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A Countdown To Global Catastrophe?
An anonymous reader writes "From The Independent: The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.
For the full story, see this article."
Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Mayor: What do you mean, biblical?
Ray: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor... real Wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies.
Venkman: Rivers and seas boiling!
Egon: 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanos. Winston:The dead rising from the grave!
Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
start the looting yet?
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
(The SUV, you pervs)
The possibility of changes to the world's ocean currents is a very real possibility, and could have catastrophic consequences. However, they are not irreversable. I have read reports citing the fact that these currents have cycles, where every 10 or 20 thousand years they shut off, only to restart a century or two later. Yes, that would be catastrophic to us, but not to the planet. Hell, it survived a fiery birth, multiple major meteor impacts, magnetic pole reversals, caldera supervolanoes, et al. and the planet is still around. We might not be around later, but good ol' Earth sure will be.
Does anyone have a link to the actual report? This article just sounds like more scare mongering and dumbing down. As always, the devil is in the details, I want to see the details.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
since the Ice Age...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I live in Michigan, US. I want global warming about now. It's about 0 degrees here. The sensor in my tire froze and broke now saying my car has low air pressure in the tires. I step out side and feel my noze hair freeze. BRING ON THE GLOBAL WAMING!!!!!! I need to thaw out.
Evolution or ID?
Is it me...or is it hot in here?
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
I thought we already knew we're too late fixing things up, plus some of the countries that polute the most don't really want to do much about all this anyway. Better rake in the profit before we all perish. Really, is there anything that can be done?
Sample this!
Warming? Warming?! We've had record cold temps (currently 14F) plus I just shovelled over a foot of snow Saturday and we're warming? We need a better phrase please. It maybe warmer somewhere else but not here.
Speak truth to power.
There is always some type of disaster that is "going" to happen. It's all propoganda just to keep everyone frightened into doing whatever it is the flavor of the month wants you to do. Here's an idea, let's just live .. because when the time comes to die, you will.
.. big deal.. death is the completion of life in whatever form it may take.
And quite frankly, when that time comes
Stop worrying about every little thing that can kill you and start living..
The Nomad
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-da Vinci
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=42521
"For the full store, see this article."
Apparently so.
I would welcome it, since it has been -40C here(with the wind chill factored in) in Ottawa, Canada, for the past couple of weeks!
Imagine that.
(... must fight groupthink .... damn, i'm losing....)
Shit on you, you capitalist pig. It's George W. Bush's fault!
I was reading National Geographic and they were talking about climate change. One of their opinions was that climate change is already underway. Essentially the switch was flipped some fifty or so years ago.
They also said that climate change happens and that's a fact of life. For example the downfall of the Egyptian empire was partially due to a massive warm spell that caused crops to fail and deserts to form. Ironically the article pointed out that there were no cars at that time.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
because billions of dollars of oil/car industry brainwashing dollars can't be wrong
I am getting so tired of this junk science. The world has been coming to an end for my entire 40+ years on this planet. Nothing has happened yet. Ain't going to happen either.
Why has it better getting progressively colder over the past 20 years in places like Russia and China?
Let's start worrying about REAL threats like UFOs and Pumpkinhead.
i hate it when doomday-sayers come out saying "oh my god the worlds gonna end!!". just like the unfortunate earthquake, and resulting tsunami, these sort of things is a natural earth occurance. do you know that we're still coming out of our last ice age that didn't happen really all too long ago? and if global warming is such a huge problem, why are some places here in texas having record lows on some days this year? if global warming is such a huge thing that's just gonna kill human civilization, why arn't we having record highs??? this is simply the earth taking it's own lifecycle, we're just along for the ride. WE have to learn to adapt and change for the planet, cause i doubt we're gonna make any difference in it's plans. my 2 cents.
President Bush Supporter
a Swedish scientist was warning about global warming in the early 20th century. Nobody did anything then, nothing meaningful is being done now. Nothing meaningful will be done until literally hundreds of millions or billions of people are killed. The world economic system is too narrowly focused in objectives to have people work for the wider good unless all individuals' survival is directly and personally threatened.
After watching Waterworld, I know now that all I have to do after all the icebergs melt is just sprout gills and keep as many 'chits' as I can.
Oh, I almost forgot. Tomato plants, and a urine-to-water distiller might be handy as well.
And they said zombies weren't real!
We are arrogant, mankind is, to think that because of a half-century of climate fluctuations, that we are all going to die tomorrow. Please, the climate has been changing in HUGE ways for much longer than the life-span of a human being.
Global Warming is alarmism, coming from political agendas of people who want attention. Remember how we all laughed at those people who purchased electric generators and resurrected old bomb shelters for the Y2K scare?
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
The report urges all the G8 countries to agree to generate a quarter of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and to double their research spending on low-carbon energy technologies by 2010. It also calls on the G8 to form a climate group with leading developing nations such as India and China, which have big and growing CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately the people who benefit the most from the current environtmentally unfriendly energy sources are the same people who are in power today (G. W. Bush), so there is a real incentive for them to just sit tight and block any such initiatives from having a real effect. The need for energy is only increasing and most people will keep ignoring this whole disaster scenario until it actually happens.
I wonder if the paper is written simple enough for people like our president to comprehend it. Perhaps someone can read it and explain it to him so next time the UN and the international community asks him to adhere to the Kyoto Protocol he knows what they are talking about.
Was that nearly all of us would survive.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't work to slow the release of CO2 into the atmosphere, since continued efforts in that direction will probably (absent a "runaway Earth" scenario) have a measurable effect on climate changes. Emergent carbon sequestration technologies also offer promise, but we're in the very early stages, and beneficial effects from those technologies would also lag behind implementation.
The nature of this panel, which includes Republican politicians as well as climate scientists, may mean that it gives added credibility to the problem we're facing. But there's nothing really "new" about this report, except that it makes explicit to the public the fact that we've stepped over the threshold of climate change.
Please don't even talk about pollution if you are from England.. I'm sick of all this anti-american crap..
The Nomad
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-da Vinci
This isn't about you or your death.
This is about leaving the planet in a habitable condition for the next generation.
Or do you also suck on loaded revolvers because "when that time comes
In case you're having difficulty making the distinction any more, the Greenpeace website is over here.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
Unless it's below -50degress celcius then you have no reason to complain. It's just a little cold weather...
Spl0it - you're neighbour to the north (Ontario sitting at -15deg. currently)
No, this is
Winston:.... since I've been with these guys I've seen $h1t that'll turn you white.
Evolution or ID?
Am I the only one who remembers being taught in grade school (circa 1970s) that we were headed for the next ice age?
What happened?
Age of Hysteria,
The Age of Hysteria"
The Earth has survived very well without us pesky humans, and will continue to do so long after we are gone. Let's all grab Michael Moore for a group hug.
I step out side and feel my noze hair freeze
That's a little too much detail.
Free XBox, PS2
Why my damn Dell Inspiron keeps melting it's base :(
Lets round up all the tree-huggers' while shouting "Yeehaah", wearing a big cowboy hat, and chewing tobacco, i'll start off with this slightly altered citation to get you in the mood:
Now look boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches. But I got a pretty fair idea that something doggoned important's going on back there. And I got a fair idea of the kind of personal emotions that some of you fella's may be thinking. Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human beings if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelings about global warming. But I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a countin' on ya, and by golly we ain't about to let 'em down. Tell you somethin' else. This thing turns out to be half as important is I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations when this thing's over with. That goes for every last one of you, regardless of your race, color, or your creed. Now, let's get this thing on the hump.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
1) We're in a warming cycle/trend and this problem is not our fault.
2) The earth will survive the warming.
3) The problem is not as bad as people say.
Given that the earth is warming, and that this warming will cause catastrophes in excess of anything we've seen, shouldn't we be trying to do something about it? Does it matter if it's caused by us or something else? Does it matter if the problems will arrive in 100 years or 1,000 years?
If we see a clear path to fixing a problem that could save millions of lives, shouldn't we do that?
This whole thing seems like a server admin arguing against doing system backups. Sure, they *might* not be necessary, what what sane person doesn't do them?Cuz we got deserts in the USA, too. We just don't live in 'em!
I think we need a good end of the world situation. I look forward to leading hordes of bad people in the search for pleasure. I plan on wearing a cool mask and driving a highly tuned car o' death while screaming "Give Me Your Oil!!"...but that's just me.
"The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world."
Obviously being a politician or business leader qualifies you for all sorts of fear mongering.
You just touched on the colossal, huge, central point that virtually every dimisser of global warming fails to "get." It's not that the world won't survive. Life on earth has survived, and thrived, at higher global temperatures than we have now. It's just that, when major transitions occur, the dominant forms of life do not remain dominant. And that would mean us.
This ain't about hugging spotted owls. It's not about whether Sandhill cranes have a place to roost on their way north in the spring. The debate's about our survival. When we read:
Those are serious risks. Any *one* of those would stand a considerable risk of destabilizing the world as we know it. Imagine a Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons as it is, whose politics were affected by a massive drought. That's the easiest thing to predict in the world; climate change precipitated the Mfcane, which set loose a huge migration of people in southern Africa, which in turn had a lot to do with the military dictatorship of Shaka Zulu. Governments, in a state of global climate change, would be made drastically unstable.
The risk of nuclear war, during the cold war, was not a certainty -- it was a risk. We spent untold resources to address that risk, on both sides. The question is, how much do we commit to addressing this one? When an overwhelming majority of scientific opinion is playing the role of Cassandra, how seriously do you take the possible tragedy?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
From tsunami to Kyoto not impacting the environment at all to dropping emissions, to overblown disaster movies, scientists resigning various environmental organizations, and other speeches. People are even connecting the environment to the tsunamis, which have nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with Earthquakes that are going to happen anyway. Lets get some perspective here.
Global warming has no exact dates to put on it, many people say many different things. I've watched several documentries (AKA the kind at 2am with real science, not just some cooking show presenter looking for a new job explaining stuff he doesn't understand). Some said the effects are far worse and being reversed, others have said it's not even real.
Either way we're not knowledgable enough on the subject to give an exact date of "when we're all fucked". But then again nuclear power is a cure for the problem (alot of people agree with this), it's just a shame no one will just come out and say "We're going to try it again". You'd think by now they'd stop signing agreements no one is sticking to (Exception America, but in a bad way).
Minor nuclear accident VS the world being screwed over and the human race and MANY animals dying.
Looks like we'll be seeing three eyed fish or nothing but fish..
I like muppets.
It sounds like the newspaper writer is making statements far beyond what the report says.
This happens all the time, the journalist misreads (or overinterprets) the report, makes irresponsible claims and statements supposedly based on the report, which inevitably results in the authors of the report being accussed of alarmism by pundits.
Which means the general populace gets bad information all around, and the zealous individuals of the 'right' and 'left' continue to feel they are vindicated in their opinions on global warming and how the 'other side' are ignoring the obvious truth.
LetterRip
The world has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age ca. 1850. Carbon dioxide levels have been rising since then due to industrialization. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy. What about global dimming, it was all the rage last week?!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Apart from the question if the climate change is real, people all over the world will just continue to burn fossile fuels as long as they are the cheapest form of energy available to them. And it seems that this will still be the fact for a very long time. History has learned that it is natural to regard the short-time effects (food and comfort) more important then the long-term effects (climate change in 50 years from now).
Don't worry, Our Fuhrer will protect us.
With luck, draughts and all that will at least mean we'll have to put up with less bushes. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Should be called: CorporateCrapDaily
Did he inhale?
I didn't learn that this was all junk science from oil industry propaganda. I saw this on the O'Reilly Factor and it had SCIENTISTS and EXPERTS on it saying that this was all bunk.
Also, I saw a special Hannity and Colmes did on it and Sean Hannity proved that this was all a Democrat conspiracy.
So maybe YOU just need to do a little research, my friend.
that is until we hit an ice age and the field of meteorolgy becomes much less interesting
In 2039, when the bit flips !
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Center for American Progress
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
More conclusive evidence, and still Bush refuses to sign up to Kyoto. Now it's just a matter of which will destroy the planet first
Haven't you read on FOXnews that there's nothing to worry about?
Apparently, the whole global warming-thing is just hyped by the U.N. Because they want to destroy the American economy. Bad guys. We can be glad that GWB doesn't give a shXXX uh, isn't so easily confused by science.
There goes my karma...
I don't need a signature.
And it breaks new ground by putting a figure - for the first time in such a high-level document - on the danger point of global warming...
And that figure is.... 42.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
As long as it is just precious yet unkown and therefore undervalued ecosystems with endangered species and third world countries that owe big sums of money to us... we should't care too much.
Now, I feel like takin' a drive with my whoop-ass humvee, spilling several liters of gas and producing some extra CO2 gas just so I can get a McDonalds - who happens to sponsor deforrestation - happy meal.
Call me cynical but I don't think things will get better very soon.
. . . there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. The earth has been warming and cooling for hundreds of years. The earth warms and cools on documented cycles of the sun. The earth has never stopped changing, and expecting it to be stable just because we think it "should be" is ludicrous. Stop listening to the moronic press who don't know how to use their cell phones, let alone try to understand the flawed methodologies of studies by ideological driven scientists whose jobs would disappear the day we all finally put our foots down and say, "STFU. We don't believe you." Back in the early 80's I did a science report on what some magazines had printed as the eminent global warming that would cause NYC to be 4 feet under water by 2004. They said the damage was irreversible and we needed to prepare for disaster. Well, it's 2005 and the only thing NYC is under right now is 2 feet of SNOW! Before the '80s the buzz in the press was global cooling. Recently Slashdot had a story on global dimming. Which is it??? At what point do we finally call "BS" on these a-holes that keep duping our governments into spending more money on studies (wasting millions) and wasting our broadcast time with pointless interviews done by reporters who don't understand the periodic table, but love dramatic, apocalyptic stories?
I live in Halifax, N.S. Canada for 10 years. In the 10 years since I've left, there's been record snowfalls for 3 years ... so much I never would have imagined. Also, hurricanes have been striking with increasing devastation whereas the cold water of the Atlantic usually diminished the hurricane significantly.
California and Vancover have been having record rainfalls (each over 600 mm in a week). There's flooding and landslides.
So far, to me, it sounds a bit like freak weather we get every 50 years or so. If this is a sign of what's to come, due to global warming we're in for a rude wake up call.
What's worse: the brunt of the pollution stems from North American and European industrialization. I cannot image what would happen if India or China had a 2 or 3 car family (let alone, the emerging trend of one car as income increases).
With the increase in industrialization of many countries (in part because of consumer culture) and also because of economic expansion and the lower cost of the automobile (namely, in India and China) what can we do to help stop, slow down or perhaps (if possible?) reverse this trend?
Take a look here for a slightly longer perspective on climate change. I haven't read TFA, but I'm guessing human-controlled causes of global warming are likely to be dwarfed by long-run trends and fluctuations.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
We have +14C (57F) here in Germany. The calendar says "winter".
This winter is at least 10C too warm, last 2 winters were also too "warm".
The last real winter I can remember is over 20 years ago when we had snow.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, undeveloped Third-World nations - including China, India, Brazil and Mexico - will be free to produce whatever they want. Yet 82 percent of the projected emissions growth in future years will come from these countries. This is why many critics see is global wealth redistribution scheme rather than a real plan to improve the environment.
"The wealth of the United States is, and has always been, the target," says Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center. "The new scheme to grab the loot is through environmental scare tactics."
He predicts international corporations, "who owe allegiance to no nation, will bolt America and move their factories, lock, stock, and computer chip to those Third World countries where they will be free to carry on production. But that means the same emissions will be coming out of the jungles of South America instead of Chicago. So where is the protection of the environment? You see, it's not about that, is it?"
He points out that hidden in the small print of the treaty is a provision that calls for the "harmonizing of patent laws."
"Now, robbing a nation of its patent protection is an interesting tactic for protecting the environment, don't you think?" he adds.
The treaty was defeated in the US senate 98-0 (or was it 98-2).
It makes no sense for the US to sign while countries like China get to hide behind "developing nation" status. Russia only signed it because they will be able to sell their unused pollution quota for billions of dollars each year.
Great treaty! Evil Buuuush!
Goodness gracious!
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
Dale: "If we take control of this global warming thing we can grow pineapples in Alaska!"
Hank: "We don't live in Alaska, we live in Texas where it gets 112 degrees in the shade. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!"
England has a fraction of US population. A fraction of the contribution to global warming, and a fraction of the troops engaged in America's illegal wars against innocent countries. Oh no, that's alright though, they're full of people with dark skin, who cares that it's illegal.
That's a shame.
Is there anything we can do besides revert to an agrarian society and kill off 80% of our population to return to preindustrial population levels? I don't think there's any politically acceptable solution to climate change, so we'll just have to ride it out (if in fact it's a real phenomenon).
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Of course it's sarcasm but if yo live in the Bible belt...
...gonna run all this on solar and wind power... or something like it.
You're gonna have to sometime, the oil will not last forever. And without oil, no electricity, little economy and yep, grass huts and beans. Spend your children's inheritance, so long as you had fun in your Hummer, right?
Did he inhale?
Global warming means that the global temperature will rise. It doesn't mean that all areas will suffer/benefit from higher temperatures. It means we can expect a shake-up in global weather patterns as the world heats up. This could mean that the Gulf Stream moves and London becomes as cold as Moscow; or that el-nino is dissrupted occurning more or less frequently than ussual; or that Texas gets snow, or Israel gets a plague of locusts.
The point is that our actions are causing changes, over and above the normal warming we'd expect to see due to normal ebb and flow of ice ages. Just because the phenemenon is called Global Warming doesn't mean that the effects to all will be a warmer domicile. To Floridians it might mean more hurricanes, and to Texans more of that snow stuff.
Just to be safe.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
Don't forget (I'm in Michigan too), that "our" (screwed up) 0F is about your more reasonable -18C. Also a good chunk of Michigan is North of some of Ontario (of course there is a huge hunk of Ontario North of Michigan as well).
And while I don't want any "global warming", I would not complain about another 30F (or 17C) of local warming right about now.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
I appreciate solar/wind/hydro energy and all, but I'm not convinced that failing to completely adopt them right now is going to cause irreversible global damage and end with the sea level rising 10 meters, killing millions.
And, well, if I'm wrong and Slashdot still exists then, you guys get to say "I told you so"... :D
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
Doofus. It's 0 F. So he's at -17C. :)
B3ryllium - your neighbour to the west. Currently 5 degrees and rising.
Maybe we shouldn't try to stop any of this. If global warming (or global cooling) is real and we are causing it whose to say that the new steady state that may be achieved will not be better than the current one?
In the short term you may see mass displacement of populations or even war but in the long term there will just be a new status quo that people will just have to live with. This new status quo may be better than our current one or worse (from our perspective) but I bet that after humans have lived in it for a 1000 years that they would rather keep it than the one we currently have, just like we want to keep the one we are used too.
The problem is Earth has never been static in its climate. It has had many localized times of climate stability but they have always ended. To think that we should try to maintain the current climate in perpetuity seems to be both arrogant and selfish.
Hybrid and maybe hydrogen would work. Solar is good for small devices and wind is for electrical generators in plains areas. Numbnuts.
by "fixing" this warming trend, we don't really screw up some cycle the Earth goes through every couple of ten thousand years, and wipe out all of the rainforests? Or kill off a large percentage of sea life?
