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Extinctions Due to Global Warming Predicted
PizzaFace writes "A study being published today in Nature predicts that global warming will doom 15 to 37 percent of plants and animals to extinction by 2050, according to various news sources. The study looked at how predicted warming would affect the suitability of the areas that particular species inhabit, and whether displaced species would be able to migrate to suitable habitat. Many of the unlucky species are being caught between the hammer of global warming and the anvil of habitation destruction." The BBC has a story about climate engineering: long-range planning on making major changes in order to reduce the effects of global warming.
Would this be the warm war?
Evolution will fill in the gaps that are opened when those animals are extinct. Survival of the fittest and fastest changing.
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose. --Bene Gesserit Coda--
reminds me of the swedish chef making "frog legs" from that episode of the muppets when the little froggie yells "uncle kermit, somebody, anybody... HeEeeEEEeeeLLlLLllPpPPpppppp"...
No evidence exists for this being due to man-made processes. This is inline with previous historical trends in terms of climate.
To change the global warming situation, you must first change the political-economic system. Otherwise fat cats who have air conditioning do not care.
The Custom Mary
I think this same prediction was made in 1981 by Paul Ehrlich when he predicted half the earth's species gone by 2000 and all of them gone by 2010-25. Maybe these predictions should be treated the same as claims of working perpertual motion machines.
Color me unconvinced.
Dog is my co-pilot.
This raises the question of weather or not we should even fool with the weather.
Many recent studies have shown that humans may not be a significant cause of global warming.
If this isn't our fault do we have the right or the responsibility to alter the course of nature?
If we screw this up, the consequenses will be chatastrophic.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
they can't predict the weather over 24 hours with any degree of accuracy, but of course we are supposed to just believe them when they tell us how things will be in 50 years.
sad robot making broken music
I've sampled less than 1% of those species! I've got a lot of eating to do before they're gone forever.
In the early part of the last millenium people were growing settling Greenland and Iceland where there is now an ice pack. Vineyards were operating in England. It was MUCH warmed then it is now. Then the mini-ice age came and Europe went into the Dark ages. No that is just between the last Ice age and now, there have been dozens of complete Ice ages in the last million years and every time they were not caused by man. It gets hotter in between, and really cold during. Species adapt and survive. If this prediction is true then how have so many species of plants and animals survived so long through and between ice ages? It makes no sense.
Considering the data on which the global warming theory is based is statistically dubious at best, i'll treat this report as something less than gospel...
Things seem to grow way better in warmer climes. If that wasn't true then keen gardeners would not have hot houses in their backyards and the tropics would not be forested.
So why exactly do the doomsayers say that life will be destroyed?
From the WP article... "The researchers concede there are many uncertainties in both climate forecasts and the computer models they used to forecast future extinctions."
Some certainties...
- the earth has been warmer in the last few hundred years than it is now,
- the earth goes through cyclic temp changes with a period of about 300 years
- it appears that we are now coming out of a minor ice age
Google if you want references.
So maybe every few hundred years 15% to 30% of living organisms die out. And likely 15% to 30% of new organisms develop.
So all normal, maybe?
show that global warming is in fact a result of man's industrialization before we go screwing the with the planet?
I mean it would kind of suck to lower the planets temperature only to find out in a few hundred years that this a natural cycle and have everything freeze when it cools off...
Don't be too hasty to ignore the global warning thing. Keep an open mind. The world used to be flat, remember? And it was only recently that the earth started revolving around the sun (vs. the reverse of that).
you never know until you know, and then its too late.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Linux will be extinct well before 2050.
Props to GNAA.
....I can't find the slashdot posting about it,
;)
but it wasn't long ago that it was reported that
the earth was actually cooling down.
An asteriod is going to make it all moot anyhow.
I remember in the 80's everyone was saying "20 years". Now they are saying 45. I'm not discounting the seriousness of the issue, just the time scale the scientists use.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
"are still some people who deny that global warming is happening. Maybe we should just pile mounds of dead animals on their steps."
The denials I've read were not the existence of global warming, but that humans are the cause of it.
At this point, wouldn't it be wiser for these engineers to be thinking about how they're going to make soylent green and yellow a palatable and acceptable experience.
It's too often global warming comes up, things are getting bad, but really whats a few species becoming extinct? at the same time many more will come about due to evolution. If anything I think the earth needs a good worldwide devestation caused by humans, all these reports mean nothing, we'll still build nukes, we'll still drive our cars, when most of our major cities (most major cities are on coastlines) are pretty much abandoned/sunken/destroyed after ice melts people will say "aww crap we sould be more careful" and then NOT drive our cars as much. No one cared about using nukes in japan, after they where used people had that "aww crap" attidude, they saw how horrible it was. We need to see how horrible pollution can be firsthand before we really give an effort. (I live in Queens, NY I'm not too exited about the idea of sea levels rising but sometimes a kick in the ass is what we need)
~50 years is a remarkably small time span to lose that many species, even in theory. It takes many, many generations for enough reproductive barriers to stabilize to make one recognizeable species... for this much genetic diversity to be lost would be a true catastrophe. If these theories are even remotely true, this is not something that should be brushed off with a "Life is just adjusting to new conditions"... this much "adjustment" to one life condition leaves what life that survives afterward vulnerable in their new monogenetic state.
It will be good for some species of reptiles and fish though. Though algea blooms might kill off even those fish that live, and a lack of prey may hurt the reptiles.
Ryan Fenton
while I'm not for pollution, this is complete stupidity. We have 300 years of data to work with here. The earth has been around significantly longer than 300 years. Something doesn't add up quite right here.
SAILING MISHAP
WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! Oh wait, most of us will be dead by 2050 anyway... nevermind.
one of the suggested solutions: "'sequestering' (storing) carbon dioxide, for example in the oceans, by removing it from the air for storage, or by improved ways of locking it up in forests " ...why didn't we think of this before? Sweeping things under the rug works beautifully in bedrooms, right? So why not the whole world! Genius!
Is Global Warming a scientific concern or a political objective? I often ask that question because whenever the global warming scenario is painted, I only hear the bad effects, never the good. That makes me wonder about those doing the painting. A scientific discourse would show good and bad, and be objective.
I can't see any animals when stuck in an airconditioned SUV doing 10-12 MPG. Anyway the habitiat destruction is happening in other foreeeign countries. As long as the good-oll-you-ess-of-aaaa keeps me comfortable why should I care. Lets start a war on those damm greenies.....I hear they have dem weapons of mass destruction....God damm...get me dubbya on the phone
You're making the mistake of thinking that global warming must mean that temperatures everywhere must necessarily increase. But that isn't necessarily the case. When temperatures rise, the equilibrium the planet previously experienced is disturbed, periods of hotter temperatures are compensated for by periods of colder temperatures, but what is important is that, overall, temperatures are on the rise.
Perhaps the best evidence we've seen today, evidence that even a layperson should be able to understand, is when we watch Antartica give up huge chunks of the ice shelf that have taken millenia to form, and for which there can only be one reasonable explanation: the planet is getting warmer. And the consequences are dire.
Even the merest possibility of such a future should cause us to worry. Shouldn't it?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Geologicaly we are in a cold phase. Some authorities even concider the modern era a mild ice age or the tail end or interglacial of the last series. This study apperantly ignors all the geological evidence of the last 1 million years. I grew up in a sonoran biotype. Two hundred kilometers from my home was an alpine enviroment. Animals that have trouble with the new enviroment will simply migrate. 15 to 30 % extintion is pretty silly.
shame on you. you made me hungry :(
What does it really matter if we can do nothing to stop it. The Earth periodically warms up or cools down so what are we to do about it. All I know is that I want some snow, I mean it's the middle of winter and we haven't gotten a good snow yet.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Seriously, which would you prefer?
To me this just seems like another one of those outcries in order to get more funding.
Species go extinct all the time... and more keep poping up. Deal with it. Next they'll be saying that the global warming is heating the earth's core and eventually the entire planet will explode (uh oh... giving them ideas).
Funny how ALL this is going to happend around 2050. Anybody else notice that?
"A study being published today in Nature predicts that global warming will doom 15 to 37 percent of plants and animals to extinction by 2050..." -- As published by Slashdot.
"A sweeping new analysis enlisting scientists from 14 laboratories around the globe found that more than one-third of 1,103 native species they studied could vanish or plunge to near extinction by 2050... Earth is home to an estimated 14 million plant and animal species" -- As published by CNN.
Very dramatic difference here.
"Derp de derp."
"global warming will doom 15 to 37 percent of plants and animals to extinction"
Mwahaha, all of their base are belong to us!
Despite this, he's at +4 at the moment because all the effing Bush apologists and people who think the Cato institute is a valid source of scientific advice lap this kind of thing up.
Goddamnit. Now we have to stuff more corks in the asses of cows. Goddamn farts are gonna kill us all...
we'll all be dead from nuclear war long before these plants and animals become extinct, so we won't even notice.
But Britain's chief science adviserr says global warming is true, so it must be. Right ?
I mean he's a "Sir" so he must be special.
I wonder if he graduated from the same British bastion of learning that employs a professor who rejected an Israeli's application for a position because of Israel's policies.
I like the British people generally, but some of them are smoking some seriously good shit.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
...is that there will be population explosions of other animals and plants. For example, the deer population in the United States is much higher now than it was 200 years ago. Eradication of predators by the colonists.
EXACTLY
. . . has an opportunity to show leadership on global warming by leading the US away from fossil fuels. Since Bush is a lifelong oilman, he would have added moral authority on the issue.
I'm laughing at clouds.
We barely have a catalog of the various plant and animal species present on this planet, yet we can estimate that 15-37% will be extinct because they won't be able to relocate within a few decades?
While I'm all for protecting the environment and not doing things to dirty it or pollute it more than necessary, some credit has to be given to the shear will of life to continue living. It's worked for millenia, it's not gonna stop wholesale just yet unless it was going to stop without our interference.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
We're just a few of years from being able to archive species DNA on a wholescale basis. The report is a scare tactic that is threatening to remove the promise of milder winters in my Michigan home. The BASTARDS!
On the other hand, my house in Texas is up for sale: BUY IT NOW!
Unfortunately, coral will be one of the first things to go due to global warming. Warm temperatures cause the coral to eject the algae that grows within them. This gives this a distinctive bleached look... Better enjoy your tropical diving while you can!
My next ski holiday will be that much crappier.
Hi there
Kyoto was doomed well before Bush took office. In 1999, the senate voted 98-0 against this treaty. Other nations have began to have second thoughts about it as well. This treaty was more about holding developed nations back than it was about reducing emissions, and it is on the scrap pile where it belongs.
The end of the universe happens on January 19, 2038 anyway. We've known this for years.
...but think of the low heating bills! So keep driving those SUV's
The extinctions are caused by off-planet outsourcing of a critter's niche.
Table-ized A.I.
Perhaps the best evidence we've seen today, evidence that even a layperson should be able to understand, is when we watch Antartica give up huge chunks of the ice shelf that have taken millenia to form, and for which there can only be one reasonable explanation: the planet is getting warmer. And the consequences are dire.
Yeah- because we know for sure that this is a new phenomenon cause by evil capitalists. What- whats that? We don't know that? You mean the polar ice caps could have been freezing and thawing over and over again for millions of years with no human influence? You mean that retards like you have no idea what they are talking about?
The law of averages hardly applies to a continuous process whose state isn't indepepndent of its earlier state.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I am one of the older members of the Slashdot community, about to turn 44. One of the fun things about the community is the boundless enthusiasm, drive, and accomplishment of the mostly younger people who frequent the site.
I'm stunned, though, by the response of the younger people here to the real threat posed by global warming. After all, it really isn't going to affect me too badly, I won't be here in 2050 -- but you will. Global warming, for whatever reason, is undeniably real. Especially in the higher latitudes, temperatures are many degrees higher in the winter than they have been even thirty years ago. Talk to anybody in Alaska or northern Canada about it -- there's absolutely no question about the fact of climate change.
The relexive denial that anything is wrong shocks me. I don't understand it.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Excerpt:
The study is entirely a computer simulation, and as anyone familiar with this art knows, computer models can be trained to produce any desired result.
And:
The case for species preservation should be made on hard ground, not on computer-generated squish.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
that large portions of the planet used to be tropical jungles, with the dominant species being large reptiles for hundreds of millions of years?
It would seem that a warmer, wetter planet would be more likely to create that type of environment. Kinda like a greenhouse, for lack of a better word.
Mammals are just a fad.
It's so fortunate that we have your genius to show us the error of our ways. What would we do without the services of your intellectual army of straw men to protect us? How would we have deduced that articles in Nature are "peer-reviewed" by the editorial staff of the NY Times? How would we have known that it is strictly a coincidence that those advising us to cast caution to the wind all have a financial stake in resisting change? I for one feel very fortunate that you've reminded us that people living in poverty as well as riches all do so as a matter of personal choice...
The "insightful" rating of your post only further confirms the deep thinking of Slashdot moderators.
Has anybody blaming human actions for global warming offered any reason why the ice age ended? I don't think humans were around then to be responsible...
There seems to be an unstated assumption in the article that dooming 15-37 percent of species to extinction is in itself a negative thing, which means that we have somehow accepted as true the idea that a species should exist perpetually. The historical record suggests that species tend to have their time and then disappear; either in some form of mass extinction event or by slowly
fading away.
Our understanding of bio-history suggests that the cycle of evolution and extinction is the way things work and has always worked. This cycle is partly in response to events like global warming or cooling or cataclysms like, as a recent slashdot article suggests, when a supernova rips off the ozone layer andlets the sun barbecue a whole bunch of species.
However, in spite of this, looking at the life surrounding the volcanic heat vents on the ocean floor, the return of life to devastated area like Mt. St. Helens, it seems that life itself seem to be rather stubborn, versatile and adaptable. The planet as a biosystem seems to be able to recover from massive damage which can eliminate most of the life on earth.
Yet as a caveat, I wonder if we as a species have thrown a destabilizing factor into that robust bio-system by stressing it past its ability to recover. After all, who knows how the various forms of pollution and destruction of natural
resources will impact the ability of the planet to rebound from this bout ofglobal warming or ice age, whether or not it is natural or man made.
I think it odd for us to thik this chage should lead to an ever stable temperature and perfectly preserved artic ice shelves..
If you want to read a journal where just about any crackpot can publish anything, read Nature. This just further establishes that point. Espousing apocalyptic meglomaniacal left-wing ideology is going to give real scientists a bad name.
So if I'm understanding the gibbon right, we shouldn't do anything about global warming because there's a chance it might not be caused by man. We should watch our cities be submerged and species by the thousands go extinct rather than lift a finger to stop it.
Thankfully, most people don't see it that way.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I wonder if he graduated from the same British bastion of learning that employs a professor who rejected an Israeli's application for a position because of Israel's policies.
How is this remark in any way germane to the current discussion of global warming? This is like me, for instance, pointing out that Ariel Sharon is a war criminal. Not relevant, not relevant...
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Global warming? It's -40 outside with the wind factor...i guess that by global those lefty environmentalists mean "anywhere where warmth coincidentally is present"
Who told you that? The same scientists who are telling us that we're heating up the planet?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I'm waiting for the day when the south beach diet means philly cheese steaks! And any scenario that ends up with most of florida submerged under the ocean can't be all bad.
I am not a climatologist. You are not a climatologist. The vast majority of the people engaging in this debate are not climatologists. Who am I supposed to trust? This is a big, big deal. Global warming or no global warming, we're in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth's history and people are still bickering about politics. Why isn't this front page news? Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet, our resources and ultimately our way of life?
Anyway, isn't extinction temporary?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I think it's important to understand that the Earth's environment is not a static thing and never has been. Without question, industrialization has warmed the environment. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and when I was a kid, the Willamette (as polluted as it was back then, now you can catch salmon off the seawall right in downtown) actually froze over. But also, keep in mind that the Earth has gone through many freeze and thaw cycles. We are in a thaw cycle, and industry or not, we can not change that. Not all climatic changes are due to Man's ignorance, some are inevitable. Of course if you live in South Florida, this may not be what you want to hear.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Uh, I think you have a bit of specious reasoning there.
When Antartica gives up huge chunks of the ice shelf that have been around for millenia, it means that Antartica is getting warmer.
You even say that the warming isn't planet-wide, then in the next sentence say it is. Not that I'm disputing global warming on anything, but I was jarred by the incongruity of your reasoning.
"...Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming..."
Yeah, but now we have the machine that goes BING!
Hmmm...The prudent should not take a long-term lease in Manhattan below the 31st floor.
"...while history is usually explicable it is often irrational" --Roger Spiller
With the current prediction of a world human population of 9 billion by 2050 there will not be any habitat left anyway. You have to grow the food for 9 billion and that will destroy the habitat even if gobal warming doesn't destroy the habitat.
Something tells me that something is going to give long before 2050, but as they say in the long run we are all dead anyway.
This is Slashdot, no one here is interested in the facts anyways.
Global warming won't make it cause we will run out of oil LONG before we hit that. And when we run out of oil... Bye bye civilization as we know it.
Sorry, but please do yourselves a favour and give a gander into google for the peak oil crash in the next few years.
Godspeed.
I think it's more likely that you simply can't read.
The warming *is* planet wide, it simply isn't uniform, and extreme swings towards warmer temperatures are parried by commensurate swings towards colder temperatures. But overall, the temperatures creep upward.
Maybe if I drew you a picture...
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Does it not occure to you thats its easier to tell you what the temperature was yesterday than it will be tomorrow??
Link
Just wondering why this is modded as "Troll" and "Flamebait"?
I guess the environmentalists really don't like dissent...?
here in New York is colder and colder.. so maybe we will see new species arriving. I should go to Central Park more often
But if our environment doesn't change, how will we ever evolve as a species? Don't fear change brother!
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
CNN: one-third of 1,103 native species they studied could vanish or plunge to near extinction by 2050: Of course there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
This is stupid because there is no one (except perhaps /bin/laden and his ilk) who would find any joy in seeing Americans have to adjust their lifestyle a bit. Most of the rest of us either don't care or do our best to emulate it anyway.
No, the only people actually feeling the effects of the environmentalists' crusade are those of us living in "progressive" countries where gas has been $5/gallon for a long time already and where every conceivable form of energy is taxed through the roof "in order to save the environment".
Nevermind that we need that energy to go about our daily business whatever the cost so demand isn't reduced anyway, nevermind that those same progressive governments put exactly zilch of that tax revenue back into alternative energy research and nevermind that it doesn't make any difference anyway because the rest of the world is still polluting at least as much as they ever did, so....
You get the drift. It's enough to make a poor sod wonder if this global warming panic isn't a huge scam cooked up by politicians to allow them to tax the populace with impunity.
Not that I doubt that the climate is changing, but wouldn't it be a good idea to get everyone to agree on the scientific basis for claiming man is (at least partly) behind the change, what measures to implement and then to implement them globally? Reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases 1% globally must be better than reducing them by 10% in a just couple of medium/small countries.
Also, it wouldn't leave those of us living in those countries feeling like we're having to do all the lifestyle adjusting in a massive and costly gesture of futility while the rest of the world doesn't really give a rat's ass.
