Austrialin heat wave

[Llamas]

Whether or not one believes there's anything we can do to stop it, it's about time the idiots who are in complete denial that global warming is happening shut the fuck up in favor of not being embarrassed like the Doomsday 2012 believers were on the 22nd of December.

Case in point: Australia's meteorologists had to add new heat colors to the map to indicate record-high temperatures. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...90806V20130109

Tar has been melting. Wildfires have been started. Petrol has been vaporizing. Clearly this is a serious problem and ignoring it is more likely to result in deaths than trying to do something about it.

But wait, I forgot there's been some snow in Russia, so obviously global warming isn't happening... right??

PS: even Fox News has reported that 2012 was the hottest year in the US's record: "A brutal combination of a widespread drought linked to a La Nina weather event and a mostly absent winter pushed the average annual U.S. temperature last year up 0.6 C (1.08 F) above the previous record set in 1998 to 12.96 C (55.32 F)."

[Static_Martyr]

Climate change has been established fact for as long as I can remember. Growing up and reading about this sort of thing, I always heard that there were these "climate change deniers" out there, but I never really met any of them until I started using the internet. Then I was like, "seriously? There are people who deny that this is happening?" Because the science behind global warming is so well-established that only libertarians seem to disagree with it (and only then because they believe that eco-savvy-ness is bad for industry, and they worship industry as a god, so naturally anything they perceive to be against it is automatically evil).

Like the retards who thought "The Lorax" was "anti-corporation."

[Godxilla]

Static, I don't think you know what a libertarian is. They are smart (conservative) on fiscal issues, and liberal on social issues. That means that we believe in global warming. But unlike liberals, we think that there has to be an approach that doesn't screw business/livelihood. We can't ban factories, sorry. Otherwise liberals wouldn't get their precious weed or porn videos. Sorry. What we can do is provide good reasons for businesses to go green. Tax breaks? Maybe. Punishments? More likely. But in all seriousness, let's not act like jerks here. For example, are you wearing clothes right now? Are you using the internet right now? Are you sitting in a chair? If not for these "evil businesses" that supposedly steal everyone's cash (while never leaving the office, funny), none of this would exist.
So think before you advocate the destruction of the world's economy, bitches. Sorry to rain down the truth, but the forecast can't be helped.

[Llamas]

Damn, I don't think I've ever made a typo in a thread title before (unless drunk). Can a mod fix it?

[Jojan]

That is beginning of the apocalypse, mother fuckers. And you are all going to hell. I guess you could say that the Lord is taking you... down under.

[Static_Martyr]

I don't think you know what a libertarian is

I've never met a libertarian who could accurately describe what a "liberal" is. As you demonstrate when you say:

we think that there has to be an approach that doesn't screw business/livelihood. We can't ban factories, sorry.

Libertarians are, by and large, incapable of registering nuances in terms of regulating markets. It's either, "I'm for a completely free market, because the free market will solve all of our social problems, if the big bad government can just get out of our business," or, "I can't believe you're for regulation! You want to regulate how much toxic Benzene a factory can emit in a year, that means you want to ban factories!" Even Rand Paul (libertarian poster boy and famed comparer of national healthcare to slavery) disagrees with that assessment.

Or:

Otherwise liberals wouldn't get their precious weed or porn videos.

I don't smoke and I don't watch. But good job with the uninformed snap judgment; it fits in nicely along with the rest of what you said.

For example, are you wearing clothes right now? Are you using the internet right now? Are you sitting in a chair? If not for these "evil businesses" that supposedly steal everyone's cash (while never leaving the office, funny), none of this would exist.

Exactly my point. I have made no such assertion that corporations or businesses are "evil," or even "bad." I'm all for business. Business is a necessary fact of life. At the same time, I don't believe that your right to do business to any extent and at any cost trumps my right to live in an environment that isn't a toxic waste dump; if we can prove that certain business models lead to higher rates of pollution, then I'd say that making sure the air isn't full of toxic fucking fumes that give people cancer (as happened at a facility in Arkansas) should take priority over making sure that an already-filthy-rich corporation makes a few more million dollars in one year.