The planet has been around MUCH longer than we have, and goes through warming/cooling trends we really don't know all that much about. Hell, the poles shift every once in a while too... You think we ought to "fix" that as well?
can't make up it's mind here in Phoenix. We went from record rainfall and a lot of flooding (which hasn't happened for about 20 years) to record temps last week and this week of over 80 F. We already hit 115+ in the Summer I'd like to see some global cooling, or maybe California to break off and make the western boarder of Arizona a beach. If global warming can help with that I'll start spraying as much aerosol as I can.
it gets warmer and there will be more water evaporation (vapor) that goes up in the atmosphere creating clouds blocking sunlight thus cooling things down a bit the water vapor cools and condences falling as rain or snow, nature has balance...
That's why the weather channel says that it is -2 in Albany, NY. Global warming...
... can they??!?!?
Wait, -2 degrees... that's COLD not WARM. But it has to be due to global warming... that's what all the politicans and grungy environmentalists are telling me... and they can't be incorrect,
Fanatical alarmist proclimations of doom in 3, 2, 1... oh. Too late!
So-called scientists have been saying that the end of the world is right around the corner since as early as the 1960's. Crazy nonsense, like that by 1980 the world would be massively over-populated requiring "population control" (eg. forced abortion/genocide/what have you), and that the entire world would either be starving to death or rationed on food.
"But this is different!" you say. Then tell me, how is it so different?
This seems like nothing more than more scare tactics by the likes of the Earth Day foundation and the Sierra Club. Granted, I've not tied the connections together myself, but if it fits the trend...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
According to THIS article:
r y/ did-sgsAtWaxCKF0EsgTbBP-2fa91M.asp
http://www.examiner.ie/pport/web/world/Full_Sto
Human activity might have saved us from an Ice Age.
The article states that since 1790 the earth's global temperature has risen 0.8 degrees.
In almost a quarter of a millenia this is the change. Excuse me if I remain skeptical that this was caused by human activity.
No, actually Global Warming doesn't mean all those shake-ups will occur.
It doesn't mean any of them will occur. The fact of the matter is, all the computer models in the World and wildassed guesses mean that we know very little about how the planet, and solar system for that matter, are warming and what the ultimate side effects of that warming are.
We don't know that our actions are causing changes. Any speculation about "expecting a shake-up" is 99.99% BS.
No doubt something like: "World to End unless specific remedies are taken! Everyone must do exactly as we, the report authors say, and give us lots of money too, or the seas will boil!" I mean, come on. The climate is a chaotic system for which we've only got the barest inkling of the initial conditions, and very limited understanding of a few of the many feedback cycles embedded in it. Certainly not enough to undertake whatever austerity measures the report will recommend.
"The risk of nuclear war, during the cold war, was not a certainty..."
Fry: "This snow is beautiful! I'm glad global warming never happened."
Leela: "Actually, it did. But thank God nuclear winter canceled it out."
the world ended in the 1100s and the 1500s when the temperatures were that high before, so this is just academic.
having the world end is antihammer
--;
www.HammerRevolution.com
If we all get together and act quickly, we can still reverse this. Just stick your air conditioner in your window the other way around, and turn it on full blast. If every AC unit in the USA is turned on reverse full-blast like this, we should be OK.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
These alarmist diatribes need to be taken with a grain of salt. If there is a significantly climate change, many places on the planet will be MORE desirable. Some places will get more rain and have longer growing seasons. Some people inland will suddenly have beach front property. To make it sound like every person on the planet will come out on the raw end of this deal is disingenuous at best.
Will people suffer, yes. However, people have always been starving from famine somewhere on this planet and they always will be. The locations just change.
"That's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage."-Monty Python
I'm glad that senior politicians and business leaders are spearheading this "scientific" effort. We constituates needs someone to put a spin on the issues for us in order to understand them.
"There is an ecological timebomb ticking away," said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe.
As always, it's great to see the former transport secretary weigh in on a topic so close to his area of expertise. BTW, Olympia Snowe sounds suspiciously like the name of a hippie child of greenpeace parents.
The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate.
Wow! The earth has been around for 4+ billion years, and it only takes us 250 years to set it on an "irreversible" course of destruction. That kinda power indicates how far we've come since the Ice Age!
So, the production of waste gases started to affect the climate in 1750, huh? Well, let's consider:
In 1750, the population of
- the world was only 760 million people.
- North America was 5.3 million people.
- Europe was 158 million people.
- South America was 19 million people.
- Africa was 82 million people.
- Asia (including Russia) was 493 million people.
- Australia was 1.5 million people.
Now, we all can imagine how heavily industrialized South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia was during that time period. Which leaves North America and Europe as the truly industrialized countries.I find it very interesting (or rather, highly implausible) that just 169 million people were capable of generating a measurable change upon the earth's climate in 1750.
If you have given these kind of reactions, and you honestly believe that your reactions is valid indeed, I would be very, very interested to see where you got your information. Please, share your info, or forever hold your silence.
Drowning the US with some mega-tsunami would be fun, for a change...
("And how!" is rarely used anymore, but was roughly equivalent to "hell yeah," "damn right," "bet your ass," etc., only less impolite.)
Sorry for the excessive quotations marks, but I just feel like there's some simplistic thinking going on about the ability of human beings to react en masse like this.
If a scientific consensus exists that certain human activities (industry and commerce, mostly) are affecting the environment in ways that will eventually harm us, that's still a long way from doing anything about it. Reversing industrial and economic trends costs money--mostly opportunity costs from having to cease certain profitable, but polluting/warming endeavors. It's not always possible to set up a system in which those costs are rationalized to the people who can deal with them.
A lot of it comes down to what "we" means, in this context: you have to get a politically enabled consensus on the existence of the problem, AND on the view that the harms of environmental damage outweigh the economic costs of changing how we do things. In the US, right now, I don't see either of those realizations taking root enough to affect policy substantially. Even if the science and economic analyses are sound, there's still going to be a long, drawn-out debate over the merits.
But is this really so bad? We're deliberative, not knee-jerking. I've been convinced lately that the scientific evidence in favor of human climate influence is pretty strong, but it's still an enormously complex question.
And remember, getting the answer wrong will be just as harmful to the human race if we go overboard on trying to prevent climate change: all those opportunity costs, whoever pays them, will be felt collectively as a lower standard of living.
Basically, I just think you're being unfair by labelling humanity "stupid, paranoid, ignorant, and arrogant" (not to mention suggesting that we should go extinct!). This is an incredibly difficult question to get right, and the consequences EITHER way are pretty nasty if the human race gets it wrong.
So Galactica will find a fresh, new planet? =)
So, who wrote the paper? Who did the research? Is this a political or scientific paper?
I mean, I don't doubt this because it's a "GLOBAL WARMING!!!" paper. I doubt it because, as the article clearly states, it's written primarily by politicians and businessmen, and will probably primarily serve political and business interests.
It's only my cynical, sarcastic nature that causes me to question whether those interests reflect Truth, Fact, or Right.
What the hell would Noah want with a boat?
A few things that you may have missed:
1) Record high temperatures in Europe causing drought and an estimated 35,000 deaths.
2) Global mean surface temperatures have increased 0.5-1.0F since the late 19th century. see here
3) Sea level has risen 4-8 inches over the past century, not good for coastal habitats (Same source at #2).
4) The Larsen B Ice Shelf Collapsed dumping some 720 Billion Tons of Ice into the sea.
Based upon these, arguing that nothing has or will happened is a little foolish don't you think?
As others have pointed out the term Global Warming connotates a rise in average temperature overall not a rise in every local temperature. The 'fact' that it may or may not be colder in some parts of the world now than it was previously does not disprove the theory by any means.
If you have references for your assertions I would be glad to see them.
I have a friend who's geologist.
He climbed on top of "Le Mont Blanc" (4807m) in order to analyse it's ice.
It found traces of pollution (hydrocarbures) which,
So there's a huge pollution in the air, it also crosses the seas (and the Rhein).
Concerning Capitalism, I think that a system which reward people by increasing their materialism is vowed to collapse.
Anyway, we are doomed and I like the idea I won't have to get retired.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I'd first say that it is a very good idea, but I suspect that Southern americans, starving, would come up with their guns seize the farms.
An apocalyptic event like this would drive the world into complete anarchy, and only the craziest and strongest would survive.
Quebec, with it's huge water ressources, would sure be invaded by americans.
perception is reality
"Wheew, it's freezing outside today!"
"Yeah, i heard on the weather forcast that cold is close to its increased maximum today"
"Yeah, heard the same. And like if that's not enough, they said on Fox last night that also hot will probably reach its increased maximum somewhere around late july."
"Increased maxima of BOTH hot and cold in the same year!? What is the world coming to???"
Or don't. ... wait for it global cooling. Of course, this was in the days before the Internet and during the time it was popular to endorse that.
Bad news sells, and gets grant money.
And nothing is bad news like a doomsday prediction.
I'm not trying to troll, but there have been "10 years to doomsday" reports based on
Don't trust me? Pick up a Newsweek from April 1975. Or just do a bit of research, you'll find a lot of the same scientists who were alarmists for global cooling switched to global warming.
Virtually all of the environmental organizations out there have been hijacked by groups that are more anti-corporate and anti-capitalist.
I'm not just saying this, so is one of their founders (see Patrick Moore).
If you want more proof, go to a environmental protest, the majority of folks there are complete morons and unable to answer the simplest things about the environment. In high school, I went and got 25 folks to sign a "Ban sodium chloride" petition.
The vast majority are there for yelling and for a chance for (under-educated) white middle class college aged kids to fight against "the man".
I really can't take anything these folks say at face value anymore.
Hey, I think it is a great idea to start using energy sources that are somewhat more modern, but alarmist fear mongering isn't the right way to go about it. At a certain point people start beginning cynical.
Don't.
Cry.
Wolf.
You.
Stupid.
Fuckers.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
While England may have a fraction of the people.. I read a report that stated that 90% of england had problems with pollution.. I can definitely say that 90% of the US doesn't have this problem.
The Nomad
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-da Vinci
Not that it matters anyway. I'll probably end up dying on the runway somewhere because of some kid with a thinkgeek.com green laser shined it in a pilot's eyes or from the horrible human/bird flu conflagration that may or may not happen sometime soon.
[insert sig file here]
I'm not saying that global warming isn't a problem... but from all indications, the Earth has a remarkable ecosphere that heals itself pretty efficiently. Everyone remember the ozone-layer scare from the early 90's? Yeah. The ozone later is still there. In fact, it's in better shape now than it was then... and all things considered, we're not a much more environmentally conscience species than we were 10 years ago. It's just that the Earth can cast Heal as a freagin' 100-level White Mage. Go Figure.
Personally, I'm taking this "report" worth about a grain of salt. Common sense says "global warming, bad!" But is it going to destroy the planet in 10 years? Bah. Go hug a tree.
/dev/random
With more pollution and the alleged heating of the Earth won't this will create more, dirtier clouds?
Clouds that contain higher than normal amounts of pollution particles should be more reflective than cleaner clouds, and so more sunlight will be reflected before it reaches the lower 'smog' zones of the atmosphere and so should not warm as much.
Would this then act as a natural balance?
Global Warming "theory" is a religon. The science used to back it up only works if you ignore 90% of the facts.
Repent your evil capitalist ways or we will all burn in the hell earth will become.
This paper puts out enviro-scare stories nearly every day. They publish little else but wacko leftwing junk as most Brits will tell you - that's why they have a tiny circulation. What has this got to do with science and technology, and cool stuff in general?
Try searching Google for the Independent and global warming (156 hits)
or Independent and neutral (23 hits)
or Independent and unbiased (5 hits)
or Independent and Linux (5 hits)
Interestingly Independent and Bush evil gets 29 hits while Independent and god good gets 37 hits.... (okay I took liberty with the formulation of these last two, but you get my point).
What did we expect? Mankind to live and prosper on this giant ball of dirt forever? All great things shall pass. Too good to be true. Nothing lasts forever. Good-bye cruel world.
Crying wolf every day wont help solve the problem.
I hope all hell breaks loose tomrrow.
Its time for 'house cleaning' on this planet.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was home in North Dakota for Christmas. One morning, it was -41F without the wind chill. I think that the average global temperature might indeed be increasing, but only because ND isn't averaged in. You plug that -41F (for the C people, -40 is where they are equal, so it's just a tad warmer than -41C) into the average, and all the sudden the whole world feels a little cooler.
"which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 metres over the space of a few centuries"
Within fifty (max one hundred) years, nanotech will render all of this irrelevant.
If you're not a monkey, you don't care if the jungle has problems...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I'd wager to bet that most of the "dismissers" you mention are well aware of these facts. Scientifically literate people can see what's going on and visualize the possible long-term consequences, but it's going to take more than public opinion polls and stock-market prediction techniques to understand the process well enough for longer-term predictions. Cassandra is being listened to, just with a grain of salt.
If we can be sure that this will happen and nobody that can really do something about it will do nothing, the point is starting to worry with what will happen next, at least for some countries will be nice to have an end-of-the-world party, switch to a sea-based way of life or do more investigation over hybernation and things like that.
I think the overall goals of most people who are in favor of changing environmental policy largely revolve around spending more on research to understand what is causing global warming, so you are saying nothing that disagrees with them.
Furthermore, your mentality-- let's wait and do nothing until we have proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are destroying our environment, lets drag our feet in the dirt until the last possible moment so that we can live the way we are living right now for as long as we can. It may be too late when the so-called bulletproof evidence you're waiting for comes up behind us and kicks us in the ass.
The flaw with your argument is that you are assuming that the money is already being spent on things that are more important, and I believe that most environmentalists would like to suggeest otherwise.
...for alcohol. Hehe.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
this would be catastrophic to us
This reminds me of an interesting concept i studied in ethics at uni - Obligations to Future generations.
Do we have any obligations to 'future generations' (if we do then preventing this kind of thing would seem to be one of them). We're likely not going to suffer the brunt of our actions (and the actions of our forebears) but it seems our children probably will. Many people here seem to regard reports of this kind with some flippancy, so how do these people view their obligations? Do you have any?
IMHO, we do have such obligations, and we should be trying to take actions now to prevent suffering in the future.
--robin
OK, if the worst-case scenarios pan out for global warming a lot of people could die.
Let's say we implement at a bare minimum the kind of strategies required to make Kyoto a reality. Not just window-dressing, but actually enforce upon the population of North America a cutback in energy use. How many people will die? Perhaps worse, how many people end up in basically third-world living conditions with no access to health care because there isn't any transportation available?
Those are the kind of tradeoffs that need to be considered. And that is assuming that global warming is a fact.
Not very, when the vast majority of "scientists" whose opinion is being cited are SOCIAL Scientists.
I really don't believe economists and sociology professors know as much about climate as meteorolgists and geologists.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Its not the sky falling Chicken Little, its the oceans rising!
We don't need no stinkin' science when we gots ourselves GWB and the Sweet Baaaaaby Jebus!
Just say a prayer to the God of Sweet Baaaaby Jebus while sending a check or money order to Suckers for, er, Sinners for Sweet Baaaaby Jebus.
Science, bah: What a bunch of horse pucky. Belief in the God of Sweet Baaaaby Jebus is all you need!
The article says that the report is going to be published tomorrow but there is no link to any site where it might be published. Does anybody know the link?!
Did anyone else think this story was about the possibility that Britney Spears may be having a baby?
CO2 is rising because it must with increasing temperature -- ever opened a warm soda can?
Our "civilizations" annually emit approximately 0.07 kg CO2/ m2 Earth surface, compared to 880 kg / m2 annual rainfall. I very much doubt even the total has much effect (beyond algae blooms & other plant growth). Let alone the tiny (yet expensive) changes contemplated by Kyoto.
Human activities masked another Ice Age. Kind of like the novel, Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn.
Yeah, I know, Superman has always bailed us out before. He wont just give up now..
Whatever
If people want to use less petroleum products, do it! Don't do it using global warming misinformation as an excuse!
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
I understand the point of the article. But the report in question also urges G8 countries to use renewable energies. I feel like the reason we can't do that is that we crave energy beyond what renewable energies can practically provide us.
Nuclear technology can provide a much needed interim solution between fossil energy and renewable energy. Not renewable, but doesn't contribute to CO2 emissions!
Scientists need to learn some marketing. They really shouldn't reveal these global warming findings right after a blizzard.
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
The problem with Global Warming Theorists is that they do not take into account the fact that CO2 in the atmosphere is absorbed into sea water and is re-cycled via the carboninc acid cycle. This cycle is held in equilibrium over time (remember your High School chemistry).
It is also critical to understand that most of the world's "production" of CO2 comes not from man but from CO2 outgassing in sub-oceanic rifts and volcanic activity.
There is no reason to panic.
(This will stick in your brain all day. bwahahahah!)
The Final Countdown
Europe
We're leaving together
But still it's farewell
And maybe we'll come back
To earth, who can tell
I guess there is no one to blame
We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
Ooh oh
We're heading for Venus (Venus)
And still we stand tall
Cause maybe they've seen us
And welcome us all (yeah)
With so many light years to go
And things to be found (to be found)
I'm sure that we'll all miss her so
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh ooh oh
(interlude)
The final countdown
Ooh oh
I'ts the final countdown
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh
It's the final countdown
We are leaving together
The final countdown
I haven't read much of the underlying science in the global warming debate. But I have to say that the level of hysteria of many of these reports does not pass the "smell test".
What I mean is that these reports always talk of widespread death and destruction, with NO positive effects. Real life is never that way, if we get warmer weather some things are affected negatively, other things positively. But these reports never seem to speak of any positive effects. That is why I am skeptical. It sounds like someone with an agenda talking, not a scientist.
Don't confuse knowing very little with knowing nothing at all. Take a pot of water and put it on the stove. Turn on the burner. You know that the water will get warm and eventually boil. Scientists could make some measurements and tell you pretty much exactly when it will boil, and how quickly it will boil dry. But no computer program in the world can accurately tell you exactly what the pattern of bubbles will be during the boiling. So what? It just means that there are some things we can't model/predict, like boiling or weather, and there are some we can, like climate and thermodynamics.
We do know that our actions are causing changes, and we know that further actions will cause further changes - within a range of uncertainty. This won't change just because you want to continue to pollute.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
George W Bush, for rejecting the kyoto protocol. And thank you, american friends, for voting for him, again !
Yes (SARCASIM), I'm the doofus for using Celcius like the rest of the world.
No, this is
Now imagine what happens when you add more energy to a chaotic system. Gee, I wonder if it will get more chaotic?
While the overall energy of the system will rise, local effects will vary and can be turbulent. It is just that local effects and surges of energy (hot and cold) will shift about on a much later time scale.
Right now it seems to be on the order of 2d6 months (for you pen and paper gamers out there), i.e. 2d6 months above average, 2d6 months below, per regional climate area, with a graduallly increasing trend (increasing chance of failing saving throws, etc)
of course, it could be worse. The weather could be chaotic evil.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It has nothing to do with the journalism of WND, it's referring to some of the critics and what they're saying. Can't you read the quote you just posted?
My friends dad who does this kind of stuff told me that in the last 12 years (this was 2003 I believe) we have had 10 record hot years if meassured ove the last millenium.
He currently is currently measuring water flow in various gaps arounf the arctic circle so we can have a better picture of how exactly the flows of the ocean do effect global weather.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Something caused and ended the previous ice ages -- and it wasn't us. Oh, and I'm sure that the occasional volcanic eruption has no impact whatsoever on the global climate or pollution, right?
Scientists can't even predict the weather three days out -- hell, in this area, not even twelve hours out! -- with any degree of accuracy, yet they have the audacity to claim that they can accurately predict what'll happen in five, ten, twenty, or a hundred years to the Earth's climate, taking into consideration not only human activity, but also the natural phenomena that they don't fully understand and can't accurately model? Give me a break!
Global warming is more of a political movement, an anti-American, anti-capitalist load of crap than it is a sound climatological theory. How else can one explain that ridiculous Kyoto Treaty?
