Removal of Global Warming

Features that fail BOTH reality and gameplay viability checks should never be in the game. IV's desert fairy magic was an example.

As for real GW, we certainly do not know how much impact human activity has on climate change, if any. It is ludicrous to make up pretend factors and include GW on the basis of 0 research.

Technically speaking, the end of the ice age was MASSIVE global warming ------> That was likely not man-caused!

As it stands a little-understood topic known over only the tiniest fraction of human history has no place being given some pretend factors to cause it and then thrown into the game...unless it has a functional in-game usage. GW has never done that in any civ game ----> the decision to completely remove GW was correct.

Plus, GW was completely broken to the point where Environmentalism and Recycling Centers actually made Global Warming worst. If the game had renamed it desertification and made it relevant, the whole "world turning to desert" would've made some sense.

Then there's the whole thing about nukes causing global warming in Civ4....

Pretty much that, TMIT. Like I pointed out above, the only TBS from firaxis where GW makes sense is in SMAC, because it has a game value both as cause and consequence and it is a coherent output of other game mechanics ( namely the Planet climate system ).

No civ game has so far even tried to have a climate system , so spitting GW in it is incoherent .... and the choices made for causes and effects made it have 0 value as cause and conquequence. In other words, it didn't gave the player any real decision to make that had anything to do with the rest of the game mechanics and it didn't contributed to suspension disbeleif. I'm quite glad that they got this one right .

Sonereal said:

Plus, GW was completely broken to the point where Environmentalism and Recycling Centers actually made Global Warming worst. If the game had renamed it desertification and made it relevant, the whole "world turning to desert" would've made some sense.

Then there's the whole thing about nukes causing global warming in Civ4....

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Right, so we all agree 'do not do it like civ4'. Anyone disagree? Okay? No, no one burst into my room to tell me no, so I'll go with it.

But should it exist in the game in SOME form?

Without a climate model, no, there should not be a GW event. Makes 0 sense and does not add much to the game value, especially when compared with the work to put it running

What, like there's not enough global warming emitted by Askia when you see him, or Montezuma, or global chilling when you see Augustus, or when you see Catherine and you see not her face

Larsenex said:

Please...Global Warming is a myth, further study is needed......

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Like what, studying the Climate Fairies who caused the supposed Medieval Warming Period which has no evidence to support it being global?

Those darn fairies must be at it again, changing the climate through their supernatural hocus-pocus that evades our attempts to measure it! I mean, it must be them, since every other potential source we looked at wouldn't be causing the current global warming and something that we're 99.99...% positive would cause warming is actually being put into the atmosphere as fast as we can dig it up.

If only those Liberal Elitists would get over their political agenda and give our claims Academic credence we could stop pushing our message only through the public sphere. It makes our position look really bad when an overwhelming majority of climate scientists from across the world oppose us while we're stuck with the typical rube (with the occasional engineer) for our support base. It's all a part of their super conspiracy and/or they're deluded into believing such pseudo-scientific nonsense which was gradually "understood" only after a century of study. Those scientists never know anything! Just look at the minority who believed there would be global cooling back in the 1970's. I mean sure, the whole thing was more of a media craze and a majority still thought global warming would be more likely, but it proves that they're a bunch of scare-mongering know-nothings. Good thing their lies won't work on me since I'm a rationally skeptic individual

[Did I get everything? And to think, I used to agree with such a convoluted mess...]

Zechnophobe said:

Right, so we all agree 'do not do it like civ4'. Anyone disagree? Okay? No, no one burst into my room to tell me no, so I'll go with it.

But should it exist in the game in SOME form?

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No. Not really. If they add global warming, they should go ahead and add back in unhealthiness and then diseases which are far more relevant on the 4000BC to 2050 AD scale than global warming.

CivDude86 said:

Would make martine CS even more powerful. A human player would just start fire off nukes just to turn the world into a giant desert/tundra. A TP is just as effective on those tiles as grassland so someone who gets most of their food from CS and rush buys would not be affected.

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If you've blown up enough cities to cause a nuclear winter, you should probably have already won the game anyway.

Abegweit said:

I'd offer you a glass of kool-aid to settle you down but I see you've already drank the whole dang jug

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I don't believe in the Netherlands either. Dams, land reclamation, etc. are all myths.

