He was made into a joke for his climate change documentary (remember ManBearPig?) when now it feels like if we listened 15 years ago we'd be in less of a snake pit.
>it feels like if we listened 15 years ago we'd be in less of a snake pit.
We really missed the boat in the 60s/70s when the West largely gave up on Nuclear power (which environmentalists are against). Imagine if the West invested in nuclear power to the same level as France did - think of the trillions of tons of CO2 that would not have been emitted into the atmosphere. Maybe it would have bought us an extra 5 decades.
There is nothing we could have done in the early 2000s that we didn't do (and though your comment is very American-centric, the world is bigger than America). The biggest gains we received were when many regions transitioned from coal to natural gas but natural gas was not an economical option before the fracking revolution (which environmentalists are against).
Even now, we don't really have any options to transition from fossil fuels. The best we can do (outside of nuclear, and if geography allows, hydro/geothermal) is to pair natural gas with solar panels and wind mills - but though solar/wind are OK (just OK) with CO2 emissions, they are very hard on the environment because of land-use requirements, production, and disposal. This doesn't take into account other fossil fuel use, like fuel for cargo ships, rockets, and airplanes, and the thousand of products that need petroleum.
By the way, there's a Green party candidate running in Vermont (or Maine) that is against importing hydro power from Quebec. Insanity.
This! We could have reduced our GHG footprint by 20-30% for the last 3 decades just by having gone nuclear in the 80s and 90s.
What's crazier still are all those "extinction rebellion" types who oppose it even now because "it's too late now" and "we'll have better storage tech in 5-10 years". It makes absolutely zero sense. What rational mind when faced with an impending existential threat wouldn't take a known good solution over a potentially better solution down the road? At least temporarily if not forever, but but alas we have to let perfection be the enemy of the good. And that's assuming what they want is even achievable or desirable in practice.
I swear half of the "greens" you meet are actually just malthusians in disguise. They don't care what happens to the environment as long as they have theirs, others be dammed.
>What rational mind when faced with an impending existential threat wouldn't take a known good solution over a potentially better solution down the road?
Agreed. I suspect the people who claim climate change as an existential threat and denounce nuclear because of reasons like nuclear waste, don't really believe climate change is an existential threat.
>types who oppose it even now because "it's too late now"
They aren't wrong about that because we set ourselves a timeframe of 2030-2060 to completely decarbonize. Restarting large-scale nuclear deployment would take decades and wouldn't really fit within that timeframe.
The brutal reality is that we will not decarbonize by 2060 with renewables - so we keep wasting time by not investing in nuclear. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe we will get back on the nuclear wagon, because we live in a world that is still growing in population and per capita energy use and there is nothing as energy dense as nuclear.
I'm also surprised that for all the talk about decarbonizing to fight climate change, there is very little discussion on what we need to do to live with the effects of climate change. It's pretty obvious that no matter what we do, we're not going to be removing the existing carbon from the atmosphere anytime in the next few hundred years.
Would it really though? It's true we don't have the penchant or capacity to execute on megastructures nowadays but SMRs in particular seem like a viable way to jump start that learning curve again. If France was able to pull it off in the 80s surely we could do the same today?
If rebuilding our nuclear infrastructure was an absolute national priority, the way the moon landing was in the 60s, I don't see a reason why it couldn't be done within a decade plus change (kind of the way COVID-19 has accelerated vaccine development by years because we decided that a COVID vaccine is critical). The problem is that as a society we are not anywhere close to treating nuclear power as a necessity. In fact, the present inertia is to move away from nuclear, with much of new nuclear reactor projects being cancelled, and a number of existing reactors actually closing. There is tepid support for nuclear AT BEST by the public and representatives, and nuclear is still vilified by environmentalist and the fossil fuel lobby (i.e. natural gas companies).
Given that reality, we're looking at decades at best. Basically we need to see renewables through to the end and be convinced that they cannot power a modern economy before there can be any shift.
I don't think we need a societal shift. I think this is something that the market could solve if only the Feds would actually build out the deep geological repository we were promised and which industry already paid.