The punchline is always the same: send us more money.
Catastrophe is always around the corner, only time and more research (ie. grants) will tell.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Care to cite a source? The CIA fact book on the UK and the US seem to disagree with you, to me they indicate that the US has more of a problem than the UK which is currently reducing much of its polution., while the US has 'water pollution from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers; limited natural fresh water resources in much of the western part of the country require careful management'.
They'll claim we copied their supervolcano, showing how both supervolcanoes are based on the same fundamental structure. It'd probably be more interesting waiting until their market cap dips low enough for Slashdot readers to buy them out ...
Right now I'd say those chances are in the same range as the chances of a celluloid cat, being chased by an asbestos dog, in hell.
Until enough people die, nothing substantial will be done. The remaining questions is how many deaths is going to be "enough".
My wild-ass-guess is that it'll take at least 10 million deaths due to direct, weather related, causes and agricultural failure to overcome inertia.
Christ it is like talking to a small child. It is not you that we object to it is your behaviour.
earth has cycles just like women
give her the space she deserves, in about 7 to 10 thousand years the pms will wear off and hopefully we didn't get clobbered out into the doghouse (the moon)
Yes, global warming is real, thats why this winter is pretty cold, and last summer temperatures didn't even reach 90 degrees where I live.
The weather people are lucky to predict the weather correctly four days in the future. Their predictions about the weather 40 years from now are likely to be wrong.
Nobody wants to hear bad news, and that includes alien civilizations. The planet Krypton's leaders refused to listen to Zor-El's warnings that the planet was going to explode. The result? The whole race died (except for a few people).
And remember, they were smarter and more advanced than us. Just face it folks, we haven't got a chance.
Pick your link (Umm, except that one about the Genesis flood...)
Brought to you by Megadeth: Countdown to Extinction (1992)
IANALOOA
The report starkly spells out the likely consequences of exceeding the threshold. "Beyond the 2 degrees C level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly," it says.
does the report spell out the consequences of going back to the stone age and living like ogg and grog, which is what would be required to have CO2 emissions decrease? shouldn't there be a comparison of the benefits?
"So.. do you remember when you said you would sleep with me if I were the last man on earth?
The time is now baby!"
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Anyone know anything about weather (pun intended) the approximate date for the "end of the world" could coincide with a foretold date of armageddon?
Was Nostradamus vague enough to "predict" even this?
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
I thought slashdotters were intelligent. Every post here is saying global warming is a sham. If you actually spend some time looking you will find out that global warming doesn't just mean it gets hot. It means everything goes hay wire. Most likely is that we will have hotter summers and colder winters. Weather will be extreme. More tornados, more hurricanes, more droughts and more floods.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
So there won't be enough virgins to throw into volcanoes or whatever to prevent an angry GAIA from decimating humans. It is a plot so that we won't have any method to avert destruction.
When religous zealots predict apocalypse, they sound silly and are dismissed.
When secular scientists do so, for some reason anything they say is swallowed without examination. In the 1970s it was a new ice age.
The earth changes, as does the sun. We just had a huge Tsunami and are in danger of similar ones closer to the "modern" world. Or earthquakes (what are the building codes near the New Madrid fault - around Arkansas and Missouri - again?). Then there are the mouldy oldies that can cause a plague - against us or our monoculture crops (Mad Cow anyone?).
The problem I noted in beginning this is more serious. 50% of teen agers have a STD, what happens when something fatal like AIDS (or something that is extremely debilitating and/or expensive) enters into the MTV culture - assuming things like HPV aren't already 'it'? That is another real threat, but I don't see people asking MTV to become more Victorian (and Syphillis in an age without effective treatment brought that age on).
There is also cost involved in preparing for disasters that don't happen. New and sensational threats (especially ones that will fund research for many years) ought not be dismissed, but not overracted to. There are a lot of plain and common threats we ignore. Is there a reason that when we abandon common sense about real threats we must become puritanical about rare things? Smokers are persona non grata - even on the beech where people are developing melanomas.
Get real.
East Coast... Gone
West Coast... Gone
Problem... Solved!
But I find it hard to believe that human pollution is the only or even the biggest cause. Yes, I believe we are heading for a major world-wide catastrophy because of drought and flooding. I believe part of this is due to so many human beings using so much water, causing it to be either evaporated or polluted. The ocean does a good job of fixing the problem, but only on a geologic time-scale. The water that is evaporated eventually comes down as too much rain somewhere else. So we end up with droughts and floods in different places.
That, I believe, is the limit of humans having any major affect on our climate. As another post mentioned, we have been on a warming trend since the last ice-age. There have been several temporary warm-ups throughout history before there was much wide-scale industrialization. The world is in a constant state of change. Life is all about adjusting to those changes. Those beings that can't adapt will die-out. That's what evolution is all about.
I know I'm asking for a Troll rating on this one, but it's not meant as a troll. I am merely stating my opinion based on my own observations.
But why is the rum gone?
Last year in a newspaper article, the esteemed Mr. Michael Crichton commented on the fact that for years, he's been covering and writing about world disasters that have been fortold by scientists, the government , and news media, and that in all of that time not a single predicted catastrophe has come to pass. Global warming is just the latest in a series of liberal media scare tactics to get back viewers and regain lost ratings/subscriptions. (Cough... Dan Rather, CBS News... Cough...)
Anyone who has watched Trek knows that humans can permanently muck up the atmosphere of a planet.
This of course ignores the whole fact that no one agrees that we've actually "turned the burner on" as far as Earth is concerned.
Further we don't know what would happen if we "turned the burner off". This article suggests that we'd get the ice age routine just like in Fallen Angels.
The other article about Global Dimming also would suggest that there are other changes we aren't accounting for.
It's not a binary either-or problem. It's a complex system that is "described" using things like chaos theory.
BTW, statistical analysis against the old "hockey stick" temperature data suggests that the seed data is flawed and will always create a hockey stick shaped graph no matter what data is fed in to it.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
If that really is the case, then wouldn't it be a good idea to artificially increase the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere to reflect away even more sunlight in proportion to the increasing CO2 levels? Conspiracy nuts even say we're doing this already, with "chemtrails" spewed from fleets of jetliners.
Of course this would just be a bandaid solution, and there's still the law of unintended consequences to worry about in a large chaotic system. The ironic thing to me is that in the nearing carbon-based economy of nanotech, we'll probably have the reverse problem of people extracting too much free carbon out of the atmosphere.
Power to the Peaceful
The sun will burn out.. in roughly 4 billion years. Billion ... as in, a thousand thousand thousand.
Global warming could cause major havoc within *this century*.
Hey, terrorists might kill us, but we only live around 60-80 years anyway, so analogously, who cares, right?
Just because you won't live forever is a real stupid reason to walk into traffic.
PS, someday entropy will increase to a maximum and *nothing* will be alive. That's a fact. It doesn't mean we lay down and stop breathing.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Still ending last ice age, Link to wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages#The_Late_ Middle_Ages
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Hi Jerry
To be fair, we don't know that current changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation are driven by global warming (and in fact most models suggest otherwise). But global surface temperatures are rising consistently; the warmest four years on record have occurred since 1998.
Grant it you can't believe everything on the web (as is my discussion here) but sure.. here is the site where I got the 90% from (might I add this is from the UK even):
c on tent_objectid=13595107_method=full_siteid=50082_he adline=-England-suffering-dramatic-pollution-name_ page.html
3 .html
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0600uk/
that article is also pretty much repeated here:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_83584
Not to mention that I have friends that have visited parts of England and have told me that the smog there is horrible.
The Nomad
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-da Vinci
No No No No, the only thing I agree is that it's not the planet, it is us! Countries have had all sorts of pressure, eg the former USSR, but that has not caused global political disaster beacuse even when in desperate straights people can still make the choices necissary to act in their own best interest.
The *REAL* issue is that today many countries have signed a treaty (Kyoto) and the only reason why they think that it is a good deal is because it tries to screw the US harder than all the other countries combined. Its promoters know that they only chance they have of getting it thru is by screaming bloody murder that the sky is falling every time a weather or temperature anoymaly occurs. And since the last few years have had record sun spots (which coorelate 1000 times better than man made activities BTW) they have been exploiting that to the max.
The most pity-full part is that the treaty would actually make things far worse if implemented. The new regulations would increase the barriers to entry for the fossel fuel industries, which would drive down competition, which would allow them to reap more profits, which would guarantee the securement of financing to use up as much pollution "shares" as possible - and if anyone thinks that the rules wouldn't be "tweeked" once they've maxed out and locked in their monopoly, then I have some shares of the Brookland bridge to sell you.
Ironically, countries like US today tend to be moving away from an industrial production based economey that uses heavy environmental resources to an information based service one that tends to be more efficient. Kyoto would do allot to help dying industrial rellics lock in high prices to live a little longer, but nothing to promote such a service based economy or the environment.
Actually, we don't KNOW that our actions are causing the changes.
We KNOW that in a vacuum light goes so far a second. We KNOW that at sea level in a vacuum the gravitational acceleration is 9.81something something meters per second squared.
We don't know what out actions are causing and we don't know that further actions will cause further changes.
This has nothing to do with my wanting to pollute. But thanks for throwing that out, makes your argument much more believable. The old, if you don't agree with me, you must be bad routine.
George W. Bush told me that global warming is just some tree hugger myth perpetuated by the Enemies of Freedom. They hate our freedom to consume! We must be Firm in our National Resolve to Warm the Planet.
I think it's probably valid enough though to hypothesise that we will be freezing our butts off here in Ireland, and in the UK if the Gulf Stream just suddenly stops.
Like, one/two season's delay. Normal winter, normal spring, Gulf Stream stops, normal summer, autumn, MOSCOW-STYLE WINTER! (Look at the other places as far north as Dublin)
So no, it won't be "day after tomorrow" nonsense, but we'll be dropped straight into it, no time to adapt properly, with the first killer winter (literally - cause we can't cope with even an inch or two of snow, or at most a foot in the North) shaking people up rightly.
On the bright side, Ireland's nearly the richest country in Europe now, and our PM Bertie Ahern's declared himself a socialist. We'll just declare ourselves Nordic, bump up the state welfare system, and Bob's your uncle - another rich Scandinavian state.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
There is no "clear path". Until you find a cheap source of power that is easily transportable and offers a high energy density that doesn't have tons of hazardous waste in it's process and emits no pollution, there will never be a clear path.
Solar cells only work in the day, do not develop alot of power, and require alot of resources to make.
Hydro power would be clean, except for the fact that environmentalists don't want to dam rivers.
Nuclear is nice and clean aside from the reletively small amount of very hazardous waste. Doesn't work well on a small scale.
Alcohol, half the energy density of gasoline, we still have to make it, still pollutes.
Wind, not many areas are condusive to signifigant wind power, and again, environmentalists hate seeing crap on a hill.
Hydrogen, just get it from water right? When it burns it just produces water. If you can pull this one off without putting more energy in than you get out you could be a candidate for a nobel prize.
Geothermal, wastes water.
So where is this path that is so clear? All our energy sources had signifigant downsides.
Oh yeah, and COWS have been targeted as a source of global warming causing pollution because of methane gas. Yes, COWS, the walking refridgerators that preserve meat until we are ready to eat them.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
And you're not?
The most massively stupid of all the arguments is "It's pretty damn cold where I am right now."
Some of them are trying to be funny, some of them genuinely believe it.
Even on the face of it, with no deep thought, it should be obvious that if our planet has some cold places and some warm places and it warms up, the cold places will not necessarily become entirely warm.
Since the very center of Antarctica is starting out at -89 celsius, Antarctica will be coldish long, long after the rest of the planet is uninhabitable. The edges will melt, but the center will remain one of the coolest spots on Earth.
Now, the hotter the rest of the planet gets, the more convection there will be. The air starts to move around a lot more. There will be higher winds.
This part is like making soup. If you heat campbell's soup in a pot, you can see the convection get faster and faster. The noodles move more as the soup heats up, even before it boils.
With faster winds and more overall air movement, the cold air that usually just sits in the arctic regions gets stirred into the main air. That warms the arctic regions, and it freezes the hell out of anything in the way of that cold wind.
The fast that you're getting a cold wind in a relatively northern location like Massachusetts doesn't mean there isn't more total energy. It just means that you're getting a blast of arctic air.
Meauring the total average energy of the planet is not something you can do easily. It's not something an armchair scientist can do. You need many, many thousands of data points.
That means that you can't just toss away the Greenhouse supporters as "consensus scientists." The people who think it's just a normal warming trend are *also* "consensus scientists*. This is a much bigger thing than any one scientist can measure. It's going to take a community determination either way.
However, all that about what warming is aside, consider this:
We know that the pollutants fossil fuels put out are carinogens. We know fossil fuels are limited. We know people are dying because oil wealth is so unevenly distributed among nations. We know sunlight and wind are far more evenly distributed. We know that oil spills kill wildlife, that individually driven cars kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, that steel reserves aren't sufficient to keep throwing cars in dumps....
There are so many other reasons to stop hauling around two tonnes of metal everywhere you go just in case *today* is the day you have to move a piano. If you don't believe in the greenhouse effect, have the decency to consider these other problems. Without smoking and the American car culture, millions fewer would die each year.
The Mayans were gone before the europeans ever got to the Americas. As for the Incas, the spanish simply wiped them out using guns, not diseases such as small pox.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
There's not enough data to say the things this report is saying. All of these "catastrophe" reports are nothing more than political maneuvers backed by very little to no real scientific proof. Like a previous poster said, we've been in a warming trend since the last Ice age. The climate changes; It's a fact of the Earth. We don't know rates because these changes happen over hundreds of thousands of years, and the patterns last millions of years. We have data for a couple hundred years max. There's no way we could know whether or not what we're doing (humans) is either helping or hurting this process. Maybe we are helping the planet warm. But what's helping Mars warm? The sun's more active these days, making all planets warmer. Our magnetic field is in the beginning stages of a flip (magnetic north will become south and vice versa), and it's thus weakening. This prevents less of the sun's radiation from hitting parts of the Earth. All I'm saying is that this is a group of politicians who know nothing about what they speak (typical), and are just trying to scare people into voting for them again and to donate money to the environmental movement organizations that fund said politicians' campaigns.
Common sense isn't.
Actually I haven't yet seen one single piece of conclusive raw evidence supporting global warming. Many questions by millions of people are raised concerning it, including the fact that the planet's plantlife (which is increasing) takes in CO2 and emits oxygen, which is part of the natural balancing of the ecosystem.
If you look closely at the primary groups and individuals that spread apocalyptic claims about global warming, you'll notice that they are almost entirely politicians with agendas, academic professors (professors are not scientists), etc. Very few are scientists, and the scientists that are part of it have "connections".
It reminds me of the founder (and ex-president) of Greenpeace who is now boycotting his own organization, claiming that it has been politically hijacked. Even most local-level "experts" on environmentalism have shown personally that they don't know what they're talking about. And who ends up with the big $$$? These people and organizations.
I'd suggest watching the Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode on Environmentalism (and also PETA while you're at it hehe)
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
My previous link says they (physical scientists) don't believe global warming is happening.
You can read my documentation for my statement.
Where is yours?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Is there any proof that temperature increase is related to industrial activity?
Is there any proof that temperature increase directly causes "worldwide catastrophe"?
Plenty of assertions, correlations, theories, but no science. The argument that this is a normal part of our planet's healthy development is just as valid, in that both arguments are based on faith.
In my mind, its too early to change policy. First, we need to really understand the nature of climate and the impact of industrial activity. As near as I can tell, we don't yet appreciate the natural variability of climate, much less whether our activity is harmful or not.
I certainly hope that the next ten years doesn't throw the climate into catastrophy because we need that time and more just to make sense of what is happening.
And those old folks in Alaska will also tell you that they had to walk to school uphill both ways in that colder weather.
Won't work, global warming IS the fix to one of his biggest mistake.
All joking aside, I hear people from moderate or colder climates being genuinely serious about wanting global warming. Unfortunately, many of these people miss the point. While I stand to be corrected in my naive literalism, I would think that global warming refers to the average temperature of the world increasing. It does not mean that everybody will get warmer.
Many northern areas, esp. those with cold water currents from the Arctic nearby could conceivably become colder with global warming. For example, if the increase in global temperatures results in an increase of the melting of Arctic ice then even colder water could come down with those cold currents. This would have a cooling effect that could cancel out any warming in some areas.
The linked article in the original post refers to "the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream)" and that would not be good for many areas. Many relatively northern areas are warmed substantially by the Gulf Stream.
If you get an increase of cold water from the Arctic and a decrease of warm water from the Caribbean, a lot of areas with relatively cold temperatures may become even colder.
While an Arctic current and the Gulf Stream may be of no (direct) consequence to Michigan, the Great Lakes area in general is affected by the Lakes themselves. You think 0 degrees F is cold? It's still nothing compared to a Prairie winter.
What if global warming caused the water level to become lower? That could render the lakes less moderating. Hotter summers and colder winters is not what the Great Lakes area needs.
What if global warming resulted in the water level of the lakes increasing? Perhaps the area may become more moderated. You might also get flooding. You might get an increase of diseases flourishing in areas of low-level water that only started to form as the lakes rise.
Of course, that assumes the changes are in isolation, which they will not be.
It also ignores the political and economic side. Even with no change in the Great Lakes due to global warming, if the climate starts really acting up, somebody might want to pipe out significant portions of that water for economic reasons. You think President Bush would care about Michigan and New York if Jesusland needs water?
We can handle that. Of course, there's there matter of delivery times, and the global weather control station is just *crammed* with requests right now. We expect your extra 30F will arrive late July, perhaps early August. We hope you will enjoy our service and look forward to dealing with you again.
Sincerely, Global Weather Control, Inc.
I don't know about you guys, but I am freezing my ass off in Boston. We got almost two feet of snow and my gas-sipping Honda will not go anywhere even with snow tires. It does not have enough weight or power to plow through the snow. With that in mind, I am going to get an SUV next year. I don't care about spending more money on gas or pissing off some hippies. We live for today and not for tomorrow.
We must be reponsible; however, we should not forget that soon all of us will die and next generations will have to take care of this planet. You never know what they 'll end up doing, right? We always assume that we are bad and that we need to make the world a better place to live. Unfortunately, in life things are alot like in the stock market: past history does not indicate future performance. We can switch to cars that have 50HP and have 70mpg, use nuclear power instead of coal and eat hummus wraps. But we can't expect the future generations to do the same or even appreciate what we have done for them. For all I know, we can try our best and our kids and grandkids will still do whatever they want. We can elect "green" leaders and yet it will not stop some nut from nuking its neighbor. Do you really think that people in fifty years will say, "Oh, we can't do this to our planet because our grandparents took care of it!"? No, they will not.
We have to do what we need in order to survive and unfortunately sometimes it is not what we would like to do in the ideal world. The world is not pefect and neither are we.
We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? ... ....Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE! We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
But for us to sit here and say "nothing will change" and turn a blind eye is just plain stupid. If you're older, than
- BUY LESS STUFF and don't throw out so much trash (help decrease the resource consumption cycle)
- Demand resource and energy efficient alternatives
- Tell your politicians that you care about environmental issues such as air, water quality, waste responsibility
- Steer clear of, and tell others to stay away from practices you know to be harmful
If you are fearing that such practices will destroy the US economy, don't worry -- the economy is on its way to collapse under the weight of decades of corporate scandals and greed. You are NOT going to destroy the economy by cutting down consumption. Nor are you going to save the economy by purchasing new cars or computers.Do what you know is right. And if you're religious at all, take pride in the fact that you will not be eternally marked with the sin of helping destroy the lives of your fellow humans.