Let me get one thing straight before you fuck it up: we are not talking about "small businesses," we are talking about already-super-profitable industries, that knowingly violate existing EPA regulations, and try to justify de-funding the EPA on the grounds that "it's bad for industry" (which, when we look at the hard numbers, doesn't mean shit except "we'll make slightly less money this year," nevermind the fact that you're still so profitable that Forbes ranked you #2 on its list of profitable companies for 2010, raking in more than $100 billion in one year with a mere 67,000 employees nationwide).

So think before you advocate the destruction of the world's economy, bitches. Sorry to rain down the truth, but the forecast can't be helped.

That's what bugs me the most about the libertarian dismissal of the fact of climate change: it doesn't even deny that climate change is happening, for the most part. It simply asserts that it doesn't matter, that in principle, your right to a profit supersedes my right to be able to breathe natural air and not suddenly develop cancer. Forgive me if I disagree. I don't believe you really feel that way, but you know what? If you do, fuck you. As someone who has lived through cancer, I personally value life more than profit. And if corporations can charge me to clean up the air that they polluted just so I can breathe it, then they need to pay for fucking it up in the first place.

Anyway, maybe when I meet a libertarian who can get his/her facts straight for two posts in a row, I'll stop making fun of libertarians.

Damn, I don't think I've ever made a typo in a thread title before (unless drunk). Can a mod fix it?

Lol. I did not even notice that. I just read it as "Australian."

That is beginning of the apocalypse, mother fuckers. And you are all going to hell. I guess you could say that the Lord is taking you... down under.

God, I love that "YEEEEAAAAAH" meme

["Melyssa K" Kennedy]

That is beginning of the apocalypse, mother fuckers. And you are all going to hell. I guess you could say that the Lord is taking you... down under.

I'm literally sitting here giggling, not because of the Down Under joke, though, that was funny. It's your use of a CSI: Miami picture!

Anyway, I think the prime issue is that most people want to live in the here and now, which is likely no more than 10 years away from serious oil, climatic, etc. issues. If it's not killing them now, people don't want to think about it. Intelligence coupled with greed is the bane of long-term human survival in the technology era.

[Baldwin]

Tar has been melting. Wildfires have been started. Petrol has been vaporizing. Clearly this is a serious problem and ignoring it is more likely to result in deaths than trying to do something about it.

Road tar melts, bushfires start and petrol vaporises every summer here. And yes, lots of oldies and English tourists die every summer. They always have. There's nothing to be done about it, it's just hot here.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1226549810192

According to the meteorologists, this heatwave is "not notable".

I agree.

[Static_Martyr]

Road tar melts, bushfires start and petrol vaporises every summer here. And yes, lots of oldies and English tourists die every summer. They always have. There's nothing to be done about it, it's just hot here.

According to the meteorologists, this heatwave is "not notable".

I agree.

Except that quote is taken out of context. What it *actually* says is [emphasis mine]:

Despite this, Braganza says the current event "is not notable for the size of individual temperature anomalies. It is notable for its size, as almost the whole continent is warm," he points out.

"It is more typical for parts of the continent to be significantly cooler when we have a large heatwave."

But is it climate change at work?

"We have broken the record daily average temperature over the whole of Australia set at 40.17C in December 1972," Braganza says.

"We have gone six consecutive days with the average (national) temperature over 39C and that has never happened before, and we expect that will go seven days all up (including yesterday).

"There are aspects of the heatwave that are at the very edges of what we have experienced in the past, but in terms of individual sites I don't think this is the sort of event like Black Saturday," he says.

I agree that it's not "climate Armageddon," but to deny that this is a climate milestone is more than a bit dishonest. At the very least, it's something to watch.

[Baldwin]

But the point remains that this isn't caused by climate change, it's just a regular monsoonal trough or somesuch science-talk. Climate change exists, I don't deny that. But this is just your run-of-the-mill record-breaking heatwave. If you want to go around proving climate change to idiots, you can use the mountains of data that already exist. Or you can just not do it at all, since they won't listen to you, and it's not your problem anyway.

But when people claim things like "fires are starting", "tar is melting", "people might die" are some amazing new phenomenon that have to be dealt with, it sounds kind of stupid and condescending to people who actually live here and deal with that happening every single year in living memory. It gets hot here. Sometimes it gets hotter than usual. Once in a great while it gets hotter than it's ever been since people started writing down the exact temperatures. That's normal.