Government should set a carbon tax, redistribute the proceeds as basic income, and get out of the way. Let industry sort the rest.
Even South Park revisited that sometime in the last few seasons. With ManBearPig literally in front of people and they're still questioning it, or asking "Well, so what if it's real? What can we do now?"
I have a friend in his mid 70's who believes that global warming is happening but not due to any human activity that it is all just part of the normal cycles of the earth. He knows nothing of science and is just spewing what he has heard on conservative radio and television.
> have a friend in his mid 70's who believes that global warming is happening but not due to any human activity that it is all just part of the normal cycles of the earth.
What I dont get about this viewpoint is like so you're just gonna sit around while the climate becomes more hostile because it's natural? I mean humans have done a lot to combat nature and bent the world to their comfort for a lot less.
I think the argument is that, given that climate cycles are natural and not a result of human carbon (etc) emissions, reducing carbon emissions is not a effective way to combat nature, and there's no political will to undertake strategies that would actually be effective. (To be fair, it is actually true that reducing carbon emissions is not a effective way to combat nature; the position of non-stupid advocates is rather that it's the least ineffective method.)
Well that’s true. Carbon emissions are self-reinforcing. It would take 200%+ emission reduction at this point, as heat itself is increasing co2 release today in various ways.
This means reductions can only bring a short delay, they can’t stop global warming.
At this point it’s getting warmer mostly because it’s getting warmer.
A former colleague of mine expects the Rapture any day now, and that's his justification for his behavior. I guess he's not worried about what'll happen if he's wrong and his daughter has to grow up in the worse world he helped to create.
I have relatives who were convinced that the Rapture was coming in 2012. The looks on their faces when I asked them in 2011, "Why do you keep going to work, then? Why are you still having kids? Why did you just buy a house?" can only be described as quizzical. They simply couldn't see the logical disconnect.
They want to leave the world a burning wreck for the non-believers and live it up until the end. Sadly they are also going to be living on the burning wreck.
Science told us in early 2020 that masks are useless against a coronavirus. Here is German's top virologist declaring in January 2020 that masks will not stop the virus:
You're right, science is proven wrong time and time again. We used to think Newtonian physics was the bees' knees. Man, they sure look like fools now that we know Einsteinian physics is more accurate.
Yes, science is great, because as Dawkins said, "it works, bitches", but it is not infallible. Even scientist sometimes can make mistakes, put their delusions above scientific principles, or decide to lie and be total cunts. Therefore, science constantly needs to be questioned and tested and there is nothing wrong with doing so.
My view on experts crapping on masks at the beginning is that they believed the virus was only spread with close contact and touching surfaces. And I'm sure a few of them just wanted to avoid the public buying up all the available mask to protect themselves leaving fewer for medical/science workers.
I think people also had a problem with sanctimonious preaching from someone who flies around the world in private jets for six figure speaking engagements and lives in a mansion with 20x the electric usage of the average American household. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/GlobalWarming/story?id=29068...
Sorry for being repetitive, but when a teenager girl from Sweden had enough of the hypocrisy and decided to cross the Atlantic in a freaking yacht to prove the point, the same group of people also made fun of her... for using single-use utensils in a train.
All one has to do is to decide that they hate "climate activists" - humans are fallible, so it's not hard to find reasons to hate every single one of them, be it Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, or Michael Mann.
Documentaries virtually always get made fun of. It's filmmakers trying to make sense of empirical data and history, and they always say some stupid stuff.
Miami and Fort Lauderdale should be completely destroyed today according to his predictions. In order to boost his investments and become richer he was predicting catastrophic issues that clearly never happened.
He now has become a symbol of anti-climate change arguments and he has done more harm than good.
'Man Bear Pig' was not a universal meme, it was just a cartoon where he was mocked. South Park is satire, it doesn't translate to universal or even popular perspective - it's just a show. Some climate skeptics obviously would mock him, but that's to be expected given their view of the world.