It's called being 'mortal' - deal with it. If you read all the 'scare journalism' and start to take it seriously, you'll never get out of bed in the morning. There's a lot of junk science that's reported as though it was valid. There's a lot of very low probability threats reported without addressing the probability. There's a lot of legitimate problems reported without reference to solutions or means of avoiding / averting the threat.
The problem is that too many journalists are scientifically illiterate or have an agenda (or both).
[Insert pithy quote here]
or Israel gets a plague of locusts.
You'd like that, wouldn't you?
The global warming crowd would have you believe that their science and their theories are foolproof. In fact, they are in the early dawn of their efforts. No one - NO ONE - can yet demonstrate how global warming is working, or even if it truly is happening. Medical science was once at the point where they knew that using leeches helped prevent infections from growing worse, so they tried leeches for most everything. The global warming "scientists" are not even at that point yet. I dare anyone to tell me that forcing countries around the world to do "X" will in truth cause "Y" to happen, on a global environmental scale. Personally, I think the deforestation of vast parts of Europe and North America, and now being followed by deforestation across much of South America, Africa and Asia, are the major disruptors of stable climatic effects.
Perhaps the global warming crisis is at hand and immediate drastic measures are needed now. Perhaps we've been complacent, shortsighted, ignorant, slow to respond, stupic, etc. etc.
But this alleged report is all about the horrible consequences of our past sins rather than about about the modeling of the future climate. That makes it sound like just another attempt by people with a point of view to scare people into doing what they want rather than a serious attempt to shape opinion with insight, facts, and arguments. People everywhere are weary of terrorism and scare tactics being used as a tool for action. If this is truly a potential crisis, it deserves a sober approach and not just a lot of hysterical arm waving by an anonymous group identified only as "...a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world."
If I were in charge of an islamic state, with access to nuclear material, and a sea or ocean; I'd be staring at that water, hard. I'd be looking at some underground, underwater way to generate that salt water to fresh water. I'd be looking next at assisting the farmers on how to handle that much water coming in to the country side. I figure the local commercial types could take it from there.
Same old bollocks from the idiot lefties desperate to maintain control of a world that's getting away from them.
Wake me up when disaster strikes, Chicken Little.
>Nothing meaningful will be done until literally hundreds of millions or billions of people are killed.
You know, when I was young, we had nuclear weapons pointed at each other, able to kill millions within 20 minutes, millions more within 24 hours and those would be the lucky ones. And the few people who controlled the weapons had the motive and training/will to "push the button". Lets not even talk about accidential launchings. The effect on Earth, something it has never seen before since it cooled down, was a secondary afterthought.
And did I ever tell you how I walked to school uphill? Both ways?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Biodiesel still requires burning. Meaning we still make CO2. Sorry, try again.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Yes, our nations are causing these changes. And, our nations can indeed actually stop the runaway effect if it happens. I have no idea why people aren't addressing this.
If we do reach the so-called point of no return (where Greenland's glaciers melt, the Amazon goes up in flames, the amount of Oxygen decreases, etc), why can't we just launch a very large solar-sail and block out the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth? I.e. move us into the "shade".
Yes, it would take a lot of fabric. Yes, it would take a lot of launches and resources to track and manuver each sail. But yes, it would cut down on the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth.
If the point-of-no-return is indeed only ten years off, IMHO we had better start moving on this today. Not as a cure, but as a backup plan in case this thing really does happen.
For those of you old enough to remember the dynamic 60's space program, this would top that. And have to be international in scope.
What am I missing here? The only thing I can think of is reduced crop seasons. But this is going to happen anyway.
We don't know that our actions are causing changes. Any speculation about "expecting a shake-up" is 99.99% BS.
At the very least we know that in 20 years or so we will have burned essentially all of the stored carbon from millions of years of accumulation. That's a change. That's a freaking *huge* change.
You really have to wonder what people like the parent's poster are thinking. They obviously are not rational, but from other posts the author is clearly educated and literate. So what makes an educated, literate person irrational? Religion.
What does it say about God when we have so much domain over our planet that we can reshape it... or destroy it? Like a sun-centered solar system, a mutable earth can shake a person's faith; they think Man is powerless before God, and God created the earth (and put all the fossils and layers there to trick us into trusting science and thus making computers and such, if we were not faithful enough).
I suppose it could just be mental illness though. Denial can be a coping skill, but when it will impact your life severely (like 30+ ft. raise in sea level, global dieoff, etc) and you still refuse to witness the plain facts that's an illness.
"The point is that our actions are causing changes, over and above the normal warming we'd expect to see due to normal ebb and flow of ice ages."
As it happens, there's no compelling evidence to support this claim. What we have is a SMALL measured change in global temperature which is well within the normal variation of the last 50 years, never mind the last 50,000, plus a great deal of unsupported, computer model generated balderdash. Total evidence of human-caused warming beyond mere correlation: zero. Correlations are interesting, but not proof of causal relationships.
Go look it up. Net change since ~1950 is under +2 degrees C, well within the "noise" level. I'll save my panic for later, thanks all the same.
Besides, being Canadian I'd say better warming than cooling. You can irrigate a desert but its hard to farm a glacier.
I hear everyone spouting selfish arguments about how global warming is a bad thing. Of course- you probably live in Europe, America, or the tropics.
Selfish bastards.
To those of us who live in the polar regions, we welcome global warming with open arms. What's bad for you is good for us. Just because it might make your city uninhabitable doesn't mean it's bad for the entire Earth. Those living in areas that are always covered in ice will see their life improve. But as it is now, it just so happens that most people live in regions that are currently temperate and they don't want THEIR life to change. So the majority will be on their side.
But that just shows your shortsightedness and selfishness.
Well, Sherlock, we have some pretty good evidence for it. As I keep having to repeat: we know we are releasing CO2, we know that CO2 is staying in the atmosphere, and we know that CO2 absorbs IR radiation. We also know a bunch of other facts about the physics of radiative transfer, thermodynamics, fluuid flow etc etc. We know that when we combine those facts in a computer model that that model shows warming (on average). Finally, we know that it is getting warmer (on average).
Don't confuse not knowing everything with knowing nothing.
if you don't agree with me, you must be bad routine.
Well, I see you using deliberately disingenous arguments to defend a position that would allow you to continue polluting, even in the face of evidence that such pollution causes long-term risks for the survival of others (and yourself). Is that "bad"? Are you actually an environmentalist? Perhaps, but I'd be willing to wager my left nut that you aren't.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
:) I prefer celsius myself. F always throws me off. I'm glad I live by the water, though - thermal regulation is neato.
Don't confuse knowing very little with knowing nothing at all. Take a pot of water and put it on the stove. Turn on the burner. You know that the water will get warm and eventually boil.
Boiling a pot of watter has been repeated. I have not seen anyone show me that in that past CO2 levels have gone up and temperature went up with it.
Besides, wouldn't the sun be a better analogy for the burner as opposed to CO2? Especially seeing as how solar output has gone up?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
global warming is the biggest bunch of horse-puckey ever forced on the world's non-scientifically educated populations ... which is most of them ...
... hellloo? anybody out there witha CLUE? If ol' Sol changes output by 0.000001% we're gonna FEEL it ... and don't tell me the Sun is a constant-output reactor!
not a SINGLE study relating to this shows Earth "changes" vs. solar output
Just total bullshit, fostered by communist countries that can't compete with the U.S.
I tend to view this situation as though we've doused the world with gasoline, and the various leaders of the industrialized (and even pre-industrialized!) world are standing around fumbling with matches while giving each other the raspberry.
Bzzzt.
Duh.
Almost went into the ditch on one side, maybe (ice age).
Then we swerved away from it (agriculture-produced warming).
Now we're crossing the double yellow line (2 degrees Centigrade).
Headed for the opposite ditch (Venus, a runaway greenhouse).
That must be progress!
I would much prefer them to wait until there is a better understanding of what the problem really is. We don't know all the parts to the problem either, some claim one thing while others claim another.
Right now Global Warming is a catch all phrase used to explain the unexplainable. Got a very cold winter, its Global Warming, got a warm winter, its Global Warming. No rain? Too much rain? Hell some pundits tried to blame the Tsunami on it!
See the issue here? How is the public to know what is and what isn't when anything and everything is blamed on "Global Warming". It would be unfair to claim people have their heads in the sand.
The problem facing the Global Warming crowd is that they don't agree amongst themselves except for the fact the weather changes. Everyone is quick to chime in with their example even if it contradicts another.
As such my view is,
Do not attempt to correct something when you don't even know how it really works.
Common replies I expect will state "We know how it works" which obviously isn't true or that "We know what is causing it" which ignores the whole issue I provided.
Get it right. Many of us do care.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
>They are conveniently ignoring the fact that 6 Billion human beings BREATHING emit more CO2 in one year than all of the fossil fuels that have been combusted since they were first extracted from the ground.
;) A while back one group claimed that *anything* that emits CO2 was a pollutant. By using a little logic (which is a good thing haha), that would immediately include humans and all animals. Countries might as well just start doing Stalin-like population reduction tactics (and my family history goes into that - my grandpa escaped the Ukraine during Stalin's mass starvation tactics; my grandma lived in West Germany and her dad was very outspoken against Hitler; her family was always afraid he was going to be taken away)
Actually they're not ignoring that lol
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
Global Warming is the biggest sheet pulled over the worlds eyes ever. This is just how earth works. Nothing we can/could do about it. BTW, i just took all the catalytic converters out of my car, take that nature.
Since it is not real, that makes them better than the alchemists (can't call them scientists!) funded by rich and powerful "environmentalist" groups who put forth the fakey "global warming" theories.
Thank you.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
OK, so human activity (fossil involving fuels, principally) are to blame for so-called global warming. This leads to some interesting questions:
...and if anyone is experiencing global warming in their area, please turn on a fan and point it in the direction of the northeastern U.S. It's cold as hell here!
What caused the end of the last ice age? Cavemen and campfires?
A Canadian economist a few years ago reviewed the data that the first guy (OK, I'm a little short on details) who postulated global warming. He (the economist) found there were errors in the data and the methodology, and when the errors were corrected, the warmest time on record was in the middle ages.
Finally, to say the global temperature is warming is a dramatic and ridiculous oversimplification of the facts. Unless you can compare every temperature from every day (or hour!) of the year, from a very large number of points on Earth to some historical baseline, how can one even suggest any kind of trend.
This continues to be JUNK SCIENCE of the highest (lowest?) order.
NASA-GISS Warming
Did he inhale?
Here is the cold hard truth - we Americans are living in the 29th day of a lifestyle that is not sustainable, and it will end soon, very soon. The world, as well as basic geology and the second law of thermodynamics is begining to tell us we can't keep living this way. Our consumer driven lives do come at a cost, in economic terms the hidden costs of our lifestyles are called "externalities". These externalities include massive degradation to the environment. 25% of the coral reefs in the world are dead. Most fish is unsafe to eat now because of heavy metal content. Our fisheries are dying out. Rainforrests are becoming a thing of the past.
For those of you who live down in the desert what happens to Las Vegas when the Colordo river stops turning the turbines in the Hoover dam - the flow rate was down 70% below average last year and we have had 2 wet decades and are now entering into a dry era.
The average American meal travels 1300 miles fueled by hydrocarbon energy before we eat it. Every calorie of food we eat requires 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy input to produce it, not including packaging and transportation. All of our fertilizers and pesticides are derrived from oil and natural gas. 90% of an Iowa farmer's costs are directly and indirectly related to the cost of fuel. Every pound of beef produced uses 2500 gallons of water and 16 pounds of grain. Talk about unsustainable. What happens when the fuel runs out? We will we have a couple options, scale back usage, or go to war to procure the remaining scraps of what is left. Our administration chose plan B. Going to war for something that should be left in the ground in the first place.
Right now is a very precarious time in American history and I think war is the last thing we should be pursuing, why? We are is massive massive debt. The trade deficit is gargantuan. Our dollar is financed to the hilt, and it's on the virge of collapse. Petrodollars as they call them now in economics are relying heavily on China buying our t-bonds, the corrupt world bank loaning money to third world nations which will never be able to pay them off (forcing them into credit card debt if you will), and the oil trade being financed in the dollar instead of the euro. That was in fact one of the hidden agendas of the war in Iraq, to get Iraq's oil trade switched back into dollars (it took about one week after the invasion to get that done) because Saddam had changed it over to euros and we weren't going to take it. But, the world is starting to consider switching anyway. We have 800 military bases around the world, fighting multiple front wars, buying, spending, consuming, pillaging, like there is no tomorrow. It's called imperial overstretch, it's why the Rome and the Soviet Union collapsed. If we don't stop imperial overstretch, there will be no tomorrow.
By the way, did you realize that Saudi Arabia -the most intolerant regime on the face of the earth- has 7 trillion in our stock market? The lead the wold in beheadings you know. 15 out of 19 of the hi-jackers who did 9/11 were from, you guessed it, Saudi Arabia.
Additionally the housing bubble is poised to collapse. Houses are WAY WAY WAY overvalued. I hope you didn't just buy a house. And the production of Oil and natural gas is going to start into a permanent decline when both of those peak, as soon as now - 2007.
"If you think there's a problem, why don't you pay to fix it?"
Wherein lies the problem. Nobody wants to get caught holding the tab. This problem is going to make things like Y2K look inexpensive, and if it turns out that global warming is as much of a non-event as Y2K was, (whether because the problem was actually averted or because it was never a problem to begin with) then you're going to look mighty dumb for having spent 100+ trillion dollars or however much it will actually cost to slow/reverse the current warming trend.
There very well may be a problem. There also may very well be no good solution. If there is a problem, count on having to wait until it's obvious that people are dying from the problem before there will be any real effort put into fixing things (and not just from coincidental climate randomness either, because that could just be a fluke, right?). And just hope that the people who are dying are also the people who have the money. The United States would rather send you a billion dollars in aid than to spend quite a few trillion to curb pollution. In any case, you're still going to have to wait until it's too late, or almost too late, and perhaps satisfy yourself with a really big "I told you so." That's as close to victory as you're gonna get realistically.
All hail capitalism.
I was really worried for a while but then I realized they meant 2 degrees Celsius, which is like 50F, so I think we're ok for a while.
See Jared Diamond's new book Collapse, for a history of the influence of environment degregation on the collapse of civilizations from Easter Island to the Mayan Empire and cliff dwellers.
Dude, it's only been down to 10 below or so. Hell, I've still been riding my bike 10 miles to work once in a while. Stop being a sissy.
Besides, I have to assume that you realize that your statement is silly. Global warming means there's more energy in the weather system, not that we're all going to be sun bathing in December. More energy feeding into a chaotic system just means more chaos.
Yeah, yeah...we've heard all this shit before. In the 1970s it was global cooling and we were all looking at a future as ice cubes. Now it's global warming. Whatever. Call me when it's the end of the world. I want to take pictures.
c'est un farce! Global warming is nonsense crackpot theory invented by hippies and liberals. Bah.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Spelt.....
Have you been DaMa9eD today?
When you don't know everything, you know nothing, but you can guess at a great deal.
Everything you said we know about CO2 is true, but until we know everything, there will be space for surprises. I'm not defending the position that we should pump CO2 into the atmosphere here, just saying that all we have today is a fabric of guesswork.
New book by Michael Crichton. Read it. While a work of fiction, Crichton clearly did his research as is evidenced by the plethora of footnotes and published research paper references. As with most things, don't believe the media hype. I remember in Connections, James Burke says "That's when Greenland stopped being green." Twenty-five years ago, they knew that this wasn't the first time the Earth got warmer. Maybe we'll once again be able to enjoy "the chateau-bottled fruity little numbers from England."
You're right about the Mayans, but there's no way a few hundred Spanish conquistadors could kill tens of millions of Aztecs, Incas, and so forth in a few years using their primitive guns. Their guns' accuracy and rate of fire were both too poor to give the advantage to a few hundred conquistadors over an army of tens of thousands of Incas or Aztecs. However, disease could and did make the difference, and the combination of external attack and massive plague deaths are what brought down the Aztec and Inca empires.
As for wiping them out, even if the guns had been more effective, the Spanish didn't have anywhere near enough men or ammunition to kill tens of millions in that time span. European diseases did the vast majority of the damage.
Take a look at these graphs.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Any more commenting on this crap would be a waste of electrons.
I personally applaud the Bush administration's intentional acceleration of greenhouse gas production, general environmental damage, and expanded fossil fuel dependancy.
Hopefully within just a few more years, enough polar ice will melt to cause a world wide coastline rise, thus eliminating all of those bozos that always vote for democrats.
I say - bring it on. All of us evangelical christians smile a bit as we hear that it looks like the end of the world is coming. We know that the world of man is doomed anyway, heck maybe the whole title fight can transpire before i have kids that have to go through it. I'm glad we finally got someone bent on accelerationg the destruction of the world in office, hopefully Jesus takes the cue.
Bouns: please note how i only care about the affects on america in my post, even though it's plainly obvious that the entire planet will suffer.
I just wnated to make sure i've upset _every possible one of slashdots whining factions_.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Yup!
You go out and purchase real estate at the higher elevations in low-lying states. For example, I grew up in Florida and recall that the highest point is near Tallahassee (something like 85 meters). Imagine owning Tallahassee island in a few years ....
Furthermore, the theory suggests that extreme tempreture variations will be caused by Global Climate Change, so lets get this out of the way. "Global warming" refers to the gradual increase of the Earth's average surface temperature, due to a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. "Climate change" is a broader term that refers to long-term changes in climate, including average temperature and precipitation, as well as changes in the seasonal or geographic variability of temperature and precipitation.
Global warming is one of the led- in factors but not the sole cause for "global climate change."
Global temperatures have increased by 1F over the past 100 years. Although this may seem like a small change, it is enough to harm important ecosystems, change rainfall patterns and raise the sea level. Climate models project additional warming of about 2-10 F over the next 100 years. The overwhelming consensus of scientists who study the atmosphere is that this warming is caused primarily by the build-up of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. Pew's Global Climate Change page
Still Mud? Try www.phoenixmud.org!
Highlander 2 is the prophet movie of the ages.
America is evil. Bush is responsible. Venice will be flooded(wasn't it nearly completely dried out a week or two ago?). When this STOPS being a political issue and moves into a scientific forum, I might listen.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
If the science involved is correct, then I don't believe that there is much hope for us. While as individuals or as small groups -- perhaps even nations -- many of us are capable of understanding the urgency of the matter and what needs to be done to avert a global catastrophe, I don't believe it will be enough; too many of us are unable and/or unwilling to understand the problem and what hangs in the balance.
These days, I often think that the whole situation looks a lot like a simple, closed-ecosystem experiment that one might perform in a lab involving a petri dish, an algae culture and some bacteria. If the bacteria were smart, they would limit their own population size before reaching the point at which the algae could not reproduce fast enough to feed them anymore, or the point at which they would be poisoned by their own waste products before it could be processed by the algae. But, being bacteria, they're not so smart, so they eat and reproduce themselves to death. It seems to me that, at the moment, we're behaving just like those bacteria; by the time enough of us realize that something is wrong, it'll be too late for us all.
If anyone wants a depressing SciFi book to read I recommend "The Sea and Summer" by George Turner:
6 203583?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/058
I don't believe that global warming is a threat to the human species. But in developed nations we and our children will experience a reduced quality of life. In the developing world where they don't have the resources to deal with more frequent extreme weather there is suffering and death in store.
