What does Donald Trump’s threat to seize Greenland mean for the EU and NATO?

@Thalassokrator seems to take as unexaminable postulates his own sometimes insulting preconceptions about some of those with whom he might not see completely eye-to-eye, when he asks of me:

"Does it give you [apparently referring to me] great pleasure to remain wilfully [sic] ignorant about the actual predictions climate scientists make?" (Bracketed material added to promote clarity).

Yet, I have not denied that the climate is changing.

To the contrary, and on more than one occasion here, I have acknowledged that the climate is changing. And given my prior education and experience, my understanding is not based upon the mere memorization of popular opinion. I didn't learn about the asserted mechanism for climate change from a beloved high school teacher, and I learned it perhaps before @Thalassokrator was yet gracing the Earth.

The idea that the composition of Earth's atmosphere could trap some of the energy radiated to Earth's surface from the sun was recognized long, long ago. Indeed, the idea was likely first suggested by Joseph Fourier (a lovely mathematician, of course) in the early 19th century.

Later in that same century -- around the time that the American Civil War began, John Tyndall (a lovely Irish physicist) made clearer the possibility that both water vapor and CO2 (with the atmospheric product carbonic acid, H2CO3), could act to trap and make available the energy of some reflected sunlight.

Later, thanks to the brilliant Swede Svante Arrhenius (who, I believe, has craters on two different worlds named after him!), we could know that a doubling of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (remember, it is just a trace gas) might raise our temperature by a few degrees.

In other words, the basic idea of induced global warming isn't particularly controversial, and I learned of it long ago and I haven't denied it. Indeed, it explains why Earth, at its average distance from the sun, does not have an arguably less pleasant atmospheric temperature.

Where men CAN more reasonably differ is the extent to which we panic or think that New York City (or Copenhagen) will be under water any day now, or that every storm or wildfire is due to, or greatly exacerbated by, global warming -- or, "climate change," which some seem to find a politically more convenient name, presumably since it can be hurled toward any natural catastrophe, from snow storms to hurricanes to wildfires to grumpy neighbors.

The fact that we might not see eye-to-eye about the rate of change or time for panic makes neither of us willfully ignorant, @Thalassokrator. I respect you, and if you can't respect me then I guess I'll just have to bear that burden. Have a nice evening, and thanks for responding. Sincerely.

In the meantime, I'll look, from time to time, at the sea. So far, beaches don't seem to me, upon visual inspection, to have become generally and significantly closer since my youth.

Admittedly, I haven't been to Copenhagen yet. But I haven't heard of any Danes fleeing to higher ground. Have you?

Donald Trump is a typical populist. Too much talking and a little bit gay show.

@Gaia0405 said in #4:
> bro. can you make up some memes or something? insted of righting about this BORING stuff?
@Raspberry_yoghurt said in #3:
> The Americans here still don't understand that a threat is a threat - so no.

What do you want from this forum? I know I am also interested in politics, but I don't randomly type things that regard fascism and America, I'm not even American, even so, I wouldn't single handedly try to change everyone's minds, I tried and, well, that's how I got myself into the full swing of politics, just by talking about the Ukrainian-Russian war. I suggest you stop acting like a muppet if you don't want to end up with in a weird situation.

Some random things that I really think you should delete

@Raspberry_yoghurt said in #7:
> That would be good, but I think most of US will just let fascism win and not oppose it.
>
> 200 years or US yakking about democracy and land of tre free Independence and bla bla was just hot air. Couldn't wait to get spanked by their dictator when it came down to it.

Take a chill pill

@Phil224 said in #2:
> Can we just take a break?

Yes, we can take a break : )

@V1g1yy said in #43:
> The Japanese were well known for killing their own wounded if they were too much trouble to save. The Russians murdered so many of their own the numbers are incalculable.

Have the Americans had any of their states invaded and occupied by Axis forces ? Have they seen, or even experienced atrocities and genocidal crimes on USA territory ?

Thankfully, negative. However, this does not detract from the heroism of American soldiers, young and old, who were ready to give their lives to defend countries that were not even theirs !

But the Soviet Union experienced this. And unlike American soldiers, many Soviet soldiers were consumed with another unimaginable fear : were their mothers, fathers, fiancés, wives, children...alive and safe ? There are some frightening stories of soldiers who came home alive from the war but lost their entire families. Nothing. no more family, no home. imagine the pain of these people who fought not only to counter the forces of evil, but to fight for their families to survive.

England also experienced this with the Blitz. but not the United States.

> Stories abound about unarmed people sent into the front line expected to pick up a weapon from a dead person and continue on OR get shot by their own comrades when they attempt to return to the line, or if they didn't move 'fast enough'.

so now imagine you are a Soviet soldier in 1941, you are fighting for the survival of your loved ones and you see a guy running to hide or surrender. It is not only the battle that this individual is endangering, but, indirectly, the existence of many civilians potentially of your family. and no one in 1941 thought of doing psychology in the field.

