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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.
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--
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
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...
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?
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.
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?
"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."
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...
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.
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?
You're obviously not a biologist. When the animals migrate (that is, when the ones that are able to move hundreds of kilometers as a trivial matter do so, assuming that humans have been kind enough to leave interconnected pathways and contiguous biomes for their safe passage) WTF are they going to eat?
The plants have to be there first. If there is radical climate change, plant communities will not be able to pack up and skip north or even uphill at that kind of rate.
15-30 percent is probably conservative....
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
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?
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.
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?
> 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
> While environmentalism is not a bad thing by itself, most hard core environmentalists are much more interested in political-economic changes than they are in actually 'saving the earth'.
Did you discover this by reading their minds, or by reading their diaries?
Also, even if we suppose what you say is true, what do the political views of a "hard core" have to do with the reality (or lack thereof) of global warming?
> Once socialism and communism were widely regarded as failures, the leftists needed some other method of advocating their anti capitalist beliefs. What better way to bring down capitalism than through extreme environmentalism. Make it too expensive and too difficult to produce anything or even to go about our daily lives, and industrialized society will crumble.
FYI, neither socialism nor communism have historically been against industrialized society. In fact, communist countries tend to attempt brutal plans for catching up in industrialization. Surely you've heard of the "five year plan"?
> Once again, I'm not saying all environmentalists have this goal in mind, and I for one don't want corporations to be able to legally dump mercury in a river or anything like that, but many hard core enviro-freaks are also die hard socialists.
And many hard-core fuck-the-environment types are Republicans. Did you have a point?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
When I was in elementary school, they tried to scare us by telling us that by the year 2000, the earth would run out of oil and the ozone layer would be completely gone. Global warming is getting the same attention today, and I have no doubt that in twenty years the environmentalists will have found some other bogeyman to use to push their agenda.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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"
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.
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.
----------
That's a stupid thing to say. As an American, I want the rest of my countrymen to moderate a little more. There are some things that are just complete excess. Where I live, half the cars on the road are SUVs, and many people use them for nothing more than driving a few miles to work and dropping their kid off at school! I don't know about other Americans, but I think its sick that we consume 25% of the world's energy, while having only 5% of the world's population.
I think there should be laws to at least provide a monetary incentive to pollute less. In some industries, corporations pay to pollute. If they pollute less than they paid for, they can sell that excess capacity to other companies. That creates a competitive market for pollution credits, which has had dramatic results in driving down pollution. I'd like to see the same thing applied to individuals.
And before anybody bitches at me about liberty, let me tell you that I'm the first one to regret additional government oversight. But we live in a republic, not an anarchy. Our society recognizes that some government restrictions are necessary, and most importantly, our economic system (capitalism) recognizes that certain things are outside the bounds of the free market. These are things like national defense and a clean environment, things that everyone benefits from. A free market will produce less than the efficient quantity of these things because everybody will want to let somebody else pay for it, because they know they can still get the benefits. Government oversight is unfortunately required for such things.
I also think that the Republican party's stance on Kyoto is laughable. They ask: why should we cut more than Thailand? The answer: because we pollute more! Compare this to the answer they give when we ask: why should the rich get larger tax cuts? Because they pay more taxes?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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?
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
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.
"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...
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.
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!
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
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!
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.
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!
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.
heh, it's funny how we always hear about the greatest biomass per acre per 90-120 day period being from hemp from the people who'd like to roll a J while they're powering the turbines. Well, I've seen some other studies which claim impressive numbers for other plants too depending on climate (you can google for them) - so if we make a good way to plants into energy, there's plenty of ways we can get at least 75% of the claimed values of hemp, and plenty of other plants that will grow where hemp won't. So let's go ahead and do it with boring grasses and weeds and sunflowers first, and then someday some country somewhere will do it with hemp with miles and miles of glorious doobage.
Paul Ehrlich's first predictions were in his book The Population Bomb, originally published in 1968. In it, he warned of massive famines in the 70s and 80s, when hundreds of millions would die of starvation. (Here is a good critique of Ehrlich, and a good book review of The Population Bomb.)
He has more than 30 years of dire doomsday predictions, none of which happened. Truly the epitome of the boy who cried wolf. But what's really baffling is how so many people still hang on his every word. Somehow he's still a huge celebrity among environmentalists.
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.
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make install -not war
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
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.
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...
That argument makes no sense to me. You've just described why people play the lottery, too.
The emperor is naked.
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?
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.
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.
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.