Baked Alaska

mithras the prophet writes "Global warming stories usually focus on the hotbutton politics, scientific debate, or latest disturbing anecdote of receding ice. A very interesting New York Times story takes a different tack, highlighting the reality of climate change for small-town Alaskans. Whatever the cause, temperatures in Alaska have risen by seven degrees in the last 30 years. This has very real consequences for ordinary citizens; the rest of us would do well to consider their stories. Lucy Eningowuk and her 600 fellow citizens of Shishmaref will vote next week whether to move their town to the mainland. Despite community efforts, thawing of permafrost and wave action from melting ice has eroded away most of the land the village is built on. Residents of Barrow (warning: MIDI-enabled page), on the North Shore, are swatting mosquitos for the first time in their lives. In an ironic twist, managers of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline are putting in supports to keep the pipeline from breaking as permafrost thaws."

Comments

Re:oh no... more global warming (...not...??)

[pubjames]

Ok, let's get all the extreme left-wingers out and have them parade around proclaiming that the rise in temps in Alaska are caused definitely by global warming.

Extreme left-wingers? What??

What I don't understand is why most right-wingers in the USA like to classify issues such as global warming as a left-wing political issue. Is it not possible to be right wing and concerned about the environment?

Cost of failure.

[Jason Pollock]

There is a difference between the two. The cost of the correlation between masturbation/eyesight is a pair of glasses. The cost of global warming is conceivably a lot higher, and so deserves more attention and effort.

I think a better example would be the Challenger disaster, which killed the crew, and stopped NASA in its tracks for years. All because they asked the engineers to "Put their management hats on".

At the end of the day, we have three things to decide:

1. Is Global Warming is happening? The answer seems to be "Yes".
2. Should we do anything about it?
3. What can we do about it?

Now, we can argue about what the causes of global warming are, but that shouldn't stop us from finding a solution. There are only a few variables that we can conceivably control to bring the warming back down. One of those is CO2 emissions. It doesn't matter if the warming is a result of human activity, all that does matter is that it is happening and that we need to do something about it.

Jason Pollock

Re:Cost of failure.

[FreeUser]

There is a difference between the two. The cost of the correlation between masturbation/eyesight is a pair of glasses. The cost of global warming is conceivably a lot higher, and so deserves more attention and effort.

More to the point, there isn't, and never has been, any evidence that masturbation leads to blindness (or poor vision at all).

There is a mountain of evidence, piling ever higher, that our industrial wastes are changing the albedo of the planet, that the planet is thus radiating less heat away than previously, and as a result the climate is growing warmer.

Is it absolute proof? As you point out, no, it isn't, and absolute proof wouldn't be possible even after the entire process runs its course and Earth comes to resemble Venus (assuming it were ever allowed to go so far), as one could still argue that it might have been a natural phenomenon.

It is like arguing that an oily beach is a natural phenomenon. It is possible that an oil reserve is exposed to the sea through natural causes (like an undersea earthquake opening a rift), but the hulking remains of the Exxon Valdeze would, for example, make the argument that the cause could have been natural pretty weak, even without 100% irrefutable proof.

So to with the ever warming planet. It could possibly be natural, but a mountain of strong evidence suggests it isn't, and to proceed on the very unlikely assumption that it is natural is folly to the nth degree, and an action only someone living in complete denial because they simply don't want it to be so could ever advocate.

BTW, you can't even 'prove' 2+2=4 ... much less explain why. It is aximoatic that 2+2=4 ... one could build a methematics just as easilly on the notion that the plus sign adds 1 to the value, such that 1+1=3 and 2+2=5. It wouldn't yield very useful results, but it can be done. 2+2=4 because that is how we have axiomatically defined addition to work.