Note that I'm not saying that the claims that the climate is changing are a scam, but I do think it's prudent to wonder out loud about the global warming panic that, as far as I can see, has only ever resulted in raised taxes in some countries. Where is the reduction in emissions of greenhouse gasses? Where is the reduction of the ozone holes? In short, where did our money go?
So, my dear Americans. Be prepared for the day when you too have to pay $5/gallon for gas, only make sure that when that day comes your money will actually be used for something that makes a difference.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
Most of the studies I've seen lately indicate global warming is a crock, and if it weren't for global warming we'd already be entering an ice age.
Oh well. Like you said... ;)
If it's not caused by man, then there's not much we could do to stop it anyway.
Don't mistake our skepticism to mean that we think nothing is wrong. Just because we aren't chicken littles doesn't mean we're ostriches with our heads in the sand instead. Just because we don't want to ban the internal combustion engine means that we approve of inefficient transportation.
To take the example of the recent blizzard, storms have happened since the beginning of the earth. It *may* have been caused by global warming, but it overwhelming odds are that the recent blizzard was caused by the same thing that caused all blizzards in the past.
About a decade ago when global warming started entering the public consciousness, I kept seeing weather reports saying that a record had been broken. I seem to recall a record breaking high or low temperature about once or twice a year. Surely that's evidence of global warming? A lot of people around me were saying it was. But simple statistics shows that it's hardly unusual. The average temperature in a location fluctuates. Since accurate temperatures were not recorded until recently, the probability is rather high that any particular day might break a recorded temperature. 365 days in a year, with temperature records for 100 years. Think about it. For example, a temperature of 98 on June 1st might break a record, but a temperature of 98 on June 2nd might wouldn't.
Basically what I'm saying is that I do not trust anecdotes. Neither do I trust sensationalist reporting. Heck, I can't even trust climatology models when the climatologists are still out looking for data to improve the models!
The average world wide temperature fluctuates. We have had ice ages in the past. We have had warm periods in the past. I'm not talking about ten thousand years ago, but only a few hundred. The temperature is changing, I have no doubt. What I do doubt is that mankind is causing it.
We shouldn't be polluting. We shouldn't be clearcutting rain forests. But we shouldn't be panicking.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
What amazes me is that as a nation we can spend what will sure to be hundreds of billions of dollars to invade a nation with the flimsy pretext that they're a threat to the world--which turns out to have been a lie by the way--but yet when a much more tangible threat appears on the horizon we hear all these voices demanding absolute proof.
Which as you suggest, isn't possible.
If we're going to run out of oil anyways, and if the combustion engine is such a threat to our environment, then why wait? Why not deal with it now?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
There are already many scientists quickly refuting this studies numbers. Climate over time gradual shifts in temperature between ice ages. As we can see by the history of many of our planet's animals, life is quite resiliant and this is something the study doesn't take into account. What we should really be concerned with and talking more about is the destruction of natural habitats such as the rain forests. This issue is constantly becoming more serious and will surely cause more animal extinctions then the slow rate of global warming we are experiencing.
How many of you jumping on the global warming bandwagon don't believe the weather predictions on the local news?
How come you're willing to believe weather prediction of 50 to 100 years into the future?
-- Will program for bandwidth
The parent is at least correct in saying that we don't know how much humans have contributed to the warming, but something is definitely happening. A lot of people seem to complain that we shouldn't do anything since we don't know what the problem is. But what if we find out after it is too late? We don't even know what too late is since small changes on a global scale can throw things way out of whack, possibly in ways we don't even know about.
The analogy I have used in the past is what do you do if you notice that you are starting to gain weight? You never know for sure where that weight comes from. You could just note that a few of ancestors were fat, so it is probably genetic so there is no sense in doing anything. Or you could take a few measures like starting to go to the gym, switching to diet soda, cut back on junk food. There is no doubt that these would help, only a question of how much.
We are pretty sure that greenhouse gases cause the planet to get warmer. So we are contributing to the problem, we just do not know to what degree. So we might as well do what we can in case humans are a significant factor to the problem instead of looking back saying we could have done more. Unfortunately fixing the environment fix after a problem is probably not as easy as it is to loose that bit of extra weight.
I'm beginning to think that most of what is classified as "scientific research" these days falls under the 3 categories: A) expensive projects relying on really expensive toys specially designed to help provide partial answers to questions of no practical value whatsoever, B) lucrative research that tends to be funded by private industry (especially when industry can't depend on public entities to subsidize it) and C) a cozy network of university and government bureaucrats who make a living off of agreeing with each other, promoting new research fads in order to draw funding, and generally using the bully pulpit of "science" to advance what is really just the latest political ideology.
Yep, <Shrug>, There's literally nothing Bush, The Environmentalist President(TM), could have done.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
... before putting too much stock in tree-hugger predictions. :)
h es _quote05.html
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speec
Yes, yes, it's just an opinion, but it's very interesting and thought provoking. It helped me understand (somewhat) the motivation behind the truly wacko environmentalists.
100,000s of species since the beginning of time have disappeared, and we're still doing fine. Who are you to say who shall live and who will not? Humans are comparable to the flu, annoying yes but not with any consequences at long term for mother earth. Unless we completely destroy earth (like a stupid virus who forgot it's first goal, to procreate and live inside an organism not kill it then die itself).
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
I think it's mostly likely that 50 years into the future we'll have 15-30% fewer spotted owls and white tigers and 15-30% more Velcro Sheep and Mice That Piss Vodka.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Now don't flame me that Global Warming exists, I'm not disputing there may be evidence that it may exist to some degree. But it almost certainly doesn't exist to the degree Global Warming zealots proclaim. To some degree all science and scientists are seen in a more skeptical light by the general public when Chicken Little prognostications don't come to pass.
We know species are stressed by man's activities on Earth (Global Warming or no). So if one makes predictions that species will become extinct due to Global Warming, and low and behold they become extinct, then perhaps the general public will suddenly get religion about Global Warming. Who cares if Global Warming is really to blame.
Letter To Iran
We shouldn't be polluting. We shouldn't be clearcutting rain forests. But we shouldn't be panicking.
I think you'd find that if we weren't polluting and clearcutting rain forests, there wouldn't be this much controversy, let alone panic.
You know, what really perturbs me is that now we're hearing that all the oil is going to be running out soon. If this is the case, then doesn't it make sense to aggressively pursue alternative forms of energy, and do so now? Global warming isn't the only issue here.
I feel the same way about the trees. Do we stop clear-cutting before we run out of tree, or after? You would think that people would see the wisdom of stopping sooner rather than later, but that doesn't seem to play out as policy.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Frankly, earth with be just fine with or without us. The only reason to worry about biodiversity is because it serves our interests. The universe could care less, so the only reason for us to act is if it makes sense for us to do so, not because we have some vague "eco-responsibility" to try to keep everything just as it should be. Especially since we cannot know what the outcome(s) would be if we had not influenced the biosphere. We are part of nature. Ahh, the dilemma of the philosopher.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
... the planet is getting warmer.
Yeah? So fucking what. The earth moves in cycles, moron. Things change over time. It's natural.
It's extremely egotistical o think we mere humans can have any effect on something like the entire planet. Get over yourself idiot.
Derrrrr, think much?
I read an article a couple of years ago about global warming. The article was backed by very interesting data and graphs (although I am sure it was slightly biased).
Basically, what the article proved was that global warming isnt really an issue. The "global climate" if you will, will change naturally over time. Humanity has existed during a global "summer" and that summer, believe it or not, is due to end within the next few hundred years. The earth spends millions of years in ice age, and then returns to a brief summer that lasts a fraction of that.
Another good point that they had made in the article is that there was a higher global temperature in the middle ages, and that was the highest it has been in our history.
If you dont believe the stuff I listed above, perhaps you will find this next little point a bit more interesting. Humans result in
I dont really think that we have much to worry about. We are comming to the end of the fossil-fuel age anyways, perhaps none of this will really matter at all in the long run?
Because that would be inconvenient. After all we are the "Me First Generation" aren't we?
You can see this by how people drive, speeding, cutting people off, etc. You can see it in how businesses scam people left right and center. How schools push students around like 2nd class citizens, etc...
The Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) was nothing more than a way to divert attention from the fact Bush has no fucking clue how to solve the first damn problem in the US. But hey, so long as he is blowing up the buildings of some stupid Iraqi I've never met, hey that's progress!
Oh yeah, that and there is huge money in oil. So why cut it off before they can start gouging [sp?] when we really do start running out. You think 0.72$/L is bad now [or whatever that is in gallons] just wait till it's 10.99$/L or so...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Why not deal with it now?
Who? Who is it you propose should 'deal with it'?
Are you proposing a big increase in enforcement powers of government, to mandate some sort of 'solution' planned in a top-down fashion by bureaucrats and their minions?
There isn't a 'big International plan' for industrialisation, nor even a 'big National plan' in many countries.
Really, that's what this is about, for many of the people arguing for it: A proposal to implement a planned economy directed by government.
That's been tried before. No thanks.
A Good Intro to NetBS
How many doomsday predictions have you heard in 44 years?
How many times did doomsday actually happen?
... predictions are that thousands of species will be extermined if the global temperature remains the same, and thousands will also go extinct if the temperature drops.
Change is bad. The environment should be compelled to remain exactly the same as it was the first time a human observed it. And by "human", of course, I mean a White European Male observing in the last few hundred years. That's the only true state of the environment.
The better way to bring down free-market capitalism is to actually devastate the environment. Those presently in power will make it too expensive and too difficult to produce anything or even to go about our daily lives, by perpetually creating environmental wastes that will later need to be cleaned up. I'm glad you don't mind corporations illegally dumping mercury in a river though! ;->
The corollary argument being that there's nothing wrong with driving a car through a crowded marketplace, if you can't prove definitively that you're going to hit someone.
Human activity changes the Earth (for good and ill). We understand little about the long-term consequences of what we do, because the reasons we alter the Earth are for our short-term interests. Only very recently (historically speaking) has there been any credible scientific theories of what those long-term consequences might be. And the overwhelming, but not unanimous, consensus of those theories is that human activity is a significant factor in the changes we can measure in the Earth's climate.
Climate changes cause extinctions. Extinctions often trigger more extinctions. This is our historical evidence, which provides a reasonable guide as to what will happen in the future due to our climate change. Whether those extinctions will cause our extinction or will even affect anything we care about is unknown. Like a car through a crowded marketplace, there's a lot of bad things that could happen, but predicting them with certainty isn't possible. Maybe we won't hit anyone we care about.
We should be worried. The Earth is a complicated machine. We can't just keep whacking buttons and pulling levers hoping that nothing breaks.
I do believe that, generally speaking, life on Earth will survive whatever we do to it. I hope, but am much less confident, that we will be among that life.
NUKE THE USA!!! (especially if Bush get re-elected)
I think it odd for us to thik this chage should lead to an ever stable temperature and perfectly preserved artic ice shelves..
We don't thik that, dumbass.. We think that if the ice melts then everything from New York to New Orleans is underwater, leading us to conclude that spending a few billion now to buy even a 1% possibility of saving a few hundred trillion later is not only a good math, it's the only course of action that isn't mind-bogglingly idiotic.
Fry: We're all gonna die aren't we?
Farnsworth: Oh I should think so. Although last time aliens invaded all they did was force the most intelligent of us to pair off and mate continuously. Oh yes!
Neither House has ever voted on the final Kyoto agreement. Fact.
Actually, from everything I've read, the ice age probably is going to come. Global warming is only in the short term, and I've been reading quite a few theories that global warming may in fact speed up the onset of the next ice age.
Actually the costs of "preventing global warming" is many, many, many..... orders of magnitude greater than the "hundreds of billions of dollars" you are talking about. And the benefits of both of these actions are highly unknowable and difficult (example: save the world from global warming or GiantNukeTM but get obliterate by asteroid and watch that return on your earth saving investment approach nil). I'm not even going to bother arguing about the war with you, but you should realize that what i say above is infinitely true.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
i wish global warming would hurry up. im getting sick of these new-england winters.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
> Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming.
The very same people? Really?
> There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
So, do you dispute the physics of greenhouse gasses, or the fact that we've been dumping them into the atmosphere at an astonishing rate since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?
> But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder.
The primary effect of global warming is more thermal energy in the atmosphere. That doesn't equate to a uniform temperature increase in all places at all times. Climate is a wonderfully complex phenomenon. For example, if global warming melts the Greenland ice sheets, the flux of cold water into the North Atlantic might shut down the Gulf Stream and send northwestern Europe into a local ice age. (It's warmer than it has any right to expect, due to the Gulf Stream.) The inconvenient freeze would still be global warming, and still catastrophic to the well-being of millions of humans and animals.
> But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO.
Who says it's a political agenda? What if it's a sober warning rather than scaremongering?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
- CO2, CH4, etc., do trap longwave radiation (the greenhouse effect)
- Atmospheric concentrations of these gases are increasing due to human activity
Yes, there are a lot of uncertainties in the temperature data, and the signal-to-noise ratio of human-induced effects is low, and there are a lot of potential feedback mechanisms (e.g. cloud formation) and ancillary effects (e.g. aerosols) that we don't understand, but to completely write off human-induced global warming as a myth is pretty dumb and very much indicative of a different a political agenda.It's also not noted very often that, as much of our emitted CO2 ends up in the oceans (by increasing atmospheric concentrations we introduce an imbalance in the carbon cycle), we are lowering the pH of the ocean (CO2 + H20 -> H2CO3 -> HCO3- + H+. Expect it to drop by 0.5pH or so over the next century or so (that figure is from memory, I may be off, but not by a lot). That scares the crap out of me.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
There's a lot pf politically-motivated bullshit on both sides of the debate. On one hand you've got the enviro-Nazis who predict that global warming will kill us all. On the other you've got the greedy corporations and their apologists who insist that toxic sludge is good for you and and that a 30%+ rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last several centuries is harmless - don't worry, be happy, buy our gas-guzzling SUV's.
Is human-induced global warming a certainty? The evidence for it is compelling, though the severity that it will eventually attain is anyone's guess. Will it cause mass death, destruction, and extinction? From studying past episodes of climate change, it seems likely that global warming would cause a great deal of hardship in certain areas of the world, while benefiting others (Canadian farmers may well benefit at the expense of their neighbors to the south, for example). Species will go extinct, though any estimate of how many at this point is little more than guesswork.
Climate is never stable over long time intervals - it has fluctuated wildly before and it will do so again, with or without human intervention. But just because it will happen doesn't mean we should make it happen sooner than it would otherwise. Everyone is going to die someday, but that doesn't make it okay to commit murder. The same argument applies to species extinctions.
I believe there is a reasonable course of action the U.S. should take, in between the radical Greens' proposal to stop civilization in its tracks, and the industrial/corporate strategy of do-nothing, head-in-the-sand denial.
The US should first of all sign the Kyoto treaty. Contrary to right-wing scaremongering, its mandated reductions in greenhouse emissions are quite moderate and and attainable (before Bush rejected it, most enviros blasted the Kyoto treaty for being pathetically inadequate). It would provide an impetus for developing new fuel/energy technologies that could very well boost the economy. If the US doesn't develop this technology, Japan and Europe will, which certainly won't do much to cure our our trade deficit. Gas/electric hybrid vehicles are now a reality - in fact, the Toyota Prius won several awards for best car of the year.
Public transportation should also be encouraged - Europe has a very efficient and reliable rail system, and there's no reason why the US can't have one. The money for funding all this could be attained by stopping corporate welfare for the oil & auto industries, as well as diverting money from all the pork-barrel highway funding projects that Congress is so fond of.
--rc
This kind of talk epitomizes the hubris of mankind. Our indirect industrial activity and driving SUVs is now being likened to mass extinctions of the end-Triassic or K-T variety. If repeated strikes of kilometer-wide asteroids couldn't "stress it past the ability to recover," why do you think our industrial activity will? Why do you want to think that?
Are you suggesting, as many in academe and the Third World who wish an inversion of the social order, that we return to a 16th century lifestyle, including population reduction?
The fact is, periods of global warming have happened in the past, in the absence of industrialized civilization, indeed, in the absence of man himself. Who was to blame for those? Or what is to blame? I say blame need not be assigned; it is the course of nature.
The fact is, climactic changes over the course of centuries is normal and to be expected. These variations, over time scales greater than our lifetimes, are perfectly normal. One of the things that drives be bonkers is this sudden insistence of normalcy at the scientific level. Watch the weather on TV the next time it rains. The meteorologist will say how much precip the storm has brought, and then inevitably state how much yearly rain shortfall/excess over normal there has been -- as if it has to be exactly on the expected totals every day of the year. In places with a rainy and dry season, there may be two days per year where the yearly rainfall accumulation total agrees with the expected accumulation - on a perfectly normal year.
It is my opinion that global warming is simply another tactic, like political correctness, to induce guilt in western thinking.
No, I think hysterical and 'fighting tooth and nail' will just make things worse. But have fun with your placards if you find that a good way to spend your college years. Especially good if you can figure out how to extend out your college years indefinitely by, say, going for a Masters, Ph.D., and then tenure in, say, climatology or even the social sciences.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Extinction is natural. But an extinction rate that may be several orders of magnitude above the historical rate is, frankly, probably not a good thing.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Is that most people thing about this in terms of the planet vs. man, and that because of our intelligence we can probably come up with something to fix the problem. But the planet doesn't care about us. The planet will keep functioning without us. The question you should be asking is, "How much am I willing to give on the off chance that the environmentalists are right, and that my children will never see sunlight without breaking out into huge radiation burns."
The question is not will we survive (for I have a lot of faith in mankind's ingenuity), but rather will we want to?
With the thawing permafrost, its easier to get oil out of those off limit alaska fields!
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
As I understand it there was a cooling and warming trend in the 1300's...why wasn't there mass extiction then?
Is the article implying that human climate change (there is still debate as to wether the current trend is human caused) is more damaging then "natural" climate change?
By the way if you include bacteria in your "extingtion equation" then everyday something like 90% of the species on the planet go extict...each bacteria is a unique species (a-sexual reproduction). This makes me think...if our primate ancestor are now dead does that mean they are now extint??
I think you just answered yourself. We must concern ourselves with not fucking up the environment not for the environment's sake.. it'll be fine without us, but for our sake, for christ's sake!
"The absurd is clear reasoning recognizing its limits"
-Albert Camus
Its all about fear mongering for Tax and Grant dollars.
Global Warming has already been debunct by German Scientists 4 years ago.
The environmentalists has already tried to claim credit for fixing the ozone layer. They can'
t predict the weather accuratly but they can fix the ozone layer. Right...
If smog and hairspray caused ozone depletion, why would the ozone hole be specifically over the polar cap instead of hollywood california or south beach florida?
Good try. You are doing well.
You can write quite well.
You can tell us what a not too stupid guy could have told us.
You can even put your sentences into paragraphs, which one are representing a quite clear and concise argument.
Well done, I guess you have graduated from something, someday.