From a column of George Orwell's, 3 November 1944:
/ O/ OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19441103.html
"TO the lovers of useless knowledge (and I know there are a lot of them, from the number of letters I always get when I raise any question of this kind) I present a curious little problem arising out of the recent Pelican, Shakespeare's England. A writer named Fynes Morrison, touring England in 1607, describes melons as growing freely. Andrew Marvell, in a very well-known poem written about fifty years later, also refers to melons. Both references make it appear that the melons grew in the open, and indeed they must have done so if they grew at all. The hot-bed was a recent invention in 1600, and glass-houses, if they existed, must have been a very great rarity. I imagine it would be quite impossible to grow a melon in the open in England nowadays. They are hard enough to grow under glass, whence their price. Fynes Morrison also speaks of grapes growing in large enough quantities to make wine. Is it possible that our climate has changed radically in the last three hundred years? Or was the so-called melon actually a pumpkin?"
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors
3 November 1944 - As I Please - George Orwell, Book, etext
We still don't know what's driving climate change. Whether it's anthropogenic or otherwise is more worthy of debate. The climate has changed in the past, and the climate will change in the future. We do not even know whether climate change is bad.
Thanks for your prompt reply to our service request.
However, if the 30F does not arrive until July, rest assured that the talk will be shifting from global warming to the up coming ice age. Average summer temps here are around 80F. I expect that your shipment of of 30F will arrive in the next week or so only to have to return it and be reshipped one or more times over the next two months.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
Can I just offer a big thanks to everyone who sat out on the November vote, or voted to put us 50 years behind on this track. THANKS! We'll likely be holding each other up at gunpoint for our water supplies in a couple years, so maybe I should save my thanks until we meet in person. :)
Sure, we'd still have ambulances and fire trucks and so forth, but you have to look at the situation from the stand point of someone living in it.
For years we've gotten by with horses, ox-carts and so forth. We can do better than that now, without the pollution.
We, as a race, will not change until we have no other option. Maybe a big breakdown is what we need?
According to this article we could possibly generate all the electricity we need, at least during the day time, in 10 years with Stirling engine's that generate electricity from solar power. That coupled with fuel cells should be able to dramatically reduce our dependence on oil, and as a result reduce green house gas emissions.
Now, the one problem with this scenario is the U.S. and its current leadership, which is deeply invested with in the oil market, and makes HUGE profits when the price of a barrel of oil goes up and up and up. I hope that with in 10 years the rest of the world will gain a back bone and stand up to the U.S. instead of be bullied around. It won't be too hard to do, seeing that the U.S. economy is already in the shitter now, and Asia and the EU are projected to make huge economic gains in the near future.
Here is hoping that U.S. power is diminished in the next ~10 years, so we can avert this catastrophe.
Greed is why.
Getting an extra few hundred dollars back in your taxes is more important to people than the future of their own children (see under: Republicans' fiscal policies). Driving a Hummer to work is more important than not being able to breathe (see under: LA smog). And getting your way is more important than killing 15,000+ human beings you don't know (see under: Iraq war).
If we were seriously concerned about any of this, starting with the most immediate, breathable air in our cities, we'd have hydrogen cars out there already. But until people start dropping like flies from lung diseases, until all those rich f**ks don't suffer themselves, we're not really going to come up with a solution. But by then, it'll just be too late.
I just wonder once people start dying in the US, if the US will try to storm the remaining food/resource reserves by force. (yes, you might argue that Iraq already happened, but I'm talking resources other than oil).
If our future depends on our ability to sacrifice something for the sake of our well-being 10+ years from now, we're all screwed.
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
1) Short of enforced birth control, the human population will increase.
2) Unchecked population growth will imply large scale changes to the environment. Food must be grown, energy must be collected, people must live somewhere. All the latter require surface area and raw materials of one form or another.
3) Current economics or attitudes, and their effects, are symptoms of the growing population. Changing them will not change the fact that more humans are created than die.
Therefore, one could conclude that the changes proposed by the enviro sensitive are only delay tactics. The global climate, if it is affected by humans, will change whether we like it or not.
The challenge then is not to try to stem or avert the change. It will happen. Change, as always, is inevitable. Those who would try to convince you otherwise have their own interests at heart. A report endorsed by politicians and industry? Think about it.
The challenge IS to adapt to the new environment. Humans have done so in the past and we will do so in the future. That's why we're the dominant species.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Shiz you can at least wait until we're experiencing a unprecedented heat wave to get my attention....
Oh my god. Never have I seen a funnier Score 5 funny. Good job dude. Or not.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
All you global-warming alarmists have is shrill fear-mongering and name calling.
Don't look now, but people are beginning to notice.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
The great bogey man nailed by many environmentalists (much to the degree of many collectivists) is the industrail revolution which occurred in the early-to-mid 1800's (some even go back to the mid to late 1700's). Since Orwell is writing during America's postwar industrial boon about events that that occurred well before industrialization, this passage seems to more or less support the notion of anthropogenic change.
Still, you're quite right. Climatologists who aren't funded by the governments of the world, and are thus removed from the Iron Rice Bowl/Iron Triangle (PDF) effect, often point to ice cores taken in antartica as proof that we are in a natural cyclic period of climate change. Scientists using computer models often have to use mathematical tricks to get the models to fit the data, indicating that issues like CO2 and particulate emission have been greatly exaggerated. The more I read about global warming, the more I'm convinced that its quite the ballyhoo, and is distracting from more serious ecological issues like the penetration of toxic metals into groundwater and nitrogen-laden runoff in coastal estuaries affecting fish stocks.
Can I join you? We could start a vast, wasteland roaming posse. I've actually built pneumatic arrow launchers, so I'm handy.
--- Ban humanity.
You forget, the wacko leftists are not capable of logic because it quickly dispatches 99.9% of their emotionally-driven pseudo-arguments.
Maybe I was being a bit oblique, but my point was that I don't believe there is any impending global warming catastrophe.
I guess global warming isn't even questioned on Slashdot, huh?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
That's incisively put.
I'd like to draw the topic's attention to a very recent book: "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", by Jared Diamond (whom many may know as the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel.") He treats many of these ideas in detail and at length.
Thank you for raising that. It was sort of annoying to see how quite a few people seem to think that the Kyoto treaty was a gift from God, and it would solve all our problems, and how Bush is utterly evil because he was in charge of the government that turned it down.
You know, the thing is, I realize that humans are polluting the environment, no one argues with that. Is it doing irreparable damage? Not in the really long term. Might we die off before it gets repaired? Sure.
There's a lot of stuff we can be doing, and I do a lot of it myself, but there's also no reason to get rabid about it, and there's no reason to jump at the first treaty that talks about cutting pollution, especially when it's a poorly formed one that is made to benefit certain countries over others (and not the least-polluting countries either).
Computer models are not, in fact, wildassed guesses. If you know otherwise, please explain. I'm sure the world's climate modellers would love to know what you're basing that assertion on... unless it's a wild-assed guess, of course? Just a hunch.
Of course the models aren't perfect, and of course there is more to learn about the past & present climate. Yes, climate's a very complex, non-linear system, with emergent features, unexpected interactions, and the model's grids are getting finer and finer each year. Still, we know much more than you suspect, with much more certainty than you seem to think. As I keep saying, if you know better than tens of thousands of very intelligent, dedicated, hard-working scientists, with massive amounts of data, published in peer reviewed journals, I'm sure we'd all love to hear about it. If you're just spouting off on Slashdot cos you just don't like hippies, well enjoy your drought (if you're in the west of the US), your -30 degrees big freeze if you're in the NE, your thaw if you're in the arctic north, and your crumbling economy wherever your are.
YAAT (BYHL). HAND!
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
The sunlight is getting to Earth. It's being absorbed in the atmosphere. And guess what the absorption of sunlight causes? heat -- warming, in other words. That's not good news.
Then why are you impressed by the statement "lots of (social) scientists BELIEVE global warming is happening?"
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
You mean like gas is now in the UK? Alright, when I was there last month at the then-current exchange rate, it was $6.25 a gallon, not $7.00 a gallon, but, close enough.
Gas at $2, $5, or even $8 a gallon won't stop people using gas for their cars; they'll just shift to more economical vehicles or modes of transportation.
Gas at $50 a gallon, or gas availability of only 1 or 2 days a month, on the other hand, makes it impractical to use as a staple of 99.9% of the population's lifestyle. That's when a fundamental shift in society's infrastructure must occur.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
The point is that our actions are causing changes,
over and above the normal warming we'd expect to see due to normal ebb and flow of ice ages.
Ok I am calling bullsh#t here.
What is the normal ebb and flow exactly?
No answer?
How about approximately?
Be honest here we have no idea what the normal "ebb and flow is."
In fact it can be fun just to get the people studying this stuff to agree on IF we are still in a Ice Age or not. If you can't even answer that question why again am I supposed to think that disrupting the US economy is reasonable again?
Back in 1975, I was told that we were going to run out of oil by 1980 ... and I was SO looking forward to driving. Obviously that hasn't happened. Probably never will.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Surprisingly, some scientists think rather the opposite.
Basically thier theory is that global warming hs averted a catostrophic ice age from hitting us.
More details on the study here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Israel gets a plague of locusts" .....ah one can only hope......
"Not to mention that I have friends that have visited parts of England and have told me that the smog there is horrible."
What, your friends have somehow time travelled back to the Tyme Of Ye Olde Sherlock Holmes ?
I suggest your friends are winding you up, their are very strict rules governing air pollution in the UK, it's almost impossible to live anywhere where you allowed coal or wood fires and factories are tightly monitored for emmissions. I live in Birmingham which was once the industrial capital of the UK and probably the world and the air here is a clean and pure as could be.
"...The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world..."
Where can I find the names of the senile politicians who wrote this report ?
I would categorize dismissers as: "Pshaw" type: don't demonstrate any basic depth of knowledge, beyond the fact the sun rose this morning. Basically, sitting pretty and don't care, and know they won't be alive to feel the consequences of their actions. "Bought" type: Spew out lots of carefully selected figures from a much larger pool of data to selectively discredit that which the total pool of data overwhelming demonstrates. Invariably financed by an industry group. "Ostrich" type: Smart enough to see what is happening, but just shove their heads in the ground. Never met, seen, or heard a dismisser that had a cogent argument.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
>You forget, the wacko leftists are not capable of logic because it quickly dispatches 99.9% of their emotionally-driven pseudo-arguments.
That reminds me of a liberal girl who once told me that men in general are an inferior race when compared to women, and that I was racist; except that was right after I said that men and women are equal lol
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
BTW, never will I say this is an easy thing to do. However, it is something that must be done. Things that must be done are never easy to do.
The way to start is with us, people who can have the forsight and intellectual capacity to see and understand these facts. To continue this, we must instill these thoughts and beliefs into as many people as possible, if anything, with the children we have.
We need to do this, if we don't, we may as well line ourselves up and put eachother out of our collective misery.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
The reason to do nothing ineffective now (e.g. Kyoto) is that it will be cheaper to address the problems as they occur later than to prevent them now. This is true for four reasons: 1) the time value of money, 2) a free market society gets richer and richer all the time, 3) new technologies get invented all the time, and 4) scientists are just guessing (remember Global Cooling?).
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Get a clue people, they are BSing you. Remember the Freon BS? Turns out that Freon had NOTHING to do with the ozone depletion. Junk science.
The sky is just fine. Even if we go 10 degrees C higher, we will be where we were about 6 hundred years ago, before the last mini ice age.
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of wes
Wow! TOTALLY Deserving of Score:4 Funny or whatever it will end up with.
Stand up comedians should just quit working. We have slashdot teenagers whooping up about driving SUVs and burning oil because it just may piss off someone. Wow that is funny.
Slashdot seriously needs a filter to remove messages moderated as funny. They never are.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Global dimming?!? Damn, and here I thought it was just US voters.
The spirit of Thomas Malthus lives on. And Malthus was wrong, too. So was Paul Erlich.
...no computer program in the world can accurately tell you exactly what the pattern of bubbles will be during the boiling...
Well, maybe we can't tell the exact pattern of the bubbles, but, we can at least sort them! Go go gadget bubblesort!
I just read a few posts saying that it's time to do something.
Well, ok, do it.
Here's a short list:
1) Replace your lightbulbs with Compact Flourecents
2) Put those wall warts on a switch.
3) Turn off unused equipment
4) Use a setback thermostat
5) Lower your hot water temperature
6) Insulate your hotwater heater
7) Reduce your use of Air Conditioning
8) Your SETI at home score is meaningless - turn your computer off when you're not using it.
9) Drive the speed limit
10) Drive less.
11) Get a home energy audit.
Easy things to do, and pretty painless. Anyone know of any good any good books/resources on how to conserve juice?
I don't see anyone else mention this yet... but wouldn't it be wise to move away from fossile fuels and accept nuclear power. We can make nuclear power relatively safe with pebble bed reactors and although its not a perfect choice, given global warming, it is probably the lesser evil.
...if Lake Vostok http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok were to melt then we might get either supersaturated with oxygen or some 400,000 year old bacteria. But considering Vostok's is the coldest place on Earth it would take a great deal of global warming.
Or a little too curious scientist.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Global warming is caused by human activity. Are there any studies of the feasability of further human activities that may mitigate it? Things that come to mind are: increased particulate production (volcanoes do it) and space-based reflectors. The downside: once you start fiddling with the controls, everything can go haywire!
This is what worries me personally. I mean here I am walking around in shorts today in London, and yet I hear that people closer to the equator (e.g. in Chicago or Washington) are having less of a balmy day today. I don't really want their weather. I like the Gulf Stream!
Shoot every Hummer owner. Yes, on the spot!
As far as I have been able to tell, none of the these elaborate computerized climate models on which we are asked to make life and death decisions has been tested against the real world to see if they could accurately reproduce the climate of the past.
For example, if we had a model that claimed to predict the climate for the next 100 years, we could test it by plugging in the climate data for 1905 and running it forward to see if we get output that matches the actual climate of the past 100 years. If it did (and did so repeatedly), we could be fairly certain that the model could predict the next 100 years.
I have dug through numerous such reports without seeing any indication that the original researches tested their models. Until they do, I say we don't make wrenching economic changes based on their say-so.
man, that was quite funny :)
Friend of the Wise, Brother of the Brave.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to save my words forever in the archives of Slashdot:
Catastrophe is not imminent. "Global warming" is overhyped by people who like to think that they're gifted with knowledge and vision, but in reality have the same extremely limited and largely meaningless small set of data that everyone else has.
(Mods can ignore this post; it's only here for see-I-told-you-so purposes. Or you can mod it down, up... whatever.)
Do you understand the words I am using?
"Documentation?"
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
This would have alarmed me before.. But after reading Michael Crichton's new book "State of Fear"... You realize how alarmist these people are and that they really don't have a lot of facts to back up their arguments. Would global warming really be that bad?
You raise some good points and I am concerned about a lot of them too. I do have three children to feed. However, I refuse to run around in a panic just because "a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world" are scared. This is not science, it's politics. In fact most everything I read about Global Warming reeks of politics.
m l
Read this essay for a more detailed explaination on why I refuse to scare easily:
http://www.sepp.org/NewSEPP/GW-Aliens-Crichton.ht
You're gonna have to sometime, the oil will not last forever. And without oil, no electricity, little economy and yep, grass huts and beans. Spend your children's inheritance, so long as you had fun in your Hummer, right?
Actually, oil makes up less than 2% of the US electricity generation. Much less than natural gas which could be said to be linked. Still, IIRC, 53% comes from coal and around 20% from hydro. Coal is much worst for the envronment than the burning of oil and if weather patterns change, we may see our current hydro system in for a shock. But without oil, I imagine that we'll be changing over to biodiesel or some such for autos, but it's not like the oil will run out all at once. Easy to get to and cheap to pump oil will start going away and the price of oil will grow hirer and hirer. We'll start using lower grade oil and switching to other energy sources as it does. The major effect of running low on oil is that our economy will slow due to the higer costs of energy.
Terrifying!
Terrifying!
We've already seen this "movement" abandoning "global warming" in favor of "global climate change."
I'm going to make my own prediction:
Terrifying!
-Peter
Hi!
Global Warming has been a well known topic in Germany for the last ten years. I guess there would are only very few people in Germany who doubt that the emittance of stuff like C02 stands in direct correlation with the greenhouse effect. I remember that the german public reacted quite irritated when president bush refused to sign the kyoto protocol, argueing that doing so would pose a threat to industrial growth. I don't intend to point the finger on someone. I'm just curious. Is and was global warming simply not a Hot topic in the United States ? Do you simply not care ? Or were you completely taken by suprise by that article ?
Show me a link that lists these climatologists.
How hard to comprehend is that?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Why this forum attaches credence to the politically motivated, eco-blathering of a British leftist mouthpiece, I'll never know. The U.S. is opposed to arbitrary, economically harmful curbs on CO2 emissions whose benefitial effects we can never know with certainty. Get used to it. To those who mod me down - thanks for your attention.
an ill wind that blows no good
I would find this report a little more credible if they didn't use 1750 as they're base line year. 1750 is one of the three coldest years in the "Little Ice Age" 1450-1850 a period when temperatures dropped to the lowest point seen since the end of the last ice age. Both the Thames and New York harbor froze solid. IIRC, the other two coldest years where 1695 and 1815, the last caused by massive volcanic eruption leading to "the year without a summer" In short, they chose a distinctive and unique year for their baseline. Its like raising an alarm about flooding because a year with normal rain is shows rainfall totals far above those in a year of severe drought.
In general, much of the Global Warming hysteria relies on people not understanding that a five century stretch of unusual cold preceded the last 150 years of "unusual" warming.
Oops! Above should read "higher costs of manufacturing and transportaiton." rather than "higher costs of energy."
Another issue that I've head about but can't testify to would be that petroleum is used to make many of the fertilaizers that we use to maintain our current food crops. Once oil gets more expensive or harder to find, food prices start getting higher and we may not even be able to grow enough. That would also hurt the biodiesel prospects.
Not only will the oil not last forever, but the evidence seems to indicate that we are reaching the peak of the global production bell curve now. This means that there will be less and less of it available as the years pass. The consequence of having the supply not meet the demand will likely cause widespread wars and collapse all by itself, which may or may not occur in time to save the planet's climate.
Spend your children's inheritance, so long as you had fun in your Hummer, right?
Well, I have to wonder what our children's inheritance actually is. Once we started down the oil road, given human nature, there was really only one possible outcome - population overshoot and collapse. For 150 years we have been living on borrowed time... our children not only don't have an inheritance any longer, but they never had one to begin with.
12 pounds of smoke for every gallon of gas,
imagine the accumulation of millions of people, every day, every hour, every second for the past ~70 years, thats alot of smog.
As a participant in an experiment to seed thunderclouds to prevent hail, I see this "threat" of Human-caused Global Warming as a farce. Over a 5 year period, the attempt to seed these thunderclouds to reduce hail had absolutely no statistical effect. That is, the clouds rained or hailed with the same frequencey as non-seeded clouds. If after 5 years and millions of dollars of direct and focused attempt at climate change in a such a small, localized, and compared to global weather, and insignificant system was a sum total of .... NOTHING... .... how can people be so arrogant to assume that humans can cause a global, massive, and most significant changes BY ACCIDENT?!??!
We can't change a single microcosm of weather when we want to...but we can change the entire weather of the globe by accident....(ya, right!)
The insanity of econuts is boundless.... :D
If you fall off the top of a building, you don't think "Well, I've survived so far, so there's no proof that the fall will kill me", do you?
How about some facts. It's new, I know I know, don't be afraid.
/ mi_seri es_results.asp?rowID=576&fID=r15&cgID=
p here
.05ppm of CO2.
.05 times 1000 or 50 ppm give or take.
t ime2.ht ml
This site:
http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/mi
which documents the about in thousands of metric tons, the amount of CO2 each county has produced from 1990 to 2000. The maximum amount for any year during this 10 year period is 25,298,310 thousand metric tons. That's a lot of human activities!