To step back would have meant giving up.

Moreover, if the individual was captured, the n*zis would have executed him or deported to a concentration camp.

And sacrifice other soldiers to search for a fugitive so they can put him in prison ? besides where, if many prisons had been emptied and prisoners were released to go to the front ?

unfortunately, given the circumstances, morality was often put aside in favor of efficiency and survival. It was a climate of psychosis, any suspicious gesture or behavior, like looking behind could be considered treason

> As to Thanking the Soviets, let's consider the alternatives that could have come to pass. How many of the conquered European countries did the US integrate into the 50 states? Hmm, none.

But on the other hand the Americans were able to take advantage of the disarmament of Japan, West Germany and Italy to install military bases and have a certain strategic and diplomatic control of the area (With the exception of Great Britain and France, who kept a distance and acted as a counterweight in the Western bloc), with their modern equipment, but also the training of the new generation of soldiers, particularly Europeans, in a case of a conflict against Soviets, which would later give rise to NATO to counter the Soviet Union. and also, it allowed to USA a significant political and cultural influence on western Europe, both very positive on certain aspects (culture, science, technology) and very negative on others, and above all, the image of a military superpower that have to be respected and feared, in possession of a weapon of mass destruction (atomic bomb).

> How many of the Eastern European countries "Liberated" by the Soviets were handed back to the indigenous peoples? Ah, none eh? Ok, so, if it were not for the US and Britain allowing Denmark to exist once again, what do you think would have happened? Do you think the Russians would just give it back? Like they did Eastern Europe?

well Denmark would have liberated itself ! because once the Berlin objective had been achieved and the main n*zis leaders were captured and their ideology destroyed, the Soviet troops would very likely have stopped the offensive there since France was already liberated.

without the Soviet Union, Germany could have rearmed itself at the end of 1944 and had overpowering technologies while concentrating the majority of its forces on the border and on the Belgian front, and the British and American troops simply could never have arrived in Berlin with a single western and southwest front ! and this could have ended in negotiations between Germans n*zis, the United States and England, once France and Italy were liberated. with a situation that could have been quite similar to the Treaty of Versailles, but where the n*zi ideology would have just guaranteed to be able to be a little more moderate with someone other than the h (like rommel or donitz). but the Holocaust would undoubtedly have continued in the shadow of the general public and the genocides would never have been condemned

and now let's imagine if the Netherlands or Japan had made a communist revolution after the war, how would the United States have reacted ?

- Greenland frankly has nothing to do with the United States, and represents absolutely no threat to its neighbors. Greenland is an exceptional territory that must be protected and not drilled, and if the Greenlanders want independence without breaking with Denmark, they should vote, unless they have already done so.

I respect the United States, it is the country of Jazz and Lady Gaga! but the United States is not paradise on earth either and despite its young age, the USA is not an innocent little lamb on the geopolitical level but rather a young wolf already experienced. therefore, without criticizing your comment, I only wish to provide a counterbalance since the USA has pursued an anti-communist policy as active as the anti liberal-capitalism policy of the Soviet Union. just not in the same way, nor with the same methods

What? I don't/can't understand

@Noflaps said in #51:
> Thalassokrator seems to take as unexaminable postulates his own sometimes insulting preconceptions about some of those with whom he might not see completely eye-to-eye, when he asks of me:

Why should my preconceptions or better said my opinions about you be unexaminable. I specifically asked you to prove me wrong. To refute my prediction. That necessarily requires examination. You are welcome to challenge my impression of you. You are welcome to show me that you actually do know and understand for example what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says.
I'm sorry that my plea was insulting to you. That was not the point. The point was to once again make you aware of the cutting edge of climatology and to call on you to engage with it. As said, I think you're smart. You're obviously well-read. You could understand the current state of climate science if you so desired. Instead of repeating stuff from the 1990s. So far it didn't seem like you'd soon do that and my last post was an expression of that gut feeling of mine. But it would certainly not be the first time I've been wrong.

> "Does it give you [apparently referring to me] great pleasure to remain wilfully [sic] ignorant about the actual predictions climate scientists make?" (Bracketed material added to promote clarity).

Clarity, huh? Well, next time I should make myself more clear. I realise that "you" might be an extremely ambiguous word, especially when preceded by a ping of your username and the number of the post I'm referring to. Thanks for also pointing out the interesting orthographic difference between British English and American English regarding the word "wilful". It's ever so quaint how Americans spell it "willful", isn't it?

> Yet, I have not denied that the climate is changing.
> To the contrary, and on more than one occasion here, I have acknowledged that the climate is changing.

And neither have I claimed that you deny the changing of Earth's climate. I claimed, quite correctly I contend, that you ridiculed and downplayed the effects of climate change in #47. And it's not the first time that you have done so in this exact manner.

