A few days ago I posted a three-second video on Facebook (equivalent YouTube version) with the following caption: We met this dolphin in Sarasota. He said that he voted for Trump because he is enthusiastic about global warming and sea level rise. Why, we asked? “I want to move into a third floor condo in Miami,” he replied.
My Facebook friends, nearly all of whom supported Hillary Clinton, did not think this was funny! Is that because (a) it is in fact not funny, (b) they have a poor sense of humor, or (c) they’re still using up all of their emotions mourning the loss of President Hillary?
[Note that, as an engineer, I think that any solution to problems caused by atmospheric CO2 will be engineering and infrastructure solutions. The U.S. is a shrinking percentage of global CO2 output. We tend to be led by politicians with no technical or scientific background (see Why would anyone expect the U.S. to be a leader in dealing with CO2 emissions, climate change, etc.?). We are no longer great at engineering and we’re terrible at building infrastructure (see U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results and High-speed Rail in California versus China). If the Earth does need to be saved from humans, I think that it will be Chinese and Germans who do the saving and therefore the American public’s choice of a president is not relevant.]
The joke was amusing. Well done. The embed does not work, so well done too on the link.
Your Facebook friends are beginning to remind me of that old Seinfeld bit where George did the opposite.
Since every instinct your Facebook friends have seems to wrong, then the opposite must be right.
Great joke.
It was funny enough… 😉
I don’t Facebook but
should Trumpenfuhrer say to,
I will with relish
One core competency of American society is for us to tell everyone else what they should think and do. FB seems like a weapon of mass destruction in that regard.
I ceased to take the Democratic party seriously on climate change when I discovered that both Clinton and Trump were flying their jets to and from the flyover states every day. As the Instapundit says “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when those telling me it’s a crisis act like it’s a crisis..”
d) execution. I watched the video three times before I realized that the joke which I had already read in the blog post (without realizing it was the joke) was in the caption.
The global warming issue has an economic component in addition to the engineering component. Markets will not adjust appropriately to the threat of global warming because its costs are external to the cost of production. As a global scale externality diplomatic action is required. The US remains the world’s #2 CO2 emitter with three times the emissions of #3 and a world super power. The President is in charge of diplomacy and also has significant influence on domestic economic policy. Who the President is does matter in the sense that the President’s actions (or lack thereof) will significantly impact how much the world ends up warming. That said, it seems unlikely President Trump will do much less on global warming than President Obama did (unless of course he actually does spark a coal renaissance, but that also seems unlikely). I do agree that the legacy of cost plus engineering and bungled regulation in the US nuclear industry makes it less likely the most critical technical innovations will occur here. On the other hand, innovation has been known to happen in our start-up sector.
Some alarming predictions about climate change published by the AP and Washington post … in 1922 (94 years ago, some things never change):
The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate at Bergen Norway
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.
Silly Philly, The Chinese will do their chops in the press, but they won’t do anything about Co2. Climate change was a hoax invented by them to stifle American manufacturing, dummy!
Philip: The US still plays a leading role in scientific research, I imagine Trump and the Republicans could have some significant impact here (e.g. by withdrawing funding for climate research).
billg: The article is real, but the last line appears to be invented. Snopes.
Personally, my favorite illustration of climate change is Figure 3 of Hansen Sato Ruedy 2012.
Russil: I agree that a lot of good scientific research is done in the U.S. (except for the majority of research results that are false; see http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 ). However, reflecting sunlight back out to space and vacuuming CO2 from the atmosphere are engineering problems, not science problems. And if there is to be any effect on a planet it would have to be done at infrastructure scale, not lab scale. Reducing cost and improving efficiency for solar cells? The Chinese seem to have been the leaders there.
If we have put 25% of the available carbon into the atmosphere then the first order of business is to avoid putting as much as possible of the remaining 75% into the atmosphere. That is a big undertaking but still a lot more readily accomplished than either of the approaches suggested in comment #10. The US President could play a significant role in securing the international cooperation to make that happen faster (it will start happening on its own as cheap oil runs out). I will concede that the best domestic policy for accomplishing this is currently a non starter regardless of who is president due to the US Congress. Even there, the President could provide leadership and help to move Congress over time if the President believed in climate change. I will also concede that reviving the US nuclear industry (with new approaches and technologies) is as or more likely to occur under a republican President than a democratic President.
There is a device that produces vast quantities of energy with zero carbon emissions. It’s a well proven existing technology. It’s called a nuclear reactor. Yes they have certain risks but, if burning carbon is really going to turn our planet into Venus then they are small. If people are really serious about the threat that global warming supposedly poses, they should be out there begging for more reactors to be built immediately, before it’s too late, but instead they oppose them too.
Jackie: see the last sentence of the comment immediately preceding yours. People concerned about climate change do indeed support nuclear power (what else can we use to replace coal-fired electricity generation?). A detailed look from Vox.
Support for nuclear power among the climate change proponents in Europe is quite spotty. Germany with its very active greens has shut down its nuclear power due to fear of Fukushima. Well, more precisely the private suppliers were shut down by the Germans.
And consider Sweden, which for decades has managed to generate 90% of its power with zero-emission technologies hydro and nuclear, yet is still mulishly set on going for solar and wind power; building new nuclear plants to replace the 40-50 year old existing ones is bizarrely enough not on the table. (Earlier attempts to run on ethanol and wood pellets were abandoned once the tax incentives ran out.) One might assume it’s because of the greens, but our political parties and representatives are weapons-grade moronic across the entire spectrum so who really knows.
(I assume the ultimate solution will be quiet reliance on buying power abroad, i.e., Russian gas, after the nuclear plants have been shut down and solar/wind turns out to be unworkable. Because we’re virtuously stupid like that. Also, my green friends appear to have a great belief in energy savings, which I’m sure will come in handy to improve GDP.)
Yes–engineering is going to be involved.
Yes–the elite 1% will dictate policy
Yes–science is relevant, check out this article to see where that is going
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/enzymes-from-nine-organisms-combined-to-create-new-pathway-to-use-co2/
Yes–it wasn’t american scientists
Yes–it was German scientists
Nevertheless–If you want your grandkids to have some beachfront property, buy hilly land with altitudes ranging from 120 to 220 feet now while its still cheap.