Dude posted links to his own posts, declared them awesome while ignoring the critiques and rebuttals that were posted, then blocked me again instead of engaging in any meaningful way.

This is the Conservative brand's cultivated mindset in a nutshell. I've experienced it in numerous completely independent off and online ecosystems I've substantially engaged over 3 decades now.

Whatever else its membership does and believes, the American Conservative brand has essentially become a death cult, that has wholesale adopted the values and morality of the fossil fuel industry and ruthlessly applies these no matter how obvious it becomes that doing so works against humanity long-term. Even mundane run of the mill conservatives who aren't interested in any of these topics, at this point support what has become a self-interested maniac with a clathrate gun to the head of every living thing on the planet, yet is tolerated because it provides a useful thing cheaply like a meta-Nestle. Only a small number of oligarch-class individuals at the top of this fuckpile will be shielded from the effects of ever-increasing fossil fuel use toward inevitable yet predictable bad ends, yet the rank and file who pay and suffer fight to accelerate this very system. Irrational death cult.

@destraht Carbon is emitted from the oceans when it warms. You speak as if this is something "the environmentalists" never knew or even considered, and that it somehow "solves" the matter of atmospheric carbon balance.

Reality is, the ocean is one of Earth's main mechanisms for regulating CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The excess carbon that mankind has been unsequestering for almost 2 centuries has mostly gotten absorbed by oceans. That process has reached a point of saturation, where not only will future emissions remain in the atmosphere resulting in a persistent spike in CO2 and greenhouse effect, but ongoing warming accelerated by said greenhouse effect causes a net release of carbon from the oceans. Hello, positive feedback loop and runaway reaction!

As far as desert reclamation, I DID address that in my response to that post. You present it like some brilliant innovative idea the lefties never even thought of, when in reality all manner of desert reclamation and forestry restoration projects including urban forest heat island initiatives are constantly in the works. These alone, even scaled up 10X their current massive worldwide collective levels, will be nowhere near enough to process all the carbon projected to be burned over a few short decades, even IF the oceans still had decades to go before reaching the current carbon saturation point.

Right now there is so much dissolved CO2 that coral and shellfish struggle to precipitate sufficient calcium to make shells because of what carbonic acid does to the pH. Even at current high concentrations, the carbon can't and won't precipitate out as carbonates at a rate that could exceed carbon getting added to the atmosphere.

Absurd of you to think you can declare the whole thing solvable by "Just reclaim the sahara desert with an irrelevant sprinkle of Milankovich cycle woo."

@destraht

How this works is that you've built all of your mental models around carbon being a severe problem for us, and you'll simply live with that your entire life as it's the lynchpin for fucking you over.

That's exactly how I see you approaching the issue of carbon from a not-a-problem position. Difference is, you bring just-so narratives that are provably incongruent with the reality of it in multiple ways, aka fractally wrong, and bring unprovable woo as evidence. When confronted by someone extremely familiar with the topic, you do that thing you accuse others of, a complete mind wipe, and ignore that topic completely like you did ITT with the CA smog check program's intent and workings, and as you're now doing with the topic of carbon dioxide.

This will only fly with people predisposed to agree with your CONCLUSIONS, who are also unwilling or incapable of critically examining and challenging your REASONING AND EVIDENCE. Once you've spouted woo in place of evidence on one topic, it casts your knowledge and credibility in a certain light to people who actually understand the topics you're dabbling in. When you do this across the board with many topics, a pattern emerges that is well known and mapped out: schizoform ideation. You also consistently fail what is known as the ideological turing test, in that the bulk of the claims you make about opposing ideas and groups are not even close to what they are actually claiming.

Most "right wing narratives" around the topics of climate, energy, and pollution (Oil is really plentiful not scarce, CO2 isn't really dangerous to the climate, Pollution isn't really that bad, all of the above are made-up crises by wackos who want to put humanity back to the caveman days) fit this mold. They ALWAYS fall apart under scrutiny. Yet they persist because their proponents and follow-on believers actively shut down rational discussion around the topic.

One way to prove me wrong about this would be to stick with the discussion about the CA smog check program. See if your map of ideas related to this can even possibly stretch to accommodate these facts and if you can still carry a rational discussion on the topic supporting your POV. I'm guessing it can't possibly be stretched to fit, and rather than fixing your mental model, you'll take the expedient path of attacking me on a different topic, or ignoring the topic, in order to maintain a worldview that is independent of the world itself.

@destraht

When you're in California the weather is good and so everything is a-okay. I've read this theory that having good weather and soil makes all of your political theories automatically correct.

If you say you want to live in a tourist part of Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America because the weather is so fucking good, people will think you're a degenerate and think you're weird for wanting to live around so many Latinos and dumb for not realizing that most people there are poor and how corrupt and dysfunctional the police and government are there.

If you say you want to leave California because it's a one party state and the Democrats are corrupt and the police don't do shit and there are too many Latinos and most people live in poverty and the weather just isn't worth it, then fuck you plus you're a racist.

This is the power of branding.