Lectro was RIGHT--post1626--(climate related)

“Climate” is a watchword among the Democratic presidential candidates — and an enormous downside risk. Once you are convinced that you are addressing a planet-threatening crisis that will soon become irreversible, prudence and incrementalism begin to look dispensable.

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The real felt urgency of climate change will not, anytime soon, match the rhetoric of the advocates.
The more the climate debate changes, the more it stays the same.

Polls show that the public is worried about climate change, but that doesn’t mean that it is any more ready to bear any burden or pay any price to combat it.


“Climate” is a watchword among the Democratic presidential candidates — and an enormous downside risk. Once you are convinced that you are addressing a planet-threatening crisis that will soon become irreversible, prudence and incrementalism begin to look dispensable.

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There’s no doubt that climate is a top-tier issue for Democrats. In a CNN poll, 96 percent of Democrats say it’s very important that candidates support “taking aggressive action to slow the effects of climate change.” It’s doubtful that mom, baseball, and apple pie would poll any higher.

Among the broader public, according to a survey by climate-change programs at Yale and George Mason universities, 70 percent believe that climate change is happening, and 57 percent believe that humans are causing it.

It’s easy to overinterpret these numbers, though. An Associated Press/University of Chicago poll asked people how much they were actually willing to pay to fight climate change, and 57 percent said at least $1 a month, not even the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

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The political experience of other advanced democracies is a flashing red light. In Australia last month, the liberal opposition lost what was supposed to be “the climate change” election, against all expectations. Pre-election polling showed that about 60 percent of Australians thought the government should address climate change “even if this involves significant costs.” It turned out that it was one thing to tell that to pollsters and another to vote to make it happen.

In France, gas and diesel hikes as part of a government plan to reduce carbon emissions by 75 percent sparked the yellow-vest movement in car-dependent suburbs and towns, and had to be ignominiously reversed.

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The real felt urgency of climate change will not, anytime soon, match the rhetoric of the advocates. There’s currently an effort to make every natural disaster in the U.S. a symptom of an alleged climate emergency. This approach may pay some dividends, since there’s always extreme weather, but it hardly reflects a careful accounting of the data.

Bearing real costs for the sake of the climate will always be a sucker’s game for any one country so long as there isn’t a global regime mandating emission reductions (and, thankfully, there isn’t anything remotely like the political will for such a regime).

Finally, whatever the costs, no one is going to feel any climate benefits anytime soon, or likely ever. The supposed upside of plausible policies adopted by the U.S. would be minuscule changes in the global temperature decades from now.

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All this should counsel caution rather than apocalyptic rhetoric and policies, although Trump has every reason to hope it doesn’t

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sailordeac said:

.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/climate-change-primary-issue-democrats/

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sailordeac said:

CNN being right about anything politically correct would be rather unusual

nor is there any convincing evidence that the Green New Deal would impact climate change in any significant way, if at all, but it would sure cost a lot and cause huge social and economic dislocation, sort of like socialism, if you think about it

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ONW said:

Tell that to Greenland.

"Greenland lost 2 billion tons of ice yesterday, which is very unusual"

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/greenland-sudden-ice-melt-wxc/index.html

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sailordeac said:

CNN being right about anything politically correct would be rather unusual

nor is there any convincing evidence that the Green New Deal would impact climate change in any significant way, if at all, but it would sure cost a lot and cause huge social and economic dislocation, sort of like socialism, if you think about it

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birdman said:

Ok, maybe, but a glacier in Iceland got bigger.

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WakeForestRanger said:

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ImTheCaptain said:

i forwarded that to my wife and she sent me a copy of her paper published in April that describes essentially the same phenomenon in large freshwater lakes. wild

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