ManBearPig is the perfect example of something everyone really needs to know: if someone appears to be a galactic asshole, who makes a mean-spirited TV show where everyone behaves like a jerk, then it's quite likely that they are infact an asshole. These entertainments are not edgy, insightful cultural artifacts. They're just assholes on TV.
> These entertainments are not edgy, insightful cultural artifacts. They're just assholes on TV.
20+ years of cultural commentators, the Oscars, and show ratings suggest that you're wrong. Stone + Parker may be assholes, but they are insightful assholes, performing the much-needed task of holding our noses to the shit we left behind
> Stone + Parker may be assholes, but they are insightful assholes
"Insightful" about how people respond to messages in the same sense that a successful demagogue is, except that they are playing on "easy mode" where they don't have to produce results of their own to be judged by -- or even, in classic demagogic fashion, to distract from by attacking some other target -- sure, they are definitely that kind of insightful.
Insightful beyond that...well, none of the evidence you point to is explained any better by adding that additional assumption.
They don't hold peoples noses to the shit left behind, they are just masters of the clever juxtaposition of the cheap, easy, shallow (mostly recycled, but for the juxtapositions) attacks.
They are also good at crafting amusing stories, and welding the shallow attacks into the stories as a delivery vehicle. So I'm not saying that they aren't talented, just that the talent has nothing to do with any substantive insight regarding the substance of their targets. Actually, I think they'd be a lot less successful at what they do if they didn't have an absolute and total lack of interest in substance, which would be a distraction from the cheap, easy bomb-throwing.
EDIT: Rereading that, it sounds more hostile than I would like. I mean, South Park is great entertainment, there's certainly value to periodic, momentary escape into the kind of cheerful,shallow nihilism it wallows in. My wife and I had Stan and Wendy figurines on our wedding cake. I'm not anti-Stone/Parker, just against the idea that their work is insightful social commentary. Not only is it not, and not only is that central to its success, but, to the extent it is (personally, to me, and arguably socially) valuable, that's also central to its value. Its not intellectually stimulating, enlightening, or insightful, its an escape from being intellectually "on" at all.
I think the word you are looking for is 'satire' and it's cutting and intelligent not because of the depth of their understanding of some issue, but their willingness to offer characters and comedy around simple ideas and perspectives others dare not broach.
Charlie Chaplin was didn't exactly delve into ideology.
'PC Principal' is a brilliant satirization.
They skewered the sometimes insufferable Tom Cruise because everyone else has to 'fall in line' to the inside censorship and only they had the courage to just 'have a go'.
The bubble they've created for themselves where they can now get away with just about everything is otherwise non-existent in the industry.
> I think the word you are looking for is 'satire'
Yes, that's the genre they operate in, which I thought goes without saying.
No, that's no part of what I was trying to describe.
> it's cutting and intelligent not because of the depth of their understanding of some issue, but their willingness to offer characters and comedy around simple ideas and perspectives others dare not broach.
It's clever in presentation more than “intelligent”, and, no, almost none of it is around “ideas and perspectives others dare not broach”.
Well almost every central bit in South Park surrounds a concept others won't touch, or at least, not in the manner SP will.
+ Mickey Mouse as a totalitarian fascist? You couldn't breathe this outside of a writers room, anywhere, and yet, it's something that probably a lot of people, even within the industry, absolutely love.
+ Walmart as a cultural monster, devouring society? Possibly not an unpopular idea, but definitely not one that anyone can do, because Walmart represents too much advertising power. Many of us hate Walmart, so where's the Walmart skits on SNL? There are none, because they're shills. SNL literally exists to sell Walmart ads.
+ Very simple articulation of how China is able to suppress and censor American businesses? Nobody in entertainment will touch this. Hollywood exists to sell films, and China will eventually be their biggest market.
+ Wrestlers as posing, effect actors, ultra authoritarian 'PC Bro' culture, Japanese businessmen deferring to the 'large penises' of American businessmen for social favour, a 'Token' Black character ...
