I agree. The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly to see it for everyone who wants to see it. There must be tons of resources dedicated to summarizing the scientific results or collecting the multitude of relevant publications, so we cannot say we didn't know. But it all doesn't help if one has an incentive not to see it.

My guess is that people are aware of the possibility that global warming is real and human-made and a danger but they don't want to acknowledge it for some reason, maybe because they don't really care. You simply can't make a man see if he doesn't want to.

I should probably post a bit of the tons of resources
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Causes

With a background in climate science you may know of many, many more.

Not the one to speak for the moderator, but I like humor ;-)

However, even in the games, new developments bring their own problems: more expensive maintenance; longer construction times; the need for specific materials; the need to update your infrastructure, both urban and rural, with an implied opportunity cost; pollution; the threat of triggering climate change... Well, at least we can forget about the last one now ;-)

Also, you might eventually invent chemical fertilizers and biocides (with their own drawbacks) and self-moving vehicles (with theirs), but nothing really beats agriculture or the wheel.

Beware, long post.

TL, DR I: Makers of indie games also cringe their teeth in fear sometimes.

TL, DR II: While Civilization VI is a large-budgeted game and inherently more vulnerable to abuse campaigns, leading to the self-censorship action explained in the OP, independent efforts that in principle have embraced controversial social issues, such as This is the Police, also seem to feel vulnerable and provide politically correct excuses a the first opportunity. Therefore they do no enjoy a a complete freedom of speech. Maybe it is the whole media of PC gaming, that nowadays moves more money than then film industry, the one that has become mainstream, and therefore subject to this kind of servitude?

_______

So, concerning (self)censorship in videogames and complete freedom of speech, in times like these, rampant cliques patrol Internet, marking their territory in search of any deviationism and easy targets to abuse, making of the world's logosphere a true "global village" in the worst of senses (that of censorship of "deviant" conduct and speech people used to escape from to the cities). In times like these, we might think that large-budgeted, mainstream endeavours, like the Civilization series has become, would be more vulnerable to fears of boycott campaigns and defamation.

Enter an independent game that in principle openly embraces rather controversial social issues: This is the Police. If you have not played it before, it goes about police management and procedures balanced with political, social and personal agendas. It does not hold your hand and really leaves much to the understanding of the player. There are hints galore and depending of your wits and personality you can make of it a simpler or a more complex game. However, the game encourages you from the start to develop your own agenda, make your own choices and navigate the various challenges in the game instead to just reacting to them.

That said, let us consider this article on the game as source of the quotes below. You can go and read it or stay reading here, it is really up to you. Although in the last section of the article, when analyzing the middle and late game, it seems that the reviewer missed quite a lot of aspects this rich game has to offer.

>>This Is the Police is the first game created by Weappy, a small studio in Minsk, Belarus. Like many North Americans, I knew almost nothing about Belarus when I started playing the game. I didn’t know that it is commonly referred to as “Europe’s last dictatorship,” or that sitting President Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994, or that his government has a long and well-documented history of violating human rights. [...] some of these facts might be relevant to a game ostensibly critiquing law enforcement [...]

This, ladies and gentlemen, means bravery at game making.

There is more:

>>The sheer proliferation of derogatory language and identity-based violence would be unthinkable in today’s climate [...]. Moreover, the orders to shut down peaceful protests with nightsticks and SWAT teams feel genuinely alien from where I’m sitting, because Canada doesn’t have the same laws against public assembly that Belarus does.

As the writer puts it, they not only defy authoritarian types (and their local authorities) but also the tyrants of political correctness. Have they not some guts?

However, when pressed just slightly on other grounds...

>>Weappy representatives have apparently been inundated with questions about how their game relates to the scourge of police-related violence currently plaguing America. To their credit, the developers have been consistent and forthright on this issue. They condemn the shootings like the rest of the world, but they started the game long before that conversation picked up traction, and their game has nothing to do with it. Which is true: of all the shades of corruption and villainy explored in This Is the Police, you will never have to answer for the police shooting of an unarmed citizen. One could wish this issue was raised somehow, but I don’t think there is anything here to fault the developers for.