Now according to this site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmos
The total weight of the atmosphere of the Earth is 5.1 × 1018 kg.
Now a metric ton is 1000 kg, so I lucked out.
Summary so far:
CO2 per year 2.5 x 10 to the 12th power
Atmosphere weight 5.1 x 10 to the 18th power
both in kg.
SO...we humans are adding into the atmosphere per year in parts per million (ppm) about
Let's play. What-if we humans have been doing this for 1,000 years. The steam engine was invented in 1763, so let's play that starting in 1904 we humans were already in stride, bleching out the 2.5 bajillion tons of CO2. I don't know what the 'ramp-up' for co2 production was. I am 'ass-u-me'ing that we are or near some very high value today and it was lower in the past. I picked 1,000 years for easy multiplication, using today's high output - maybe the shorter period (not the full 2,000 years of the Industrial Revolution) times the higher output, covers the ramp up? Don't know.
That's
Now this site:
http://c3c4.utah.edu/snowbirdsymposium/co2
Says CO2 levels NATURALLY varied from 180 to 280 ppm. So our current level of 350ppm seems higher by 70ppm, and humans account for roughly 3/4 of that abnormal high.
Up till this very moment I'll have to say I considered all environmental scientists as wack-o's. Now it's just most of them.
BUT I think that I'll change my mind, and agree that something is going on and we humans are likely the cause.
Quick the rest of you stop driving your cars and freeze to death for me!
*click**beep**beep* Scotty, One to Mod up!
This is in no way a super-scientific opinion, but there is some truth to the planet itself having some sort of homeostatic tendencies, i.e. whe things like heat and atmospheric constituents get out of whack the planet as a whole has mechanisms to level that out and buffer the changes.
Now I don't mean to sound like a Gaiaist here, but even consider this global warming thing to be the analog of a planetary fever. Something, us, is unbalancing that homeostatis, and the planet is getting rid of it by warming, as a human would when infected by a virus or bacteria.
I know, all of this is basically what is being said above, and in like manner all we would have to do is stopping acting like such a contagion, and begin contributing to maintaining the planets homeostatic balance, therefore returning to the class of endosymbiont as opposed to the parasite we have become.
Really, my point in posting this I suppose was to relate the whole concept in terms seemingly more simple to the public eye. The only necessary addition are examples of the planet's homeostatic systems, and some ideas, as listed above, on how to be helpful as opposed to destabilizing to our environment. But then again destabilization seems to be in political vogue at the moment (in the US), so that this not getting attention isn't too surprising.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
It's the end of the world as we know it.. and I feel fine.
Haven't you read the theories? We need to get sentient machines going quickly, which then will enable us to convert our knowledge to shared digital information. Only then can we pass on everything we've learned to the next evolutionary step: Machines that build machines. They will figure out a way to gather sufficient energy - don't believe this "people energy-pod" rumor you've been hearing.
Thereby, in the distant future, they'll send out hundreds of thousands of autonomous "seeds" to distant planets, carrying everything we have learned, with the mission of eventually tying together each's knowledge into a central intelligent repository spanning the galaxy.
We're already doomed, it's time to build the time capsule. Even if we're not, it'd be a good idea.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed now, and probably the biggest problem is NIMBY-ism. In fact the easiest & fastest solutions could come from alternative energy sources - probably cheaper & faster than nuclear, given the huge time it would take to commission new plants, etc.
In the UK we have huge wind resources - both off & on shore. We also have huge potential tidal resources - a barrage across, say, the Bristol channel could generate maybe 10% of our total power needs. But (naturally) people who live near such potential schemes are generally opposed - and as a result, deadlock results.
And if you say "go nuclear", you will find exactly the same situation - quite apart from environmental objections, there will be a very long drawn out process, even before construction can start.
Many of those who complain are people with land - in the UK most of the countryside is still owned by a very small % of the populace. Of course, the same people who complain happily drive around the countryside in their SUVs..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Should we start building the factories now?
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Sounds just like my ex-girlfriend, the quintissential liberal Bryn Mawr graduate psych student.. sheesh...
haha...
http://www.tai.org.au/Publications_Files/Papers&Su b_Files/Meeting%20the%20Climate%20Challenge%20FV.p df (This probably needs mirroring ;)
The main recommendations and introduction are reproduced below (hope this post isn't too large)
Summary of main recommendations
1. A long-term objective be established to prevent global average temperature from rising more than 2C (3.6F) above the pre-industrial level, to limit the extent and magnitude of climate-change impacts.
2. A global framework be adopted that builds on the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, and enables all countries to be part of concerted action on climate change at the global level in the post-2012 period, on the basis of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities.
3. G8 governments establish national renewable portfolio standards to generate at least 25% of electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025, with higher targets needed for some G8 governments.
4. G8 governments increase their spending on research, development, and demonstration of advanced technologies for energy-efficient and low- and zero-carbon energy supply by two-fold or more by 2010, at the same time as adopting near-term strategies for the large-scale deployment of existing low- and no-carbon technologies.
5. The G8 and other major economies, including from the developing world, form a G8+ Climate Group, to pursue technology agreements and related initiatives that will lead to large emissions reductions.
6. The G8+ Climate Group agree to shift their agricultural subsidies from food crops to biofuels, especially those derived from cellulosic materials, while implementing appropriate safeguards to ensure sustainable farming methods are encouraged, culturally and ecologically sensitive land preserved, and biodiversity protected.
7. All developed countries introduce national mandatory cap-and-trade systems for carbon emissions, and construct them to allow for their future integration into a single global market.
8. Governments remove barriers to and increase investment in renewable energy and energy efficient technologies and practices through such measures as the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies and requiring Export Credit Agencies and Multilateral Development Banks to adopt minimum efficiency or carbon intensity standards for projects they support.
9. Developed countries honour existing commitments to provide greater financial and technical assistance to help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change, including the commitments made at the seventh conference of the parties to the UNFCCC in 2001, and pursue the establishment of an international compensation fund to support disaster mitigation and preparedness.
10. Governments committed to action on climate change raise public awareness of the problem and build public support for climate policies by pledging to provide substantial long-term investment in effective climate communication activities.
Introduction
Climate change represents one of the most serious and far-reaching challenges facing humankind in the twenty-first Century. The international consensus of scientific opinion, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is agreed that global temperature is increasing and that the main cause is the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of human activities.1 Scientific opinion is also agreed that the threat posed will become more severe over coming decades.2
The cost of failing to mobilise in the face of this threat is likely to be extremely high. The economic costs alone will be very la
What I don't understand about this issue are the arguments against doing something to resolve the problem.
Because all of the arguments seem to revolve around destroying the two great Satans of the USA and capitalism. Has it not been pointed out that the "polluter" USA gets punished severly by Kyoto while the "polluter" China gets a slap on the wrist? Has it not been pointed out that the Kyoto treaty was rejected nearly unanimously by the US Senate? Has it not been pointed out that the "solution" to the global warming problem specifically targets the "American love affair with the automobile" which is inextricably linked to millions of commuters getting to their jobs and allowing our economy to function?
It seems to me that those who champion "global warming solutions" are also those who happen to hate the United States and hate capitalism. (This pronouncement applies to many, but not all, who champion "global warming solutions.") I suspect that much of the motivation behind "global warming solutions" is the effort to weaken the United States and destroy capitalism (which is defined by many as evil). Until the "destroy capitalism" aspect of "global warming solutions" is removed, I'm going to remain highly skeptical of it.
Your argument is, "But whe HAVE to do SOMETHING!" Really? Are you sure? Is the "solution" going to make life worse for me than the "problem" will? Furthermoe, since the enemies of capitalism are my enemies, why should I trust what they say? Aren't they content to lie to a capitalist pig like me to ensure that a fair world comes about?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
My point was that there are a multitude of variables that need to be factored into global climate models well beyond any simple "turn the burner on" scenario.
:-D ).
It is obviously impossible to actually perform full scale experiments due to the size and time-frame necessary (we're not multi-dimensional lab rats after all
The debate over the "hockey puck" shows that there is disagreement over basic foundational data (which only represents a very short time period as far as the Earth is concerned) so drawing conclusions especially to the point of X degrees more and we all die is misleading at best and scientifically dishonest at worst.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Global warming states that the maxima of BOTH hot and cold will increase. Nice to see people are too ignorant to even know what the actual theory is.
It doesn't take a genious to see that Kyotoists manipulate and distort climate research to suit their main political purposes and weird view of the future.
an ill wind that blows no good
We need to stop producing CO2 ASAP, the world needs Future Energies and methods of making people understand that alternatives are here!
You might be interested in my project..... According to the latest predictions, oil production is likely to peak in 10
years. Alternative fuels must be deployed quickly before the world grinds to
a halt. Moreover, climate change as a direct result of fossil fuel
consumption threatens our very survival.
Green Motorsport is working to meet this challenge head-on by marketing,
developing, testing and demonstrating the viability of integrated renewable
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In 1998, Australia was the worlds worst polluter, and they're not even in the Northern hemisphere. According to the UN, the third world produces almost three times as much greenhouse gases than the US, Europe, and developed asian countries (Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, et al) combined. While the 'westernized' world consumes more resources, they also do it more efficiently and emit fewer harmful emissions than countries like China (who is responsible singly for 29% of all CO2 from coal, while the US is only responsible for 19%).
As to your rhetorical question about reversing the trend? Aggressive investment in nuclear fusion for energy production, hydrogen as a storage medium for energy, and efficient transmission methods for electrical power. The problem is the 50 years of draconian environment legislation lead by scientifically ignorant environmental groups like Greenpeace.
Climatologists Blast McCain's Hearings on 'Global Warming'
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Sure they do.
Its just mosly not with a girl who gives it everytime they see an SUV...
Muslim extremists are blaming the tsunami on US and French nuclear testing.
I'm going to make a bold prediction:
We're all gonna die.
I am told that the Sierra Club came out with a report that said gave it 10 years...five years ago.
And as for the idiots who think "it won't happen", consider the problem of the pool of water hyacynths (also known as 'the 29th day').
mark "I suppose y'all agree with Limburger
that there's no such thing as light
pollution, either"
If this article is accurate, is anyone else worried that maybe we've got the wrong guy in the seat of power in the white house? His record on the environment isn't exactly what we'd need to get out of this mess.
launch a spacecraft to move out to a point between the earth and the sun.
have it deploy a large enough "umbrella" to shade the earth.
the closer it gets to the sun, the smaller the SpaceShade (tm) could be because it would throw a larger shadow over the earth's surface.
it could be tuned to open and close to precise amount to achieve the desired level of planetary cooling.
ha ha, only serious
Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No
The continuing references to a supposed analoguous 1970s frenzy over Global Cooling come from the right-wing media in the US, and are not based on historical fact.
The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow.
But, what happens the day after tomorrow?!?!
Motorcycles and small sportscars get you laid too. So unless you're banging the entire female rugby team at once in the back seat, have the decency to switch!!
Bork!
"From The Independent: The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already. For the full store, see this article."
Cool, I can go to this article for the full store. If I went there for only half of a store, I'd be pissed.
I wonder if anybody is thinking about global warming in Boston these days?
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
not to mention that most farming is now a large industrial operation requiring machinery and basically oil, in order to plant, harvest, transport the food to markets, etc. In our current system our food supply is dependent on oil.
Nice try.
#1. For those of you who live down in the desert what happens to Las Vegas when the Colordo river stops turning the turbines in the Hoover dam - the flow rate was down 70% below average last year and we have had 2 wet decades and are now entering into a dry era.
What heppens? They import water. Canals are built for a reason. Then, just like now, they have adapted and go on with life.
#2. All of our fertilizers and pesticides are derrived from oil and natural gas. 90% of an Iowa farmer's costs are directly and indirectly related to the cost of fuel. Every pound of beef produced uses 2500 gallons of water and 16 pounds of grain. Talk about unsustainable.
Unsustainable? You mentioned nothing about not being able to sustain this. Every year advances in farming make everything easier, faster and better to produce.
#3. Right now is a very precarious time in American history and I think war is the last...
Ahh now we get to the heart of your post - Anti Bush. How about staying on topic?
#4. When gas goes up to $7.00 a gallon I don't think you will be laughing as hard.
You must be new here (Earth). Gas used to be 34 cents a gallon when I was born in 1970. What do you think ol Dad and Mom would have said if you told them then 'When gas goes up to $1.90 a gallon I don't think you will be laughing as hard.'? Guess how much MPG my Dads car got back then? 68' Firebird, about 17MPG. Funny, I get 38 in my Toyota Corolla. You can buy a car right now that gets 60mpg. You can build a house right now that gives electricity back to the electric company instead of feeding on it.
#5. Now, I realize that all this ranting does nothing.
Except debunking your FUD?
I'm not a Scientist. I don't read Scientific journals. The source of my quote above is this transcript of a Newsweek article.
:-/
I didn't say anything about a frenzy. I have demonstrated that the "environmental movement" used the very same scare-tactics in the past over "global cooling" that they use today over "global warming" and "global climate change."
I wrote the Earth Day folks and asked them if the first Earth Day was, as I'd heard, to raise awareness of global cooling. The ignored me. I'm inclined to take this to mean that it was.
This whole thing is rather separate from the Scientific issue, which I don't pretend to be informed about. The BS seems to be impenetrable on both sides of the debate.
-Peter
You can make a computer model predict ANYTHING YOU WANT by selecting the variables you choose to base your calculations upon.
Computer models can't even accurately predict next week's weather, but you insist that a computer model can predict climate in a hundred years?
I bet you believe in astrology, too.
You don't need a computer model to correlate "global warming" with periods of solar activity.
Furthermore, the temperature data upon which global warming theory is founded was selectively culled to yield the desired result:
CORRECTIONS TO THE MANN et. al. (1998) PROXY DATA BASE AND NORTHERN HEMISPHERIC AVERAGE TEMPERATURE SERIES
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
As if politicians and business leaders have the expertise to make this pronouncement? Right. I'd be interested in what the acedemics have to say (and interested in their qualifications), but the rest of the group? They're just along for the ride.
They're in there because other politicians and business leaders never listen to scientists. The fact that you prefer to listen to the academics makes you a fairly rare bird.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
We've been in the 29th day for the last 40 years, surviving countless end of the world predictions.
.
I will be laughing because of people like you who spread fear of unproven predictions of starvation out of one side of their mouth and then boycott genectically enhanced food out of the other. Those who claim that gas shortages will cause the end of civilization while flying in airplanes to protest to save Alaska's wilderness from being tapped. The very same who claim that the rainforests are almost gone (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1132362.stm)
I have two children to feed and feel it's irresponsible to perpetuate the fear of "guessing" that the world is going to end it 10 years. Show me some facts that everyone agrees on and I will listen.
We need to stop this ignorant spread of the end of the world crap. Global warming, CFC's, gas shortages, recycling, landfill shortages, killer bees, comets smashing into the earth, DDT, forest preservation, its all crap, all guessing. The media is not to blame, its us, we buy what they are selling. Stop it.
There's significant scientific evidence that the earth was here before humans even existed. It can exist without us.
As of today, it's estimated that we have 3 Billion years before the sun goes supernova, destroying the earth in the process. If humanity becomes extinct, who's to say that some other form of sentient life won't appear between now and then? (assuming nature can eventually repair the damaged we've caused).
The UK Met Office press release on temperature rise is here
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
the world ended in the 1100s and the 1500s when the temperatures were that high before, so this is just academic.
I'm sure the Mayan civilzation, which died at least partly from drought during that time, would find your jibe hilarious.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Do you really want to discuss the philosophy of knowledge, or are you just being cute? It's more than "guesses". Much is based on experiment, observation, and other, directly verified, laws of physics.
We don't "know" everything about gravity (e.g. what happens at very small or very large distances, how it's quantized, etc), but I can tell you that if you jump out of a window, the world will be a better place. Some "guesswork" is more reliable than other guesswork, and I'd put the science of climatology at a level high enough to warrant action.
Sure, there is always room for surprises; any good scientist will admit this. But then any politician will twist that uncertainty into an excuse for inaction - which it most definitely is NOT.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
This is the problem with the Global Climate Change arguement that is being thrown about in the press and here.
The argument that it's all Man and the fixation of greenhouse gases and the refusal to look at anything else but Man and greenhouse gases.
CO2 does not mean warming. Go look at USHCN data for say New York City and Albany NY, NYC has gotten much warmer since 1822 and Albany hasn't. CO2 isn't causing that, urban heat islands are. As more and more places to collect data become urbanized more and more elevations in temprature will be recorded, but that doesn't mean the planet is getting warmer.
Now for all this CO2 in the air, why is the ice mass of Antarctica growing? And at the same time, even with decreased CO2 levels, why were the interglacial periods 400,000 years ago warmer than today?
The World is getting warmer, but just because CO2 is increasing at the same time doesn't mean CO2 is causing it.
Every time is a precarious time in history.
Today's disasters are always the worst imaginable.
Our way of life is always on the brink of being stamped out.
The ruling class is always made up of the most corrupt, savage demons available.
You can't get tinfoil without holes in it anymore.
Boo hoo hoooo hooooooooooo.
Humanity is doomed? Come on. Ten or fifteen degree shifts in temp won't doom humanity. An eskimo can survive in a desert, a desert nomad can survive in the artic. Even worst case predictions are easily surviveable. Japanese got past the bombs.Europeans got through the plauges. All peoples have made it through every war. Extiction at our own hand is so very unlikely as it goes against our very nature in the first place. All problems have always found thier own resolution be it by self determination or external forces or some combinatiion. Relax a little bit because worst case predictions are always wrong as far as human extiction goes anyway.
Kyoto puts CO2 emission reduction targets on developed countries. Yes. This does not mean wealth redistribution. Well, unless these countries are composed of morons that will just slash-and-burn their economies to reach the target.
What Kyoto is about is switching the economy from C-based to H-based. It means innovation. It means research into renewable energy and nuclear energy.
A country can reduce their C02 emissions to almost zero if they switch their economy to be H-based (yes, including cars) and use reneweable/nuclear (like fusion) energy sources to fuel the economy.
Oil will run out soon enough at which point the developing countries that get their ecomies in order will get screwed by lack of oil (ie. high oil prices). At that point they will *need* to switch to H-based economy. And guess what? The developed world would have the tech. to *sell* it to them.
Wealth redistribution to the poor nations? LOL. Kyoto will keep the money in the developed world.
A nation like US is screwing itself by not signing the treaty and spending money on research. What you will end up having is US buying tech. and research from Europe.
Cold War->Innovation which fueled US to be an economic superpower (ie. space race->computers, etc..). Kyoto is designed to take place of the Cold War in driving research/innovation.
Almost forgot these are the same people who tell you to cut up your six-pack ring containers to save the birds and then want wind generator farms which chop up birds into little pieces.
The only way to make it better is to produce less CO2 !?!
BS, CO2 disolves in sea water and there is pleanty of that. Do some research on the Carbonic Acid Cycle.
Most of the CO2 is caused not by things breathing but by out-gassing along sub-oceanic rifts and volcanic activity.
no problem. when the oil runs out we just switch over to burning trees, and when those run out we'll be too dead to care. Pity for our descendants though. ah well. off to continue my unchecked selfish consumerism.
Check out the soil conditions before you buy.
(Hint: There's hardly any.)
The increased indusrial carbon dioxide output has about as much an effect on the climate as environmentalists. Since humans exhale heated carbon dioxide. Perhaps we should put restrictions on how much the can ouput as well.