This is something to attack the media and assholes using the global warming for political schedules, and influence zones. I personnally am wondering about the extent of the global warming. You are exposing a quite polished point of view, that can bring you the favors of badass moderators, but you are trying to defend an ill-suited point that brings nothing to the discussion. As you told it, the main difficulty is to know whether the climatic changes are driven in some way by human interference. We all know that, and I guess you just had to read a NYT article (free registration, so good, heh ?) to get the point. But what you may not know (apart the fact that you are truly inventing things - no organization or scientific movement ever claimed an ice age in the 70s, because at that time, they just realized how big the global warming was... but nonetheless this proves to be a good introduction ) is that scientific studies have been led on that subject. The result is that, obviously, as there are no objective scientists, things are mixed up.
But what a responsible guy may say at that time is : let's take a conservative stance, we don't know, so let's assume we have something to do with it. We should increase our probabilities of survival. This is Darwin after all.
Apart from that, I'd like to check some of your ideas and make a not so detailed analysis of it (basically because they don't deserve it :). Let's see :
First paragraph : we are free ! oh yes man ! that's a +1 for you.
The two next paragraphs ; the core of a polished discursive rhetoric, like we know some things, but actually we don't know them, so let's fuck all that. +1, you seem informed. No comment on that.
Two next paragraphs : let's settle this in a democratical way, instead of relying on evil pressure groups. I hope your kids will reward you the best fucking idiot medal if ever we suffer heavily from global warming. +1 for you, for you believe in democracy.
And eventually +1, because you read /., and post a link. This is +4 you have +5 insightful, your previous post is +5 interesting. Well done, for the two first posts. Do you hope to access M1/M2 soon ?
WAKE UP FUCKING BADASS MODERATORS, KARMA WHORE.
Didn't you noticed the sig ? I can spot these from miles away. Use your head, not only your finger.
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
While bravely defending George W. Bush's environmental record!
These scientists need a new environmental scapegoat. If you listened to them, El Nino and Global Warming are responsible for all changes in weather.
Hot in the summer! Colder in the Winter! It's Global Warming! What? It's raining? El Nino!
If this is the case, then doesn't it make sense to aggressively pursue alternative forms of energy, and do so now?
Aren't we already doing this? Have I missed something? We don't need government tyranny to step in and do something, because we're already doing something as private individuals. It might not be as fast as you would like, but it is happening.
When people panicked over 9/11, we got a Department of Homeland Security. Do you want a similar Department of Environmental Coercion?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
A lot of people seem to complain that we shouldn't do anything since we don't know what the problem is.
This is the usual strawman that the "global warming proponents" trot out. It's not true. Most anybody who doesn't buy into the whole global warming thing still believes in protecting the environment. There are lots of good reasons to reduce pollution and cut carbon dioxide emissions. There are very few people who would argue that reducing pollution is a bad thing.
However, that doesn't make it right for so-called environmentalists to go running around screaming that the sky is falling without proof. Right now, all we can say is that humans might be increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that the amounts might be enough to have a significant effect on the climate, that the effect might be to cause the average temperature of the earth to increase, and that overall global warming might be a bad thing to happen. Personally, I think that those are a few too many mights to warrant turning global warming into the biggest environmental concern of today. However, since global warming plays well into a nice doomsday scenario for the media, that's what everybody focuses on.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Because of this. (Read it at '-1') The negative ratings are nothing to do with environmental issues.
Precisely my point. There are many potential pitfalls for humanity, an infinite number of disasters. And we have a limited number of resources with which to live our lives. It's all a question of balance. The wise man plans ahead, the foolish plans not at all, the even more foolish one spends all his time worrying about the future and never does anything about the present. Didn't someone famous once say something like "Life is what happens when you are planning for the future."
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
One possible effect of global warming could be an ice age.
"scaremongers"? Keep away from anyone that is fundementalist in their views and look at the science.
The science tells us that:
a) There are currently NO energy alternatives for fossil fuels
b) global warming is real, and it's partially due to humans
Don't get religious about it. Be skeptical and scientific about it. If strict environmental measures work against your political ideals, than change your political ideals.
Ever heard of the Kyoto Accord? It was an international agreement to reduce green house gases that the US signed then pulled out of. The Russians followed suit and also pulled out. Oh well burn baby burn.
It seems like the only thing I can do being a dirt-poor student.
But it seriously makes me mad, our species sux.
Even if you don't believe these doomsday predictions (and they may not be true), wildlife desperately needs protection. Stop posting here and do something positve if you're not already.
Needle Nardle Noo
Global warming or no global warming, we're in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth's history and people are still bickering about politics
Yea.... yea we are...
Frankly, most humans don't care about what animals are dieing. All you have to do is appeal to the rich people by saying "hey, with global warming, you won't be able to go skiing in the alps anymore! now give me money and i'll see what I can do to fix that"
It's not the case, at least not by any reasonable projection. The amount of known, untapped reserves of crude oil have increased dramatically over the last few decades. The rate it's being discovered has grown faster than the rate of consumption, in fact. No rational analysis of the numbers could result in a pronouncement of "oil is going to be running out soon". In the 70's, it was projected that we had ~30 years worth of oil left. Now, 30 years later, we have projections of between 40 and 50 years worth remaining. I'm not saying that we'll keep finding more of it forever or that using more is better, mind you, but the "running out of oil" bit is no longer a credible line of reasoning.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Fucker.
It all goes downhill from first post
According to the second law of thermodynamics, any action or reaction will cause energy to become further dispursed... meaning entropy, or randomness, of the universe is increased.
There's the example of spilled water. In order to "clean up" the mess, I can use a sponge or paper towel, but in doing so, the water gets into the sponge (and some particles still on the surface). Water evaporates from the sponge (or towel) and the surface into the air. Now, thought the water is not on the surface anymore, it is spread randomly throughout the room -- Entropy is increased.
So, according to this physical rule, it doesn't matter what we do -- try to "fix" the situation or allow it to get worse on its own -- the situation of the universe will only degrade.
What I mean to say is that ultimately, no matter what we do, energy will be so dissipated that it is impossible to harvest any for good use and our time will eventually come to an end.
/nova20
I find it astounding that so many, presumably intelligent, people are suggesting here that the global warming is some plot hatched by leftie commie greenies. Wake up. Global warming is occurring, and yes we were heading towards the next ice-age, doesn't that show how big a deal this warming is? CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than at any point in modern geolical times, global mean temperature is above any in modern geological times. Both these things have oscillated over the last few hundred thousand years on a fairly regular cycle but are now above the highest point of that oscillation and have acheived this in 150 years or so - not 50,000. The IPCC third assessment report is the work of THOUSANDS of scientists, who roughly agree. The reports denying these events are by a few scientists outside the mainstream of science. If you don't believe in mainstream science have a think what led to the development of the computer you are now reading this with.
However, the various models used in reports such as this one in Nature rarely take sufficient acount of the ability of species to adapt, at least not plants (I am a plant physiologist) and assign temperature responses that are based on simple maths rather than facts. I doubt the situation will be anywhere near as bad as this report makes out.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
And we could always cancel out Global Warming with a Nuclear Winter.
Actually, it's government tyranny that's standing in the way of alternative energy research. A great example is hemp, which produces more usable cellulose than any plant out there, yet if I were to grow the stuff in quantities sufficient to experiment in producing power with it, the government can sentence me to death.
Don't mistake concern and the quest for change with calls for greater government oversight.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
It is a fact that the earth is currently getting warmer. We may not be able to discern how much, if any, of this warming is due to greenhouse gases. But not knowing is a strong argument for the reduction of greenhouse gases, since it must be admitted that there is a possiblity of unkown probability that we could be setting ourselves up for a catastrophy.
The best we can do is play it safe, asking for the sober guidance of scientists whose job it is to study this kind of phenomena. But alas, we are not playing it safe. Pollution producing industries have strong enough political ties to ensure that environmental regulations are kept far more lax than most objective parties would determine to be safe.
Just when I think that /. can't shock me anymore, it manages something new.
I have never in my life seen such a whiny, arrogant bunch of immortal 15-25 year olds, so secure in their "knowledge" of climate studies, that they can just dismiss years of serious research and peer-reviewed publications as 'political propaganda.'[
Say what you want kids, but you're only fooling yourselves as an excuse to keep on behaving as if nothing were wrong.
I agree that the sky is not falling and it should not be viewed that way. But I guess if you want anything done in politics, the environmentalists exaggerate some things to get the politicians to notice.
The media is part of the problem too. By making it look so bad and blaming everything on it, it is becomes like the boy who called wolf story. People just don't trust any of the stuff about global warming and thing that it is some generic excuse with absolutely no evidence. Although almost everyone sees pollution as a bad thing, I have gotten into quite a few arguments with people that do say we should do nothing. They think the cost of inconveniences to people and industry is more than what the damage being done is, so hence there should not be any more regulations related to pollution. I don't agree with this and think that we have the technology to clean things up a lot, it is only a matter of getting the price down.
Clearcutting in industrialized nations stopped years ago (mostly). The problem is that the ones doing the clear cutting are the poor in third world countries. Try telling them to stop clearing land to feed their families, and to look at the big picture, and they'll probably laugh in your face.
Why do you trust climatologists? Have they proven to be reliable in their application of the scientific process in the past? In general I would say biology has proven to be a field filled with more crackpots and the least stringent application of rigorous science than most. Now that the respectable fields (biochemistry, genomics, etc) have split off, it really is a refuge for psuedo-science and sensationalists.
Unfortunately, fighting tooth and nail will likely do very little. There have been several mass, and I mean MASS, extinctions, according to the fossil record.
Somehow, life has won out.
So, even if 200 years from now there are no humans left alive, or if there are but all of our descendents are scratching away at the dust bowls we leave scarring the surface of the earth, the rest of the world will keep on trucking. Humanity isn't that special, and fighting tooth and nail isn't going to change that.
I agree - very few of us are entitled to an opinion, because we simply don't know. The truth is that:
Why would there be so many more extinctions coming? I find it hard to believe we aren't even part of the picture, especially when I see how many fossil fuels we burn and all the trees we cut down, and would much rather we take the "better safe than sorry approach." Even if we aren't at all responsible for it, at least we can save species and cut down on pollution through more environmentally-friendly measures.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml
No problem. Here's how we can all do our part. It'll cost each individual just a few dollars a month, require no government intervention, and no changes to the energy system.
Everyone just leaves their freezer door open for about 15 minutes every other day. Leave a window open near the freezer for maximum benefit.
To minimize impact on the power grid, those with odd addresses, leave the door open on even days, and those with even addresses on odd days.
The excess heat generated by global warming will thus be magically removed by... the uh... hmm...
Oh well. Let's worry about WHERE the heat goes later.
At least the energy used to run the freezer is clean, non-polluting electricity, which comes from... um...
Oh crap. Never mind.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
Shouldn't we be putting more effort into taking care of things that will cause global extinction?
We've had how many near earth collisions with rather large unfriendly rocks? I can say with certainty that if one of those guys decided to pay us a visit, we'd be in a hell of a lot more trouble than loosing a few species of animals.
And on top of all that, we've got RIAA to deal with...:)
It's great to study our planet and do wonderful things with it, but let's not neglect the obvious for the warm and fuzzy.
Just my $.02
Actually the costs of "preventing global warming" is many, many, many..... orders of magnitude greater than the "hundreds of billions of dollars" you are talking about.
Really? I wasn't aware that conservation cost that much. I thought it would actually save us money, as much as hundreds of billions of dollars, over time.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
We remember the Kyoto accord.
One of the things I distinctly remember is how political it was. 'Developing Nations' which have FAR less technology to deal with pollution, and large areas of undeveloped land mass were mostly exempted from most of the mandates.
It was patently political and anti-Western in thrust. A badly flawed solution to an unclear problem. Thank goodness it hasn't gone anywhere.
A Good Intro to NetBS
the ground temps are read in urban areas, and the atmospheric temps can be attributed to the weaker magnetic field allowing more solar radiation to hit the atmosphere and warm it...that is why there is a disjunction between the temperatures in the atmosphere and the ground. the ground temps predict the atmosphere should be much hotter and the atmosphere predicts that the ground temps should be much cooler....in fact, there have been some preliminary studies that show if you survey the rural regions on the ground, there is a temperature DROP of .5 degrees.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I've said this before, but I still think we give ourselves too much credit. I think we are seeing the results of much larger cycles in the sun that we do not fully understand.
Why?
Because Mars is experiencing global warming too.
Don't get me wrong, I think we are trashing the environment, and that if we don't do something about it, it will come back and bite us in the ass as a species, but I don't think it is a given fact that global warming is a direct result of our actions. There is simply too much we don't understand.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
Urban Heat islands have a MUCH greater effect on weather patters than does anything else created by Humans.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
so, t is smart to try and fight nature?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Different flavors for different folks. You'd better wipe what you've been lapping up off your chin, dude. Cuz you're just as big a zealot, politicizing it the way you are.
Fucking chickenshit littles.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote05.html
Thought you might want to know
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Really? I wasn't aware that conservation cost that much. I thought it would actually save us money, as much as hundreds of billions of dollars, over time.
As population of the world decreases due to flooding, extreme weather and higher rates of skin cancer related death, etc?
http://jesus.everdense.com/
You do understand why it was done that way, don't you?
Think of the emission of greenhouse gases as a sort of license to develop your economy.
Would it be fair then to allow only the west this opportunity?
We're the cause of most of the pollution. Of course we should be the ones to be made to cut back the most.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
never mind that out of all the species ever, 99.999% of them went extinct before humans ever existed....
Why do you bother to lie about things that are easy to verify? I'm betting it's stupidity.
"Hating Bush" is a fulltime occupation for folks like you, eh?
You're a heck of a lot like the Clinton haters.
Regular folks think you're loony.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Not according to these guys.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I'm sure I'm going to get flamed, being as everyone here is a tried and true athiest that believes in the "pure science and truth" of evolution, but...
Yet more "circumstantial" evidence that supports the idea that speciation is impossible: we see a loss of species at an incredible rate, and no new ones. What dillusion makes people think that anything could survive massive earthly upheavals when minor climate change fucks everything up?
Then again, it's not like things like the disproval of spontaneous generation, oh, several hundred years ago, does not already invalidate evolution.
Oh well. If you can't accept something, create a notion that contradicts and claim it as truth instead.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
According to New Scientist, Americans live at a rate that requires 5 earths. Europeans live at a rate (IIRC) around 4 - 4.5 earths. The people who are living at a 1 - 1 ration of consumption and global resources are in the scarier regions of africa.
FWIW, I scored in the low european range, even though I live in the USA - we are avid recyclers, we have one econo car, but usually walk or take public transport (parkings a nightmare anyway), etc.
People who deny global warming are just a bunch of dopes who don't get it. HOWEVER:
The big problem is population. And EVERYONE (left, right, center, black, white and in between) needs to recognise that the destruction we wreak is proprotional to our numbers. We need to reduce our population, and do so soon.
However, rapid population declines (from disease or nuclear war) would cause incredible and unnecessary suffering. So we have to figure out a way to decrease our numbers rationally and gradually and globally. And we need to start that ASAP.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What if it's a sober warning rather than scaremongering?
Give us a concrete way to tell the difference.
Until then, the dubious risks of global warming will have an awful hard time outweighing the very real costs of the remedy.
Bravely is right, since the Left is in a virtual lockstep agreement that Bush is the environment's worst enemy despite the evidence to the contrary.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
I think dope should be legal..Hell all drugs steroids,antibiotics,heroin,HGH,LSD..all of 'em.
Saying that,hemp,while a usefull cultigen,is not the save-all of humanity and was most certainly not made illegal-by Democrat controlled congress..signed by Progressive hero FDR by the way-for the economic interests of the petro-chemical industry.
Buncha DAMN hippie propaganda.
You can get fantastic yields from pine trees.
A proposal to implement a planned economy directed by government.
Well, that's not what I'm arguing for.
I do however like the idea of taxing it (it's one of the few kinds of taxes that make sense to me.) Tax it through the roof, and tell people that next year, the taxes will be even higher.
That's the way to encourage conservation and the creation of alternative energy sources. Make it clear that oil's days are numbered.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Jesus, man, don't you realize the potential of a weed planet? You talk about it as if it were some kind of bad thing! We could support our entire planet with as much pot as anyone could ever want! Johnny Ganjaseed the land!
>So, do you dispute the physics of greenhouse gasses, or the fact that we've been dumping them into the atmosphere at an astonishing rate since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?
Isn't water a green house gas?? In fact the number one green house gas. I do belive you are talking about co2...you should also be pointing out that higher CO2 in the atmosphere means faster plant growth. (carbon sink) and that we have been putting co2 into wood which makes houses and books and on and on.(carbon sink)..then we also don't know how big the ocean carbon sink is. The question here is how much have co2 level raised in the past 100 years? I do belive it is very close to zero. so if CO2 has not increased significantly what green house gas could be causing this whole global warming problem? Water?
Additionally the reporting within the article, does not seem unduly unbiased. Maybe its just me, but any reporter who calls a report "cockamamie galimatias", should have evidence for why it is "cockamamie galimatias". As a computer simulation it is agreed, that the information may be inaccurate. However, it may be accurate.
The study is entirely a computer simulation, and as anyone familiar with this art knows, computer models can be trained to produce any desired result.
This doesn't really suggest that the information is inaccurate, it suggests that he falsified the information or rules of the simulation to give a different outlook. Mistakes are one thing, that is something else altogether.
1st Problem, Computer Simulation and no relations found between a Greenhouse Effect and Species Extinction. Well I think it is a given, the article accepts "most aspects of global warming theory", I imagine that means the guy actually accepts that the earth warms up. Some animals are not as adaptable as others when it comes to temperature change. The article at this point kind of infers that since none of the evidence is proved, that the possibility does not exist. Well, the report was a projection. Not a highlight of the links.
2nd Problem Over a length of time projects a 15 percent to 37 percent extinction, the main problem with the New Republic article is that it uses the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a figure for dismissing the figures out of hand, yet the figures obtained form the are not over a 50 year period, additionally I could find no records of any attempt to project these figures. As such, I can see that the figures were of the redlist, showing a yearly risk percentage, of which not all were evaluated and even the category mammals showed a 6% risk for last year.
3rd Problem namely, that past episodes of global warming have not produced the mass-extinction that the Thomas computer models project. As mentioned in the article, this has happened over the past century, a significant change, but possibly not quite the change needed to curtail the lives of some. It is likely however that further changes will exacerbate the problem. Additionally, it is significantly hard to determine whether a species is extinct, unless we are aware of its existance. That however is pure speculation as is much of this article. It also mentions that the temperature change speculated in 2100 is 3-6 degrees (while complaining that the projections are not exact enough, it seems the article writer forgot his previous statement about projections). This allowing for division by two, works out to be either 1.5 or 3 degrees adding on the previous change of 1 degree, well thats over the figures he uses to compare with European temperatures rose naturally by one or two degrees at the end of the "Little Ice Age" in Europe. At that time however, IUCN was not really available to provide figures about mass extinctions. People were more concerned with their own survival.
There are further points but I'm too tired and this has turned out longer than I expected.
I do accept that computer simulations can be dodgy, however you do really need compare like with like figures. A comparison of 50 years against 1 is not a good comparison.
