It can be argued that the WHO is a politically influenced organization that made serious mistakes during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, it relied on incomplete or misleading information provided by China in the early stages of the outbreak, which delayed global recognition of the virus’s severity. Additionally, the WHO supported the use of cloth masks long after it became clear that they were largely ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID-19.
Trump supporters, like myself, think it’s smart not to reduce our nation’s sovereignty by kowtowing to the WHO. We as a nation can make appropriate health decisions.
The WHO is a mechanism to allow a degree of cooperation among the world’s nations on matters of public health. It’s imperfect, as any organisation with such a difficult scope would be.
But the world needs some way to cooperate, especially in matters of public health which do not care about national borders. Casually throwing that away for short term political theatre is so painfully stupid.
Also, no one kowtows to the WHO and no one gives up national sovereignty over their own health decisions. What led you to believe this?
“I transformed my life by participating in Toastmasters for about a year an a half. ”
Same here. The time investment is quite small compared to what you can get out of it. my main regret is that I didn’t learn about toastmasters when I was 18. My life could have gone quite differently.
To bad you core premise is incorrect. CO2 is not the driver of global temperature changes. If it was then ice core samples would show this. The ice cores show something completely different. The ice core data shows that CO2 levels respond to temperature changes. So temperatures go up and then hundreds of years later CO2 levels go up. Temperatures go down and then hundreds of years later CO2 levels go down.
What does drive global temperatures then? It is that huge ball of gas and fire in the sky commonly called the Sun.
So other then your core assumption being wrong your write up sounds interesting.
First, this phenomenon is well known, and it's easy to find citations if you look at the raw data [0]. BTW, the cause of the periodic change in temperature is believed to be the periodic variation of Earth orbital eccentricity, obliquity and precession [1][2], which causes the Earth to receive more or less solar radiation.
> So temperatures go up and then hundreds of years later CO2 levels go up.
> CO2 is not the driver of global temperature changes.
Next, OP's argument is not a a good one. If you know p->q, it doesn't imply q->!p. Thus I reject OP's argument as invalid, unless more information can be added to improve the argument. In fact, q->p is entirely possible. It's how an oscillator circuit works.
And here's an interesting case: Perhaps the planet Earth is more similar to an electronic circuit than most people think. Although the idea of orbit variation can explain a lot of things, including the δ¹⁸O time sequence (an indicator of temperature) obtained from the ice core records, but some serious issues remain unsolved. If you convert the δ¹⁸O time series into the frequency domain via FFT (i.e. putting it into a "spectrum analyzer"), you expect to see a 413,000 years cycle spike which is the periodic change of Earth's eccentricity. However, this is not detected. There are many hypotheses, but the most interesting one is: perhaps Earth's climate is a nonlinear system worked like a frequency modulator. It transforms some AM "carrier" signals, such as the 413,000 years cycle, with astronomical information, to a FM signal in the δ¹⁸O time sequence. This paper attempts to demodulate it with limited success [3].
See? The climate of Earth is a complex system with a myriad of positive and negative feedback mechanisms that are still not fully understood. So if the OP wants to claim that CO2 is not important to the global temperature, he should attack the climate models instead (I really hope the model is wrong and the reality is much brighter), not presenting oversimplified statements.
It's not worth debating the issue further, per Guidelines,
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
I shared the possibility that the Earth creates a FM signal that contains astronomical information, since it inspires intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for.
Ford doubling his minimum wage is simply an example of capitalism (not government) raising wages. This is why capitalism is the greatest economic system (by a mile) ever devised.
An increase in aggregate worker productivity isn't necessarily an increase in the ability of workers; most productivity gains are attributable to capital investment. If you took a productive modern worker back 500 years, they wouldn't be much more productive than the locals of that time, as they'd lack the tooling, machinery, resources, equipment and factories that magnify human productivity today. It hence makes sense that the gains from rises in productivity wouldn't all accrue to workers, as the gains result from the actions of business owners investing in better means of production, not from action on the workers' part.
All productivity gain is the result of capital investment. That doesn't mean the benefits should not accrue to workers. Who do you think is provisioning, configuring and using the machines that result in that gain? Shareholders?
Did you know that Canada was once a tropical climate? I'm just saying it's possible that the earth's climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to change after they take away our freedom by placing a tax on energy.
Please proof that claim. 100x faster never. And faster warming compared to which period. We are still in at the tail end of an ice age so warming is expected.
xkcd is always fun and supported by facts, but that chart only goes as far back as 20000 years ago.
No chart-based argument is ever fair if it does not show all available data and includes zero. Which is to say that it needs to cover about 4.5 billion years and show temperature in degrees Kelvin. Not that it isn't rhetorically effective; it's just not fair.
To restore the effectiveness, you'd probably have to put everything on a log scale, also chart the first derivative of the mean global temperature function, chart the partial pressure of CO2, and label all the mass extinction events.
The facts speak for themselves; no one should need to be tricked in order to believe them. And cherry-picking is a rhetorical trick. The rate of change in mean global temperature is at a level that is a hundred times more rapid than the warming and cooling rates seen in previous geological eras. And while we are still under the Eocene maximum for absolute mean temperature, biological evolution needs time to keep up with temperature change. Species that produce new generations on the scale of decades can possibly handle a 5 degree change, when it occurs over 100000 years, but not so much when it only takes 100 years. If you swing the needle on the temperature gauge fast enough, only the species that can produce new generations in a matter of hours will survive it.
IMO it's always interesting to know what's happened in ancient history, but for the purposes of keeping earth habitable for humans, I'm mainly interested in the period of time in which humans have lived on earth. The rate of change has not been totally unprecedented, but it has been within the time range we've been around.