Which is fine. Although the "conversation" arguably started a bit earlier, like at the time people were singing about strange fruit or earlier. But never mind, let us concede at this point.

Because, anyway,

>>Their final claim to self-exoneration, however, is harder to interpret. “This Is the Police is not a political game, but a human one,”

Aha. Sure it is human, and humani nihil a me alienum puto, of course.

Also,

>>Yanovich never responded to my questions, but a few days later he posted an open letter on Weappy’s website directed at inquisitive journalists. The letter outlines three “caveats” about the game. First, Yanovich claims that his country’s history is irrelevant to an evaluation of the game: “This Is the Police is not about the United States or any other individual country,” including Belarus. “We deliberately did not specify when and where the events in the game unfold—not because we were being cryptic, but because it doesn’t matter.” The designers want to explore universal issues: “The problems of every individual are the problems of all mankind.”

Which is so nice and politically correct and faux. For anyone who has played the game, it is not explicitly set in a time and a place, true, but it is certainly not placed in Singapore or Addis Abeba, that is for sure as well (as the writer reflects himself).

The inspiration for the game appears to come from iconic USA police procedural tropes along with commentary on social issues, corruption. and the ubiquitous tropes of "making a difference" and "doing the right thing" vs folding to the force of circumstance. Like the city is flooded to your waist and you have have to choose between a bucket or a swimsuit, and maybe some ground in between. Think Steven Bohco's Hill Street Blues meets Kelsey Grammer's Boss. For the time, the game mixes concepts and looks that would fit in an American film set int he 60's or 70's, but also contemporary ones (the clothes of the press crowd and the very beginning and the presence of racially diverse journalists prominently in the front row) as well as timeless, iconic elements.

All this mainly to good effect: the game uses a visual language that is easy to interpret while conveying the idea that struggles for civil rights, freedom or (local) government transparency that some lucky ones amongst us might consider already a thing of the past are instead something to consider even today.

Then, why not mentioning all this openly? Instead of abjectly declaring the game non-political in any way and non-related to the US in any way? Are they not in the indie scene? with the artistic freedom that large budgets do not have?

An indie game in the nineties (ah, the shareware) might arguably have got away with practically everything. However, it might seem that PC gaming as a media has itself become mainstream, with the servitudes that other media like the film industry or television have been suffering for decades. Heck, globally computer games industry makes more money than the film industry nowadays.

Yes, it might seem that even indie developers cringe their teeth in fear sometimes.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

No, no, that's not what I'm saying. Let me break it down.

I am positing, that per the topics being discussed in this thread, the civ games and their framing of history, science, etc. are flawed in certain ways relevant to those topics of discussion.

As part of that argument, I claim that those flaws include a predeterministic view of historical progression.

Then, to illustrate why I think that is not a legitimate view, I provided an argument and examples to the gist of; as not all ideas are necessarily derived in a linear order (and/or, not necessarily determined by existing ideas if you're treating that as distinct), any claim that they are universally so derived, is total horseshit. And thus beneath serious consideration - illegitimate.

Do you understand me now?

This is in general a complex field. The tendency is, the more money is involved, the less controversy is allowed. Because for a mainstream AAA investment controversy will probably mean less sales.

On the other hand the more "indie" or "art" or "niche" a product is, the more it can gain from controversy -> more attention, more sales.

Of course there are always exceptions, in the end it's about risk management and freedom of expression.

And the other things is, that for me (and probably most Europeans) it's kind of baffling that stuff like climate change or evolution are controversial topics at all (ok, the latter maybe in how to deal with it...).

No, they don't. As the tree branches, any civilization can progress through history differntly, sometimes even skipping some technologies or government types entirely.

I am not saying that dependencies between different technoligies and events are accurate, but the approach itself seems quite legitimate.

No, you haven't provided any examples. You just said that inventing complex ideas doesn't need understanding of simple ideas.

If some ideas don't need to be derived, that doesn't mean all ideas don't need to be derived.
Because news today are so trustworthy.</sarcasm>

They can progress through a single, rigid hierarchy of superiority as stipulated by the game's conception of what qualifies as such. If the player picks a particular tech on turn 15 or turn 150, or bypasses it entirely is not relevant here.