The article does state "The IUCN's 12,259 estimate is plenty worrying in itself, and habitat loss is plenty worrying in itself.".
However the IUCN's projection is based on existing figures, these could rise or lower due to external factors, they are simply based on previous records. Additionally they are due to a threat by other organisms, maybe the
Yea, intent to not enter such a worthless and harmful treaty.
If it's not caused by man, then there's not much we could do to stop it anyway.
WTF? Lots of things that are caused by things other than man can stopped (or adapted to, or modified) by man.
example: Dog bites man. This was not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can devise a muzzle to stop it.
example: The river floods the village every spring. Not caused by man. But, clever tool-using ape that he is, man can build a dam or construct a levee so that the river does not flood the village every spring.
Why should global warming be any different? Humans have been messing with their environment since before they were humans. Some of the results have been good. Some have been bad. Most have been both, depending on where you sit. If global warming is destroying us or things important to us (whether they be our livelihoods, our health, or fuzzy little animals) then it makes sense to at least try to do something about it. Even if we didn't start the problem (and there's a heap of indicators say we did).
A friend of mine frequently uses the old adage "It doesn't matter whose fault it is. It only matters whose problem it is." Never has it been more true.
Any computer model is as good as the underlying assuptions and the initial data. This research seems to be more political than scientific. Pro-Kyoto people must maintain a sufficient level of public fear to receive further funding.
Give me money and in a similar study I will prove that by 2050 up to 30% new species will be created due to global cooling.
Read Crichton's recent lecture for a more elaborate discussion.
This is "Funny"
Logan's Run reference.I thought you geeks liked cheesey SF movie references.
We're going to Mars. Time to start clubbing seals and putting those CFCs back in hair spray.
So people keep on trotting out the "1970s cooling scare". While the "scare" did make it into the popular media, it wasn't nearly as widespread among the scientific community as you make it sound.
m l# wheel
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Global warming, on the other hand, has been real science since Tyndall and Arrhenius (late 19th/early 20th century).
-Marcus
ps. the "corrected" satellite data now show some (small) warming (even Christy admits that): a recent paper by Santer (Science, May 2003) about a reanalysis shows there is controversy about whether the satellite data might show even more warming.
And while I will be the last to claim that climate models are perfect (I use them myself, I am intimately aware of their problems), I will point out that climate and weather are two very different problems (think about the difference between solving the three body problem, and the the ideal gas law that predicts mass behavior of millions of particles). And at the very simplest level, if you add forcing agents (CO2) to the atmosphere, all other things being equal, you will indisputedly get warming. The question is how much, because feedbacks (positive + negative) complicate the issue greatly. Which is why one does uncertainty studies - see
http://web.mit.edu/globalchange/www/outreach.ht
The question is: how much are we willing to spend to reduce the chance of the really bad outcomes? The answer is unlikely to be "our entire GDP", but is also unlikely to be "zero".
I won't be here in 2050 -- but you will.
Dint'cha hear? Bush is gonna launch manned missions to the Moon! And Mars! Those young'uns won't be here in 2050 either. They'll be there.
Hope they put lotsa seats on them thar moon-rockets, kiddo.
I wonder why. Surely it can't be the fact that only the Senate (not the House) can approve treaties, now could it? Nah.
Reference US Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2: "He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;..."
Sorry. I know nothing.
Well, I might be if there was such a thing as Global Warming. Truth is global warming is a figment of some really speculative computer models, so I think I'll be able to contain my fear.
Flame on, you Greenie idiots. Its all make believe.
Who says it's a political agenda? What if it's a sober warning rather than scaremongering?
Years of experience tells us that it is scaremongering.
Yet it would be nice if we really could control the weather... I'd make it a nice 70 degrees outside right now.
"Simple statistics shows that it's hardly unusual"
/ ann/ann03.html ). There is reasonable (though disputed) evidence to show the 20th century as the warmest of the millenium (Mann study).
Do you really think that climate change science is based on a few anecdotes? That there aren't statisticians working in this field?
There is significant work being done looking at global average temperatures, looking at global extreme weather events, looking at el nino/la nina incidence rates, looking at droughts, heat waves, etc. etc.
And certaintly for global average temperature, the evidence from land and ocean based measurements is very strong that the earth has been warming rapidly (oft cited statistic of 10 warmest years on record all coming since 1990 - http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2003
El nino/la nina incidence is certainly up (though possibly due to complex causes).
Data on extreme weather events vary: For examples, reported tornadoes are up, but we have better reporting, so who knows if actual tornado incidence is up. I believe that heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods are all supposed to have had measured increases, but I'm not as sure about this as I am about the rest of the post os don't quote me.
And the people who care like insurance agencies (who have really good statisticians) believe in global warming - do a search on Munich Re and climate change...
In any case: we increase the concentration of major greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 50 to 130% (CO2 + CH4), and you don't expect this to have any impact??? Yes, temperature changes naturally, and to a certain extent we have to adapt to it. The worry is that if we apply enough forcing to the system, the temperature will change so rapidly as to cause major disturbances to our way of life.*
*Actually, mostly disturbances to the way of life of the third world. With irrigation, dyke building, air conditioning, etc. the US will probably be able to adapt with only minor disruptions. Though we will probably lose much of southern Florida at some point in the next 150 years...
To restate a previous post, just to make sure somebody actually pays attention this time.
I know that species die out and new ones evolve.
I know that life will go on.
I DON'T KNOW if Homo Sapiens will survive this. The fact that i'm not sure and a whole lot of people aren't sure, Does mean there is a problem.
Well heck, if we're going to run out of oil, and burning it is so darn bad, why should we try and slow down the process? Why don't we just run out sooner and be done with it?
i agree: something must be done
but what i find interesting is that
in many ways (in this case) doing nothing
would be an important contribution
drive your car less and not at all when unnecessary
stop cutting down rainforests
dont dump pollutants into streams
stop drilling for new oil
etc
now of course this would be a major paradigm
shift and would probably require quite a bit of action
in terms of policy making to enforce these things
on the corporate side
but it really resonates with me
that the answer could be as simple as
doing less and using less
whats easier than that?
Strange that a science fiction author seems to understand the scientific method better than most scientists. Michael Crichton's lecture Aliens Cause Global Warming shows the potenital source of all these massive death and doom predictions, historically. Like Mr Crichton, I do not claim to say that man has no impact on the environment. But rushing to fix a problem that may only be caused by numerical modeling and financial politics is something we should think twice about.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
But what if we find out after it is too late?
Sorry, but this kind of argument doesn't hold water. The same thing could theoretically happen through intervention--what if it turns out our "solutions" slow us down or prevent us from discovering the true cause, and a sufficient solution. "What if" scenarios are just that: guesstimates.
No comment.
Cute. It would seem that you're not a resident of the United States, since you append the '$' after the amount and because you are unfamiliar with the gallon unit, so I am less than convinced that you know what the domestic problems are in the U.S.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
I just read mostof the comments here and yes, everyone has very good and valid points point. the tempertures are raising.is there a global warming or is it natural? we dont know. depends who you talk to.
but the MAIN point the climate is changing. warmer colder, whatever. this change WILL affect out human society, least of all it will affect the food chain and our ability to produce food. we are what, 6.5 billion people, right? major changes in the eco system man-caused or NOR will throw human society into chaos because we wont have enough food to feed everyone.
I for one hope to see WHAT exactly ALL of you smart asswipes who know how to speak SO well sitting in ur cosy houes/apartments eating whatever you want and having a nice swell life will do then. Me? I'm 38. It wont affect me much. but YOU, it WILl affect. whatcha gonna do then, geeko? plead to ur goverment to 'save u" and curse everyone for using cars. it will be toooo late.
so keep on talking and talking and spinning good sentances and creating nice phrases.and consuming. and consuming. and doing nothing.
ur children will spit on ur graves and curse u. I just wish I could be there to laugh.
This is gross over-simplification. First of all, the term global warming is only correct when you are talking about mean global temps, and those changes are minor. However, locally climate change can be extreme.
The problem is really habitat loss, fragmentation, and the fact that many species have suffered dramatic losses in population size and gene diversity within those populations. Thus, they are not capable of producing enough individuals through random gene recombination and mutation that will appear to have "adapted" to the changes and found successful lineages that eventually repopulate the altered environment.
Only those species that are already successful in human dominated ecosystems, and that have R-selected reproductive strategies (e.g. dandelions, rats, house geckos, and domestic animals and "invasive species") will thrive in this next 200-1000 year period.
You're interpreting the facts to fit the prediction. You must be really adept at reading your horoscope.
> "The very same people? Really?"
Actually, yes. Not every one the same, a significant number is.
> "So, do you dispute the physics of greenhouse gasses, or the fact that we've been dumping them into the atmosphere at an astonishing rate since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?"
Just for reference, one substantial volcanic eruption releases more CO2 and C0 into the atmosphere than every single internal combustion engine that ever existed. Yes, undoubtedly, we are *contributing* (and we *should* attempt to ameliorate that contribution as practicable), but we certainly aren't the primary source of those gasses. Also, water vapor is a more effective greenhouse substance than CO2.
> "Who says it's a political agenda? What if it's a sober warning rather than scaremongering?"
And what if it is scaremongering (or politics)? Do you really want us to engage in a course of action based on blind panic (or political expediency rather than effectiveness)?
While there are clearly anthropogenic effects on the climate, the magnitude of those effects and the degree to which those effects are related to other normal, natural, periodic cycles is something we simply don't have any *real* answer to. Our climate models are *nowhere* near being able to make even a moderately definitive prediction about the future of our climate.
I'm in agreement that we should make certain efforts to ameliorate our own contributions, but even those contributions *must* be implemented in a fashion that don't exacerbate the problem (or create other problems that may be as bad, or worse than what we're trying to solve). There will be *NO* instant (or even quick) changes in a system with the massive inertia that is contained within the biosystem. Apart from sensible conservation efforts and meaningful investigation into alternate energy sources, not one of the *solutions* presented by the alarmists can be considered to be meaningfully effective with minimal side effects.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet, our resources and ultimately our way of life?
Simple. How do you fight an unknown enemy? There is some evidience that suggests that the world was much warmer 200 years ago. Mostly from sparce scientific data and anecdotal evidience. Maybe humanity has lived in a cyclic world of heat and cold, and just never noticed until they started keeping records of it.
If we run around like chickens with their heads cut off, we'll never accomplish anything. We DO have time to study the issues and come up with a solution rather than going on an environmental witch hunt.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
I can't believe such a patronizing and insultful comment was modded up as insightful.
That is the problem is that global warming has NOT been proven. Most everyone seems to take it as a rock solid fact when it's really nothing more than specualtion. What needs to be proved:
h es _quote04.html
1) That there is an average rise in temperatures happening. Ok, this has been proved. Over the last 100 years, which is as long as we have data for, there has been a rising trend totaling around 0.5 degrees. So, we know that over a very short time span temperatures have gone up a bit, on average. Ok.
2) That this change is something that is going to continue, and we are just witnessing another level of cycles. Temperature moves in cycles within cycles. It cycles during the day, week, moths, years, decades and so on. We need to know that this is really an upward trand, and not just a temporary roughly century-long cycle. This is where the pseudo science starts. People get computer simulations to show that temperature will continue to increase. However those simulations are based off of equations to which we do not know the variables. Hence, they are WORTHLESS. We do not have the ability to accurately predict weather for a week, much less 50 years. All simulations doing this are nothing but fiction.
3) If we then show that, indeed, this IS a contiuning upward trend, it must be established that is is a manmade trend. It may be that we have nothing at all to do with any temperature trend. Again, you get pseudo-sicence, people taking simple gas laws and computer simulations, making wild assumptions about vairables, and declaring they have proof that manmade emmissions are the cause.
I recommend you read Micheal Chriton's lecture on the point. He's far more gifted with language than me and does a much better job explaining it and the roots:
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speec
So don't go bagging on "younger people" here. YOU are the one that is ignorant of the scientifi method and the research surrounding global warming. Just because you hear it on the news, doesn't make it true. Just because a scientist says it, doesn't make it true.
Part of the problem is that we're like a blind person at the controls of a motor vehicle. We know the vehicles moving, and that's a pretty bad thing as the outcome can only be messy. But there is one control which will fix the problem and many that will either not improve the situation appreciably or possibly make the situation much worse. God forbid we should find the accelerator rather than the brake!
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
No, it most definitely shouldn't.
Contrary to right-wing scaremongering, its mandated reductions in greenhouse emissions are quite moderate and and attainable (before Bush rejected it, most enviros blasted the Kyoto treaty for being pathetically inadequate).
It was killed 99-0 in the U.S. Senate during the Clinton administration. Bush just did us all the favor of burying it rather than letting there be any question as to whether or not it could be revived.
It would provide an impetus for developing new fuel/energy technologies that could very well boost the economy.
I'd rather we make those developments with our economy humming along with current energy resources rather than trying to do it while our economy is being stifled by premature CO2 caps.
If the US doesn't develop this technology, Japan and Europe will, which certainly won't do much to cure our our trade deficit.
It doesn't matter who develops it. Once it is developed, it will be used worldwide. If the Europeans can find some good alternative energy source, more power to them! We'll implement it once it makes financial sense.
Gas/electric hybrid vehicles are now a reality - in fact, the Toyota Prius won several awards for best car of the year.
But does it make financial sense? How much does it cost? Does it look like a normal car, or some futuristic bubble that I don't want regardless of how cheap or efficient it is?
Public transportation should also be encouraged - Europe has a very efficient and reliable rail system, and there's no reason why the US can't have one.
Public transportation is good, where applicable.
The money for funding all this could be attained by stopping corporate welfare for the oil & auto industries, as well as diverting money from all the pork-barrel highway funding projects that Congress is so fond of.
Well, I happen to be fond of working highways so I'm glad Congress shares my views.
Basically, you're asking for a change in American attitudes. First, if 99% of Americans like their current attitudes, what right do you have to say they should change?
Give me a solution that fits my lifestyle. I like the freedom a car gives me. I like being able to drive from NYC to LA. If you give me the option to buy a normal-looking car that gets 100mpg for $2k more than the same car that gets 25mpg, I'll pay the extra $2k. But don't expect me to pay 20% more for a car that I don't even like. And don't base your economic and envrionmental goals on the assumption I'm going to start taking a train or bike to work.
Ping! I wonder which environmental nut falls for these redundant frequently aired politico global hot crap! A little common sense should let any geek know that a newly discovered substance called Dihydrogen Monoxide which is invisble to environmentalists and politico nincompoops has put a hole in all these theories. This white substance Dihydrogen monoxide steams into number one as the only big issue. Dihydrogen Monoxide (or H20 as its known) clouds into sky carrying millions of tons of boiled water (just think how many electric kettles you need to boil to make one cloud) and its the one and only major carrier of heat around the planet. Since 2/3 of the planet is water, there is little or nothing anyone can or should be doing about it. These ennviornmental nuts just don't have any answer to geeks pricking their bubble.
The 'But it'll cost too much' excuse is rather amusing to me. How many industries and inventions were formed despite that cry? How much economic benefit do you suppose they have created? I know many people believe the government should not even really exist, and that the 'free market' can take care of everybody's needs. Perhaps you believe this. I, however, do not believe the 'free market' is infallible. I figure sometimes the government can play a valuable role by shaking up business once and a while. They say, "necessity is the mother of invention", but reducing the emissions these companies produce isn't nessesary to them. Give them a push, and I'd bet that new, innovative ways to deal with the problem would be found. Then again, what do I know?
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Exactely, the oil argument is just an assumption on our part. Oil may just be like food. A long time ago, everyone predicted we would run out of food but we never did. Whatever happens, we want to be in control of the Oil supply so we can maintain our dominion over other countries.
until we try to restore the ballances of nature and employ nanotechnology to reduce our footprint on this planet, a very messy future awaits us all (enviromental refugues, civilization collapse, survival of the meanest etc. Our present capitalist system has a built-in defect in that we ignore the ecosystem and that it supports us all (all plants and animals too, after all, we are animals too). The only solution is a very advanced nanotechnology based society where there are no rich/corp/people and probablly no money need too (looks like star-treck without all the phasers and photon torpedoes (it does not take a genius to figure out that over-weponised cultures self-destruct). so here we are, we need nanotech to improve ourselves and drop all this immature nationalistic warmongering crap and simply build a better society...we mibht as well get rid of all the bushes and the sadams and any nationalistic twits and military types and ship them off to some other star system where they can play their silly games like world domination..oh, that includes bill gates too, don't forget to ship him off too, and, that SCO crowd too..and my dumb former co-workers too..and also....
[A.D. 2239]
President Bush?! You mean the president who refused to sign the Kyoto protocol?
> Even the merest possibility of such a future
> should cause us to worry. Shouldn't it?
No. What should worry us is our social problems. Once these are fixed, then everything else falls in place.
This is not true. You can look at the atmospheric CO2 concentrations before and after any major eruption in the last 50 years (the time during which CO2 has been continually monitored around the world) and see that the amount of CO2 you are talking about was not released into the atmosphere.
Over the past 100 years, fossil fuel burning has released somewhere around 170 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. If a volcanic eruption released this much carbon, it would increase the CO2 concentration from 360 parts per million to 440 parts per million. That didn't happen.
You can also go back 500,000 years using glacial ice cores and see that the CO2 concentration never approached its current value during that time, even though there were many portions of that time span during which volcanic activity was much greater than it is today.
Also, water vapor is a more effective greenhouse substance than CO2
But the concentration of water vapor is limited by the saturation vapor pressure. If I dump a whole lot of water vapor into the atmosphere, the excess will precipitate out. The residence time of a water vapor molecule is quite short.
On the other hand, CO2 is not a vapor at room temperature, it's a gas. Its atmospheric residence time is much longer, so CO2 emitted today will be around for 50-100 years.
Finally, becauee small warming caused by increased CO2 causes the saturation vapor pressure of water vapor to rise, the water vapor effect amplifies the effect of CO2, causing approximately double the warming we would see with CO2 alone. This has been experimentally verified in studies of the troposphere following the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
Finally, I would point out that chemical analysis of glacial ice cores demonstrates that over the past 500,000 years, whenever CO2 concentrations were high, temperatures were high. Whenever CO2 concentrations were low, temperatures were low. During ice ages, CO2 concentrations were exceptionally low. During interglacial periods, CO2 concentrations were high.
Today, CO2 concentrations are about 30% higher than they were during any time in that 500,000 year record. Because the oceans take a long time to heat up, we will not see the full warming due to the current CO2 concentration for many decades, but it is a great stretch to assume that the mechanisms that regulated the ice ages will suddenly stop working and fail to deliver substantial warming over the next century.
funny thing is, I hear a lot of scientists stating that we're entering (slowly) another ice age.
So like.. uh.. which is it.
the most diversity of species are the hot ones. So I hereby call baloney-sausage on this psuedo-science! And as always, I must conclude by pointing out the earth has been much hotter in the past, and much colder than it is now. Don't like the climate on earth, just wait, it'll change.
... and I wish to moderate this news "-1 Flamebait" or "-1 Troll" or even better - "-1 Moronic".