You have made your point clear numerous times that you know that the climate is changing but that you do not think that such change poses an appreciable threat to human wellbeing and economic prosperity to warrant anything other than business as usual: Let gradual technological progress do its thing, we don't need to change the way we live at all, climate change doesn't need immediate attention, it will sort itself out. That's basically your stance, isn't it? And that shows that you haven't engaged with the IPCC reports of the last 2–3 decades in my opinion. Or in fact with any of the climate science they summarise.

> And given my prior education and experience, my understanding is not based upon the mere memorization of popular opinion. I didn't learn about the asserted mechanism for climate change from a beloved high school teacher, and I learned it perhaps before Thalassokrator was yet gracing the Earth.

Despite your insinuations my understanding isn't based on memorisation of popular opinion. Nor did I learn about climate change from a beloved high school teacher. But if that's the only way your mind knows how to handle the massive cognitive dissonance you must experience then be my guest. Sure, everybody who disagrees with you is a clueless child blindly following their equally clueless teachers for purely emotional reasons. Or a teen or young adult just saying stuff because it's fashionable. Those are your top two and frankly only rationalisations.

I wonder how you rationalise the statements made by the 270 authors (from 67 countries) of the IPCC report. Are those men and women in their 40s, 50s and 60s also emotionally driven and clueless?

> The idea that the composition of Earth's atmosphere could trap some of the energy radiated to Earth's surface from the sun was recognized long, long ago. [...]

Yes. I'm aware of the history. It's funny you should give me a lesson in the history of climate science when I called on you to look into the future. And to look at the current state of the art of climatology.

> Later, thanks to the brilliant Swede Svante Arrhenius (who, I believe, has craters on two different worlds named after him!), we could know that a doubling of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (remember, it is just a trace gas) might raise our temperature by a few degrees.

Arrhenius calculation (all done by hand) was extremely simplistic and therefore off by a lot. That's understandable because it was a very long time ago (1896) when computers didn't yet exist. And it's not that a large increase in CO2 "might" raise "our [local] temperature" by a few degrees, it's that it "will definitely" raise the average global temperature everywhere on Earth by a few degrees. Given the heat capacity of the entire troposphere that's quite a lot of extra added heat that can be used to power storms, heavy precipitation, heat waves, etc.

> In other words, the basic idea of induced global warming isn't particularly controversial, and I learned of it long ago and I haven't denied it. Indeed, it explains why Earth, at its average distance from the sun, does not have an arguably less pleasant atmospheric temperature.

No, you are confusing two things.
What you're referring to here is the natural greenhouse effect. I.e. the effect of natural greenhouse gasses already present in our atmosphere absorbing infrared radiation reemitted from the ground (after the absorption of short wavelength light of the sun by the ground) and reemitting it back towards Earth thereby lowering the effective rate of radiative transport of heat from Earth's surface to space.
It's indeed very good that this natural greenhouse effect is present, otherwise the average surface temperature of Earth would indeed only be about 255 K (or -18ºC or about 0ºF).

But this natural greenhouse effect doesn't cause a rapid warming trend. It keeps temperatures very stable (across the span of a century at least). So what you call induced global warming and what is usually called anthropogenic global warming is not caused by the natural greenhouse effect.

Rather it is the rapid change in atmospheric concentration of certain greenhouse gases (CO2 chiefly among them) that causes temperatures to change rapidly. And that's exactly what we have been seeing for the past 150 years and the past 30 years in particular. Human activity (burning of fossil fuels) has rapidly raised the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by more than 40% compared to preindustrial levels. The CO2 concentration right now is much higher than it has been at any time in the last 800,000 years (Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, have existed for the last ≈300,000 of those years) and it's still rising faster and faster each year. It is this rapid increase in atmospheric greenhouse gasses that leads to a trend of rapid temperature rise as we see it right now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surface_temperature

The current rate of change in atmospheric CO2 concentration is +2.68 ± 0.28 ppm/yr. Each year the concentration of this greenhouse gas increases by 2.7 parts per million, source: mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/carl/climate/CO2growth.html
This number might not sound like much, so let me put it into perspective:
We know from ice cores that a shift of 100 ppm (in atmospheric CO2) means the difference between a glacial period (complete with a kilometre thick ice sheet covering Northern Europe) and preindustrial warm climate, that's how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gasses. Those changes occurred very, very slowly (at a glacial pace) prior to human activity:
What nature usually does in 20,000 years we currently do in 40 years (100ppm divided by 2.68 ppm/yr ≈ 37.3 yr). Children born right now who plan to live to the ripe "old" age of 40 years, should be ready to experience CO2 concentration changes that are more than those of the 100,000 year glacial interglacial cycle (www.climate.gov/media/13493). In the first 37 years of their lives. On top of already being in a record warm interglacial.