It's not too important, but I also would gauge the most recent civ's tech trees (have not played every one of them, or it was years ago) as having comparably less dead ends to other games of their broad type, those with fictional settings in particular.

The raw mechanic of tech tree is not what I am claiming as illegitimate, but the framework it is appearing within in this series.

Oh fine... I should have said "an example'' and not the plural, my mistake, ya got me there mate.

You asked how I could derive one from three, I gave you an example of how that could be done to illustrate the argument I was making. If you're wanting specific examples of historical fact, I did not provide them because I was talking in abstract terms (for both example and that argument), thus making them irrelevant.

I am not saying ideas never need to be derived, I am saying that because not all ideas necessarily need to derived, the conception that they must always be derived in a given order is false.

No, you haven't given any example. You just said that one can be derived from three. Nothing more.

If idea A is derived from idea B and idea b is derived from idea C. How can you derive than in any order, except C>B>A?

Thank you for the very thoughtful contribution. Yes, I agree, Civ is foremost a strategy game and compared to the real world hopelessly simplified (as most games are).

Does it mean global warming is a worthless feature in Civ? You argue that the only goal in Civ apart from some historical references is conquest and domination. Global warming would either completely distract people from this goal and or it would be so simplified that it would not be worth to include it.

Still global warming was inside the game for many years. Probably because it's a very strategic element by itself. Ensuring maximal efficiency with minimal resource usage will become very important in the future on our planet and global warming did produce a similar effect in Civ (you just couldn't build thousands of cities and put factories in each of them). Operating under external constraints is a hallmark of strategy games. If only those happy micro managers would get up from their computers playing Civ and using their skills in real life fighting global warming...

On the other hand Civ is quite simplified and not really an Earth simulation. I'm actually happy with the developers leaving it in as well as leaving it out. Actually, I guess, it could be an option.

Okay, Some short basic things, to not let the thread drwn too much in cheap armchair anthropological theories.

1° Evolutionism is wrong. It's an outdated scientific theory. It was an ethnocentered colonial bias on the world ("we are the top, contemporary others are images of our past") that lead to misconceptions and scientific deadends, and was often illustrated by tediously shoehorned exemples (for instance, technological artefacts sorted from less to more complex, or -arbitrarily enough- the other way round, and with some awkward cheating on the sequential order). But cultures evolve differently, take different routes and directions, diffusionism plays a large role, societies are made of many aspects that transform differently, that go back and forth to different modes... And well, the idea of a linear evolution axis with a determmined sequence of "stages" towards progress is simply false (much to the chagrin of marxist anthropology, which offered interesting angles but also completely false ones).

2° "Civ" games are naively evolutionist. They are structured around this simple idea that the is a predetermined axis of progress that all societies will have to go through. It is simply the simplified, reductive mirror of our own cutural history and projections, and is pretty forgivable for a videogame (or a 1960s childbook), but let's not let it reinforce back our misleading common sense beliefs to the detriment of the science of mankind.

3° Monotheisms are not "closer" to atheism than polytheism. Polytheisms in their various forms are generally satisfied with mere orthopraxy and don't require the intrusive concept of "true faith" as our book monotheisms do. So it's actually much easier to be an atheist in polytheisms (as long as you play along with the rituals). Not to mention that polytheisms, by multiplying gods and spirits and attaching them to different elements of life and ature, can dissolve them into the spiritual entities of various forms of animism (pretty far from our familiar notion of gods and all it demands). Spiritualities, beliefs and practices are complex, and measuring the "distance" between them is far from a simple matter of arythmetics (counting on your fingers the number of spiritual entities and see which one is closer to zero).

4° Just as we have one life, we have one world. Human science doesn't take place in controlled laboratories, with reproductive experiments. So there is always an ambiguity arount the contingency and necessity of historical processes. Never confuse them. What we do have at hand, is the immense diversity of human societies and cultures, their different configurations, and their temporal relations with each others. If we step out of our obvious, immediate horizon, a lot of our universalist assumptions (about the existing and about the possible) fall apart. It's a work that demands more than idle speculations, and there are whole fields of science dedicated to it. To the precise understanding of these diversities. Expect it to not transpire very much in a simple videogame.

