You sure about that? Because I'm pretty confident that global cooling wouldn't flood up to 10% of the world's population out of their homes.

California has built a bunch of grid-attached battery storage!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-critical-mass

It would be interesting to know what the price tag is.

I've built grid attached battery storage in California.

What was the price tag?

Cooling may not flood homes but will certainly freeze a lot of homes.

If we're talking about +10 or -10, -10 is probably worse.

Nuclear is still better than solar, even in the environmental footprint category. I understand why people fear nuclear but it's really a tragedy we are investing so much in a probably dead end (solar) that's probably stop gap measure at best.

I think it was $34k, but it included solar and it was like 5 years ago. It was just a house, not a utility installation obv. It was one of the first lithium battery residential systems around though. It was the first in Cali for the battery manufacturer and for a while we were on their website's front page.

GOP undoing a rule so that oil companies operating wells on federal lands can just vent methane. No capture, no burning.

also this:

http://www.vox.com/2017/2/2/14488448...rotection-rule

gotta be able to dump coal waste in streams

H.R.861 - To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.
115th Congress (2017-2018)

Sponsor: Rep. Gaetz, Matt [R-FL-1] (Introduced 02/03/2017)

Committees: House - Energy and Commerce; Agriculture; Transportation and Infrastructure; Science, Space, and Technology

Latest Action: 02/03/2017 Referred to House Science, Space, and Technology (All Actions)

Mother****ers

China quality air, here we come!

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/...power-producer

Congrats China, you're the next leader of the world. We had our fun, but apparently we're fine ceding control of the future of the planet to other countries. Too busy MAGAing I guess.

This is slightly off topic but the lack of funding and support for space exploration is even more alarming to me than the debate on climate change.

While i am a supporter of environmental initiatives, in the end, it is a half measure that does not address the long term issue of human race survivability.

I'm a huge pessimist that modern civilization will last long enough to create a self-sustaining off-earth colony. I think we're headed for a new dark ages in the next 50-100 years. If not species annihilation.

www.clcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/TheConservativeCaseforCarbonDividends.pdf


thinkprogress.org/new-ideas-from-republicans-59211efbcaaa

James Baker was on CNN calling for a carbon tax ffs.

Just one more thing the EPA should have done before it was dismantled by Trump...

I think there's some kind of a history of leading conservative figures taking reasonable positions on things after they've cashed out. George Shultz apparently has solar panels and drives an electric car now. Damn, coulda used a little of that spirit back in the Reagan days when they tore the solar panels off the White House.

Have there been any cases of publicly funded scientists getting something like climate change completely wrong before?

Looking at history, we have things like cigarette companies lying about the causes of lung cancer, funding disinformation campaigns, etc. Same can be said for big sugar at this point.

I'm just curious if the opposite has ever happened, if big science said some industry was causing harm and the people with the most to lose, the industry itself, were right that they weren't and not just completely looking out for their bottom line at great expense to consumers.

I would be really surprised if it happened when there was a nearly unanimous consensus among scientific experts. ~95% or whatever the current number is.

Merchants of Doubt was an excellent book on this imo.

Seems like there's been some back and forth on diet (cholesterol good/bad) but I don't know how much of that has been real science vs. industry lobby.

In general I think there was a whole school of thought around the turn of the 20th century which involved behaviorism, psychology, medicine, anthropology and just about everything that amounted to an irrational and cultish attitude towards science. I think it led to a lot of wrong prescriptions like parents not holding babies, anti-breast feeding, overuse of cesarean and induced births, overuse of psychiatric drugs like lithium, and things along those lines. Those are the only kind of things I can think of that sorta fit.

As far as the environment goes, no. There have been tiny minorities of scientists who made incorrect speculations like global cooling that anti-environmentalists to this day make out to be a huge failure of science and a reason why we shouldn't believe in warming now.

I think a lot of the climate denier arguments of this type are scientific paradigm shifts, like flat earth, earth-centric universe, Newtonian physics vs quantum physics. They point out that pretty much all scientists were in agreement and they turned out to be wrong. Therefore scientists should not be trusted. FAKE!

Scientists never really believed in a flat earth, certainly not as a consensus view. Newtonian physics remains basically right for a huge class of problems and applications.

The thing that climate change deniers neglect to mention is that historically the resistance to new scientific ideas comes from the establishment figures whose power they threaten. Big surprise since thats their ****ing side.

A really interesting property of science is that whenever it's proven to be wrong, it's proven to be wrong by more science. Since the scientific community has proven really effective at advancing the quality of life, why not give them the benefit of the doubt?

Even if they showed up ten years later saying, "hey, nevermind on that global warming thing, we goofed,"--which they ****ing won't--what would we really have lost? A bit of efficiency and increased costs for corporations, a bunch of tax dollars? Sure not ideal, but nowhere near proportionate to the cost of being wrong.

If you are old enough and selfish enough, doing nothing about climate change makes sense.