Anonymous Coward #fundie

Anonymous Coward #fundie news.slashdot.org

"Global cooling", oops, now called "Global warming", oops, now called "Climate Change", is, in truth, just the latest Apocalyptic The Gods Are Angry End Of The World Unless We Repent Cult. There's a new such cult every few generations complete with sinners (climate change deniers), purchasing external signs of righteousness and piety (Prius cars as an example), the ability to sin at will by buying forgiveness from the gods (carbon credits), outlawing sins against the gods (banning plastic bags for example), large visible tributes to the gods to show our piety as a social group (huge wind power projects as an example), and most of all a uniting of the ruling and clergy class (politicians and "scientists") to strip the people of their wealth in sacrifices (taxes) to conduct ceremonies and make offerings to the gods to appease them. Human nature is simply human nature and does not change appreciably over thousands of years. These behaviors have made the elites rich through all of human history and the average human alive today is no more wiser about the manipulation the an ancient Egyptian making an offering to a priest to help make sure the Nike flooded again this year to make the soil fertile.

20 comments

old comment by

When the plebes couildn't understand what was so dangerous about shifting weather patterns scientists simplified their warning as a singular worst case scenario: temperate zones shifting enough to melt the ice caps without being able to reform somewhere else.

And because that evidently wasn't even simple enough it was shortened to just "warming" as it was passed back and forth through the ignorant masses and made into a joke.

Well now the effects have manifested more severely than simple unseasonable weather including killer heat waves, droughts, monsoons, hurricane force winds, and more subtle changes to soil affecting plant life and notably staple crops they figured if we weren't ready to talk about the greater scope of the problem like reasonable adults with our lives drastically impacted we'd have to be too stupid to live.

Well the childish jokes continue so I guess that answers that.

old comment by Arceus

(From Nat Geo)

"Scientists have discovered an unprecedented die-off in the world's largest reef, the Great Barrier Reef, prompting the Australian government to issue its highest response level.

Diver surveys based off Cape York, Australia's northeastern tip, found up to 50 percent mortality in the reef from coral bleaching. Death among the organisms that build the reef's structure is most likely linked to rising temperatures in the ocean, the government announced.

"The corals in the remote far north of the reef experienced extremely hot and still conditions this summer, and were effectively bathed in warm water for months, creating heat stress that they could no longer cope with," Russell Reichelt, the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said in a statement.

Bleaching occurs when warm ocean water stresses corals to the point that they expel the tiny algae, known as zooxanthellae, that normally live inside their tissues. The algae provide the corals with most of their food, as well as their color. If the heat stress is lessened soon enough, the coral can recover. If not the, organisms will die.

What's happening in Australia is part of a global trend. Over the last year, about 12 percent of the world's reefs have bleached, due to El Niño and climate change. Scientists have predicted that nearly half of these reefs (more than 4,600 square miles or 12,000 square kilometers, or more than five percent of reefs) could disappear forever. That warming trend is expected to continue through the year, leading to what may be the longest global coral bleaching event in history."

For your info, corals survived the friggin' Permian Mass Extinction, the world's worst extinction, so something is definitely wrong.

And you and your disgusting kin are still denying that anything is happening.

old comment by Mister Spak

"Human nature is simply human nature and does not change appreciably over thousands of years. These behaviors have made the elites rich through all of human history and the average human alive today is no more wiser about the manipulation the an ancient Egyptian making an offering to a priest to help make sure the Nike flooded again this year to make the soil fertile."

For example the manipulators who tell us global warming doesn't exist oops I mean it exists but humans don't cause it oops I mean humans cause it but if we stop my stock price will go down so let's keep doing it.
Anonymous coward is no more wiser about the manipulation the an ancient Egyptian making an offering to a priest to help make sure the Nike flooded again this year to make the soil fertile.

old comment by Kanna

(1) "Global cooling" was a couple of rogue scientists with an eye-catching theory. It was never supported by the climatology community at large.
(2) "Global warming" is what's happening now, but as that doesn't mean that all spots are warming at the same time, it was changed to:
(3) "Climate Change" by the conservatives, because global warming sounded too scary to them.

I see you don't understand it yet. The means you probably live far above sea level, and you don't make your living farming a crop which requires a certain measure of weather predictability for success. Or perhaps you are just that proverbial ignorant frog in the pot of warming water.

old comment by TimeToTurn

There's some point here about how governments are responding to climate change (and who profits) and of course greenwashing corporations, but this is a pile of nonsense. If climate change is a religion, then it's infinitely more true than any other religion, considering you'd have to be blind not to see the evidence surrounding you.

@Arceus

Well, to be fair, lots of taxons survived mass extinction events only to go extinct at the next mass extinction. A shame it'll take millions of years (if not longer) for Earth to recover biodiversity. Of course, in millions of years there will either be no more humans or we'll all have Ray Kurzweil's singularity at last.