> Where men CAN more reasonably differ is the extent to which we panic or think that New York City (or Copenhagen) will be under water any day now, or that every storm or wildfire is due to, or greatly exacerbated by, global warming -- or, "climate change," which some seem to find a politically more convenient name, presumably since it can be hurled toward any natural catastrophe, from snow storms to hurricanes to wildfires to grumpy neighbors.

Show me the IPCC report that says that we should all run around aimlessly panicking. Show me the report that predicted that New York City would be under water right now. I'd be very surprised if you could present those given that I know for a fact that these exaggerated supposed predictions are made up in order to make it easier to ridicule the concept of anthropogenic climate change as a whole.
So yeah, we can disagree about supposed "predictions" you make up out of thin air.

And one can also disagree about how strongly different extreme weather events are coupled to the annual global mean temperature or any of the higher moments (like variance) of the temperature distribution. Or how cloud seeding might affect radiative forcing exactly. Or about the uncertainty in different methods of predicting when a certain climate tipping point may be reached in the future. Or countless of other (partially) open research questions.
Much open, scholarly discussion is taking place on these matters. But you'd actually need to engage with the subject if you wanted to participate in that. And not just with your distorted view that hasn't changed since the 90s.

Individual weather events can never be identified to have been (solely) caused by human-caused climate change for absolute certain. However it is not disingenuous and not wrong to point out the fact that anthropogenic climate change makes extreme weather events more likely and/or more severe (depending on the event in question), that's clearly what the models show.

> The fact that we might not see eye-to-eye about the rate of change or time for panic makes neither of us willfully ignorant, Thalassokrator.

The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 is a directly measurable quantity. And likewise for the rate of change of global average temperature. Those are hard facts. So I'd say, yes indeed if we were to disagree on those then at least one of us would necessarily have to be wilfully ignorant.

Also you're talking about panic again. Nobody proposes to panic as that would be counterproductive. That's your false dichotomy you've set up in order to justify your inaction and indifference: either one has to do business as usual or one has to panic. That's simply not true, there are way more options in between.

> I respect you, and if you can't respect me then I guess I'll just have to bear that burden. Have a nice evening, and thanks for responding. Sincerely.

A certain modicum of respect is given freely and unconditionally. But respect also has to be earned and maintained lest it erode. Perhaps that's hypocritical of me to say because I confronted you. Either way, I wish you a nice evening or day whenever this might reach you.

> In the meantime, I'll look, from time to time, at the sea. So far, beaches don't seem to me, upon visual inspection, to have become generally and significantly closer since my youth.

Because anything you cannot see with your naked eye isn't real. Like electricity, viruses, atoms, particulate matter, methane, ...?
And because eyes are the most precise measuring device ever devised? Come on. You can do better than that. I have unwavering faith in you.

@Thassokrator -- for the seas to rise in our lifetime and cover port cities they had better stop just piddling around and start rising in a fashion that is visible without precise equipment. We've already been waiting for almost two decades now for Gore's fearful graphics to correspond to reality within unaided human perception.

Let's not cover the matter over with words. A lot of children have become fearful when bombarded with repeated claims that begin to seem quite exaggerated in their urgency.

And yet, after twenty years, indeed over my long lifetime, the sea has NOT risen to an extent that anyone standing on the shoreline can simply see.

There are costs and burdens undertaken in order to combat global warming. But the sky is not the limit in how many costs and burdens can be borne as a practical matter. Remaining calm and avoiding fearful exaggeration is not just advisable -- it is genuinely necessary to preserve civilization.

We will and are dealing with global warming -- we have no choice. But we have to temper our fears and not rush to solutions that are impractical merely because an unrealistic urgency is imposed upon us by those who are fearfully or cynically or politically driven.

China is burning a lot of coal, are they not? To keep their more than a BILLION people alive? Should we tell them to stop, heedless of consequences? Could they stop, even if they wanted to follow our lead?

America, with its MUCH smaller population, is already bending over backwards to improve. So is most of Europe. Many don't seem to realize that.

We perceive the importance of the subject. But we are not all going to panic or agree that every storm or fire is genuinely due to "global warming." And our refusal to do that is not ignorant.

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Incidentally, with respect to climate change, you apparently accuse me in #50 of this: "It seems you're obsessed with it, in every second thread you [apparently meaning Noflaps] find a way to shoehorn it in."

Well, I believe I've authored over 3,200 posts. Are you really going to claim I've "shoehorned" a discussion of climate change into roughly 1,000 posts (assuming one or two posts per thread)? Or is this merely the very sort of exaggeration that I am reluctant to endorse.

My humor is not at all predominately directed at the fear of climate change. But the exaggerated, rather aggressive reaction of some, even to gentle humor dealing with the subject, makes such humor seem even more timely.