This is a lot of media. Bizarrely no skepticism, just writing articles matter of factly using dubious (or at the very least opaque/unverifiable) figures from foreign governments.
And a surprising lack of reporting on the dozens of side channel leaks from China - videos of dead bodies, videos from leakers including the young doctor who was admonished and succumbed to the disease...
Yeah a lot of it was rumor and hard to verify but...nothing? You'd almost start to wonder whether our journalists were cooperating with the Chinese government or something in censoring everything. I struggle to come up with a legitimate excuse other than total incompetence. It was all over the internet and a lot of it (first hand accounts from Chinese citizens within China) would have been reasonably easy to verify for a journalist who knew a Chinese speaker.
Likely a rhetorical question, but they're trying trying to become the place where people go to look for things ... since apparently there is a massive amount of value (at least enough to risk the windows user experience) in controlling that entry point into search.
We will have overpopulation and environmental crises in the future and they will get explained away mindlessly as being completely caused by climate change, when that may be only a partial or even not significant factor in the events.
Not enough fresh water - climate change! Not the fact that the population increased by a factor of 4, and the local acquifers have been drained.
Hu? Climate change causes changes in rainfall patterns. These are hard to predict, but it's where a lot of research is focusing right now. The IPCC also says so. In some regions it might be helpful, in others it will hurt.
So climate change interacts with everything, but I think it's obvious to everyone invlved that it isn't the main driver of everything?
There have always been droughts though, and things have varied from location to location. This effect you are invoking needs actually quantifying, and then comparing to the change in population. Would these regions coped if their populations hadn't drastically increased? Has water supply actually even decreased?
e.g. Yemen, population has gone up x4 in 40 years (or something like this). They have wars, and water shortages. What is the relative contribution of climate change?
It is fairly balanced and fact filled, but when it comes to reduced rainfall and climate change, they are invoked, but left completely unquantified. No source, no estimate, no numbers (let alone a nice impartial unmanipulated graph). Did it decrease 10%, 1%. So if they have absolutely no handle on the quantification how can they make the claim at all? If there is a large uncertainty then that should be expressed.
This is what I mean, we are being primed to accept climate change as an explanation. When we have other massive, dominating factors - massive population growth and running out of acquifer runway (i.e. they have been in deficit for a long time).
Literally in the first paragraph of the article you cite as problematic it says:
> Like other unstable situations in the region, climate change may be an exacerbating factor in the country’s instability, not a primary cause, and to what extent is uncertain.
It's simply a hard question to quantify the impact of climate change on rainfall. Major effort in the IPCC report just goes into adequately representing the uncertainty in precipitation changes. And this is not hidden it's front and center in the Summary for Policymakers:
So yeah, people now look for the contribution of climate change to all sorts of things. It will often not be a dominating driver, and often hard to quantify, but I don't see anything terribly problematic here in the sense that the dominant reasons are ignored. (Population growth in this context is often also indirectly taken into account through land change uses, which mostly means turning nature into farmland.)
They are citing it as a cause but have no quantative basis for it what so ever apparently. The effect could be 0, or negative, they've apparently just brought feelings on the situation.
So figure SPM.7 looks pretty serious. It is 60-80 years in the future (probably further at the time of the models) and based on models (albeit on the agreement of presumably independent models). However current shortages are being attributed to climate change. To do this it should be possible to a) show a long term drop in precipitation and b) show climate related causality somehow. This should be easier than accurately predicting the future - but of course is less easy than innaccurately predicting the future.
So what you show I would say reenforces my point. We have predictions based on models (which we can take seriously or not), but then we also have current events which are being attributed to climate change with no quantifiable basis for doing so - despite the fact it should be possible to come up with some kind of proxy for climate induced problems(other than just a shortage happened).
But literally SPM.7 is the summary of the summary of the summary. There is so so much research published on precipitation, the vast majority of which is careful and precise in giving uncertainties.
It's also actually harder to attribute causality to long term trenda for individual current events than to look at model based predictions for the future. The entire extreme events due to climate change business is incredibly tricky to quantify, even though there are some good heuristic reasons to think it might hold.
So you won't conceed that this is problematic that there is according to you presumably relevant data they could cite - even if it doesn't directly apply to yemen in that particular perioud, but they chose not to? I mean what ever happened to 'citation needed'.
I mean uncertainties is a bit of an umbrella term. You should be able to be certain about predictions if you make the error bars big enough. If you still can't come up with a reliable assertion doing this then things are spurious.
There's already a lack of fresh water in various parts of the world but the problem is particularly concentrated in the Middle East where 70% of the world's desalination plants are located.
For example Kuwait meets more than 90% of its water demand through desalination.
Personally, I think the overpopulation argument is weak. The places that have overpopulation issues are the places where people don't listen to people talking about overpopulation. It's the same problem with plastic use, non-green electricity generation, etc. Most policies are just going to negatively impact the minority without actually solving anything.
I firmly believe that necessity is the mother of innovation, so we should be encouraging those who feel a need to cut back to reproduce, because those are the people who will innovate for the rest of the world. If you have the means to make positive changes, you have the means to raise children to continue that effort. If food starts to become scarce (globally, not just regional distribution issues), we'll innovate new ways to produce food. If water starts to become scarce generally, we'll innovate ways to conserve it and/or desalinate. If pollution gets out of hand, we'll innovate solutions there too.
So I think all of the talk about overpopulation is counterproductive. We should be discussing the problems overpopulation causes and solve those since there's no way to force another individual or group to stop reproducing, but you can make living more sustainably more cost effective.