Don't worry guys I just sent Billy Boy an e-mail about this problem...it will get patched sometimes next year and then get delayed for a few years...it will probably need a couple dozen upgrades and it will have a few problems but point being...the richest guy we all know is now working to fix the problem...so sit back and vegitate some more and relax!
Damn straight. It's unbelievable how many people seem to think that we can switch to solar/wind and start walking right now and it won't cause any problems. More surprising still is the number of people who then go on to say that we need to take care of our poor. Who do you think these environmentally friendly policies will hurt the worst? The poor. The people who lack the resources to live in the new eco-friendly world. If you think that increased social spending can make up for the kind of problems this would cause, you should consider the countries of China and North Korea (not to mention the former Soviet Union) for examples of what excessive government social spending can do to a country.
Rash action is only likely to make the problem worse. We need a slow transition to more environmentally friendly technologies, and that is exactly what is happening. Technological advances in materials (like plastics and carbon-fiber) have made production much less energy-intensive. Incremental advances in engine and automotive design have made transportation more energy efficient. Hydrogen technology has the potential to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels (though petroleum products like plastics aren't going away any time soon). Solar panels and wind-mills are a more efficient power source than ever.
Politicians need to stop proposing doomsday scenarios and start working proactively with industry to resolve these problems.
Thanks, this looks interesting. Here's a excerpt from one review that seems appropo:
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
You know, in the mid-1970s they predicted we were supposed to be buried by Glaciers by now. I think it was Leonard Nimoys' In Search Of series.
Junk then, junk now. Amazingly their prediction falls in that magic 5 to 10 years predictor range.
Less than 5 and people know whether your full of it or not, Greater than 10 and people don't care a bit.
They Live, We Sleep
Yep mainly what's going on, when you look at the environazi viewpoints (where some might have admitted to humans being pollutants just by breathing; i forgot though) and other nuts stuff like PETA's plan to fully liberate all animals (which means no pets, no seeing-eye dogs for the blind, no meat, no embarrasing animals, etc) directly shows an enormous hatred for humans. At first that hatred is not visible, but it gets extremely clear once you hear stuff like people claiming that the 9/11 attacks were somehow good because it would reduce the amount of chicken eaten (this was said by a chicken-rights activist woman) - where the last thing they would care about is people.
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
agreed. 100%. these people have obviously not seen the hypothetical-documentary THREADS
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I operate a fly fishing outfitting service in the western US. I often have to drive several miles of muddy/snowy/rocky two track to get to prime fishing locations, with 3-5 clients, gear, and myself in the rig while towing a drift boat or raft. Without a 4x4 SUV there would be no access..... I also live in hill country where several feet of snow can fall overnight. You can not get home without 4x4..... period. If you have any kind of family you need an SUV..... so there are legitamate uses of SUVs. The fact that the majority of SUV owners do not know how to, nor will ever use their vehicle off road does not mean that they are useless as a class of vehicles. There are people who rely on their SUV to make a living or to get home at night.
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
and...
The report urges all the G8 countries to agree to generate a quarter of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025....
Now, I know that the panel was mostly businessfolk and politicians, so we can't expect too much in the way of basic math skills... but did anyone point out to them that 2025 > 2015 ?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
The mass media talk about "global cooling" was about a natural cycle taking hundreds of years to complete. The scientist talk about "global warming" is anthropogenic and over a shorter timeframe.
The analogy I usually use to explain why BOTH could be true is this:
Park on a steep uphill road in San Francisco. Put your foot on the brake. Notice that you're not moving. Now, release the brake, and notice you start moving backwards. Then, hit the gas and go uphill.
The global warming deniers would look at that scenario, based on their "logic", and claim that they've proven that gravity doesn't exist!
That's simply not true; there is a lot of research going on on the impact of other potential sources of global climate change. Some by people intent on proving it isn't caused by CO2, even... It's not that no-one has looked, its that most of the evidence points to anthropogenic CO2.
O2 does not mean warming. [...] urban heat-island effect
That claim has been accounted for for at least 15 years; the effect also doesn't appear in things like ice-core and coral records. The heat-island effect doesn't explain the apparent warming. Period. Check out this link for an interesting discussion on ice-cores and temperature records. Also, if you scroll down you'll notice that there is a pretty obvious correlation between CO2 and temperature.
Now for all this CO2 in the air, why is the ice mass of Antarctica growing?
The claim is not that temperatures have to increase everywhere; just on the average. In fact, the increased precipitation is expected from the modeling (warmer temps=>more evaporatio=>more snow=>more ice); but it won't be enough to reduce the net warming.
The World is getting warmer, but just because CO2 is increasing at the same time doesn't mean CO2 is causing it.
Really officer, there is dead body at my feet, and I have a smoking gun in my hands, but it wasn't me. I fired my gun at the other guy. That guy over there on the grassy knoll. Sure you did...
Look - we know that CO2 released into the atmosphere would cause warming in the absence of any negative feedbacks. We know CO2 is being released by us into the atmosphere. We see warming. We've managed to quantify most of the possible negative feedbacks and se that they are small. What is a reasonable conclusion?
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Why trucks can not replace SUVs:
I drive a mid sized SUV with a 3.2L V6 and a 5 speed. I average 23 mpg on the hiway and 20 mpg around town, which is as good as many sedans. I spend several hours on any given week in back country that you can not access without 4x4. Full size trucks with extended cabs for the seating capacity of my SUV get much lower MPG, generally in the 14-16 mpg range.
Why ATVs can not replace SUVs:
You ever try to put 5 people on an ATVand drive 120 miles through blowing and drifting snow, and icy roads?
When SUVs are used for what they were designed for they are a very praticle vehicle..... when they are used as commuters..... then they are not very well suited to the task.
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Not that I don't believe you, but pray tell which SUV are you driving that only gives you a 3 mpg hit when changing from highway vs city/town? Now depending on where you live(Northeast US, myself), 90% of the time you will see an SUV with a single occupant driving poorly(now that really isn't amazing since ~50% of the vehicles on the road are SUVs), thus most non SUV owners hate them.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Check out: this link. Scroll down to the plot of CO2 vs temperature and then tell me there isn't a correlation. Now recall that CO2 levels are at 370 ppm and rising... Before you run off an put the cart before the horse (that warming causes CO2), know that we have good, sound physical reasons to expect CO2 rises to cause warming, but few reasons to expect the converse.
Besides, wouldn't the sun be a better analogy for the burner as opposed to CO2? Especially seeing as how solar output has gone up?
If you care to take an analogy too far, then adding CO2 to the atmosphere is like putting a lid on the pot. As for your comment about solar output - that is very unclear, and even the ones who published that said it can't explain all of the observed warming. Not to mention that its a result that doesn't have a lot of back-up, whereas CO2 increases, the observed warming, and the effect of CO2 increases on radiative transport are all things that have been studied by hundreds of researchers.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Point taken. It naturally follow that because I did the math on the percent increase of CO2 over 170 years wrong, that global warming is absolutely real and correct. Thank you.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
I drive a 2000 Isuzu Rodeo with the 3.2L V6, 5 speed manual and 4.10 gears in the pumpkins. I also have oversized mud tires with effectively raises my overall gear ratio and improves my mpg as I now operate at slightly lower rpms at hi-way speeds. I keep track of my miles and my fill ups and calculate mileage accordingly. I average 22-23 mpg crusing the hi-way at 75mph and around 20 in town.
My mileage is a few MPgs better than the reported mpg for the vehicle..... I attribute that to the oversized tires and the effective use of the 5 speed.
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
as global warming....it's the urban heat effect that is causing a rise in temperature! geez
Space Uber Vehicle
How about a jeep? or get a motorcycle if its only you riding with zero cargo
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yes, but why is the solution to all the problems you mentioned always increased government regulation, increased taxes, more state propoganda, etc., etc?
When you discuss things with enviornmentalists, it always comes down to an authoritarian state and extreme centralized government control being "the only solution". The right wing tries to scare people into totalitarianism to fight terrorism... the left wing tries to scare people into totalitarianism to save the enviornment.
When a group of politicians and political groups say "We need more money and more power over your lives, and need to control every single aspect of the economy, the food supply, and anything else you consume, or the world is going to end", shouldn't we be skeptical? Where are the enviornmentalists offering any solutions other than Big Brother?
The oil companies propose stabalizing at 550ppm, looks like the barganing has begun.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
developing countries like Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan... You name it. Nukes are an easy choice.
A corporation, nation or other large grouping of people taken as a whole is actually pretty stupid regardless of the intelligence of the individuals comprising it. They behave in primitive ways to very basic stimuli, mostly economic. When we reach the point where it becomes more economically feasable to use some source of energy other than petroleum, as it in all likelihood will before the century is out (or maybe even after just a couple more decades) then we will switch away from it and the CO2 it pumps into the atmosphere, just as surely as an animal will shy away from pain and head towards food.
And the brethren went away edified.
it would help the arguments of you lame-brained dittohead can't-get-laid losers if you posted some facts, and not such unsupported assertions as
"They are conveniently ignoring the fact that 6 Billion human beings BREATHING emit more CO2 in one year than all of the fossil fuels that have been combusted since they were first extracted from the ground."
last year in New Zealand we had the "worst weather" on record. A friend of mine down who was on one of the bases last year stressed that the situation is not good.
I know it's a geeky sterotype to boast about your uptime, and to have a myriad of displays strewn about your desk, but I hope everybody posting here to preach about the ills of global warming practice the little things too.
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
Heh, my laptop appears to have a sense of humour. About 5 seconds after posting parent, it complained about low battery power.
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
Interesting, but a couple of things. First, do they list the "raw numbers" in a non-graphical format (preferably a table)? I usually like to make my own graphs with these things. Lets me get a better comparison.
Second, I notice that temperature falls before CO2 decreases. However, under the CO2=higher temperatures, shouldn't the CO2 fall first?
Third, the graph shows that CO2 levels started rising a bit over 10,000 years ago. Or around the time the last major Ice Age ended. What caused that? I'm pretty sure that there were no SUVs, factories or anything else around back then.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Radioactive mine tailings leak into rivers. Moreover, what happens to the tons of contaminated materials from uranium mining, and tailings from uranium processing? Since you don't live near a uranium mine, what do you care. Why not just use hydrogen? Are you going to say it's dirty to generate hydrogen and not uranium mining nor disposals? At least hydrogen doesn't need disposal for virtually an eternity.
/
Using non renewable energy adds more heat to the global warming equation, which doesn't solve global warming. Using fusion will only escalate the problem because people will use more energy when it's cheap. More energy use adds more heat.
The only viable solution is to use less energy and use renewable energy along with reducing greenhouse emissions.
http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/genpatu/india
JADFINAL.pdf
Listen here, "genius" - I remember them telling me when I was a kid that the world would be overpopulated by the year 2000 - NOT. I remember the same people saying that we would run out of gas and food by the late 1990s - NOT!!! Let us cut the bull - there are very few liberals left in America - they have become basically shameless secular humanist /communists like you. You are just not smart enough to see that you are being used by the liberal elites. You think that Bush and Cheney run the show. Smell the coffee - Kerry had way more money than Bush. Bill Gates, George Soros, and Warren Buffet - big supporters of Dems. Lemme guess - you graduated from college a week ago? Try living in the real world a few years - and be observant. All of this envirocrap is about you being stupid enough to give up YOUR freedom and YOUR wealth to the ELITES - IT IS NOT ABOUT YOU "SAVING" THE ATMOSPHERE!!!! You don't think so? How can a person like Madonna tell ME to be envirofriendly - when she makes her living selling pieces of plastic with metal oxides on it (CD-ROMs) that need power to be listened to, and are wrapped in plastic and paper to be sold, yet she is telling ME to be more envirofriendly. Smell the coffee!!!
Here are a few excerpts regarding this climate stuff. .
1. Yeah. The world weather is changing. It's part of a larger picture, often referenced under the label, "Earth Changes", which is somewhat misleading, as the changes are by not confined to just the Earth. These include things geologic, atmospheric, aquatic and electromagnetic. Increased comet strikes, solar flares, blue-bands on gas giants. The whole bit.
2. It's all linked to the collective experience of the human race. Not just reflective of, but linked both directly and indirectly. As world tensions rise and global awareness changes gear, so do these general effects on our total environment increase in number and severity.
3. It's not something to be afraid of. It's going to be increasingly annoying and painful, (and severely life-shortening in a billion cases or so), but not something to fear. This is what we came here to experience, and most of us will choose to go through it all again. The idea being to continue working on maintaining honest self-awareness and a high level of participation in life. This is how you develop your soul. By contrast, believing in comforting falsehoods and nestling deeper into the feeding on other beings through self-service and inflicting pain and control over others is how you decrease yourself, (which can actually be done to the point of vanishing altogether from the collective dream). --If you get enough people on the decrease, you lose the globe. That is, the dominant consciousness 'frequency' of the globe changes so that it no longer supports certain types of awareness. This whole trend toward normalizing the concept of torture in society is a clear marker of the push from the dark side. There is a reason sex and pleasure centers of the brain can be activated through inflicting misery on others. Humans have been written with this in mind. Choosing against this trend is entirely possible and is in fact necessary if one is to grow.
4. It is thought that about half the people on the globe are seeking their lower selves and ultimate self-dissolution. Like two great schools of thought passing through one another, one toward greater awareness, the other toward nothingness. The world and all its confusion is the static created as these two groups pass and try to drag members from each side along with them.
5. The world benefits from periodic cleansing, and re-sets itself easily enough. So don't worry about Earth. The whole experience would certainly be a lot less painful and annoying if we'd all just treat her and each other better, but the cycle remains.
I have no newsletter, so don't ask.
-FL
Here is why you shouldn't panic too much. Atmospheric and physical chemists (like myself) are just starting to kick around ideas on how to negate the effects of greenhouse gases. These might have other nasty side effects, like permanent, global rain acidification, but they might be more survivable than the alternatives.
Okay, never mind, go ahead and panic.
Correlation is not causation.
We are a long way from an objective scientific agreement on this one. I haven't heard a unified voice on this from the research community.
A few years ago a study was conducted concerning consumption of milk in children. It showed a high correlation between drinking milk and decreased risk from diabetes. Now it neglected the entire rest of the children's diets! Clearly parents who make their kids eat healthier include milk. Healthier eating decreases the risk of diabetes, not milk by its self. THis is just one example of correlation not being causation.
Ahh - Peak Oil again.
Didn't we peak in the 70's ?
What about the evidence that suggests that oil may be produced abiotically at deep pressures from common elements found in the crust ?
What about the fact that all our oil numbers come from people in the oil industry - who have a vested interest in keeping their prices at a premium?
I recently discovered that the theory that oil came from decaying biological organisms in the deep past was a notion proposed in the late 1800s and never actually challenged by most western petrochemists ever since.
Imagine if they are wrong ?
Of course, using all that energy might not be environmentally consiencious, but that's a different story.
Sorry about saying Pakistan is arab. Obviously this is incorrect.I meant to say "Islamic".
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Dunno. Ask 'em. Let me know what they say.
Second, I notice that temperature falls before CO2 decreases. However, under the CO2=higher temperatures, shouldn't the CO2 fall first?
It's hard to tell that from the plot, in my opinion. The scale is very compressed, and there are uncertainties in the dating. You could also imagine various feedback mechanisms that would cause something like that. In any case, a correlation does not imply a causation. You could have a feedback loop, or a common third cause. But there is other evidence for why CO2 will cause warming (IR absorption properties and the greenhouse effect).
Third, the graph shows that CO2 levels started rising a bit over 10,000 years ago.
They did, and that is associated with the end of the most recent Ice Age. Note that the data does not include recent increases, which stand out like a spike. The current CO2 level is 370 ppm and occurs in the last 100 years. Put that into the plot and grok it...
In the absence of human sources, CO2 is released by volcanoes (at a much slower rate than human release rates, mind you); it is removed by chemical reactions with rocks. Ice ages cover large amounts of rock, reducing the weathering and thus causing a net increase in CO2 - with associated warming, which removes the ice. You get a "limit-cycle" oscillation. The problem is that we are kicking this system pretty hard - way, way out of the regime it has been in for the last 0.5 Myr. It's not clear what will happen, but the models indicate it will be pretty exciting.
The fireworks on this topic seems to have subsided, so I can sit back and give a longer-term view, or at least my more-or-less well-formed opinion as a PhD scientist in a very closely related field (planetary science). Climate change is going to really, really suck. There is little chance we'll do anything about it - and Kyoto is not the final answer. Neither is denial. Kyoto is CRUCIAL because it buys us time. Time to solve our energy problems. Time to develop nuclear fusion, which is the only way we'll ever manage to become a long-term sustainable civilization. It's either that or an ever more dismal, Hobbesian scramble for the last remaining fossil fuels. What is so frustrating is that the cost of doing the right thing is not actually a cost at all - the U.S. could change the rules of the game entirely by embracing efficiency. Detroit could re-capture the lead in cars if they just thought far enough past their own damned noses to embrace hybrids... U.S. industry could embrace the idea of innovation and efficiency as a competitive tool, and this would help keep jobs here. China will always beat the US in cost; the only way to stay competitive is by staying ahead in knowledge and efficiency. But of course US policymakers don't care (they get their wealth from - potentially foreign - stocks rather than work, so they don't have to keep US industry competitive.) and US workers are too brainwashed by the likes of Fox News to see their own best interests.
It's so frustrating. Like watching a trainwreck in slow motion.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Hey all. I can vouch for having seen data that proves global warming is happening. Unfortunately, I'm unable to link it because it's a journal article that I need my academic address to access.
In short, it's true that we aren't at the highest reaches of global climate in the past 1000 years. However, it is true that we have experienced unprecedented, exponential change over the past 100 years. Ice core samples are irrefutable: humans are changing the climate - there is nothing even remotely like this timeframe in the geological record.
The main deciding factor is when we decide to implement measures to reverse these problems. Government resolutions against CFCs effectively reversed a great deal of damage to the ozone layer, and it's possible to do the same thing by controlling air pollution due to fossil fuels.
It is ENTIRELY within the bounds of logic to assume that a few more degrees will see Long Island largely uninhabitable, and a great deal of contamination of fresh water due to rising water levels. People who refute global warming haven't seen data sets. It is VERY obvious. The only thing up to chance is the geological reaction. We have no precedence for a situation like this, and the results will likely catch us unaware if not by surprise.
Bascially he says the science behind global warming is dubious at best and has allowed us to get to where we are without scientific proof.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
This is completely the incorrect way to address this post. I agree that the parent post is politically biased and off-topic but criticizing the poster's idealogy is the wrong way to do it.
I respectfully disagree with the parent. We are not in a condition of unsustainable consumption. Technological efficiencies (which the environmentalist want to roll back) such as nuclear energy have lots of promise. Oil prices (real oil prices, not the excessive taxes the rest of the world pays) rise and the market adjusts to increase supply. There is a very large, but still finite, amount of oil stored in 'marginal' reserves that can be opened. Prices rise and supply will increase to stabilize as long as there are supplies to begin with. And we are nowhere near using all of the worlds oil. That's not even mentioning corn-derived oil products that are marginally more expensive than Saudi crude. Running out of oil is nothing but fear mongering.
Standard of living has risen in the last 50 years (as it should be doing). In my grandparents generation, people starved and countless hard-working people lost their homes. Now much less people starve and many more people own property. Not that it's easy, but a lot more people are doing both.
The biggest fear we need to address is the rising cost of health care and education. Unfortunately, both of these issues are complex and beyond the scope of this post. But I'd like to suggest that perhaps the federal government (of the US) may not be able to solve all these problems.
This is just one man's opinion...
But I don't believe we will change our lifestyle's or policies until something major happens with the environment.