Sonereal said:

Plus, GW was completely broken to the point where Environmentalism and Recycling Centers actually made Global Warming worst. If the game had renamed it desertification and made it relevant, the whole "world turning to desert" would've made some sense.

Then there's the whole thing about nukes causing global warming in Civ4....

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On that note, it's ironic that they had a desertification mechanic but, at the same time, made jungle the best land on the planet after being chopped down and turned into fertile grassland.

Gustave5436 said:

If you've blown up enough cities to cause a nuclear winter, you should probably have already won the game anyway.

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Seriously. How much uranium is that? Some of that was probably better spent on GDRs.

I don't believe in the Netherlands either. Dams, land reclamation, etc. are all myths.

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There's a difference between climate change and global warming. It isn't in the scope or complexity of the game to accurately reflect it. Even if it was "accurately" portrayed, the feature would be extremely boring, unplayable, and offer no real reward.

On that note, it's ironic that they had a desertification mechanic but, at the same time, made jungle the best land on the planet after being chopped down and turned into fertile grassland.

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There was just so many problems with Civ4 global warming. The biggest being that using nukes against an enemy maybe global warming worst for the person using the nukes.

Gustave5436 said:

On that note, it's ironic that they had a desertification mechanic but, at the same time, made jungle the best land on the planet after being chopped down and turned into fertile grassland.

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Actually it's pretty consistent. If you consider jungles to be akin to rain forests, they would be extremely fertile and valuable land if removed in the right way.

That said, it is a little silly you can chop down all rain forests easily before the industrial era.

I don't consider Anthropogenic Global Warming to be a reality though the data lies outside my usual realm of science (biostatistics). I still would of bought the game if it had been included, it would of just been another game mechanic.

Ps. hundreds of people study climate related science every year and without a global climate change their job prospects go down significantly. So when your field has a history of fraud, an inherent bias and has been politically influenced it becomes difficult to take its scientific output seriously.

Benzidrine said:

I don't consider Anthropogenic Global Warming to be a reality though the data lies outside my usual realm of science (biostatistics). I still would of bought the game if it had been included, it would of just been another game mechanic.

Ps. hundreds of people study climate related science every year and without a global climate change their job prospects go down significantly. So when your field has a history of fraud, an inherent bias and has been politically influenced it becomes difficult to take its scientific output seriously.

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Well, and so that's why you peer review the data, and attempt to reproduce it. When the other guy has a huge stack of data saying one thing, and your best argument is "Well, he WOULD say that" you don't really come out on top. Fight fire with fire, and knowledge with knowledge!

Zechnophobe said:

Well, and so that's why you peer review the data, and attempt to reproduce it. When the other guy has a huge stack of data saying one thing, and your best argument is "Well, he WOULD say that" you don't really come out on top. Fight fire with fire, and knowledge with knowledge!

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I agree with your sentiment however most peer review processes are not very good at the actual number crunching, they tend to focus on wether the conclusion is logical based on the hypotheis and data obtained. One study found seventy percent of statistical research papers in a sample of peer reviewed journals were flawed. The peer review process is a good one but it is not going to ever catch fraud, it is simply not designed to do that.

My best arguments are a bit better then that but I am hardly going to get started on a dissertation on the civfanatics board, I was just trying to show the my opinion was not that of the tinfoil wearing madman I will inevitably be accused of being.

Zechnophobe said:

Well, and so that's why you peer review the data, and attempt to reproduce it. When the other guy has a huge stack of data saying one thing, and your best argument is "Well, he WOULD say that" you don't really come out on top. Fight fire with fire, and knowledge with knowledge!

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I can butt-pull a huge stack of data also. The reality is that there is plenty of conflicting interest going into such "study", and this issue is NOT limited to study on climate change.

My favorite example is a newspaper article showing a correlation between visiting a chiropractor and having more strokes. The media has a field day with BS like this, drumming up hysteria and promoting idiocy.

The reality? That people who are legit stroke patients are seeing the wrong professional. The media claim? Chiropractors increase your stroke risk. Hmmmmmmm.