:D Only reason why I am a computer scientist: it's more profitable and I am also good at it.
Making predictions about extincts based off temperature fluctuations that we don't understand the root cause of but chicken-little it and say it's "global warming" and it's "our fault" is a lot like saying Dubya's a good president.
I have a nice chart of the global temperature over the last 4.3 billion years - it goes up and it goes down, sometimes at rates much higher than it's fluctuating right now. Furthermore 30 years ago we were on a slight down trend IIRC. More likely than not withing 20 years this trent will have leveled off and maybe even by back on the down.
Oh - btw the "we add so much carbon-dioxide.. yada yada yada" to the atmosphere is more alarmism - the average volcanic eruption is more than 40 years worth of everything we put into the atmosphere. Sure we're deforesting to - but last i check cyanobacter [blue-green algae] and plant-like planktons do most of the photosynthesis on the planet. [now before you go off on the oil spills tangent our 'oil spills' contribute less than 10% of total oil-into-ocean leakage each year, and there are even specialized organisms that live off natural oil seepage such as in the Gulf of Mexico).
Who wants to listen to the person who's been chasing for as long as he can remember, and grew up reading as many meteorology books as he can
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
CO2 is in fact a vapor at room temperature. The critical temperature is 31 C, closer to body temperature than room temperature. However, at room temperature, its saturation vapor pressure is more than 1000 psi, so my argument that CO2 will not precipitate out of the atmosphere is still valid. Nothing in my argument changes.
stop lying to us when sufficiently rational reasons exist to bring about change.
Screw the global warming angle. We haven't been keeping accurate measurments of temperature for very long. We don't know how temperature fluctuates with time or how it affects life. It's all hypothetical BS. And it's irrelavent.
We don't need to stop polluting because some animal has a 1 in a million chance of dying out if we don't. We need to stop polluting because it grosses up the planet. Whinning about poor little cute animals dying is like whinning that somebody should stop hording garbage in their house because the cat might die.
You should stop hording trash in your house because it's disgusting and one of the side effects of cleaning up besides not living in filth is that the cat will be more likely to live longer.
"You know, what really perturbs me is that now we're hearing that all the oil is going to be running out soon."
They make oil in labs. And it doesn't take millions of years to do. They used to claim diamonds take millions of years to make as well but by simulating the way diamonds are made, we find out they're created in weeks. We only think oil and diamonds are scare is because of companies like De Beers and because we have the idiotic notion that everything takes millions of years to occur naturally.
It's recently come to light that we may not be fueling our cars with grandma. It may be the result of bacterial waste or something. In other words: an unlimited resource. Diamonds are certainly in no short supply. Nobody even knows how much oil the earth contains. We only know how much is left of the oil we know about and even that's questionable. We're like little children fighting over the "last" brownie when there's a whole other batch cooking in the oven and another one waiting to go in.
But so what if it's unlimited? It's dirtying up our house. It's time to grow up and start picking up our trash and looking for cleaner more efficient ways to get things done.
Lying to us to about running out of things and animals going extinct is just ruining any chance to get people to change. It's all a lie and we're not fooled by it. Animals go extinct often. It's part of natural selection. I find it ironic that people who believe in evolution have such a hard time accepting that the world changes and not always for what we consider the better. Maybe you're not better off without the DooDoo bird but nature voted it off the island. Get over it.
If you'd shut up with the speculation and lies and just shove our noses in our shit, I think there's a good chance we might get house broken.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
What has increased dramatically is the number of people inflating the reserve numbers so that
a) they can pump more out of the ground, under OPEC rules
b) they can confuse the credulous that there is nothing to worry about - since there's not a damn thing they can do about it
Face facts. Oil supply is about to turn down, and when supply can no longer match the rising demand curve, the US way of life comes crashing to a halt. No amount of ostrich impressions is going to change that.
Of course there is no denying that extinctions happen. In fact several times during the course of history there have been mass extinctions in which over 70% of all species on the planet died. When the dinosaurs disappeared so did most other creatures. For thousands of years the earth was mostly covered in ferns.
The earth will survive of that there is no doubt. What about us though?
War is necrophilia.
Wha? fact? figures? Science? you must be some sort of a commie liberal fag or something.
Rush sez there is no such thing as global warming and I don't need any nerd with book learnin tellin me otherwise.
War is necrophilia.
I think that is taken a little out of context since in general I agree that it doesn't mean squat, but it seems to have some meaning when you are talking about something that is, based on other reasons, expected to work better than other options. Science has made plenty of mistakes in the past, but then what do you do if you are not going to pick what you believe to be the best option? Taken to the extreme, such arguments would basically lead to more of a random choice than of one based on reason. It is one thing to look back and say "We tried what we could and it didn't work" since we would not have known the correct choice, but it is much worse to look back and say "We knew we should have done this, why didn't we do it?" (and by trying something, doing nothing is an option, I am not saying we have "do" something, but doing nothing won't help as far as we currently know). I guess beyond that it comes down to personal philosophy, but I always do what I think is the best choice with my current knowledge.
I guess it is kind of like betting on die. If you see six come up a few times, it might be chance. But if it starts coming up a lot (say 30%) over dozens of roles, then you might as well bet on the six thinking it is a loaded die, otherwise your pick would have been random anyways not making a difference if your "theory" is not correct. As far as you can tell you just increased your chances.
Of course the situation with global warming is much more complex, but we are forced into such a bet since the do nothing (i.e. continue doing things as we do now) is just one side of the die. Whether you think the costs of reducing pollution is too much for its benefits, I guess that is a matter of opinion, but from what we know now, pollution isn't helping the situation.
the oven is hot.
Since the dawn of time people have been aware of this fact but suddenly Joe Blow Environmentalist notices and now suggests that somebody needs to turn down the oven.
"The analogy I have used in the past is what do you do if you notice that you are starting to gain weight?"
Nobody knows what the "ideal weight" of planet earth is. For all we know you're just some crazed dieter that thinks a full grown male gorrilla should weigh 120lbs.
Or maybe you think grizzly bears shouldn't gorge themselves before winter. After all, all that excess fat is "bad."
The only rational argument is that we need to clean up. All this other BS is irrelavent. You don't need to lie to someone and tell them God kills a kitten every day they don't take a shower. Just tell them they smell funny.
Stop lying. It's that simple. Stick to the undeniable facts. We smell funny. And that's a good enough reason.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
the ice age thing was based on an unreasonable methodology. It was basically certain people looking at a graph of the last really long block of time and seeing that the temperature of the earth got into a cycle of slowly rising, then falling abruptly, then slowly rising, then falling abruptly. They then said, hey, if it did this in the past, it will probably do it in the future. They then realized that if it did stay sort of on the same schedule, the next "fall abruptly" is in the next thousand years or so. However, this isn't reasonable science. They didn't know what was causing the cycle; they just noticed it was happening and assumed it would continue.
relevant points here: temprature rising, then abruptly falling, and: didn't know (and still don't!!) know what was causing the cycle.
Current global warming theory is not based on "temperature is rising so it will continue rising"; it's based on actually looking at the physics of what is happening in the atmosphere
But they still don't know what caused the cycle. So the models that are being used are not simply 'not flawless' they are flawed to the point of uselesness because they can't explain what we KNOW to have happened.
Your El Nino example is perfect here, scientists made the link between the ocean temp and weather soley due to the fact that they always occur together. The climate models still can't predict the occurance of an El Nino, (they think that they are getting close). The models are simply way too crude at this point to predict a known phenomina 6 months in advance, and we yet we have people like you convinced that global warming WILL happen.
It's very hard to say EXACTLY what is going to happen.
Yup, just like it is hard to hit the bullseye EXACTALY from 100 yards. So far we are managing to hit the broad side of a barn FROM INSIDE THE &%*# BARN !! Wake me when we can hit the 6 foot target at 100 yards, until then the only thing we should be doing about global warning is study it. yup, real science, not politics!
Those aren't "certainties."
You are repeating FUD churned out by outfits like the American Enterprise Institute, Greening Earth Society, and other well-paid advocacy outfits.
Every one of these factoids has been disproved.
The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, and that human activity is a major factor.
Through sheer volume and persistance the patsies of the fossil fuel lobby get their distortions onto editorial pages. They've fooled politicians, and lots of the public, but they can't fool Maw Nature, who can be a real bitch.
Stefan
The more I see stories like this, the more I think it's time to (re)ask the question "what counts as a scientific claim?" When is it legitimate to claim an assertion as knowledge or fact or scientific? How much weight should such claims be given?
Consider the fate of Bjorn Lomborg, the author of the Skeptical Environmentalist. This man was beaten up by the environmental community and even his government. He was called unscientific. It was even suggested that because he is a statistician, he wasn't a "real" scientist - as if being a statistician meant spending all day taking the mean of 100 random numbers.
Yet, when it comes to issues concerning legitimate belief and knowledge, statistics has much more to say than physics, chemistry, or environmental science. Only in philosophy is there more discussion about what counts as legitimate belief or knowledge.
So again I ask, what counts as science? Do scientists even know? Are we at the point when we simply defer all judgement to people that call themselves scientists? Is science simply whatever such people say?
I hope not.
The problem is, 30 years ago we were told we had 30 years of oil reserves left--now, we have >50 years of reserves, and yet we use much more oil now than then.
Certainly oil will run out eventually, but at it gets more scarce, prices will rise, and demand will fall, mostly due to alternative sources of energy being used. Let the market work.
This is all Paul Erlich vs. Julian Simon-type stuff (from nationalcenter.org):
First sensible thing I've seen posted on this discussion.
Bitter and proud of it.
Selection due to unfit organisms in the Greenhouse will filter out many species, possibly including us. That sudden change in environment doesn't increase the mutation or adaptation rate, it just is a call for final answers on the genomes of whatever's living through it. If the environment changes fast enough, nothing might survive to be self-sustaining, or so little as to be unrecognizable. Think of the Sahara, which was prolific 5000 years ago, probably before humans screwed it up faster than species could adapt.
--
make install -not war
What about the events prior to the Earth's formation, 15Gy ago? Before that, there was another star, which forged our metals (and any element heavier than carbon) in its core, around which there might have been a planet, which might have had intelligence. Or some other environment in which the RNA comets we've sampled "evolved". That "ended" in cataclysm, and has returned to some kind of "balance" after 3.5Gy+. Is that a meaningful achevement? Who cares? In the long run, we're all dead, but I was hoping to have breakfast at least once in 2050.
--
make install -not war
Do you really think that climate change science is based on a few anecdotes? That there aren't statisticians working in this field?
But the public puts stock in anecdotes. And it's the public that panics. And it's the public that votes in tyrants to make them feel safe.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Who cares what motivates wackos, environmentalists or coal merchants? Global warming is happening all around us. And so is the science that shows we can at least take the edge off, buy time, to adapt or even keep equilibrium, by quitting some of our worst abuses. Unless *you* are some kind of wacko, getting a check from some carbon pusher, your motivation to survive in a recognizable environment will get you to read more about how you can help us survive, rather than deny our suicidal tendencies.
--
make install -not war
LOL, there's not even any proof yet, but were predicting the end of the universe, priceless!!!
A silly argument. To pick one example that isn't being researched for reasons obvious to all, while ignoring research in a multitude of other areas, is disingenuous.
Maybe hemp is an awesome energy source. But slightly less awesome sources also exist in other plants. Alcohol can be produced efficiently from a myriad other plants. There's also solar energy. Not a great source given the expected level of technology for the next couple of decades, but it's still great for heating your shower water. There's still other sources, that while not universal, could take a some load off of petroleum use in some specific locales. Examples include wind and geothermal.
And then there's a really good source. Nuclear. While the government tyranny bogs down the construction of nuclear power plants in gigatons of paperwork, it's only because environmentalists have urged them to.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
After 37% of the species are blown out in the Greenhouse, the surrounding species in the food web will also die. Domino effect. Who survives? Probably not humans, at least not in any recognizable form. Civilization is a definite goner - look at how close to the edge we are in so many places, from drought, famine, malnutrition. Once the cheap, malnourished labor in the 3rd world is gone, the rest just crumbles. We'll finally be able to relate to all those funny looking trilobites.
--
make install -not war
predicting evolution is a loosong game
BTW: if so many species really do go extinct, it'll be fun to see what replaces their role
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
actually you have it wrong. the last glacial maximum was about 18k years ago. on the milankovic (sic) cycles, that mean we are actually due up for an ice age, not on the tail end of an ice age.
You say "humans might be increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere..." On this point you are correct, but it would be more correct to say "humans are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere..." because we are. If you go someplace like the middle of the Pacific, or Antarctic, etc., where local effects are relatively small, you too could directly measure the human added component of carbon in the atmosphere.
We are increasing the concentration significantly, so far by about 20% over just the last fifty years.
You are correct in your comment that "overall global warming might be a bad thing to happen," assuming the likelihood of the "might not" side of "might" is zero, and assuming some reasonable definition of "bad" that includes lots of people being displaced from their homes, their ways of life destroyed, many people starving to death, widespread ecological damage (and resulting economic damage), and general social & economic chaos world-over.
Global warming is the biggest environmental concern of the day because there's absolutely nothing that humans could do to our planet, short of full scale nuclear armageddon, that could wreak so much havoc over the next hundred years.
In my opinion, global climate change isn't a very good doomsday story because, although it will be terrifically expensive for human kind, it is happening slowly enough that a lot of people will never even believe it exists, and no single event can ever be pinned on it. Slow and seemingly innocuous changes over the course of decades don't make for very good shock "news" stories on FOX.
It's not _directly_ anti-american, but "America" gives a shit about global evironment (check international negotiations) and thus enviromentalism becomes opposed to "America", which "America" usually interpret as Anti-American.
("America" meaning the official actions of the USA)
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
Notice that in the 70's the discussion was that an increase in temperature *might* happen. Now we're discussing why it *is* happening.
You must have a shorter attention span than George Bush! That web page (Mass Extinction Underway)is not just ONE article-- it has HUNDREDS of links to studies and articles from countless sources including Science Magazine, Scientific American, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, the IUCN, Smithsonian, National Geographic, BBC, CNN, New York Times, etc., etc.
I have gotten into quite a few arguments with people that do say we should do nothing. They think the cost of inconveniences to people and industry is more than what the damage being done is, so hence there should not be any more regulations related to pollution.
Be careful. No more governmental regulations is not the same as doing nothing. Enforcing the laws that are already in place, encouraging research into alternate energy sources or pollution reduction, and improved education are just a few other ways that we can combat the environmental problem. In my opinion, all of those are probably better ideas -- and will have more of an effect -- than passing yet another law.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
That is one pathetic strawman argument. I mean, you can't even find something irrelevant to attack the man himself with, so you have to use an unrelated topic about a person who just happen to be from the same country to try to smear him with?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Climatic Optimum of the early middle ages when temperatures werre warmer by 3 to 6 degrees and Vikings established their flourishing colonies in Greenland?
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715 where temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees colder?
Not to mention that many scientists doubt the fact that there is any significant warming and claim that when the samples tainted by local city hot spots are removed there is nothing that registers above the noise.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The study looked at a defined population of species, and then extrapolated the results. This isn't unusual and is one of the reasons for the tolerance in the headline figures.
Or do you think they'd study everything on planet earth ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You accuse me of favoring a big government solution, I cite an example of how getting government out of our lives will bring results, and you call it silly?
...it's only because environmentalists have urged them to.
So I guess if it were your decision you'd leave in place the ban on hemp. Great. Just don't go parading around as some kind of small government advocate because we'll all know you're full of shit.
It's hard to think of a big idea that wasn't seen as silly... before it was made into reality that is.
LOL! Now who's being silly!?! Big oil was the culprit that put the screws to nuclear, not the environmentalists. Oh sure, your TV tells you it was the environmentalists, but think about who really holds the power between the two of them.
And BTW, you should really educate yourself about hemp before saying silly things about it, like these other plants being only slightly less awesome than hemp. It isn't just that the plant produces so much more per acre, it's that it can be grown on so many more acres. There isn't really even a contest here.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I have just read through a whole load of "damn tree-hugger", "this theory is crappola" and the insanley cliched "statistics can be made to fit any point of view" posts. Nothing unusual for the slashdot crowd who seem to fear the nature and its consequences as much as they love out of this world science fiction.
I have a message for you: There is a difference between a scientific study and a "raving" environmentalist.
I've lived here in Europe for 17 years now, and even here I can that climate is changing. The yearly winter and fall storms are getting worse, the summers are getting much hotter and drier (three of the last four summers have been far hotter than normal accompanied by droughts and flash floods) and the winters are much warmer than they were 12 years ago (When I got here there was snow for months in winter, now if there's snow for weeks you're lucky), and all that repeatedly, so please spare me the comments on sunspot cycles and freak seasons.
Mod this down if you wish, but I firmly believe that this demonising of the warning on climatic change is extremely counter productive.
Human activity:
-Creates enourmous amount of CO2, a gas that undisputably causes green house effect (deny that).
-Depletes vast tracks of forest (now, deny that one Batman). Those are trees, the ones that consume the CO2 in the athmosphere and release oxygen.
So more CO2, less trees to disipate it. CO2 is the main ingridient in Green House effect.
Now tell me I need more data (on top of the enormous body of evidence already gathered by most serious scientists).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Would you notice if 30% of species dissapeared?
Most probably not, and I venture to say that people like you would not care.
As long as the species you care about (cows, pigs, chicken or carrots, avocados and tomatoes if you are veggie) are easily available via battering farms, many people will not even notice or give a toss.
The panda is almost gone. Lets say thge last one was killed just about now. Would you have noticed?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I hope you save many American jobs with your denialism.
Tell us please, where do al the CO2 we produce (that was not there to start with) go?
How is nature suppossed to deal with that additional CO2 in the athmosphere if we are killing trees (exterminating vast areas of jungle and forests) all around the place? (now deny that one as well).
How is US people, driving inneficient vehicles at 2 milles/gallon suppossed to help the situation...
Global warming is not based in superstition and you know it.
Fucking trolls.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The patterns that govern local weather have nothing to do with long term trends.
If you let a stone fall from a high place you may not accurately predict how long it will take to hit the floor, but you are 1000% sure it will hit it....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Global Warming=Bad.o mhouse.com/yellowstone.htm
Is it something we have caused or is it natural=Don't know.
But don't worry it will all be fixed when Yellowstone Park Blows up.
It is overdue by around 40,000 years. And it is supposed to lower global tempuratures by around 21 degrees. Yea that would fix the global warming problem.
Oh here some references. armageddononline.tripod.com/volcano.htm
www.solc
And Oh by the way, the latest news was that its begining to bulge.
According to Sir David King, the British governments chief scientific adviser , the number of people in Britain at a high risk of flooding was expected to more than double to nearly 3.5 million by 2080, and damage to properties could run to tens of billions of pounds every year yet the UK is only responsible for only about 2% of the world's emissions. The US, with just 4% of the world's population, produced more than 20%. The UK has asked the world's developed economies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% of 1990 levels by about 2050, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate but despite declaring support for the UNFCC's objectives, the US had failed to ratify the Kyoto accord for emission reductions and "refused to countenance any remedial action now or in the future." Sir David also stated that global warming is a far greater threat to the world then global terrorism (and its easy enough to look at the deaths that have occurred in Europe over the last 10 years that are directly attributable to the unusually hot weather and make the case). We Brits (stupidly in my opinion) have supported the American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and continue to do so. It would be a good thing if you returned the favour.
