the sleet hits the fan in Texas

You think that considering a range of possibilities is dangerous?

Wow.

The unnatural restriction to ideas that you find personally flattering is a bit sick, and the idea that the only changes that you have to worry about are those with which you are comfortable is even sicker. The obvious example of a change that you are ignoring is anthropogenic global warming, but there are others.

But only considering the ones that you find flattering doesn't get you all that far forward.

Your problem is that the range of possibilities you are willing to consider is remarkably restricted, and it's the ones that you refuse to consider t hat are endangering you. Anthropogenic global warming is more likely to ser iously endanger your kids than it is to endanger you, but bad forest fires in California could put your life at risk.

The 2019 bushfires in Australia were spectacularly bad, and there was enoug h bush-fire smoke in the air in major cities that hospital admissions for r espiratory problems went way up.

You can 't blame any single forest fire on anthropogenic global warming but when you get a lot more of them than you have ever had before, it can look very likely that it is playing a part.

"This is what America would look like under socialism!"

pictures of uhh...socialist Texas?

God this guy can be nasty!

I was having a conversation with someone from Germany some time back and we were going back and forth until it was made clear that here the common heating fuel is electricity and in Germany it was petroleum!

The US has some amount of heating with gas and some from petroleum, but it varies a lot by region... this is a large country after all.

At one time it was a close race to that all being German.

Not really. The Germans might have been able to hang onto France if they hadn't invaded Russia, but they didn't invade enough of Russia in that first attack to make it any kind of close race after that.

It's difficult to see how they could have, unless you believe that the Slavs are genetically inferior to Germans, and that idea turned out to be clearly false. The test was expensive, but the result was conclusive.

Oh, yeah, if 'considering' doesn't pull up the 'stop-shooting' possibility real quick, you would certainly qualify as dangerous

So we should add insects and their current crisis to the list of topics you know nothing about, but have strong opinions on anyway?

And just as you can't understand the difference between the weather outside your window today and long-term climate change across the globe, you can't understand the difference between number of /species/ of bugs, their origins, and the size of the populations.

Really? Look at the "over-mortality" when extrem heat hit europe.

Were honeybees native to the Americas before Columbus?

I'll tell my older daughter, who thought not. She's a PhD botanist who specializes in bees.

You could have googled that. Why didn't you?

Honeybees are not native to the Americas - that bit is true. But you don't have too many bugs - like much of the rest of the world, you are suffering from lack of insects due to destruction of habitats, overuse of insecticides, lack of diversity in crops, and increased pathogens in insects. (That last one is particularly bad in commercially used honey bees, due to the way they are kept and used.)

While honeybees are not native to America, they are not counted as invasive species - rather, they are a naturalised species that has fitted in quite happily. (To be invasive, they need to be damaging to the environment or local species. So Africanized (killer) bees are invasive, honeybees are not.)

I'm not sure what you meant be "I'd veto mosquitoes first" - it's not clear whether you thought they should be the first to be eliminated, or that they should be the first to be excluded from elimination lists. They are, in many environments, vital to the ecosystem which would suffer badly from their eradication. Modern mosquito control focuses on eliminating the dangerous pathogens some species transmit, rather than the mosquitoes themselves.

Ah, so you think that makes /you/ an expert? You might pick up a little from occasional conversations, but as usual you seem to overestimate your knowledge.

I like spiders. They eat the other bugs.

Had to look it up, and was surprised at how much really is electricity:

natural gas is still way more efficient, if you're comparing to electricity generated by burning anything. Transmission & distribution losses are still like 20-25% from what I recall. Any NG furnace isn't less than 75% to 80% efficient, so you might as well burn the gas yourself if you just need heat.

Yes, it depends on the area. Locally, in SF area, there were some gas line explosions, and potential dangers during earthquake. The local leaders are scare of gas lines. There are make it difficult or outright banning gas for new constructions.

Yes, Renfield agrees with you, according to Dr. Seward.

e:

ars left,

other than over-warm.

None of them make the point he was trying to make. At the moment, extreme c old does kill more people than extreme heat waves.

So far, there haven't been all that many. If anthropogenic global warming c ontinues to push average temperatures up, there will be more of them. Since climate change produces more extreme weather - both hot and cold - extreme cold may continue to kill more people than really bad heat waves (and the forest fires that tend to come with them) but that's no reason not to want to get slow down and reverse anthropogenic global warming, no matter how mu ch money the fossil carbon extraction industry spends on lying propaganda a bout the subject.