Superfluous data can distract from salient points; for example it's simply not relevant to the discussion of life on earth what the weather was like when the earth was still a ball of lava. And sure, the temperature changed quite rapidly when the moon was blown off the side of the earth. But how is that important?
I don't find the possibility of distraction to be more important than the possibility of deception.
If you conceal data because it is distracting, the person from whom you are hiding it cannot know why you did that. They only know that they cannot see what you refused to show.
If it is not relevant, it is better to show it, and explain why it is not relevant as best as you are able. And that explanation can take the form of an arrow that marks the earliest time life was suspected to have first developed.
But in showing it, an observer might be able to discern temperature trends due to changes in the sun, meteor and comet bombardments, loss of core radionuclides, radiation into space, or other cosmological factors not attributable to humanity, or other forms of life. It might show a reason why the Earth today should be cooler now than it was at the Eocene maximum.
It's just more honest. You can still show a second graphic that cuts out the pieces you feel to be unimportant, and which highlights the pieces that best make your point.
Oil is way, way cheaper than its real value. If you had to produce oil from scratch, it would cost far more. If we use it willy-nilly, we're impinging on the freedom of future people. There has to be a balance, here.
Your wording makes me cringe. People don't have "freedom" to use or have access to things in the sense you are suggesting. Its not a fundamental right to have and use Oil. In its extreme you are basically asking people to suffer today so that maybe some future people might not suffer. It is completely unattainable because the future is always in the future -- and largely unknown. So people will have to continue to suffer and make sacrifices because of the near unlimited "future people".
I can't remember the source, but I think it was a fairly well known economist. He has the position that prices for things always go up, so in effect using Oil now will always be cheaper than using oil in the future.
Your comment makes me cringe. Why not use all the world's resources immediately in the most flagrant way possible "if the future's always uncertain."
Being good stewards of shared resources is not "asking people to suffer today." You are right that it is not a fundamental right to have oil - so why do you get it all?
> People don't have "freedom" to use or have access to things in the sense you are suggesting.
Resources can unconstrain a person in the same way freedom can. They can enable one to do things not possible without them.
> In its extreme you are basically asking people to suffer today so that maybe some future people might not suffer.
It's called using the resources you have access to in a sensible way. Yes, you may have to sacrifice some short-term gain in order to unlock greater long-term gain.
> It is completely unattainable because the future is always in the future -- and largely unknown.
Do you save money? Do you ration your groceries or consume them all the first day you buy them then starve the rest of the week?
> He has the position that prices for things always go up, so in effect using Oil now will always be cheaper than using oil in the future.
The price of writing this post itself and delivering it over a network would have cost orders of magnitudes more just a couple decades ago.
Oil is not globally owned, it is owned by individuals who mine it, and the land owners who allowed it to be taken from the ground.
The way this is being worded and the only foundation for such arguments is if it is assumed oil is a right for everybody to have access, or is group owned by humanity.
I use my groceries as needed, but if I wanted to buy a cart full of apples and flush them down the toilet it is none of your business -- as after I have bought them you have no right. Unless you own the apples and are the one selling them, you have not business in telling me how to use them either.
So the only take away I have is you think all humans own oil and have a right to it, and that if some humans are using it in a way that would make less for further humans, then you some how think you have a say in telling me how much I can use.
The suggestion that you or anybody else has a say on how much of a product one can buy or how quickly they use the product is ludicrous.
No one owned the process by which the oil was produced.
We don't need to bring in leaky concepts of rights here. It is a plain fact that the Earth has a resource which was formed before humanity even existed, is limited, and the price of which is not reflective of the process required to create it. It is also a plain fact that using said resource unwisely hampers fellow and future citizens.
Buying a cart full of apples and flushing them is also unwise, but at least the price of an apple is somewhat reflective of the cost of producing one.
A carbon tax helps bring the price of oil up to at least be closer to its real value, and help prevent unwise ways of utilizing it.
> using said resource unwisely
> prevent unwise ways of utilizing
Who are you to decide what is wise or unwisely use of oil? How do you know the carbon tax does not unjustly affect the ability for those with lesser means to use it today and as a result kill off entire peoples who would have existed otherwise -- talking about hampering future citizens.
The entire notion of limiting use of it because it is going to run out is silly because it will still run out. It does not matter if it runs out 100 years from now, or 200 years from now or 1000 years from now. It is still going to run out.
You want to trade the freedoms of today for the idea of "freedom" tomorrow. You have no data or proof to suggest that how it is being used today vs how it will be used by future peoples will be better or worse. All you are doing now is raising the price artificially and hampering current citizens -- which I argue are more important than any future ones you can image.
> A carbon tax helps bring the price of oil up to at least be closer to its real value.
Value is subjective. 1000 years ago oil was worthless, and when found was often considered unwanted. The price of oil will change as its value changes over time. We could have had different events that caused us to never discover the use of oil and thus it would be valueless to us today.
From a data scientist that has been working as an architect for data systems for some time now, the way that data science was done 2 years ago changed considerably to how we do data science and design data systems geared to machine learning today. Data can be the "fuel" the economy, but the extreme demand for data scientists that need to know a huge number of things, from statistics do machine learning to programming, databases and so on, is reducing, and more specialized roles, like machine learning engineer, is growing. That´s the reason for my comment: the bubble of data scientist highly skilled over a vast number of areas is dying, and data scientists need to start to specialize to survive.
Trump supporters, like myself, think it’s smart not to reduce our nation’s sovereignty by kowtowing to the WHO. We as a nation can make appropriate health decisions.