the rules and the terms so it looks like you're not losing.
Except that the denialists are NOT losing the argument. They are winning. By a landslide. Almost everywhere, the number of people who consider it a serious problem has been going down, while the number that consider themselves skeptics has been going up. The problem is that many scientists think that they will automatically "win" just because the facts are are their side. When it comes to politics, that is an incredibly stupid thing to believe.
Re:Shut Up (Score:3, Insightful)
Devil's Advocate here: Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor.
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't relevant in any way.
Not directly to the actual debates and studies, no. On the other hand, he managed to make a little movie, do a little activism, and made a metric ton of money off the subject. He also elevated the status and notoriety of quite a few scientists in the process.
The point wasn't that Gore is some kind of scientist. The point is that he, like many others surrounding this whole subject, are busily using it to enrich themselves. They also amplify the message, manipulate it, and happily treat it as unquestioned gospel. The masses who follow the ideology in turn parrot the results - rather hotly, I might add.
Meanwhile, the scientists most associated with the theory are given the aforementioned fame, prestige, recognition, etc.
It doesn't matter what you call it (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter what you call it the physical changes to the Earth's climate can't be denied. This is like throwing a bone to the contrarians so they can claim we changed the name again.
Re:Shut Up (Score:4, Insightful)
Pollution is not under dispute.
Agreed, wholeheartedly. I doubt you will find many people who would credibly argue that pollution is a good thing.
On the other hand, pollution seems so pedestrian... no scare factor in it anymore. No alarms to be raised. The corporations have long since either spun their message to convince the world they're perfectly clean, or they outsourced all the dirty stuff to China.
The ideologues? Well, they no longer have craptacular pollution wonders to point at like they did in the '60s and '70s... I mean, back then you had Love Canal, and thousands of similar examples. They had the public's imagination captured by Soylent Green and Silent Spring. What do you have today? Not even a weak simulacrum compared to back then - at least in the Western world.
So, well, what to do?
Re:Shut Up (Score:1, Insightful)
The trouble is, it's possible to have a wealthy and advanced society while keeping pollution to a minimum. And that just wont do. It is necessary that the masses be returned to a dark ages standard of living ASAP, and so we have to demonize a normally occurring substance, like oh dihydrogen oxide, or carbon dioxide.
And as a side benefit, less pressure to clean up profitable but polluting activities. Win - Win right?
Nuclear denier, climate change denier, same thing (Score:4, Insightful)
If they're supporting nuclear then they aren't environmentalists.
Actually they are. They looked at the science and realize that if we don't use nuclear in the near term then we will continue to be using fossil fuels. That renewables are regrettable not there yet. These people are all for conservation, solar, wind, etc ... they just accept the science that these can't get us as far as we want. Especially with the billions of people in the developing world coming on to the electric grid. In short, that conservation, renewables and nuclear all need to be part of the solution. To say that nuclear does not need to be a part of the fossil fuel solution is to deny reality, much like the climate change deniers. Nuclear and climate deniers are remarkably similar, just calling different ends of the political spectrum their home, both abusing scientific reality.
Re:what if we're not religious environmentalists? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a rich/poor thing. Don't make it into one.
Environmentalism is for rich people. Poor people have to struggle just to get by. They don't have extra resources to devote to purity-for-purity's-sake. And when they do get enough of a surplus to afford to care for the environment, they need to choose based on what will benefit them -- it's clean drinking water, basic sanitation and air that's healthy to breathe, not "these guys have this scary computer model that predicts problems 100 years from now".
Telling people not to pollute at all is telling people to be poorer. Very rich people can afford to be a little poorer. Most of the rest of the world can't.
Re:I gotta better name (Score:3, Insightful)
Depending on the type, plastic packaging can in principle be good for the environment. It's not very energy-intensive to make, can be easily recycled, can be recycled many more times than paper can, and doesn't involve cutting down trees. The key is not to stop using plastic, but to use less packaging when we can. In "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", there's a reason why "Reduce" comes first.
Re:what if we're not religious environmentalists? (Score:1, Insightful)
Talk about religion! You sound like a regular preacher there.
Re:what if we're not religious environmentalists? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, not really. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that comment. Which part sounds religious? Is it because I think poor people shouldn't be made even poorer for the sake of environmental righteousness?
Re:I gotta better name (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First it was global cooling (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I gotta better name (Score:3, Insightful)
Love the civility (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny though that you guys never seem to be upset by all the money "big oil" spends on "green" stuff.
Your bigger intellectual problem, however, is that when government funds the stuff you like it does it by stealing money from MY wallet at gunpoint. When "Big Oil" spends money, it takes that money from its own bank accounts. The greenie complaint about "Big Oil" getting subsidies is a scam - oil companies do not get subsidies (money taken, by force, from others and given to them) they just get the same type of tax breaks that other businesses get (i.e. they are not taxed on some of their income because it is acknowledged that this money is being put back into the activity as a cost and is not a profit). Most "green" companies, on the other hand, get ACTUAL subsidies - government takes money from some people and gives it to those "green" companies to fool people into thinking those activities are efficient and cost-effective or cost-competative - ACTUAL subsidies like this should NEVER occur in a "free market" because they encourage sub-optimal economic activity.
Re:I gotta better name (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what if we're not religious environmentalists? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where did he say anything about "the tragedy of the commons"?
He said pollute "as little as possible". That's a quasi-religious purity standard. A non-religious, rational standard for "pollution" would examine tradeoffs: What are the costs and benefits of burning fossil fuels vs. the alternatives? Why can't we use reason to choose what we do rather than environmental dogma?
Re:I gotta better name (Score:3, Insightful)
in a price driven world, cheaper things have a cheaper cost because they require less resource input.
If you ignore externalities.
Re:what if we're not religious environmentalists? (Score:2, Insightful)
Pollution makes people ill. You can see it happening a lot in poor countries, where lack of proper waste disposal brings a lot of health problems.
But greenhouse gas pollution doesn't make anyone ill. So people in poor countries should focus on solving pollution problems that are making them ill. They shouldn't waste resources on greenhouse gas "pollution". They should also focus on growing their economies, so they're no longer as poor, so they can afford to solve all the pollution problems that are making them ill.