5° Humans are not a basic algebraic equation, and cultures even less. The temptation of offering ourselves a cheap feeling of understanding, by projecting onto reality some cheap and simple analogy with something familiar, is strong and dangerously misleading.

Rather than whether there is more CO2 in the air now (due to humans or whoever), or how much temperatures have risen on the average since the early 1900s (due to those CO2 emissions, or sun activity, or whatever)...

...I've always been more interested into WHAT exactly this all is supposed to cause to us. There never seems to be any consensus on that, even though the alarmists like to imply about "catastrophic" events coming upon us, and some even implying it will mean the end of the world.

When the summer is warm and dry in Finland (like the past summer), it is said to be due to climate change.
When the summer is cold and rainy in Finland (like the summer a year ago), it is said to be due to climate change (because the Golf current has slowed down or stopped or whatever, causing cold weather to northern Europe).

Depending who you ask, either "climate change" will mean e.g. in northern Europe that summers will be hotter and no snow in winter... or the exact opposite, a new Ice Age because the Golf current has stopped or even started moving backwards. Maybe both will happen, a new ice age with hot summers and no snow, right?

So since there are allegedly real climate change experts here, let's hear it now for once and for all, what is ahead of us, in different scenarios. What will be the world be like in 50 or 100 years, in different scenarios on how much we cut the emissions or whether we cut them at all. Will all life on Earth be extinct, or only humans are dead, or what. Will there be any POSITIVE effects for climate change, or is the discussion about them a taboo?

Also, how far right now are we in this climate change, before the ultimate catastrophe? Are we e.g. 30% there, or 50% there? Shouldn't we be seeing the signs of that incoming apocalypse already now? Yes I now it is damn hot in Sahara and there are hurricanes every year in Philippines, just like there have been decades ago. They are not good enough signs of some new kind of apocalypse, unless someone points out that Sahara was a rain forest and there were no annual deadly storms in Philippines 50 years ago (they just weren't in the world news back then like they are now in this age of global internet).

Also, what always amazes me how in this discussion the population growth in e.g. Africa, Middle-East and most of Asia is not discussed, and whether something should be done about that? Logically thinking, the more there are people on earth, the more "we" consume and pollute, causing more CO2 emissions. Shouldn't restricting the population growth especially in those high growth areas be the biggest point of action right now? In western countries this already seems to be in order, people are dying faster than new babies are born, ie. the amount of people in western countries would decrease without immigration.

Which leads to the next subject, mass immigration from the aforementioned poorer regions to richer countries, like Europe. Doesn't that immigration just increase CO2 emissions heavily, as the people moving from Africa/Middle-East to Europe, especially the cold Nordic countries, will have a much bigger "carbon footprint" after becoming Europeans (or Americans, or whatever)? In Finland you can't live in a mud hut in the middle of winter, you have to use more energy to simply survive, than in warmer countries.

So shouldn't another important point of action against climate change be to prevent people moving from regions with smaller carbon footprints, to regions with bigger carbon footprints? Again, this just sounds logical to me.

I've discussed these a couple of times with people who feel very strongly about climate change, and to my surprise they downplayed the importance of (restricting) population growth on Earth, and mass immigration to richer countries. All they seemed to be interested in is that it is somehow the white hetero men who are responsible for all of this, no-one else.

Just some food for thought. (Or is this now political discussion, hence the thread will be locked?)

Where did this news break? I assume that if a widely accepted scientific belief as widely disputed as this had been disproven then it would be all over the news. Everyone would be talking about it.... yet you're the only one talking about it that I've seen. And I read all the time from many varied sources.

This.
I never heard anything.
Can we get some sources?
You can't just make a claim like that (most of the math is false) without a link. Who said it? Where?

Shit, if this is all takes then let me be the first to say:

Well, they just proved the moon is made of cheese. End of discussion.

Can you picture that in a court of law?

-Your Honor, they just called me and told me all the evidence against my client is false. We request an immediate dismissal.
-Indeed! Case dismissed. The defendant is free to go.