Name me one instance of mass behavioral change based on scientific discoveries? Thats right. There are none.
I'm sorry to say, but I doubt we'll see any action before its too late. Maybe not too late to gradual heal the planet, but probably too late to stave off some horrendous whether for a few decades.
Anyone who is aware of the situation knows that there is a definite environmental crisis looming. This isn't just about global warming and resource depletion, but about eliminating our forests and converting nature into a wasteland.
Anyone who watches the media would think that the world will end somewhere between 30 years from now (due to resource depletion) and next year or next week (due to the latest imminent catastrophe).
And anyone aware of the actual data knows that, in North America at least, there is significantly more forested land now, and more trees on it, than when the Europeans arrived.
In California and Oregon, for instance, indians practiced a form of low-effort farming. One of their techniques was to burn off the trees in certain valleys every hundred years or so.
It turns out that a climax forest is a ROTTEN place for species diversity - both animal and plant. Deer, for instance, do best on the boundary between a forest and an open field.
(Spotted owls, too, by the way: They nest in the trees and hunt in the fields, where the rodents have a hard time finding cover and there are no obstructions to flight. That's -why they did so well in the K-mart sign. (Sign === tree, parking lot === field, rodents out of luck.) B-) )
By burning off part of the forest (a low-effort management technique somewhere between a patch cut and a clearcut) they created open fields, field/forest boundaries, and a multi-decade sequence of species succession as the land worked its way through the stages preceeding the enviromental disaster that is a climax forest. The result was population explosions of useful and/or edible plant and easily-hunted animal species.
These techniques were abandoned at about the time the Spanish conquest of the west coast upset the traditional culture. And for the last six decades or so the forests have been overgrowing as a result of "management" policies of the US government, driven mainly by voters in the cities whose entire knowlege of forest and wildlife management comes from campling trips and the propaganda of political activists.
The first phenomenon to be noticed in this trend was christened "The Smokey The Bear Effect". This was the overgrowth of forests caused by firefighting and firebreak cutting reducing the amount of timber burned to a level far below what is natural in the absense of human activity. (Forests burn intermittently - ignited by lightning or sometimes spontaneous combustion. In the absense of firebreaks these fires cover enormous areas.
Some plants - especially certain pines and eucalyptus - have evolved to use this as part of their reproductive cycle, reproducing when the fire kills off the competition from hardwoods, dropping tinder and storing oils that encourage the start of fires and their spread, or even exploding in a fire to scatter their seeds. Others have evolved to survive fires, and depend on them to clear out underbrush and other competition. The Smokey the Bear effect actually got so bad that the jackpine (AKA "firepine"), whose cones only release their seeds when burned, became endangered in much of its range.
But lately it's gotten horrendously worse. Environmentalists have managed to block most brush-hogging, burning, logging, thinning, and offroading, and even vehicular travel in much of the national forests (which, unlike national PARKS, are not parks but tree farms!) The result is that some areas have as much as two orders of magnitude more trees than they normally would support, along with thick underbrush and years of accumulation of dead leaves and annual plants (i.e. "wildflowers" / weeds). Such fuel loads create a situation where, once the fire catches, it burns hot enough to kill everything and leave a nearly sterile area that may take centuries to repopulate. (Or which may not repopulate for geologic time, if erosion removes the soil once the plants aren't anchoring it.)
"Roadless areas" are firebreak-less areas, and firefighting equipment
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Spend your children's inheritance" is another one of those stupid ass "save the children" statements.
Personally, it makes we want to puke.
My parents don't owe me jack, and I don't owe my kids. I figure the 18 to 20 years I supported them and took care of them et cetera is enough.
The money I make / the things I build are mine, not theirs. If I leave anything to them, they should be happy.
But I don't owe them. I have to live in the times I live. If I move into a grass hut to avoid doing any of the "bad things" that harm the environment, I doubt they will have anything coming in their futures except poverty.
www.realclimate.org
... the egregious Crichton manages to say "in the 1970's all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming" ..... it's not an argument used by respectable and knowledgeable skeptics, because it crumbles under analysis. That doesn't stop it repeatedly cropping up in newsgroups though...."
Actual scientists writing for your edification.
"... 14 Jan 2005 The global cooling myth
Every now and again, the myth that "we shouldn't believe global warming predictions now, because in the 1970's they were predicting an ice age and/or cooling" surfaces.
------ END QUOTE
north america is heaven, that's why we came here yo... sure, things are great here. Still, global problems effect all of us (air, water, fish all travel internationally). There's more to earth than USA and Canada :)
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
Im assuming by carbon you are talking about CO2. CO2 != particulates. Here is a reference
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
It's funny because it's ironic.
[Several paragraphs intended to explain the funny, before I realized that if you don't already understand irony, I can't actually help you. Trust me, there's a way to look at this post, in which it does in fact appear to be a funny post. Try looking at it in that way. It's a good trick to learn.]
Anyway, your bigotry is amazing. Did it never occur to you to blame global warming on the rapidly growing (and accelerating!) Chinese industrial economy?
No, it's always "the Americans this, the Americans that", as if there's nobody else in all the world.
The world climate is a massive system. The amount of energy needed to make even the smallest perceptible change would be colossal. The entire industrial base of a very wealthy, very large, very industrialized nation might have an effect, over a long period of time (as appears to have been the case), but I doubt a few hundred thousand SUVs more or less has the kind of impact you imagine it does.
Seriously. If you want to talk about this, start talking in terms of the number of factories and power plants North America currently has running. Or the number of factories and power plants China plans to build over the next fifty years.
This SUV meme is a sideshow, a misdirection. A clever ruse, meant to distract you from the massive amounts of industrialization that make your lifestyle possible, and keep you alive in a harsh, dangerous, unforgiving world, while all the while contributing to the global warming you fear so much.
Everything you do, from the shoes you wear to the computer you use to post these inane diatribes against SUVs, is a sin against nature and humanity. Stop wearing manufactured clothes! Stop using electricity! Stop buying groceries! Do you know how much industrial activity went into creating the distribution system you rely on, to obtain goods and services ranging from breakfast cereal to flu vaccines?
Anyway, the fact is that the most "advanced" economies are slowly but surely moving away from old-school, highly polluting technolgies, to more modern, cleaner, and more efficient technologies. It is slow, maybe too slow, but it is happening. And it's either this, moving forward from industrialization to something cleaner (if we can get there in time), or else moving backwards, to feudalism or primitive hunting and gathering (if we're capable of getting there at all, at this stage).
Enough with the anti-SUV rants. If you really want to make a difference, convince China to return to the stone age ASAP. (Or at least come up with a way to get them to the post-industrial "clean technology" stage without going through the industrial stage... but good luck; even the most advanced civs are still trying work out the details on that one).
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
People are not going to accept a lower standard of living, period, end of discussion. It's not in the cards. I've realized that some time ago, and the level of change in standard of living to bring things back in check - things like energy and oil consumption - isn't going to happen and we're all very ignornant of human nature to think it will.
However, climate change is NOT going to be the end of mankind, no matter what the granola-eating hippies tell you. We have lots of energy reserves in the form of fission power and coal - not clean energy, but energy. We will soon, hopefully, have energy from fusion sources, space based solar, or even from the quantum vacuum itself.
With energy you can have everything; you can produce your own air; you can clean your own water, you can grow your own food in absolutely controlled environments. Is this the ideal situation? Sure isn't. Is it likely? Yep.
Either way, homo sapiens isn't going anywhere anytime soon, no matter what the fear mongers might say. Western civilization might be headed down the drain, and much unpleasantness too - probably unavoidable so long as birth rates remain positive. If you want to do something for the planet, DON'T HAVE KIDS, hint: there are enough people - again, nobody will make that level of sacrifice volantarily.
Humans aren't going anywhere. Period.
..don't panic
Yes, cuz thermonuclear wars, widespread famine, shifting agricultural areas, mass migrations, and whole countries in complete upheaval if global warming is true are on the same scale as you and I not being able to afford a Hummer, Ipod, Alienware laptop and a trip to Mardi Gras if global warming does not happen.
Actually, I tried that one day. Put water in a pan. Put pan on burner. Turned on burner. 10 minutes later, realised I forgot to plug the damn thing in. Do'h!
Besides, you can turn the burner on low, and the water may never boil. It will evaporate rapidly, compared to not heating it, but not necessarily boil. Just to be pedantic.
I have to stop wasting so much time reading Slashdot. It's interfering with my crystal meth addiction.
Assuming the worst, and assuming this report is correct, why should people believe it? Forecasts like this have been wrong so often now that many reject them out of hand. It'll be far too easy to miss the one that might be right.
And the brethren went away edified.
I am not saying that global warming is a myth or not serious, but the reports recommendations call for changes in G8 behaviour in the next 25 years, while the critical point will be reached in the next 10 years already.
I think there is a lot more politics and grandstanding, and the timing of the release of the report is more to benifit Blair than the Earth
I thought I'd read once that water vapor is a very potent "green house" gas - but it rarely ever gets mentioned. Is is because it can't be mesured easily due to its uneven distribution (unlike CO2)?
[...] global problems effect all of us (air, water, fish all travel internationally). There's more to earth than USA and Canada :)
Quite.
But the media coverage and activist "scientific" prononcements here, where we can CHECK them, is extremely biased usually just plain wrong. And what I've seen of similar media coverage and activist "scientific" pronouncemnts in European countries, on those occasions where I could check them, were at least as bad (and usually worse, though that might be "law of small numbers" from my limited sample of checkable reports.)
So why should I (or you) trust this one any more than the rest?
At least we now have the blogosphere, so we can get our truth squads on the job.
(With such posts as my previous one just for an early shot across their bow. B-) )
But don't take MY word for it either. Let's get some certifiable experts on the job.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I showed you that the "Hockey Stick" data supposedly demonstrating global warming was FABRICATED.
Why would "serious scientists" need to FABRICATE DATA?
Climate is chaos. If those computer models can predict climate, they can predict the stock market. Make a couple of million bucks with your "computer model" and I will agree that it works.
But you have no proof that it works, and the fact that the guys who wrote it aren't making a killing in the stock market proves it doesn't work.
So only scientists who believe in global warming are serious. What arrogance.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
What planet do you live on?
A 'Basic Home', in the United States, consists of the minimum amount of space the local zoning ordinances allow for the construction of a home. In many places, that means a house roughly around 700 Square Feet. (Give or take some Square Footage.)
Homes in that smallish size can be purchased for as low as $50k in many places. You might even find them priced even lower then that.
In many parts of the world, homes as luxurious as a 'Basic Home' of roughly 700 Sq. Ft. in the US, could be had for quite a bit less.
If you are talking between 250/400k homes you are talking about luxury homes that are nearing 2000 Square Feet or more. (Depending on the area.)
As for truly 'Basic Housing' one could, if they really weren't materialistic in the least, purchase a parcel of land for less then $10k and plop a 'Trailer Home' on that land for then then another $10k.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
It is a potent greenhuse gas, but it plays a secondary role (non-causative), because its concentration in the atmosphere is a function of temperature (warm air holds more moisture). This means it acts as a very powerful "positive feedback" - warm the atmosphere through some means (e.g. CO2), that increases the water vapor content, which causes more warming, which raises water vapor levels, etc.
Don't think of water vapor as a dial we can control - rather, it's the gain stage in the amplifier.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Hehe. Personally, I prefer the "bogosort" algorithm: 1) randomly permute the set. 2) see if it is sorted. 3) Iterate until it is.
N-factorial, with no guaranteed endpoint. It's worthy of Microsoft...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Global Warming Fiction vs. Facts
The novel references the same bogus computer models that are cited by global-warming proponents such as Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, Kevin Knobloch of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and John Passacantando of Greenpeace, USA. They predict melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other catastrophes. They are as reliable as a deck of Tarot cards. Here again, scientific data amply demonstrates that, though the temperatures in Greenland and Iceland have been falling at 2.2 degrees Celsius since 1987, there has been no affect on the ice in those nations that has actually been accumulating, not melting. The same is happening in Antarctica.
"...global warming is a hoax... specifically designed to harm the lives and the economy of people living in industrialized nations..."
Were you one of those anarchists up in Seattle a couple of years ago?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
The article states the critical mark is 400 ppm. Doesn't that seem like a PFA (plucked from air - what were you thinking?) number? Why not 401 or 399?
Bill Shaw
Dedicated to Alternate Reality Gaming
That pretty much explains it, and proves the point.
The entire purpose of Kyoto is to punish the United States and transfer its wealth to other countries.
Of course you would be all for it.
You are a religious fundamentalist, but your religion is radical environmentalism seasoned with a little class envy.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Your mum and dad did not witness the price of gas going from 34 cents a gallon to $2 overnight, it took quite a while.
If changes are slow enough people can adapt and what you suggest makes sense. The poster is talking about very rapid change. I seem to recall people complaining loudly about the recent, quite mild price hike on gas.
I remember the time in Europe when gas prices more than doubled and stayed there over the course of a few months at the end of the seventies. The depression that followed wasn't much fun. Now Europeans have tiny efficient cars, but it took a long time to adjust.
Peak discovery did occur sometimes in the seventies, this is a known fact, unfortunately.
Now peak oil *production* hasn't been reached yet. This is when things supposedly start going bad.
You can read more about the various hypothesis regarding the origin of oil at the refered link.
For the record, (hot, ~20-year-old) women do not seem to follow that stereotype in real life. Said girls have said everything from "it's cute when a guy has a really beat-up car" to "if you get a used car I'll want you to bend me over the hood", so don't believe every stereotype you hear.
It explains and proves nothing except that I've presented you with facts
Facts?
A computer model is not a "fact."
It is a mathematical formula committed to software.
What are your academic credentials?
What qualifies you to be an expert on climate?
If you have no credentials, you are just a true believer, a religious fanatic whose only reason for believing is blind faith.
PS - if the standard of living in the UK is so high, why do you all have Austin Powers teeth?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
... Everyone MUST purchase hydrogen/electric cars. Kill the petroleum-based cars NOW, THIS YEAR. The make all the big burners of petroleum-based fuels find another source or be put out of business.
Simple, no? <snicker>
I wish it was that simple. AS SOON as somebody puts forth a simple, plausible answer, we'll have every politician and big business rep screaming that the economy will fail.
Yeah. I rather have a dollar worth squat than a planet my kids will have to flee before they grow old.
==>dim strStatus = "DONE."<==
I was right.
You are a true believer, a person of faith.
You keep referring to the same unsubstantiated opinions and claim them as fact.
Are all Limeys as religious as you?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Getting everyone on this planet to work their butts off, to make an asteroid ship only for the few? Never happen. The answer has to be small family-size craft possessing small family-size water systems, small family-size gardens that would produce small family-size outputs of oxygen and vegetables. The smaller the space craft and the smaller the unit riding inside it, the more people you can save from destruction. You see, you have made the classic blunder that Americans have been making for the past century, that somehow everything has to be better on a grandiose scale. Enron and the power blackout should have taught you that larger isn't the answer. It's the exact opposite: http://www.newpath4.com/AAINDEX/paget6.htm. It's true; I do have a tentative design for a gravity-overcoming engine, and it will sail thru space at very high velocity as soon as it gets out of Earth Gravity (any planet's Gravity). My price is $250,000,000.00 . It should be higher, but I put 250k of words in my website, and the website work was what tweaked me brain to comeup with the space engine, so $250 mil is the price I've decided to set. It doesn't have to be all cash either. Stocks can make up 95% of that because I believe in Earth's future. I still believe in "us". http://www.google.com/search?q=newpath4%2Binterste llar&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-24,GGLD:en&filte r=0 . Woodrow Riley, author http://www.newpath4.com/ . However, I really do LIKE YOUR IDEA FOR CARRYING EXTRA WATER & SUPPLIES.
If there is a new Ice Age coming, it won't be anytime soon, I don't think we have to worry about that. If there's going to be a major increase in global temperature values, same. But these things are N-A-T-U-R-A-L. We don't have that much influence over the global weather. The oceans are covering about 70% of the earth's surface. Are we that destructive? I don't think so. It's just something the media writes about when they run out of other stories. These things repeat every 30,000 years or so from what I know, when the weather changes dramatically (yes, we are probably heading for a new Ice Age) but it's just the way things are: it may be a "catastrophe" for us, but it's normal for this to happen. Even so, we have no reason to worry atm, it can't be that much of a disaster in the next hundred years, let's let our kids find a sollution. By the way things are evolving, we might even migrate to new planets pretty soon. Shut up! In stead of yelling to everyone in the middle of the smoke "fire! fire!" you could try and help evacuate the people.
Read the post - the guy was blaming it on North America and Europe, neither of which is in the Northern Hemisphere.
Leave it to an aussie to waste so much space when any idiot can figure out that I mean to write "Southern Hemisphere".
Well...not any idiot. But don't let that take you away from your mission to bash first world countries.
It's called "global warming", jackass. And you should read what was written yourself. The parent of this thread complained that it's North America and Europe who produce all the pollution, and the truth is that while we consume 90% of the worlds resources, we're responsble for just over half the pollution. My statement was an affront to his assinine sectionalist nationalist bigotry. Then you had to jump in with your defensive stupidity.
The U.S.A. peaked its oil production in the 70's - 40 years after discovery peaked there in the 30's. Globally, discovery peaked in the 60's and therefore global production is set to peak (you guessed it) 40 years later, in the early 2000's.
What about the evidence that suggests that oil may be produced abiotically at deep pressures from common elements found in the crust ?
If this process is occurring, it is a trickle at best. It will not affect global oil production in a measurable fashion.
What about the fact that all our oil numbers come from people in the oil industry - who have a vested interest in keeping their prices at a premium?
You can certainly hope that the possibility of declining oil production is an industry PR measure just to keep prices up. Only time will tell - the next few years, in fact. Of course when U.S. production peaked in 1971, many people didn't believe it could be a peak - that didn't become apparent until a few years later, after production had begun to decline. It's been declining in that country ever since.
Note that OPEC countries do indeed have strong financial incentives to overstate their reserves, and this has almost certainly been happening in the last few years as their reserve numbers have suddenly jumped without any corresponding increase in discovery or production. However this does not mean that there is, in fact, lots more oil to be had.
If this process is occurring, it is a trickle at best. It will not affect global oil production in a measurable fashion.
Care to back that up ? How do you know that this is the case? The idea that oil is biotic in origin has been assumed. The idea that the process which produced it happened in the distant past, based on the decay of biological organisms and cannot, therefore, be renewable was proposed and never seriously challenged in the west.
To say therefore that the oil was made once and will 'run out' is also an assumption. Most petrochemists deny an abiotic origin for oil, despite the fact that it's been shown to be possible. If some then admit, later, that it might be a small component of oil production, how can one trust their judgement (or bias) when assessing the rate of renewal of abiotic oil ?
I will certainly concede that the problem is one of consumption overtaking production. Even if oil is being produced deep in the crust, we have no idea how quickly, or whether the process is continual, or spasmodic. To say that it's a trickle at best is as ill-informed as saying it never happens, or that we have nothing to worry about.
But the Peak Oil enthusiasts tend to shout doom and gloom, end o'the world stuff. They foretold the death of the world in the last 70's and it didn't happen then.
Got any more Wolves ?
I promote nuclear power every chance I get. It's the only viable way to generate electricity without producing greenhouse gases.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
...about the release of predictions and the scientific community.
What you don't realise, that people in 1975 had different computers and no doubt different understandings, and different measuring techniques, and fewer floaty things orbiting our planet.
Sometimes you can cry wolf 2^32 times, and just before the overflow the worlf actually shows up and sinks one of your newly aquired MMORPG islands.
Part of the repeated crying of climate change is because industry, and politics, wanted it to go away.
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