I dunno, either we lurch from crisis to crisis and possibly end up with an ungovernable world, or look at implementing something like a one child policy in countries with very high population growth (or pressuring them to do so by preventing them from exporting population).
Certainly move the discourse beyond ... so well population is going up, nothing can be done about it.
Fertility has already fallen below replacement levels in most of the world. The only exception is Africa however carbon emissions from that part of the world are so small it barely makes a difference. Even if you wanted to focus in on Africa you will find the countries with the highest emissions like South Africa have a fertility rate barely above replacement level.
The reality is nearly all the increases in population are built in already, it's caused by people surviving into old age. The population is going up and nothing can be done about it.
This is why arguments about population are pointless with regards to climate change, we resolved that years ago through education and better health provision.
but we will be able to genetically engineer ourselves out of it before it becomes a serious issue.
What is your level of uncertainty regarding this? It would seem to be merely a possibility, especially if we undershoot due to falling intelligence levels ...
Even ignoring engineering, there is already preimplantation genetic screening with in vitro fertilization to screen out chromosomes with known heritable defects.
IQ being 'a load of crap' doesn't follow from some journalists glib (and incorrect) claim. What is more, if it were true and the IQ differences were such that todays average measured as a genius then, if you were to witness someone ace the test, you could reasonably hail them a genius at least in the colloquial sense.
Erm surely ability is important as well. Programming is no different in this regard to pro sports - some people have more talent (which probably in turn breaks down into innate attributes, determination and learning opportunity earlier in life).
Some people really don't get programming while others do.
When I studied at university many years ago, my course had a reputation for being tough. Before the course started properly, there was a three week intensive Java course with an exam at the end. They suggested that if you didn't pass the exam, then it probably wasn't the subject for you. A couple of people failed that exam and continued with the rest of the year long course anyway. Those people did struggle and I don't think any of them passed.
And probably also the non-local effects of using a framework - and a fairly magic one at that. All the effects of which are understood when creating the functionality, but the maintainer (even when it is the author) has a much harder time with probably only a partial understanding with certain things being out of mind.
Which is why tariffs make a lot of sense. Yet there has been this massive movement of reaganite/right wing tariffs bashing for decades now - where the mantra of tariffs causing economic harm is mindlessly repeated. You would think they didn't generate tax revenue (and thus reduce taxes/improve economics elsewhere), and where not easier to collect than many other taxes.
I'm not denying the dangers. I can see how countries could fall into populist/short term positions or get involved in harmful escalating tit-for-tat increases, but this is a strawman when it comes to having moderate tariffs.
I agree with you. Strict environmental and employment standards in US and EU make no sense if companies can just relocate to China and pollute & abuse people there.
I'm a strong proponent of "fair" trade (not "free" trade) for this reason - I'm OK with production moving elsewhere because salaries are lower, there's more resources and/or better climate for production, but it's completely unacceptable if it's done to skirt local environmental/employment/anti-corruption laws, and should be taxed heavily.
I don't quite understand your criticism of "right wing tariff bashing" though - Trump's the one who's bent on introducing tariffs, whereas past governments (including left-wing Obama) were happy to play along...
I'd argue that trump is a break from those past dogmas and regulatory capture (to some extent). Certainly he wasn't approved by the media - who are controlled by big business via advertisements.
Trump is rightwing in the same way that the german national socialists were right wing. i.e. Not really economically, or at least big business has to be aligned with the nation. I am not drawing an equivalence - he is to the Nazis what Bernie Sanders is to the Soviets i.e. not comparable in scale at all.
Honestly if country A can make a product X% cheaper than country B because of having less stringent regulation (be it environmental, quality, labor laws...) it's just logical to me that country B should impose a tariff of X% on that product.
I'm not much of a free-market capitalism, but if you have to be, then a free market is not a free market if not everyone is playing by the same rules, right?
That sounds sensible but the devil's in the details. How do you figure how much of X% is environmental? Do you insist the Chinese have similar pay and conditions for workers? How do you check where the rare earths you are buying in say Singapore actually came from?
Which is why precautionary and moderate tariffs are suitable, with some discretion for cases where things are especially egregious and/or where the economics are different (low margin vs luxury goods need different levels of tariff).
Probably ideally tariff levels should not directly made by the executive, but rather some kind of review system - (although quangos are another problem).
It's not to prevent a competitive industry which can just produce something cheaper but also to prevent governments which actively use banned practices to give their nation an unfair advantage. More here:
I'm a free market capitalist. The response we give is if country A is cheaper we should let them do it and concentrate on what we can do well instead. Even if county A is better in everything, they have limited resources so they are better off buying from us something they could do better just so they can concentrate on what they do well while we get good at something we can do but not as well. In the end the efficiency of scale allowed be working together is better for both of us.
It probably makes sense to ignore the above for things like guns and ammo - in case the other country decides to use this monopoly on military supplies against us in war. This is a worst case though, and is rarely required in the real world.
> This is a worst case though, and is rarely required in the real world.
Is it though? We're currently talking about the national security concerns coming from frickin magnets. We could have the same conversation for soybeans or steel or manure. There are a lot of things that are crucial in a country's functioning.
That argument assumes that country A's economy does not affect lives of citizens in the purchasing country (B?). Global warming, among other effects, violates this assumption. Carbon pricing + tariffs on carbon make complete sense even in the free market capitalist mental framework.
You don't seem very convinced about your own alternative though do you? More people might join your cause? And maybe they won't. Yet you may be right that they are setting their cause back. In which case there are no answers. We carry on, destined to be governed by crisis.
It's more correct to think that when 60% of the elites support something change occurs.