nednobbins

They could have left out, "for LGBTQ+ people" and it would have been just as accurate.

I can certainly agree that there is no evidence to suggest that China is "one of the most polluting countries in the world". I haven't seen a shred of evidence to support that claim. It is entirely baseless.

On the other hand, the claim that China's per capita pollution is lower than that of most industrialized nations is supported by evidence. It is the best evidence we have too, unless you've discovered a better metric in the last few days.

A claim that imperfect evidence is equivalent to no evidence is baseless and will lead to erroneous conclusions.

I agree that CO2 is an imperfect measure and you don't seem to be making the claim that CO2 has an SNR of 0 (ie it carries no information at all). We seem to agree on the core of your central three paragraphs so I won't comment on them.

You've stated multiple times now that you don't know any better measures than CO2. So even if there are other measures they're just as bad or worse. Given this lack of any better metric, on what verifiable evidence are you basing any of your conclusions?

I’m assuming based on the time you responded to me that you are in China so maybe you can elucidate me on how I get this wrong.

The same way you got your conclusions about China's pollution wrong, by misapplying evidence and jumping to conclusions.

It's interesting that you should phrase your question that way. The cheap answer would be to point out that you're not using "elucidate" correctly. You're missing a preposition. It's also odd to use "get" instead of "got" here. A corrected version of your sentence might be, "...maybe you can elucidate to me how I got this wrong." It's cheap in the sense that personal attacks are easy and do little to advance a conversation. It would be just as silly of me to use your grammar error as evidence that you're a foreign national as it is for you to use the timing of my posts as evidence of my location.

You might then suspect that I might still be a foreigner who's studied too much English grammar. That would be correct. It turns out that when I speak my native language, other native speakers can sometimes pinpoint the exact district in Vienna where I was born. These days, none of my neighbors speak German. They love the Sox and rock their "Dunkies".

Just as in the case of estimating China's pollution levels, cavalier use of evidence leads to erroneous conclusions.

OK It sounds like there's only one metric we can use to evaluate how much China pollutes.

The metric is widely used by various academics, government agencies and independent organizations. We have no better metric and that metric says that China doesn't pollute that much.

That leaves 2 possibilities; the metric actually provides no information at all or it still provides some information.

If it provides no information AND we don't have anything that does (ie a better metric) that means we literally have absolutely no information at all about how much China pollutes at all. That means we can't make any intelligent claims about how much China pollutes or how much they're fudging the number because there's no comparison to make.

If it does provide some information we're left with a situation where all of the imperfect information supports the claim that China doesn't pollute much.

Either way, the evidence as you've classified it, doesn't support the claim that China is, "one of the planet’s most polluting countries," which was the original claim of this thread. It is, by definition, a baseless conjecture.

Because an informed response would have been more interesting.

Remind you of the thing you could literally check by clicking on the "show context" link?

Apparently.

That's too bad.

So you're just going to spew out words without even checking the context of those words?

Brilliant!

Not sure why you're so hung up on dogs or 2 months. The thread still shows up in searches and you're clearly getting updates on it. Unless there's some evidence to suggest the information in this thread is now obsolete, there's no reason not to respond.

@[email protected] made a claim and provided evidence. Unless there's better evidence to the contrary it's reasonable to accept the claim. My children sometimes still respond to arguments with, "Nuh uh." I generally expect more from adults.

Why not? Have the facts changed since then?

Except when you leave out nuclear in 2020 and add it in 2023 you're not pointing out anything about Biden (or anyone else's) policies. You're just demonstrating that shifting your metrics mid sentence leads to a nonsense conclusion.

When you look at the data China pollutes less than the US both on a per-capita and a per-production basis.