Most of it is completely inane obviously, but the whole thing exists to satire/make light commonly accepted norms with insufferable artifacts, or to give air to the the issues nobody can talk about. That's what makes it funny.
'Man Bear Pig' was probably wrong and not in a good way, so they did another show about it ... which is great ... but really who cares? It was funny at the time.
I'd consider it insightful, if for no other reason than that they are able to articulate -- and often the first to do so to a large audience -- a lot of the ridiculousness in life that most of us habitually ignore, or minimize.
A lot of folks object to the characters they write, or the cheapness of the animation, but I don't think that South Park would be the success it is without either of those things. It's crudeness attracts a lot of the counterculture types unafraid to go against mores, who I think are naturally more receptive to a given episode's themes.
Stone + Parker have made it very clear that most episodes start out as a joke. But then, so do most comedians' routines. And comedians almost never need or want to explain the nature or thought process behind their jokes, because all that reasoning is encoded within the joke itself. That is part of why I think they are so insightful -- that they can form elegant, meaningful commentary on previously untouchable subject matter, using such crude tools, and get away with it. For 20 years and counting.
Who else can do that? George Carlin, and I'd maybe add Stephen Colbert and Dave Chapelle if their careers as political or social satirists hadn't effectively ended the way they did. In any case that's a pretty small club to be a part of.
Not every episode should be held to such lofty standards, of course, and I am definitely not enjoying it as much as before they started serializing everything. But overall the show has given me words and a perspective to start to think about dozens of social and cultural issues long before they came up elsewhere in my life.
Yes, I do. His stuff is often poorly researched and presented for maximum entertainment value rather than for accuracy. I may be pretty close to him politically but his stuff is mostly just entertainment.
Last Week Tonight and a similar German show heute Show are the worst, because the make fun of people from an assumed moral high ground, which they do not have. They really want to show their viewers; "Ha, look how stupid other people are. It's alright to laugh about them, because they are so dumb. Good thing we the good ones!". It is absolutely despicable.
South Park never does this. They just make fun of people or current trends in society, without evaluating them morally. They are more drastic, but never claim moral superiority.
Kinda? South Park is more obscene, but I’ve seen quite a few Last Week Tonight clips where the takeaway is clearly meant to be “haha, those people are such dummies!” I really do get it, and I personally enjoy both shows, but the genre of political humor tends to inevitably involve cheap shots at political opponents.
They aren't even remotely the same type of show! I don't know how you could possibly try to compare them. You wouldn't try to compare the Super Bowl against Downton Abbey, would you?
Trey Stone and Matt Parker are geniuses. True satirists in a world where satire of certain forms is not allowed (i.e. you cannot satire Hollywood or SJ issues in entertainment) and they've taken on considerable risk by doing that (i.e. mocking the Hollywood entertainment system).
They are literally one of the only entities in the US to point-blank take on Chinese censorship.
They are comedians, not Scientists, they're allowed to step out of bounds and be 'wrong' that's the point - it's not even about 'right or wrong' for gosh sakes.
Anyone taking literal social cues from an antagonizing cartoon is going to be led astray.
The 'Assault on Reason' is coming from a lot of angles these days.
? The 'risk' is to their own creations - they have been threatened with cancellation time and time again, probably more so than any show in history.
Do you wonder why people on talk shows, on the news in interviews, never say anything bad about anyone, never have an opinion, never critique - unless it's political? - because they risk being ignored, losing out on the next deal, upsetting a director/producer/exec/casting agent on the creative side, or advertisers (very powerful) on the business side.
Count how many people will mock Tom Cruise, Scientology, China, Hollywood - or more poignantly almost corporate brand etc. - none really - it's to expensive to one's career.
How often has SNL mocked Google, Apple, Tesla, Ford or any major corporations (or their products) in an edgy, satirical way? Never. It doesn't happen because it's censored for obvious business reasons.
How many SNL or other comedy skits have you seen over all the massive rape allegations concerning Hollywood figures? Nobody is going to touch that because they're all in the 'same industry' - it's socially toxic.
