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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 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!
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=42521
"For the full store, see this article."
Apparently so.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Winston:.... since I've been with these guys I've seen $h1t that'll turn you white.
Evolution or ID?
Stop worrying about every little thing that can kill you and start living.
Yes, but I want my son to live, and his son, and his son...
The environmentalists and some politicians may be a bit extreme to either side, but I think the issue is worth taking a closer look at... for my great great great grandchildren's sake.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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?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.
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
If you define "we" to include more than "Texas" (hard to do, I know, just take a deep breath and face the fact that Yessirreebob, there's folks livin' beyond them thar hills), then yes, "we" did have record highs last year. In N-W Europe, 2004 was one of the warmest years in a century. Not only that, in 1994-2004 8 out of 10 years were warmer than usual.
And the earth may have a climatic cycle of its own, but this time we're helping it along. You can debate the extent of our influence, but just assuming that extent is 0% and adopting an "Après moi la déluge" attitude is Just Plain Dumb.
Should be called: CorporateCrapDaily
Did he inhale?
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.
. . . 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?
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.
...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.
Greater energy within the earth's system means greater diversity in weather systems. So your record lows and Florida's huge hurricanes last year are a part of this process.
The adaptation we need will involve burning less fossil-based fuels, and preparing the rest of the planet to survive the extremes of weather: Bangladesh floods every year the spring rains and this will get worse, so assistance will be needed to avoid massive loss of life. Adaptation so they survive? If you do something...
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?
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.
Bah.. Here's a better link: article
"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.
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.
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.
What the hell would Noah want with a boat?
I'm no saint. I don't do all these things, but there's some food for thought there.
Watch all the euro-hippy doom-sayers come out, because 50 years of America-bashing can't be wrong.
Any climate change we see or don't see may or may not be caused in part or in whole by man's existence and deeds. I'm not even opposed to erroring on the side of safety. I'm just not happy with the political agenda of the people that have hijacked environmentalism.
And you'll have to forgive me for not immediately buying this climate change thing, because the last global environmental fix we needed was to save the ozone by banning CFCs, and several other chemicals that actually aren't anything like CFCs but have similar names. As it turns out, the science linking CFCs (and the complete lack of science concerning substances like HCFCs) to the ozone hole is deficient; there may be a relation, but it's not the one that they sold us.
The truely funny part though, is that the available replacements for CFCs as refrigerents are less efficient and therefore contribute to -- you guessed it -- global warming due to increased energy use. So we got fake environmental fix that is actually contributing to the next environmental problem.
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.
And we all know that scientists and experts all live of thin air and don't need to eat. How do you know they were scientists and experts did you programme makers say so? That isn't proof, I watch Enterprise and get told we can travel faster than light it doesn't mean I should believe it. How do you know that the programme maker don't have an agenda and therefore chose scientists and experts that happen to agree with them. How do you know that those scientists and experts are not the only experts that believe global warming is junk while the other 99.99999% believe it is true. There is always disagrements concerning differing viewpoints in science. You _cannot_ make an informed decision about something from a television programme since they cannot present you with all the information that you need in order to make a decision. Considering that the people who are the most qualified to make that decision are the people who have PhDs in the field perhaps we should believe what the majority of them say. That doesn't mean that they are always right, both Newton and Einstein were wrong about certain aspects of their work. In fact Einstein spent about 30 years of his life being wrong because he could reconsile his religious views with the direction that physics had taken based on his earlier work.
So maybe YOU just need to do a little research, my friend.
And perhaps you need to think a little more about what you see on television nothing is presented without bias (including this post). People are inclined to believe what supports their view and dismiss information that doesn't even if that information is the overwhelming majority* . You have to learn to be objective.
Maybe the view to take is if we take action against global warming and it was true we have saved ourselves but if global warming isn't true we haven't doom outselves just spent some more money and made the air a little cleaner (not a bad thing in my opion). On the other hand if we do nothing and there isn't such a thing as global warming then we are fine, but if global warming is true and we do nothing then we are screwed. Doing something about it seems to have a better outcome to me.
* See Slashdot moderation for an example.
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
Human activities masked another Ice Age. Kind of like the novel, Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn.
Sure, if you ignore the fact that many plants require a certain amount of direct sunlight.
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?
Pick your link (Umm, except that one about the Genesis flood...)
Heh. here is a post I made shortly prior to my response.