So now what? Have you actually analyzed the methods and results of that data yourself? Can you link such a thing that shows hard evidence of man-made global warming? A "stack of data" means nothing. A stack of data that was derived without bias and properly analyzed might get us somewhere. If you can't do it, the burden of proof lies with you, not with the people who correctly decided to leave something that has had very minimal historical impact within the timeframe of game years.

Civ V has so many problems, we don't need any BS stupidity features being added while the game is still crashing from large city counts and one strategy flagrantly dominates others.
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IMO ... make CIV5 as fun as Civ 4 was and worry about putting in global warming that happened heavily in the 1200-1300's (pre industrial era) after the main point of having fun is figured out.

Benzidrine said:

I agree with your sentiment however most peer review processes are not very good at the actual number crunching, they tend to focus on wether the conclusion is logical based on the hypotheis and data obtained. One study found seventy percent of statistical research papers in a sample of peer reviewed journals were flawed. The peer review process is a good one but it is not going to ever catch fraud, it is simply not designed to do that.

My best arguments are a bit better then that but I am hardly going to get started on a dissertation on the civfanatics board, I was just trying to show the my opinion was not that of the tinfoil wearing madman I will inevitably be accused of being.

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Well, you won't EASILY catch Fraud, but repetition does wonders for this. If your group doesn't get the same numbers, that's when things get interesting! I don't actually discuss GW too often, as I don't know of anyone who denies it, but all the more reasonable people I know seem to be of the same opinion. I'm sure this forum isn't really the place to start such a discussion.

I just always thought it was a sort of neat idea for a late game mechanic, similar to the aforementioned FFH Apocalypse Counter.

TheMeInTeam said:

Technically speaking, the end of the ice age was MASSIVE global warming ------> That was likely not man-caused!

As it stands a little-understood topic known over only the tiniest fraction of human history has no place being given some pretend factors to cause it and then thrown into the game...unless it has a functional in-game usage. GW has never done that in any civ game ----> the decision to completely remove GW was correct.

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Human agriculture emerged and spread across the world over the last 5,000-10,000 years of the current (would-be) interglacial period – bringing with it massive deforestation and change in land use. The resultant greenhouse emissions have been delaying a natural return to ice-age conditions. With the discovery and widespread use of fossil fuels (i.e. greenhouse gases sequestered underground many millions of years ago) in recent centuries, humans have probably altered the long term trend of the Earth’s climate away from ice-age conditions entirely.

Pollution and climate change have not really contributed to functional in-game usage in previous civ games because 1) they were done too simplistically and unrealistically and 2) they were not given their due respect within the game’s inherent design(s). Civilisation itself is fundamentally a massive long term project undertaken by large groups of people to alter the natural environment to suit their own ends – surely there are bound to be negative repercussions from such an endeavour. Surely these repercussions can significantly disrupt and even lead to the collapse of civilisations – and they often have.

Yet even when you play civ2 or civ3 for example, the negative effects of environmental appropriation (i.e. pollution including climate change) are incidental features, and only present slight late-game roadbumps in a civilisation’s 6000-year non-stop rise-and-rise to the stars and/or world domination. How many civilisations do you know of that have gone from strength to strength for 6000 years straight? Yet this happens in civ games all the time, pollution or not.

Future civ games really should put more emphasis on a civilisation being able to *survive* and become sustainable in the long term, rather than having pretty much all the emphasis on thriving and rising to glorious heights and quite literally reaching for the stars. Pollution including climate change could potentially provide a very suitable and realistic game mechanism to facilitate this fundamental shift in the game’s emphasis.

Zechnophobe said:

Well, you won't EASILY catch Fraud, but repetition does wonders for this. If your group doesn't get the same numbers, that's when things get interesting! I don't actually discuss GW too often, as I don't know of anyone who denies it, but all the more reasonable people I know seem to be of the same opinion. I'm sure this forum isn't really the place to start such a discussion.

I just always thought it was a sort of neat idea for a late game mechanic, similar to the aforementioned FFH Apocalypse Counter.

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I kind of like that idea I think the way I would like to see it happen is world war 3 breaking in the end game in the absence of anyone winning prior to that.

I guess we are all in a civilization that goes ICS and thus the reduction in happiness?