There are zero shows on Television today which aggressively take risks for the sake of 'comedy' - it's almost sad that it's getting kind of old and there's nobody to hand the torch too.
Parker and Stone have carved out for themselves an amazing 'safe bubble' years ago - they basically took a stand and said 'we will say anything' and didn't care which bridges they burned. Weirdly it became 'accepted' for them to court controversy within the walls of their show.
Sacha Cohen does some really outrageous stuff, but it's politically very safe.
South Park as a vehicle is stale, it was 10 years ago, but that it's legit satire, and one of the only sources of it, is why it's still around.
Given that the fearmongering strategy has worked so well, why would folks abandon it now? It's grown legs of its own with QAnon, etc.; politicians aren't even controlling the message, but riding its popularity to success.
This paper confirmed the warming trend and came from someone who was a somewhat skeptical outsider to the climatology field. Author Richard Muller wrote in 2011:
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Its publication helped to separate actual scientific skeptics of anthropogenic global warming from dogmatic contrarians. Warming "skeptic" Anthony Watts, for example, said that he would accept whatever results came out of the BEST group, regardless of whether it confirmed his premise. After the BEST results confirmed mainstream climatology, he dismissed them as flawed.
That is true - but making the government smaller is still a proclaimed virtue of the GOP. Maybe I can clarify - it's not a tenant they actually appear to follow in any real way, but they definitely hold it near and dear and are outspoken in their criticism whenever it is broken by people not them.
How would life be different if people listened to him? Would we all be driving Teslas by now or putting solar tiles on our roofs? Or would there be an ongoing lockdown that started in 2008? Would there be rolling blackouts all over the world? I am really curious, how would life be different?
We would have invested the trillions we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan in renewable energy. We might have a coal free grid. Hundreds of thousands fewer children would develop asthma. Heart disease might even be on the decline.
> He was made into a joke for his climate change documentary
He was made into a joke long before that ( lock box ) because he was a joke. And his climate change "documentary" was nonsense. All he did was use his name recognition to peddle a documentary to make himself a shitload of money.
> when now it feels like if we listened 15 years ago we'd be in less of a snake pit.
We did listen. That's the problem.
If you want a good laugh, go watch the Inconvenient Truth. Then go watch Moore's "Human Planet" and see what al gore had been up to since his documentary.
Per climate change, I'd suggest everyone here read the seminal paper, Death of Enviromentalism by Shellenberger and Nordhaus which explains why these negative only outlooks don't and won't work. It predicted to a T our current situation way back in 2005.
Post positivism, you got to have people believe in progress to make progress. But it's all meaningless, they say, because over 4 billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen and go super nova. It's not the sort of attitude that will make someone think of star-lifting:
The article is all about fearmongering and how it can be used to destroy reasoned discussion. Gore argues for television's more direct connection to the limbic system and how useful that is for fearmongering. He promotes print media as better for rational discourse and was especially hopeful about the internet, which is interesting given where we are in 2020.
David Foster Wallace 1990's E Unibus Pluram also digs into this a bit, and also talks about the influence of a possible future smartphone (taken from a proposal by George Gilder):
The downside of TV's big fantasy is that it's just a fantasy. As a special treat, my escape from the limits of genuine experience is neato. As my steady diet, though, it can't help but render my own reality less attractive, render me less fit to make the most of it, and render me dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant.
[...]
My real dependency is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images fantastic. Make no mistake. We are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we're hooked.
[...]
An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive [telecomputer] a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy. [...] . Insights and guides to human value used to be among literature's jobs, didn't they? But then who's going to want to take such stuff seriously in ecstatic post-TV life, with Kim Basinger waiting to be interacted with?
That’s why the initial Republic only allowed landowners to be able to vote. Now, we have lowered ourselves to any reasons (other than to ensure the business, welfare, defense, and property ownership).
To which capital-R Republic are you referring? Since you're saying "ourselves" I assume it's not Rome or Athens, so maybe the USA? What was so special about landowners that only they merited full citizenship? There is ample evidence it had more to do with their ancestry, religion, gender, and wealthiness than some sort of appeal to "reason." In fact, assigning merit based on race, wealth, etc. qualifies as an assault on reason in my book.
