Chasing Ice

That's a pretty depressing article.

The cohort you're talking about is vanishingly small.

Eh.

Charles, the reason why people deny AGW is because they're hearing a persuasive argument from somewhere that speaks to their own bias or prejudice. While this might make one of those people think again, the instant and overwhelming flood of reactionary bullshit from the denier crowd will probably swing them back the other way. There just aren't many people who haven't heard about AGW and haven't read enough to make their mind up already who would actually watch this and form a conclusion.

I'll have to look up the source, but secularism is on the rise across the US population as a whole. Much like global temperatures! While there are examples of specific people exhibiting nutty religious beliefs, polls show that the population in general is slowly moving away from that sort of thing.

So atheism is causing global warming which will eventually turn earth into the FIRES OF HELL!!!!!!111!!

Someone call Lamar Smith. Congress needs to act.

This article seems pertinent to the discussion:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/strong-opinions-on-climate-change-are-self-reinforcing/

It seems to me the next stage in climate change denial will be founded on the US natural gas bonanza as proof that between the free market and Jesus the corporations of the world will overcome any obstacle that climate change throws their way, assuming the government and the communists stay out of their way. Once again, a grain of truth becomes a pearl of pure bullshit.

The next stage that I heard from the right wing members of my family yesterday was, "Everyone knows the big polluters are China and India, but the environmentalists want to stop us from doing anything here where we would produce cleanly and responsibly. Instead, they force businesses to go overseas where they manufacture using dirty methods."

I didn't have the willingness to even enter that debate...

Oh, that's a classic, an evolution of "the developing world is the real problem, and if they can't fix themselves right away, then there's no point in losing our competitive edge". I'm talking the cutting edge of bullshit, here, with actual recent headlines rather than just crazyland economics.

So I saw this tonight. I liked it quite a bit. It's short -- running at around 70 minutes but it doesn't feel short. It has some breathtaking shots of glaciers and an overall sense of sadness and loss. Also, great music by J Ralph. It maybe feels slow for 5 minutes when it's doing obligatory talking heads about climate change, but for the most part it focuses on the images themselves and the setup required for the photos the doc is about.

Verdict: 60 of 69 shitboners

A lot of status quo arguing from talking heads in Australia comes down to, "We're only a comparatively small emitter and why should we disadvantage ourselves when China and India won't? It'll cost local jobs!". Actually, it often seems a lot of inaction at the global political level - at least among developed nations - is that unless everyone cuts CO2 at the same time, there's no point for their particular country to do anything.

Take this advice as soon as possible. I just streamed this tonight and amidst absolutely gorgeous photography and videography rang the same words in my mind as the photojournalist said during the movie, paraphrased "if I hadn't seen these pictures myself, I wouldn't believe it." He is referring here to the rapidity of global warming's effect on glaciers, not the fact of it. There is an amazing gulf between hearing a statistic like such-and-such percentage of glaciers retreat so many miles per year versus watching a time-lapse of it actually happening.

During the opening bits, there are soundbites from people disclaiming global warming. One of them is captioned as the founder of the weather channel and he's on CNN or whatever saying something like "in 20 years, we will all see this was nonsense and I'll be here smiling at you" or something equally self-righteous. Does anyone know approximately when he said that? It would be interesting to set some kind of Outlook reminder for 20 years later (it must still be a decade or more from now) and then ask him on The Daily Show for a massive call-out.

I watched this the other night and loved it! But I have to say I don't really see this changing the minds of any hard line climate change deniers. They'll simply fall back to the warming and cooling cycles of the planet argument or some such nonsense. From what I remember there is only one meaningful statistic, that being the current CO2 content in the atmosphere and the rate at which it's increasing (which is absolutely horrifying by the way). Everything else about this requires one to be open to the idea that the glaciers disappearing isn't necessarily part of a regular planetary cycle and that its impact is significant.