Just a few nitpicks here. For one thing nobody has proven that the Clovis people eradicated the N-American megafauna along with several other species such as horses when they came across them when migrating into the continent. AFAIK Scientists are still arguing about that. His claim about DDT is also strange. It does not kill birds AFAIK (feel free to cite cedable scientific references to set me straight here), it keeps them from procreating normally. Which is not killing birds so technically his statement can be said to be correct. Still that does not mean the ban on DDT was wrong unless he, and you, think the planet can do without cariverous birds who are the birds that suffer most from DDT. He does have one good point, some enviromentalists have progressed from treating enviromentalism as an ideal to practicing it as fundamentalist religion. That still does not mean that ALL enviromentalists are like that and writing them all off as "treehuggers" makes you just as stupid as the extreme enviromentalists you so despise.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It is front-page news; I'm seeing news of this study everywhere. By the way... our way of life is ultimately what the poster is trying to save, and what environmentalists are trying to change. The poster warned about far-reaching policies and legislation to try and 'save the planet', which will have a considerable impact on our way of life.
As for trust... trust no one! It seems that everyone these days, industrialists, politicians, climatologists, even 'well-meaning' activists such as Greenpeace, are all pushing a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with the environment.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Virtually Extinct
By Iain Murray Published Tech Central Station
It seems that virtually every news organ in the English language has carried the story of new scientific claims published in Nature magazine that by 2050 over a million species will be doomed to extinction owing to the effects of global warming. Yet few of them realized how flimsy the story actually is. Writing on another claim of mass extinctions almost two years ago, I said, "This area of research is prone to wild exaggerations," and here we have another one.
There are several reasons this claim should be laughed out of the court of public opinion. First, the research doesn't say what the researchers themselves claim. They have extrapolated to all species a model that looked at only 1,103 species in certain areas (243 of those species were South African proteaceae, a family of evergreen shrubs and trees). For one thing, we don't know how many species there are -- estimates vary from 2 million to 80 million -- and have only documented 1.6 million. However, assuming the 14 million figure widely used in the press reports is anywhere near accurate, the sample size is a mere 0.008 percent of the total species population of the planet, with certain species vastly over-represented (there are only 1,000 species of proteaceae on the planet). All the researchers have demonstrated is that, if their model is correct, certain species in certain habitats will run a risk of extinction. Extrapolating to the entire planet from this small, unrepresentative sample is simply invalid. So when the lead researcher told the Washington Post, "We're not talking about the occasional extinction -- we're talking about 1.25 million species. It's a massive number," he was guilty at the very least of over-enthusiasm, if not outright exaggeration.
This problem would be devastating enough for the claims, if it wasn't the case that the model on which the calculations are made is itself suspect. It relies on the 'species-area relationship,' the idea that smaller areas support fewer species. A researcher at the evocatively-titled Golden Toad Laboratory for Conservation in Puentoarenas, Costa Rica, writing a commentary on the study for Nature, called this "one of ecology's few ironclad laws." The trouble is that there are many exceptions to this supposedly ironclad law. The wholesale deforestation of the Eastern United States, for example, seems only to have caused the extinction of one species of bird. While in Puerto Rico, the island's loss of 99 percent of its forest cover caused the loss of 7 out of 60 species, but after the deforestation the number of bird species on the island actually increased to 97. The species-area relationship (plotted as a linear function in 1859) seems to be a poor model on which to base extinction rates.
So the model is suspect and the extrapolation invalid. What about the link to global warming? The researchers assume that global warming will reduce habitat. Yet this isn't the case. The earth is not shrinking. The reduction of one area of habitat does not mean that it is replaced by void. Other habitats expand. And so far, all the evidence we have points not to desertification or other changes to less hospitable climates as a result of global warming. Instead, the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seems to have led to a six percent increase in the amount of vegetation on the earth. The Amazon rain forests accounted for 42 percent of the growth. To model only reductions in habitats and not expansions accounted for by global warming stacks the deck. The researchers created a model that dictated that global warming will cause extinctions. Surprise, surprise! When they ran the model that's exactly the result they got.
Thank goodness for the New York Times, whose writer John Gorman was careful enough to note the limitations of the study. While others talked about millions of extinctions, he said, "By 2050, the scientists say, if current warming trends continue, 15 to 37 percent of the 1,103 species they studi
The NYT may be correct. Recent warm winters have reduced the amount of great lakes ice cover (noaa.gov) This leads to increased evaporation and thus increased cloud cover and snow fall downwind of the Great Lakes (e.g. Bufallo,NY...) It also leads to falling lake levels. Lake Michigan/Huron dropped more than three feet in the last three years. That's quite alot of water that rained/snowed out somewhere else in the world.
Also, for those in Europe global warming has the potential to lower average temperature by disrupting the arctic salt water/fresh water migration that drives the Gulf stream. Sometimes I wish greenhouse warming caused a simplistic effect easily recognized by the public. But climant doesn't work that way. During the three day jet travel restriction after September 11, 2001 there was more diurnal temperature variation in the U.S. than during any 3 day period in recorded history. We are having an effect on the climate, its only prudent to try to study that effect to minimize unforseen side effects, such as crops and lakes being destroyed by previously endangered Canada Geese!
It is well documented that HIV has mutated, it started as a deadly decease but its high rate of inflicted mortality did not give it a chance to propagate, thus it has become more bening by means of natural selection (you don't kill your host to fast otherwise you will not propagate. Well duh!. More virulent strains died away while more bening ones have sadly thrieved).
Of course people beliving in the quackery that is creationism and its ilk will overlook this stuff screaming at them and will look for the bizarrest of explanations for the now obvious truth (based in the soundest theory we have about speciation).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I am sure that none of the scientist studying global warming has never thought of that! You should write an article, all their perspectivs will change in one blow!
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Do you stop fishing before the fisheries have collapsed or after... (grand banks)
Do you stop chopping down native hardwood before or after it is unsustainable... (new zealand kauri)
Do you tell people about enrons accounting before or after it is a disaster...
Evolution happens in all systems, from universes to organisms to cultures and ideas. At least for some.
It has been my experience that those who maintain the "God" meme as their object of idolatry generally assign attributes to this meme. In literate societies these attributes are often gleaned from authoritative texts, such as the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. One then proceeds to emphasize those attributes which suit them personally. That is to say, one's ideas about "God" are mirrors of one's preferences - those attributes which one finds valuable in one's own culture.
During adolescence one's reasoning emerges as an extension of the metaphysical premises which they have uncritically accepted during their formative years. If one has been told by their preferred authoritative text that a force of personality called "God" created man in a flash, as the parable of Adam and Eve describes, and furthermore eschews the deeper meaning of this parable in favor of a literalist interpretation then one will be inclined to consider the concept of evolution as heretical, as you seem to.
The recordists of the Bible did a marvelous thing by transcribing the parables, folk tales, traditions, spoken histories, and cultural developments of the Middle East and Northern Africa. The cultural lessons of thousands of years are a valuable record. But these records should be taken in a highly critical manner as a matter of intellectual integrity and as a matter of responsible faith. One should not uncritically accept either the traditional account as presented in the Bible nor the equally obfuscated account which emerges from the fossil record through the application of our senses and reasoning.
(If your idea of faith is simply to kowtow to authority then you have been poorly instructed and need to talk to someone with insight. Perhaps you know a priest of your chosen faith who has quiescence and a sparkle in his eye. That's someone to hang with.)
Reasoning and observation are essential methods which we are obligated to apply, both as caretakers of our personal souls and caretakers of our world.
That being said, I feel you have been grossly irresponsible in applying your reasoning to the question of evolution.
First of all you are misrepresenting spontaneous generation to yourself. So-called "spontaneous generation" was a mistaken belief based on a failure to observe the evidence. People apparently believed that maggots and so forth spontaneously emerged from rotting meat, etc. This was disproved when it could be observed that flies were required to lay eggs first. That's the gist of this bit of folly.
Anyhow, the genesis of life from organic chemicals turns out to be very simple, and has been performed in chemistry classes by college students for decades. First fill a flask with the rarified gases which are known (from the fossil record) to have existed on Earth during the time when life most likely emerged. Next spark the mixture. After a few minutes the gases condense into a gooey brown sludge. When you analyze the sludge you find amino acids have been created. Self-replicating molecules very quickly develop from organic chemicals.
More experimentation reveals that it is quite simple for simple membranes to emerge from organic chemicals. Membranes which are polarized from the exterior to the interior.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think the universe is somehow not divine and miraculous. The very existence of the universe, the complex elegance of its processes, the very fact of life and mind are awe-inspiring. This process, this experience, is the very stuff of existence. To those who have sought deeply and done the hard spiritual work, God is experienced as everything that exists in this eternal present moment.
The hard spiritual work is more than just agreeing with every word in the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc., as pious as you may feel doing it. If you're a Christian, follow Jesus' prayer instructions to the letter. Use the Lord's Prayer exclusively
-- thinkyhead software and media
'nuff said.
That argument makes no sense to me. You've just described why people play the lottery, too.
The emperor is naked.
Eh "Urban" doesn't mean, like... created by humans?
You know like in "The increased temperatures in urban areas compared with surrounding rural areas.".
Last time I check only humans made cities, but global heat may have increased the evolution rate of bees or something.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
We do not have the ability to accurately predict weather for a week, much less 50 years. All simulations doing this are nothing but fiction.
If you toss one coint, I can't tell in advance if you'll get heads or tails.
But if you toss a million times I can predict you'll get ~50% of each.
There is a difference between short-term fluctuations and long term-trends.
Also, there are available climate data much older than a century (Trees for example).
The evidence indicates a (historically speaking) sharp turn upwards for global temp.
That this coincides with industrialization suggests it might be manmade.
Also, this is the general concensus among the sci community. There are dissenters of cource, but they are a minority.
I won't bother with the rest of your post, because you have obviously made up your mind and I'd be wasting both our time.
Just make sure you didn't overlook data just to arrive safely at a convenient conclusion.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
I am constantly and consistently amazed at how frightened people can become over global warming. To me, there are two ways to look at it. You can look at it either from the environments perspective and ours.
From the environments perspective, humans are a brief hiccup. The earth has seen drastically more damaging environmental disasters, and simply put, disasters are how nature changes and evolution is produced. Disasters are in fact a fine things to happen if biodiversity is your concern as they give rise to new and more exotic creatures with each passing. Even the most terrible of disasters, such as the comet that killed the dinosaurs, are not enough to put nature down and out. In fact, that disaster is what led to our rise in the first place. Humanity could probably rape and pillage this world with all of its might, and in the long term things would be okay. I am not suggesting that we do so, but I am not going to sweat much if biodiversity takes a short term fall.
So some animals die? New animals will replace them. Granted, it isn't going to happen on a time scale we can appreciate, but I think that is the problem. Environmentalist look at the world on their time scale which has the attention span of 50 years, when evolution and natural selection is far more concerned with a much broader picture in which sudden mass extinctions are not the end of life.
The other perspective from the human perspective. From the human perspective, this problem is more of a nuisance. There is absolutely nothing humanity could willingly do to the environment that could kill off humanity outside of all out nuclear/biological war (and even then). Humans force evolution upon themselves too damned quick to kill themselves. The entire ozone layer could vanish tomorrow in a single instance and humanity as a whole would go on. We can certainly make our selves struggle a little and rack up a body count in the process, but in the end, humanity will go on, even if it means we have to live inside or protect ourselves from our own environment. That isn't exactly a pretty way to live, but it certainly is not a sigh of the end.
More then the simple fact that we will cling to life and force our own evolution through technology to survive, we also can repair the damage we do in time. Already we have learned some powerful bioremediation techniques to clean up some of the more harmful things we have done. It would come as little shock if in 50 or 100 years we have the capacity to do nature's job and produce new creatures from scratch that can live wherever we please them to live. It might be that 200 years from now biodiversity has shot through the roof far beyond anything nature has ever seen simply because we wanted it that way. It also would come as little surprise if we simply expand our terraforming powers to include the entire earth. Instead of altering the environment to suit our needs immediately surrounding ourselves with clothes, cars, and houses, it is no stretch of the imagination to see humanity setting its goals even broader and altering the entire earth's environment to our needs. It might very well be that there comes a day when we simply decide that we want a thicker ozone layer and build machines to build more ozone and repair the damage we have done.
Our impact on the environment is no threat to humanity or the environment as a whole. Yes, we can shoot ourselves in the foot in the short term and that should certainly be avoided. I don't fancy the idea that I can't go to the beach without SPF 100 on. That said, we need to moderate how much we are willing to sacrifice for the environment and keep it in perspective that this is an issue of comfort and health, not life or death for humanity and the environment as a whole. Take steps to slow wanton destruction, but don't tie humanities hands in the process.
The case for species preservation should be made on hard ground, not on computer-generated squish. Conservative News And Views [rightwingnews.com]
So, let me get this straight...
you go to a site with the word views right there in the name to get an unbiased scientific analysis.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
The NYT is wrong to make such a claim, I'm afraid; and they don't do the scientific community any favours by giving people a misleading picture of what global warming is or isn't.
You cannot point to any one local climate event and go "That's global warming, that is."
What you say about the global mean surface temperature is absolutely right - it's not inconsistent with localised cooling.
(Running a refrigerator will heat up your house overall, regardless of the fact that the icebox is colder than room temperature.)
What happens if you increase the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is that you make the system a more efficient retainer of heat - increasing the overall energy stored in the atmospheric system. The distribution of kinetic energy values in a gas is pretty well-understood - the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
Extreme or anomalous weather events generally seems to require a critical energy to initiate them; if enough of the local thermodynamic system has that energy, then the likelihood of an event occurring is higher.
You can't say _when_ or _where_ this will happen; the only meaningful treatment you can really apply is statistical; by correlating the number of observed events with the estimated overall level of kinetic energy in the system.
(And there is a noticeable correlation between extreme events and the level of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions.)
Of course, it is somewhat difficult to be precise and accurate on the subject when the sceptics interpret (perfectly normal and creditable) scientific caution as lack of necessary certainty.
To paraphrase AE: if we were certain on the results, there wouldn't be much point in continuing to experiment - but that doesn't mean that there isn't a pretty good idea of what the results are likely to be.
Gideon.
"human beings have the power to completely decimate popualations of animals "
I'll bet you don't know what "decimate" means.
Hint: It doesn't mean "destroy/wipe out".
It really means "kill one in 10"; the popular usage is incorrect. You should probably use a more exact term like "annihilate, exterminate, destroy, or devastate"
What are the effects of global warming ? The public opinion thinks it's only about a higher average temperature, but in fact, the effect is more extreme weather : more storms, higher maximum temperatures, lower minimum temperatures.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Lets not forget about the ozone hole that is growing. If something isn't done we will all have skin cancer and life on the surface won't be possible soon.
Ok who the hell hid the ozone hole!
Yes yes! Poll scientists, and get a "scientific concensus".
Which is important.
Because not that long ago the "scientific concensus" was that the earth was the center of god's universe.
Galileo (the crackpot) didn't believe and rightfully the pope had him jailed.
Just like today. We all know global warming is occuring. And if some crackpot says it isn't, then the pope ^H^H^H^H "scientific community" should shun that person.
Think of the children!
Gregg Easterbrook has a good column (The 'EasterBlogg') on why this is nonsense:
http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml
Basically we've had climate change of this type fairly recently, and no mass extinctions besides what we've caused by chopping up various creatures to make our gonads bigger. Actually Easterbrook didn't make that last point, but his article is well worth a read.
Cheers, Paul
The New York Times says a lot of stupid things and engages in a lot of deception but in this case they're quite right I think.
With global warming, more energy is in the atmosphere, the result is more evaporation and more *chaotic* weather. The idea that more energy (*global warming*) necessarily brings *hot weather* has been a media simplification, and the failure of scientists to adequately explain this relatively simple fact.
The question isnt: is there a global warning?
The question is: how hard will it hit us?!
Go ahead. "Verify" it. Bet you can't find a single vote in either House on Kyoto made after the summit.
I said neither House has ever voted on the final Kyoto agreement. Are you suggesting that somehow the Senate can vote on the final Kyoto agreement without voting on the final Kyoto agreement?
Neither Congress nor the Senate have ever voted on the final Kyoto agreement since the Kyoto summit. Fact. Look it up.
Oh, and Slashdot - GET RID OF THIS FUCKING TWO MINUTE LIMIT. It's a waste of time, it doesn't stop crapfloods, there are better ways of achieving the same affect.
Which is why we should use the term climate change, and not global warming. The latter is just confusing to laypeople.
Instead apparently I'm a "zealot." And you don't even know what my opinions are.
But I can easily see you're a fuckhead. Easy to see you're a fellow-traveller. Deny everything! Except when we want to look "reasonable"!
The temperature has also never changed as fast as it has in this century, at least that is what Greenlands ice tells us with its record of thousands of years. The thing is, we can be looking at possible very warm or very cold future. The problem is that when you perturbe a dynamical system too much, the system becomes unstable and it will be very unpredictable until it finds a new stable point (do a simple experiment with a pendilum and then extrapolate). What that stable point is, is very hard to predict with a complex dynamical system as the atmosphere and the oceans. What is sure is that by perturbing the world this way as we have done the last hundred years, we will get more storms and changes in weather patterns, the mean temperature will continue to change rapidly, but can suddenly start plunging (more clouds, changes of ocean streams etc). The seriousness is of course that places that are now economically and culturally important (port cities, north europe, etc) can become places impossible to live, storms damage crops and living areas, and more serious, animals and plants don't manage to adapt and become extinct. One can call the scientist that work on climate models scaremongers, but the models they use are in principle similar to the models that predict your weather or that can explain the sesonal changes in the weather we have today. The weather man is right, what, 40% of the times? Should you not listen a bit to them then?
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
And since Bush's argument for not caring about the environment is that it is bad for the economy, what is the economical impact of 15% of plants and species extintion?
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
And who would be hurt by such taxes? The poor, who are barely able to pay their ever-increasing fuel bill now!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
There seems to be an unstated assumption in the article that dooming 15-37 percent of species to extinction is in itself a negative thing, which means that we have somehow accepted as true the idea that a species should exist perpetually. The historical record suggests that species tend to have their time and then disappear; either in some form of mass extinction event or by slowly
fading away.
This is rather like saying that because, at some point in the past, lightning has sparked a fire that has burned down someone's house, that I shouldn't complain if you take a match to mine.
On an ecological time scale we are already in one of the greatest mass extinctions since the K-T extinction. A mere second ago in evolutionary terms, we had horses, mastodons, sabretooth cats, and giant ground sloths in North America.
Yes, there have been times in the past vast proportions of life on the planet have gone extinct. But these have occurred a finite and small number of times over the last billion years. Do you really want another, right now?