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” - George Orwell, 1984
Also from Orwell: "In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. [...] But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better."[a]
> "Most people who believe in climate change have never..."
A few reactions.
(1) How do you even know this? This is not even a verifiable claim, it's just a derisive comment.
(2) Additionally, it is an elementary logical fallacy. "I claim the other side is not sufficiently educated about X, therefore X is not true."
(3) In this case, many sources in "the media" (your term, and again, a derisive and non-specific term, like your earlier "most people") are broadly correct. That is: serious assessments like the National Climate Assessment [1], summarizing the current state of the science, substantiate that there will be many varied and serious impacts of climate change.
I think your provocative comment belies a challenging truth: federated trust. I can be a rational person and in my rationality delegate the conclusions on climate questions to those who are funded to spend their time, with my trust essentially delegating to the peer reviewed journals and journalists describing their work.
We don’t however need science or such federated rationality to tell us what 2+2 is, rather why 1+3 in floating point is not 4,
To be fair, "most people" have never read a single scientific paper on any topic. Most scientists, however, have read papers in their respective fields.
If one wants to apply the tin-foil hat theory that climate change is a product of the media industry, then one should also consider that claiming that science debunked climate change would also bring eyeballs. The fact that the mainstream media as well as independents universally report on climate change being true (vs say the effects of various foods on weight loss) should say something about the underlying scientific consensus.
Much like we hope businesses listen to their cybersecurity personnel since they've dedicated their career to securing information systems, we should listen to the scientists who have dedicated years, maybe even decades of their lives to researching climate change.
I am sure you have firm beliefs about many things that you have not read papers about. You trust the field that studies these things is not full of charlatans.
If the reason to believe proposition P is that the experts who study this thing say it, most people believe P. That people with obvious non-scientific motives to assert !P do assert !P is not considered evidence of scientific controversy but rather of the non-scientific motives that were obvious in the first place.
There is a lot of information out there. I, personally, work as a programmer while not having a doctorate of math (which would disappoint Turing) nor writing my code as formally proven statements (which would disappoint Djikstra). I do my work (along with the vast majority of Americans in the workforce) on a computer which, if breaks, I can only hold up towards the sky and hope some divine intervention fixes - I don't know the conductivity of copper nor the tensile strength of silicon. I also can only guess at what the majority of people actually do with their computers.
All that said, I'm pro-computers because I've got enough familiarity to know it's not a terrible idea and I know that some smart people are intimately involved with computers and so I trust it to all work out.
I am similarly unfamiliar with specific climate studies but trust that climate change is a real issue that needs to be addressed. I'm not going to start calling out a climate denier at a party with specific points of relevance because I don't have a solid grasp of things and, honestly, don't tend to do that at parties - but I'll still look on with judgement at climate deniers as I'm firmly of the opinion (based on popular science) that they're making baseless claims.
I see you're getting downvoted heavily. I think you make a fair point. I've tried to find good sources on climate material to do my own research, because I'm a skeptic at heart.
I'd love to see a climate wiki that compiled studies / charts / resources for people to actually read the literature - vs the hysterics of the media.
To believe that to be a major concern, you'd have to seriously consider the possibility of science being a made up conspiracy theory. Which is a deep rabbit hole that ends up either in an existential crisis or a psych ward.
I am 100% for an assault on reason. Reason is the hibrisitic force that led a few hundred college grads at Rand to think they could guide an empire through wars of occupation from thousands of miles away.
Reason is the intoxicating brew that lends credibility to all kinds of quak medicine.
Reason has let theologians fabricate cathedrals in sky and then consecrate them with the blood of thousands.
Reason without the guide posts of empiricism is as deceitful as mysticism maybe moreso.
He was made into a joke for his climate change documentary (remember ManBearPig?) when now it feels like if we listened 15 years ago we'd be in less of a snake pit.