We have a very good reason for being concerned about this. The world probably won't miss cheetahs or kangaroos or blue whales all that much. But if we somehow succeed in killing off, say, bluegreen algae -- the foundation of much of the marine ecosystem -- we will almost certainly not survive ourselves.
Myself, where I grew up there was always snow that stayed in November-December (15 years ago). Now it is not usually permanent snow on the ground before January. Also, where I live now, everyone used to go skating on the canals every single winter (told by local people). Last time it happened here was 8 years ago (so I have not had the pleasure yet).
Any other having noticed changes locally?
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
I was hearing the same stuff in 1970. OMG we must be out of gas by now!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
sure, we could trade a few felonious billyonerrors for some additional survivors. we wouldn't mind having to put on our own 'entertainment' in order to avoid further greed/fear/ego based corepirate nazi life0cide against the planet/population.
too much is never enough. funnell 'vision' perfectdead.
score, mynuts won (& dropping?), iNTerest bearing?
Yeah the USA and Uganda should both be allowed the same ammount of pollution, right?
Fuck that. Christ you're naive.
Anybody who dies directly or indirectly from pollution can thank Uncle Sam if the live in North America, since that's where the majority of the poloution comes from. I can see why you'd be so reluctant to put a fucking cap on it already. "But Uzbekistan doesn't have to! Why should we!?!! Surely you cannot be suggesting that GOD's PEOPLE (THE USA) are worse than those filthy Uzbekis!?!?!"
I hope you choke on your greenhouse gasses.
True true
So, what are you saying? That Oil and Gas are going to last forever? The U.S. supposedly burns 88 (more or less) million barrels a day... doesn't that add up? Do you believe that oil is being created faster than it is being consumed? Do you drive an SUV and feel you need to defend your right to consume as much gas as you can in ignorant bliss?
With genetic engineering, we can make new and even better species to make up for those lost to global warming!
Who would have thought that these two 'issues' would solve each other.
For those in power, there is more to be gained from war than climate control.
Yeah, let's tax the hell out of gasoline that'll get people to change....
WRONG!
Transportation in the US is a necessity, not a luxury. People aren't driving 15 year old POS cars because they want to/are too cheap to buy a new one. They're driving those cars because their income covers the basics of life and nothing more. So now you want to slap them with an extra $1/gal [that probably doesn't qualify under your 'tax it through the roof' classification] on their gas bill for just getting to work? Heck, let's look at what those taxes will do to transportation costs and thus the cost of goods bought at your local store.
Think things through a little before you jerk your knee next time.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Evolutionary history is probably full of examples of species that were doing quite nicely until some unexpected event wiped them out. In the past most were _natural_ events such as meteors, massive tidal waves, droughts, etc. Now many are manmade. Foriegn species introduction, habitat distruction, environmental poisoning, hunting to extinction because some body part makes your manhood stand up, etc. Nevertheless, I'm not sure that being wiped out by Mother Nature is any more conforting to the impacted species. And Evolution has a built in compensator. Regardless of the reason the species disappears, there will always be some species able to leverage the change to advance itself. If there is any doubt of that, look at how cockroachs and motivational speakers have proliferated...
No, you don't understand.
Hating Bush is not our full time occupation. We just dislike him, his opinions and his politics intensively 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 52 weeks/year.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
Here you make the assumption that we're still "warming up" from the last ice age. This is not the case. We should in fact be cooling down right now.
If you want real proof of global warming, just look at the world's reefs. Ever since 98's el nino they've been bleaching (a process that expels algae from the reef's surface). In itself bleaching can be recovered from, but it's getting worse, not better, and if it lasts too long a lot of reefs will die. That's independant from all the reef death resulting from regular pollution. Reefs are a good indication of how we're harming the planet, because they contain one third of marine life. That reefs worldwide are dying should be very disconcerting, but apparently nobody seems to care all that much.
Point a: aggressive pursuit of alternative forms of energy. I seem to remember the usual suspects (i.e., people like you) saying "yes" to wind power and "no" to it in their back yard. I seem to remember Bush being either criticized for supporting hydrogen fuel cells, or criticized for not supporting them enough. Nothing is ever good enough for the alternative fuel people. "Alternative fuel" is simply a canard that small-minded religio-Environmentalists bring up to change the subject or distract from the topic at hand.
Point b: trees. American farmers clear-cut their crops, also, before replanting them. There are more trees in the US today than there were 100 years ago. Look it up. As American forestry industries move into South America, those regions of forest will hopefully come under the management of companies which have a vested interest in growing as many trees as possible. Just as only a dumb, poor farmer ruins his soil (and goes out of business), the companies who are succeeding in forestry (IP, Weyerhaueser, Boise, Rayonier, to name a few) succeed because they, like a successful farmer, knows how to treat the land, knows how to plant forests, and knows the proper ways of managing them through the life-cycle of growth until they're ready to be harvested. It is the policies of well-meaning (but ignorant) Environmentalists which have caused the damage to old-growth forests in America, by insisting on putting out every small forest fire and thus leading to major blazes which take down the whole forest. Ultimately, talking about forestry in such an ignorant way reveals you for the religious devotee of the dogma of Environmentalism that you are.
Global warming is the same. A policy crafted by well-meaning but ignorant Environmentalists who seem to have no problem with telling people how to run their businesses and their lives, while simultaneously being in line with the people who would rail against the government if it tried to do the same (unless, of course, they were the ones running the government). Ironic that they'd happily enact legislation preventing me from driving my car economically, or legislation which would force jobs out of the US, etc.. - most of the people pushing these enviro-regulations don't need jobs anyway, because they're academics. Check out Michael Crichton's speeches on the matter or Bjorn Lomberg's book (which had many attacks, all of which have failed or been retracted), about environmentalism, written from a skeptic's standpoint and using actual hard science to examine some of the claims made by the newest religion, Environmentalism.
What does global warming have to do with science? It is not defensible using the scientific method nor was the theory come to by repeating or observing repeated phenomenon in a controlled environment, or using any other tools of science.
Most ski resorts have switched to manmade snow to cover their slopes with ages ago because there just isn't enough natural snow anymore.
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Climatic Optimum of the early middle ages when temperatures werre warmer by 3 to 6 degrees and Vikings established their flourishing colonies in Greenland?
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715 where temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees colder?
Was there any evidence then of the concomitant habitat loss that we see now? It says it right there in the abstract of the story: "Many of the unlucky species are being caught between the hammer of global warming and the anvil of habitation destruction."
The two events you quoted were less likely to produce extinctions, since at least then the animals could migrate to available suitable habitats that were appropriately warmer/cooler. The situation now is very different, with far fewer suitable habitats remaining. Habitat loss is in fact one of the biggest factors thratening species and precipitating extinctions - global climate change just makes it worse.
Basically, you overlooked the fact that the extinctions being discussed are not merely a function of global weather changes, but also a function of the razing of appropriate habitats to suit human needs. The two together could well produce the outcome being discussed.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
Metamoderator whoever said i was being flamebait as being unfair
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
If I get to drive my SUV, mini van, or hummer when I could otherwise drive a car.
After all, I am too fat from my supersized meals and 3 quarts a day of soft drinks to comfortably climb climb into a car instead of a truck.
I also have to keep up with fashion. Driving a car is just not fashionable. I know its an inanimate object but it is just not "masculine" the way a hummer is. Who I am as a person has nothing to do with my qualities or accomplishments. Its about how fashionable my vehicale is.
If the planet is turned into a shit hole for my children and grand children then so be it.
</sarcasm>
Steve
we have to figure out a way to decrease our numbers rationally and gradually and globally
Humanity exists only to do one thing: breed. It is, like with any species, its primary goal. Reducing the population in a non-violent way goes directly against our very nature. China is the only large country that is trying it, and though they are having moderate success, they're being bashed about it around the globe.
Basically, the only approach is handing out licenses to give birth, and heavily punishing those who have children without licenses. It's inevitable (if we want to survive as a species), but people would rather see mass war or mass famine than to give up their right to have children.
Humanity has never succeeded in keeping its population under control. If you look at human history you see we've been very good at reproducing, spreading, and taking over the ecology of where ever we spread to (even as far back as 100k years). To think that some dialogue now is going to get people to "wake up" and start introducing population-limiting measures is naive.
The ironic thing is that as much as people despise large-scale war, it is a good thing for the planet and the species. It's good for the environment due to rationing (energy use, and therefore pollution, during WWII dropped radically). It's good for the economy because of the post-war reconstruction (which creates a post-war economic boom), and it's good for the planet due to the reduction in biomass that is trying to feed off of it. Do note that iraq doesn't count, because it's not big enough. Only world-wars ( or something close to it) have these kinds of effects.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling!
It's freaking -25c (-40c with windchill) in Toronto! Where is my global warming!
[alk]
-
Every one of these factoids has been disproved.
Sources, please?The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, and that human activity is a major factor.
I keep hearing this "vast majority of scientists agree" and "human activity IS" (rather than MAY be) "a major factor", but I've never seen a source for this contention.
Thank you sir, for providing the link. I read that yesterday, a very well-written piece.
You corrected the idiot, but you made a big mistake, too. You said, "Neither Congress nor the Senate...". The Senate is part of the Congress. Senators are Congressmen, too; we just normally don't call them that.
You were, in effect, saying, "Neither the House and Senate nor the Senate...".
Y'know, the last wildly popular, would-be, global, scientific, man-made cataclysm where the earth was going to enter into a second ice age due to aerosol spray cans and pollution? I'm curious - whatever happened to global cooling, and how exactly did it develop into global warming in the space of a few decades?
In a related study, average people have discovered that global cooling will destroy less than, equal to or greater numbers of species. The average people in question, just like the researchers of this study, are also unable to prove whether the Earth is warming or cooling as part of a normal process, but felt the need to release statements (on paper which destroys trees) to show people they can do horrible things to Earth on a computer too.
The vast majority of scientists agree...
If you have to rely on voting patterns, you're not talking about science, you're talking about politics.
If you're talking about science, then you necessarily must have a falsifiable prediction to discuss, the truth of which can be objectively determined. "Majorities" are not part of the scientific method. Proof is.
12,000 years ago the earth drastically warmed due to the end of a periodic ice age advance (we are due for more ice age episodes). There were some extinctions, perhaps aided by early human hunters. But the not the scale predicted by these scientiic Cassandras.
Any chance that the human kind is among those 15-37 percent? Because that would solve everything. At least for awhile - until next inteligent parasite would come.
Less is more !
I'd be surprised if we wiped out everything, but that's not really the major concern. Thinking in terms of purely human interest, mass extinction will be bad. Many of the first things appearing to approach extinction are the larger harvestable creatures ( fish, etc ). That's our food! That is bad.
"Climate change over the past 30 years has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species and has been implicated in one species-level extinction."
This suggests that there is something implausible going on. There seem to be five possibilities at least:
* The input data for the paper is overly negative
* The mathematical model used is dubious
* The extrapolation from the 1000 species studied to the whole planet is unjustified
* When the headlines talk about extinction, they mean a reduction in population size
* Climate change has not really happened yet.
Troll me if you must, but there are things to be said...
To me it is incredible how many intelligent people just want to write off global warming as hysterics. Especially those of us in America and Canada.
Really who cares if this model is skewed? Who cares if it is the worst case scenario and only has a 1% change of happening? Who cares if the earth has a possible 300 year weather cycle of cold/warm spells as someone suggested earlier? The point is that there are billions of us. BILLIONS. We are crowding out other species for food, habitat and even the air we breath.
Although I acknowledge nature and the earth cycles may have a greater role in weather variance than our pollution, I for one refuse to believe that we are admonished and should go on living high on the hog. The fact that so many (especially in this supposedly free-minded community) refuse to take responsibility for environmental damage is sickening. As was noted earlier in a highly moderated post, new species cannot simply pop-up and replace those we have lost.
People, look around. We have so many endangered species it is scary. Do you think that at any other point in history we have had such a number of vanishing species? Highly functioning species at that. From raptors to cats, they are all declining. Do any of you higher-than-average-intelligence people actually believe that this just happens? Do you think that wildlife re-introduction programs are the answer? If you do then you really should rethink. These wildlife programs are akin to applying a children's bandage to a gut-shot. The problem is us. We are too many living with too much waste. We're fat. We eat more than we need to. It's a disgrace. No one wants to change, cause it's uncomfortable. Well, you know what? In another 50 to 100 years, when water is as precious as gold and there are 20 billions of our children or granchildren running around, hungry and thirsting, we will have realized the error of our ways. We need clean energy NOW. We need to stop waste NOW. We need to encourage small family planning NOW. We need to take a look at our selfishness and realize that we are part of a bigger whole, and start living in harmony with it.
Label me as you will, at least I didn't post anonymously.
this is my sig, be amazed.
There seems to be an unstated assumption in the article that dooming 15-37 percent of species to extinction is in itself a negative thing, which means that we have somehow accepted as true the idea that a species should exist perpetually.
You don't understand the difference between maintaining the status quo and preserving biodiversity. It is normal for some species to become extinct and for new species to evolve, but mass extinctions are a different story. Many do consider it a major problem when we lose the diversity and end up with more of the same.
"Additionally the reporting within the article, does not seem unduly unbiased. Maybe its just me, but any reporter who calls a report "cockamamie galimatias", should have evidence for why it is "cockamamie galimatias"."
It's a fscking opinion piece in a fscking opinion news paper, what do you expect? There isn't a law or some constitutional ammendment that says all journalism must be unbiased.
PS. Does "does not seem unduly unbiased" mean "does seem biased"? Work on those pointless negatives...
I hope you will accept this apology.
"Majorities" are not part of the scientific method. Proof is.
Proof is not part of the scientific method. It was once "proven" that the Earth was flat and that the Sun revolved around it. The scientific method is simply (a) develop a hypothesis, and (b) do everything you can to disprove that hypothesis. If you fail to disprove it then your theory is that much stronger, but you can't say that it is a definitive proof; it is just the current best explanation with the given data/information. Far too many scientists (successful and otherwise) are biased and more focussed on "I think this is how it works so let's try to prove it" rather than "This is a plausible explanation, let's see if it stands up to testing".
Just my 2 cents
Don't make this decision based solely on credentials. Try to keep an open mind and read both sides. In particular, consider this:
If humans arent on that list, I doubt much will be done about it.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Then some bozo took that data from the actual study and then in a press release extrapolated the data and marred the information to be 15 to 37 percent of plants and animals all dead and gone by 2050. The actual people who did the study were very upset that their data was manipulated like that, because it winds up coming off as being a very unlikely and unreasonable result.
postmodernsideshow.com
The natives aren't doing the clearcutting. The multinational Timber Corporations are clearcutting the rainforests. Sure the corporations may be paying them squat to do the actual cutting, but these people were surviving just fine before the corporations showed up.
I wasn't aware that conservation cost that much.
Obviously.
Look, let's start by talking about agriculture. You are aware, aren't you, that agriculture is the source of more groundwater and soil pollution than any other field of human endeavor? And when you throw in transportation for getting agricultural products to the people who want to eat them, agriculture is also the largest single source of air pollution.
So: agriculture. We all like to eat. It's so cool, most of us do it every day. Sometimes twice. But we HAVE to cut back on pollution, because MOTHER EARTH IS CRYING or whatever the hell.
What are we going to do? Stop doing so much agriculture? No, that would lead to widespread starvation. We've gotta keep producing exactly the same amount of food, or people will go hungry. (In fact, we have to continue to produce MORE food, but let's keep it simple for now.)
So in order to produce the same amount of food while polluting less, we're going to have to be clever. We're going to have to come up with non-polluting trucks or something.
Clever ain't cheap. Somebody has to pay for clever, and when we're talking about this scale, we're talking about not hundreds of billions, but easily trillions of dollars, worldwide, over a period of a few decades.
Where's that money going to come from? A charitable grant from the Corebreech Foundation? Nope. Government? Nope. The people? Nope. (Remember, we're talking about food here. We can't just jack up the prices and hope for the best. That's where the starvation thing comes in.)
So who's going to pay for it? Industry. Agribusiness will have to pay to come up with cleaner ways of producing food. Transportation will have to pay to come up with cleaner ways of moving food around quickly and cheaply.
Who will make them pay? Only the government can, through tax incentives. But when the government gives industries tax dollars to encourage them to spend money, who makes up the difference in the general revenue fund?
TAXPAYERS.
That's right, folks. Who's gonna pay for the cost of coming up with cleaner industries? You and me, and our children. And that's money that WE WILL NOT GET BACK. It's money down the drain, spent, gone, poof.
Now, what does that money really buy us? Cleaner air? Cleaner water? Sure. Those are great things. But here's the deal... is it worth it? I live in a big city. The air is pretty clean. The water is pretty clean. Clean enough that I can't tell the difference between the air in the city and the air in the mountains when I go camping, unless I'm standing right by a freeway or something.
Would I be willing to personally pay hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next twenty years to make the air and the water slightly cleaner?
Shit, no. That money can do much more good elsewhere, even if it's just me buying sex toys over the Internet. Keeps the economy moving.
Global warming? Prove it. There is no proof that human activity has an effect on the long-term climate. Hell, the Sahara became a desert due to natural changes long before the industrial revolution; we had nothing to do with it. So we KNOW non-anthrogenic climate change happens. We've seen it. So simply putting our feet down and saying that from here on out, it's all our fault... that's silly.
So no. It will NOT save us money over time. It would, if done, become a GIANT capital suck that would essentially shut down the global economy for decades, blasting us into a global recession that we might not get out of so easily.
Dumb idea all around.
The case for species preservation should be made on hard ground, not on computer-generated squish.
Oh, the study was done with a gasp computer simulation? Well then it must be wrong. But you know, the quotations you provide strike me as human-generated squish. Try telling me why you think the study was wrong; if it's not worth your time to do that in a couple of sentences, it's not worth my time to follow your link.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
The UK has the longest uninterrupted climate records in the world - Brits started keeping the records that underpin the Central England Temperature series back in 1659; 345 years and counting baby... yay us.
According to a Met Office press release back in December, 2003 was shaping up to be the fifth warmest year in the CET series. This was despite the year including the highest land temperature ever recorded in the UK (38.5 Celcius on the 10th August). So not only notably warm, but with large variability.
[Also according to the Met Office, global warming is an observable phenomenon and 'mainly due to human activities' but what does the world's oldest frikken' climatological institute know? People like Michael Crichton and Greg Easterbrook are much more significant sources of information for the climate change controversy.]
With 2003 coming in fifth, this would mean that seven out of Central England's ten warmest years since the death of Oliver Cromwell have happened in the fifteen years since I got my bachelor's degree from UCL. Of the top ten years, only one (1733 - the tenth warmest) occurred before 1949.
Some more numbers:
It was the third warmest year for the global surface temperature series (0.45 Celcius over the 1961-90 average) and also the third warmest year for the land temperatures series (0.64 Celcius over the 1961-90 average). All ten of the warmest global surface years have occurred since 1990 (this series only goes back to the mid C19th however).
It was the warmest summer on record for Central Europe (instrumental records go back to 1781, less reliable documentary records extend the series back to the beginning of the C16th).
Finally back to the Met Office again - they are predicting that global surface temperature will be 0.5 Celsius above trend in 2004 which would make it the second warmest year on record. There's a +/- 0.12 range on that number however so they reckon there's a 20% probability the actual number will be high enough to beat the current record holder (1998 since you ask).
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
Ugh, step back from the equations and think about the basic principles.
Count, coutcomes (H=heads, T=tails)
N=1, {H}, {T}
N=2, {H,H}, {H,T}, {T,H}, {T,T}
Notice that for the sum of the outcomes, the probability of 50/50 is .5, a lopsided outcome (all heads/all tails) is .25.
N=3, {H,H,H}, {H,H,T}, {H,T,H}, {T,H,H}, {T,T,H}, {T,H,T}, {H,T,T}, {T,T,T}
You know, basic stats, binomial distribution, etc. Very simple stuff. Even with two coin tosses, you can immediately see that the odds of getting heads and tails is better than that of getting either both heads or both tails.... simply because there are two ways to get Heads and Tails, while only one way to get each of all heads or all tails.
1
1, 2, 1
1, 3, 3, 1
1, 4, 6, 4, 1
Hey, there's a demo: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lane/stat_sim/binom_demo. html
Even more interesting, to me, is that when the National Research Council, at the request of president Bush, included major global warming skeptics on the council, upon reviewing the body of evidence, they changed their minds about it (see the last two paragraphs of the link).
These are the top guys in their fields, and they make good statements based on real evidence, as opposed to the average /. posting :-)
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Lastly, the ice age thing was based on an unreasonable methodology.
No, the science of ice ages is on a much firmer footing than the science of global warming.
Look, there are only two ways we can say anything about the future: induction and deduction. We have many observations on which to base conclusions about glacial and interglacial periods. Although there seem to have been only three ice ages in the last billion years or so, each of these comprises on the order of 100 glacial/interglacial cycles, with a consistent period of about 100,000 years. That is much better data than we can observe about global warming. Our theory to explain this cycle (the Milankovitch cycle) has certain problems, but it is far more consistent than our global warming simulations.
I'm not saying you're wrong about global warming; that's happening on a much faster time scale. But don't kid yourself - we're living toward the end of an interglacial period, (and toward the beginning of our current ice age.)
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
"Or do you think they'd study everything on planet earth ?."
Niether. I actually think the story submitter didn't understand the article.
"Derp de derp."
Sure, there's global warming, but did we have anything to do with it? Is it our fault, or is it natural?
One of the biggest issues I have is people seeing a situation and overreacting on the assumption that it's wrong, or something that needs to be changed. Just because it's changing doesn't make it our fault. Nor does it mean we have to fight the change somehow.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
No, I don't know where to look. See me where?
I read at "my nuts won."
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
For the most part, these are *not* computer simluations, they are mathematical models.
If mathematicians choose to employ computers to compute the linearizations and matrix calculations required rather than pocket calculators and graduate students of yesteryear, does this make the result of these computations any less trustworthy?
No, it's not. While the public uses less energy and other resources for themselves, at least the amount saved is used to build weapons, and those are usually destroyed without regard to the environment.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Where I said "proof" I intended that the reader would grasp I meant "making testable predictions which can be proven to be correct". You are, of course, correct, if perhaps a bit overly technical, in pointing out that proving a prediction is not proof of the underlying theory.
Both 24-hour and 50-year weather 'reports' use the same basic models and concepts. If these concepts aren't accurate for 24 hours it is silly to think they will be accurate for 50 years. However, quantum mechanics and orbital mechanics are each discovered and manipulated using different ideas.
Your analogy is bad.
Blar.
Anyone remember their Bible studies? Revelations and all that stuff. 1/3 of all of the animals will die, 1/3 of the fish, 1/3 of the plants, death, doom, destruction. You die, he dies, we all die - that kind of stuff. Must be the work of Sauron...er I mean Satan! (I knew it was one of those "S" words!)
And I say unto thee: Lo! The time is near! Ahhhhhh! Hide thee lest thy life be forfeit!
Hmmmmmm....yeah - where's my PlayStation2? I've got to get one last game in before the world perishes!
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Could we create reflective regions in our desert areas, by putting out enough aluminized mylar? It seems if a decent fraction of our industrial output was dedicated to producing film, we could cover quite large areas, increasing our net reflectivity.
Okay... so I've got to have one kooky idea a day. Really, it astounds me that we don't seem to be able to get together and work for the common good... such as legislating better fleet efficiency or producing a larger portion of our power thru non-combustion processes. The technology is there... it's just a lack of leadership and political will.
.. but what else if america wont stop consuming four times more fuel than anyone else needs ... check out http://www.holmestead.ca/chemtrails/chemtrails.htm l for the upcoming f*c*ing science to keep oil-companys their profit and only kill 40% of humans ... also check at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm for patent 5003186 ... the position of "artificial weather" at http://www.maxwell.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/v 3c15-1.htm is also worth a read .. ...
"The case for species preservation should be made on hard ground, not on computer-generated squish."
Computers can also be trained to produce sensible results. The weather forecasts are notably better now than they ever where before.
It is trivially obvious that we can not accurately predict how many species will survive global warming. It is trivially obvious that we can criticise any studies attempting to do so.
But this work is not the result of hysterical conclusions, it's an attempt to gather data in difficult circumstances.
Should we listen to this sort of data? Well it is
also trivially obvious that once species have died out it is too late to recover them. Our current world leaders, most of whom will be dead in the next 20 or 30 years could have little to gain by listening to such reports. But perhaps the rest of us should.
Phil
The problem with this argument is that the examples of "environmentalists" are portrayed in an unrealistic, extreme faction in many areas of the media.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people feel that the whole environmental issue requires they take one side or the other, like it's some kind of sports game that requires unblinding loyalty.
When the topic of Christianity comes up, I don't use John Wayne Gacy as a standard by which all Christians should be compared. It's equally ignorant to employ the same ridiculous standards to characterize "environmentalists." In doing so, you do little more than show your illogical prejudice and ignorance.
No, but if you took a billion $ worth of that shit and floated it out to the equator, you could generate enough H2 to meet the energy needs of the entire world.
That's what's insanely stupid about this whole debate. No matter how many whiny slashdotters with four-digit ID's post about how the other side is wrong, no one can come up with the *right* way to fix it.
To the tree-huggers: face it, our energy consumption is going *up*, not down. Spotted owls and sea kelp are going to get trampled in the process. Please stop whining about birds being caught in the windmills that you wanted to begin with.
To the neocons: you're going to have to replace your Bronco with something that doesn't do 0-60 in fifteen seconds and doesn't sound like a penis-enlarger-on-wheels. It probably won't even go over 70mph, either. *Shock* *Horror*
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I did not say I wanted hemp to remain illegal. Far from it. I want it fully legalized, for all uses, industrial and personal.
My point was that you can't go into a funk just because one path out of thousands is being blocked by the government. Alternative energy solutions are being researched today by non-government individuals and organizations. A few avenues of research have been declared off limits, but many others are still open.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
What amazes me is that you and people like you can't think in categories other than those in which you have been programmed.
It will get warmer bit by bit until it starts getting colder bit by bit. Eventually we will move from this ice age to the next. There is little we can do to slow it down or speed it up.
"possible for mules to reproduce? Nope. Mules are sterile hybrids, and do not reproduce. They are a particularly damaging (in evolutionary fitness terms) form of post-zygotic isolation between species.
How did this get to be insightful?
When the ice cube melts in your ice cube tray, does the water flow out of the tray and make a mess?
is ot evidence that this computer model IS bunkum. A computer model is simply a way to predict the consequences of large amounts of complex data, too complex to calculate on paper. Before being able to offer informed comment on whether this model is bunk, or is valid, you need to learn what the data is that enters the model, and the assumption that are made, and the methodology being implemented, and the data being used. Yes, Virginia, models are based on data; that alone means that they arent just "computer-generated squish." Any more than the models that can relatively precisely predict the locations of the planets in 37 years, 14 days, 11 minutes and 7 seconds, based on their kknown locations and states right now, are "computer-generated squish." Me, I plan to go read the actual Science paper (Nature? I'm blanking) and learn what their assumptions were and the stated limitations of their model. But offhand, when deciding whether there is enough here to invest in continue looking at the issue, I'd certainly trust a peer-reviewed paper in one of the top-rated journals on the planet, over the offhand opinions of someone who considers models per se to be "computer-generated squish."
They are climate predictions. I don't know if its going to rain next weak, but I know pretty precisely that 8 years out of 10, we get between 20 - 35 inches of rain in my back yard. I know with a pretty high degreee of certainty that if I drive to Barstow in July, I don't need to bring a raincoat, but if I drive to Seattle, I should. I dont't know what the wind will be at the golden gate at 3pm on the 21 of July, but I can bet with very high accuracy that it will be running the current daily state of a cucle between lows of 5-8 knots, and highs of 25-30 knots, on about a 7-10 day rough cycle. What I dont understand, is why people who can't understand the difference between weather and climate feel qualified to comment on the global warming issue.
remember equilibrium? It doesn't matter if the absolute amount of carbon generated by fossil fuels is small. The amount added to the absolute emmision quantity doesnt much matter. What matters is the amount added to the difference between global emisions and global absorption, and that difference is extremely small. In fact, for steady-state atmospheric CO2 concentrations that difference is zero. Dumping those billions of tons of carbon into an equilibrium steady state (more or less) shifts the equilibrium concentration, and the new equilibrium can be etermined by calculation from knowing all the contributors to that equilibrium, or by measurement of the new equilibrium. Our current models are trying to identify all the elements and predict the new eq. We get to sit and wait to see if by observation. Why do so many seem to think that global climatologists dont know this stuff? Its not like they havent already calculated, measured, or estimated the absolute emmision and absorption of every identified source or sink they can find.
Testing!
and ugly world. It is true that losing the coastal lowlands, and watching much of the most productive farmland on the planet turn to desert, and losing much of the diversity and teh inhabitants of the outdoors that so many of us value quite highly, wouldn't (necessarily) doom us. By the same token, having my arms, legs, and genitals amputated wouldn't (likely) kill me, either, but it is still a thing I would do a lot to avoid.
24 hour weather reports, at their heart, consist of looking 24 hours 'upwind' and seeing what is happening there. They get refined by looking at factors that mogh steer teh weather differently than over the past, and that might change the state of that particualr observed weather. Climate predictis are entirely differnt, and one hell of a lot more reliable. I can pretty absolutely predict that the climate in Death valley is gonna be hot and dry in the summer, that the climate in December in Northern California is gonna consist of periods of cold and dry interspersed with periods of cold and damp, and so on.
"One more thing; Most of the models I have looked at indicate that the enviroment of the part of the world I am from, will actualy return to more historicaly normal conditions. This could include the expansion of a very special subtype of the sonoran that is rare in the US, though was not so 10K years ago. This would include the expansion of the range of some realy cool species" It would also include, in many of those models, the reduction of a good chunk of some of the most productive farmland on the planet. And dramatic, potentially near order-of-magnitude, reduction in Calofornia's water supply. Human economies are tied to the land very tightly, in a lot of ays we don't often think about. The potential economic effects of changing the potential uses of that land are enormous.
Please re-read my comment. I said "the poor IN third world countries". Your response has nothing to do with clearcutting rainforest either.
...to make yourself look like an insufferable moron?
Allow me to recapitulate: You posted your opinion to a public forum saying that because we can't predict the weather we shouldn't assume we can predict the climate. Someone responded suggesting you didn't understand the difference between weather and climate and giving several completely valid analogies (and one really bad one -- the rain in February thing). Instead of trying to show you understood the difference, you pretended the response was arguing something the poster never said and attacked that (a classic example of a Strawman Argument). The responder pointed this out and suggested some areas you might study. You responded with an ad hominem attack, pretending his response was boilerplate and that he wasn't allowing you to have your own opinions.
I call this the O'Reilly Tactic. Challenge the other guy to come up with some facts, then pretend his answer is worthless with "Oh, that's just your opinion." Well, yes. And everything he says is "just his opinion." But some people can back up their opinions with logical arguments and some people just whine about not being allowed to have their own opinions.
If you don't want your opinions to be scrutinized, don't publish them on a public discussion forum. If you don't think they can stand up to such scrutiny, don't read the responses.
The truth is we all use climate models all the time: Season makes very little difference in the tropics. It's generally warmer in the summer than in the winter. It rains more in Seattle than Denver.
Some are more valid than others. Some are more useful than others. Statistical analysis and computers are both good tools for determine which are valid and useful.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
...that many people don't understand it.
The economy of the state of Nevada is built around harvesting the excess cash of just such people.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
a) they can pump more out of the ground, under OPEC rules
b) they can confuse the credulous that there is nothing to worry about - since there's not a damn thing they can do about it
So why hasn't the price of oil gone up (in real terms) to reflect this scarcity?
Face facts. Oil supply is about to turn down, and when supply can no longer match the rising demand curve, the US way of life comes crashing to a halt. No amount of ostrich impressions is going to change that.
I doubt that will happen. Once the price of oil starts to rise in real terms that start to lay a big hurt on the economy, investment in alternate energy sources and efficiency will pick up, thus driving the costs of alternate enerfy down, and reducing demand for fossil fuels (thereby reducing the cost of fossil fuels). And don't forget nukes either ... a relative I recently
had lunch with is an ex Navy sub captain, who has
parlayed his nuclear propulsion expertise to
work at a nuke power consultancy. He tells me
that the US is bringing more plants on line.
Worst case, people will get a clue that source of ecological damage is not technology (just the opposite ... imagine
the starvation today without modern agriculture),
and is instead higher population. The cost of
those mouths to feed and shelter will go up, and
people will make fewer babies. Cut the world's
population in half, and there's plenty of
energy, and less man made CO2.
So you're saying China shouldn't face the same restrictions, facility by facility, as the US? That doesn't seem fair...
A Good Intro to NetBS
As opposed to hurting the relative rich in poor third world countries? Uhm, who did you think I was talking about?
Of course, I cry for the 1% rich in third world countries. I really do. I'm crying right now for them -- see? Those are tears.
Reread the text I posted in my comment. There is a clear mention of forest.
Why do I even bother?
He's a fucking canuck, as well as an unrepentent MANHAM CANNER.
I was talking about the major source of deforrestation in the world, and you respond with the kyoto protocol. Something that has absolutely nothing to do with it, then bring up some wierd point about rich people in third world countries. Ummm....sure.....I guess....
You bother to do what?... Make sense?... I guess not.
Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet?
At the base of it all, the problem is overpopulation. To save the planet we need to cull the population. No one wants to accept this fact.
a 30% increase in the concentration of an important component in the atmosphere, one centrally involved in regulating the temperature of the planet, in only a century, is a major abrupt anthropogenic change in the environment of the planet.
The only argument now is, what OTHER changes are likely to occur because of that one.
Sorry. I got pissed off at someone earlier for being pedantic and so I went and did it myself! I'm pretty sure everyone understood.
18000 years ago Northern Europe (Scandinavia, UK), Canada, Northern US were coivered by an ice sheet 2 kilometers thick. Then it went away (end of last ice age). It is very debatable why. After last mini ice age atmospheric temperature started rising at the beginning of the XVIII century, before we began burning fossil fuel. Large climate variations are largely not understood. I analyzed MaunaLoa CO2 data using Volterra-Lotka equations: until 1976 the curve aimed slowly at 500 ppm, from 1977 to 2002 it is aiming faster at 420 ppm.I'll send 2-pages substantiation if you are interested.
Err...by "I'm pretty sure everyone understood" I mean everyone understood your point, not my behaviour.
WTF is a political necessity?
The reality in the US right now is that in order to get to work, the vast majority of people need to drive a car. Additionally, the vast majority of goods are transported around the US via truck and rail. This whole infrastructure runs on gasoline and diesel.
So you're trying to promote a "if they need it, someone will build it" approach? Great, wonderful, what do we do during the time that we need it and there's no viable alternative.
Electric cars are not a feasable alternative for the bulk of people in the US. The range and recharge requirements for these vehicles are simply a no-go. Additionally, what do you propose to do with all of the batteries that these cars require? No, that's not an environmental problem at all eh?
Hybrid cars require gasoline. Not as much, but they still require gasoline. Additionally, the hybrid approach is inadequate for large cargo-carrying trucks. I'm not sure what kind of mass-public transit system you'd propose to deal with the layout of the average town/city here in the US. The mass transit system works in Europe in the areas were people are concentrated. The minute you venture out of those areas, you're back to a car.
Lots of money is being spent on electric, hybrid, and hydrogen powered vehicles. The fact remains that they're too expensive or too inadequate for the bulk of the driving requirements in this country.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
In particular, on phenomenon that the chicken littles ignore is the fact that CO2 impact on warming follows a curve of diminishing returns. The more that gets added, has less of an increase in warming. We are near the top of that curve.
Second is the finding by U of Maine teams to Antarctica that proved that the antarctic ice caps have been in place and stable for the last 22 million years, that air and ocean currents cause Antarctica to be thermally isolated from the rest of the planet.
There is no possibility of the ice caps collapsing any time soon, since in the past 22 million years, global temps have been as much as 15 degrees warmer. The 2-6 degree range (2 degrees more likely) predicted by the errant IPCC report is nothing.
Thirdly is the fact that all of the warming being found is occuring in the arctic. Zero temperature change at the equator has been reported. Since 90% of species live near the equator, the claim that 95% will go extinct is a bald faced lie.
Finally, the recent discovery of the impact of diesel particulates resolves the issue: the arctic is warming because of the burning of diesel engines in the northern latitudes. Nothing more.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
The fact that your domestic problems are so glaringly apparent to countries all over the world is not a good sign.
Tom's someplace in Canada. I'm in Brisbane (that's in Australia, by the way). Over here, I can see the same things about the USA that he's observed.
Your military's doing great but the rest of your country's in the shitter, mate.
Taking the coin-flipping argument as metaphorical (instead of a precise description of the relevant mathematics), the point is still valid.
Chaos theory is full of examples of systems that show high sensitivity to initial conditions, so that tiny differences of values at one point in time rapidly "blow up" into divergent behavior trajectories, yet the overall envelope of system behavior can be described precisely.
IOW, large-scale/long-term behavior can be accurately predicted even though small-scale/short-term behavior is expensive/difficult to predict.
Would you care to enlighten me as to how my country is in "the shitter"?
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
It's a fscking opinion piece in a fscking opinion news paper, what do you expect? There isn't a law or some constitutional ammendment that says all journalism must be unbiased.
I don't recall saying it should be unbiased. The post was merely meant to illustrate the article skewed their own statistics to suit their own article, in much the same way the writer of the article in The New Republic says the report was.
PS. Does "does not seem unduly unbiased" mean "does seem biased"? Work on those pointless negatives...
I was tired at the time, it was 5am. I don't really think that I need to work out my grammar before I post though. Theres always someone around to correct it for me...
That's what this study is about. I don't know what you read, I heard about the study from a radio interview with the authors. They said that gradual shifts wouldn't be a problem, except there's no longer a place for the species to shift into, because the neighboring habitat is gone.