I'm well aware of the various implications. I just don't think it's as bleak as everyone makes out to be. Sure, there might be killing, chaos, and a fairly abrupt end to our current way of life (IMO, things will simply reach critical mass and go reactor critical). The dollar losing value will likely have a large impact as well. There'll be a fair amount of cultural residue for a good while after US decline hits critical, I think, but we can likely expect the US to disappear from the world arena.
Whether that means the US is completely demolished and most of its citizens resort to rogue states (or smaller citizen states) or the US is simply converted to 3rd-world status with constant terrorist problems, I don't know. But those are the unfortunate scenarios I see playing out in my mind.
How can we prevent this from happening? I don't rightly know, and I don't really think we can. I do know that city residents won't likely have a good chance of surviving.
I personally kind of romanticize about such a situation in some respects, as it would be a true test of a person's "worth", if you will: you wouldn't survive unless you've got the skills and inborn abilities to "make a living" - in the purest sense of the phrase. The economy of skill would be balanced, with people who make copious amounts of money as a trader or corporate tycoon getting blasted back down to the level of factory workers by the over-night worthlessness of all their money and stocks. "Men would be men", as the saying goes, with personal merit being the truest form of assessment available - not how much someone is worth or what kind of car they drive, but what they know and can do.
Yes, I realize this is romanticized quite a deal. Yes, there will likely be death, murder, mayhem, disease, and starvation. It would be a natural restabilization of ecology, though. We've lived on the tit of oil for too long, and the earth can't bend that way much longer.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
How many American families will have to do without their third car, or maybe their second, or even *gasp* use public transportation! And think of the third-worldness of not having a TV in every room. And heaven forbid you can't get Cheez-Its at 3AM.
Most Americans are incredibly spoiled and could cut back consumption by a huge amount without getting even *close* to third world status.
Assuming global warming is a fact, these cutbacks would give the human race a much better chance at surviving without depriving Americans of basic necessities.
If global warming is not a fact, it will reduce your dependence on foreign oil to possibly nil, thereby freeing up a lot of the military budget for, say, tax cuts or better schools.
When you see a sign on the highway saying "Missing bridge ahead", you don't keep cruising and say "I assume that's not a fact". Not if you value your life, at least.
-Lars
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
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.
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
We have. It's indisputable that we are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, and that CO2 levels are rising. It's also beyond dispute that CO2 absorbs IR radiation, and that such absorption will act to warm the surface. That means to me that "we've turned on the burner". People argue about negative feedback that might counteract the warming effect - but that's not the "burner".
Further we don't know what would happen if we "turned the burner off"
We know withing some range of uncertainty; and the odds are that it would be less disruptive than keeping the burner on. We have recent historical data to indiucate what the world does at lower CO2 levels, and it's probably ok.
The other article about Global Dimming also would suggest that there are other changes we aren't accounting for.
I remember studying the effects of aerosols 5 years ago in my radiative transfer class; the effect you mention is a second-order effect that will amplify current warming trends.
It's a complex system that is "described" using things like chaos theory.
"Chaos theory" is one of those words that should never be used in a scientific/political context because it means different things to different people. You seem to think it means "can't be predicted and so isn't real". In a scientific context it has a more definite meaning; and my example does include that - fluid flow during boiling is "chaotic" and unpredictable. The effect of radiative forcing on climate is somewhat less so.
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.
That's an underhanded piece of crap for an argument. Care to provide a reference for that claim? Care to defend it? I take issue with you blithely dismissing many thousands of temperature measurements from dozens of researchers based on some bogus "statistical argument" that you won't even elaborate.
p.s. Why was my original comment modded "flamebait"? It wasn't inflammatory. Overrated I could accept, but "flamebait" is just wrong.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
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.
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?
>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!"
Thank you.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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.
This is kind of like me telling you, hey, that US economy doesn't look too hot... maybe you shouldn't be investing your life savings in it right now. Am I crying wolf? Or am I saving your ass? You decide... lemme know what you think in a couple years.
No, that's wrong. Volcanoes on average put in 100-200 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Humans dump about 6 BILLION tons each year. Here is a reference. here is another
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
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
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.
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.
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
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
Bullish Machine Tzar
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
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
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
For many people (I would venture to say most of the US), public transportation is not an option. I live in Chicago now, so I can see how many people would not understand that (I didn't even own a car for 3 years, and didn't really miss it), but much of the US is sparsely populated.
Sparsely populated can mean 100-200 miles to nearest store. There is no public transportation available (because there is practically no public!). I have lived in areas where driving to the nearest department store would be equivalent to driving through 2 countries in Europe! People just cannot get this if they haven't lived it. Especially people from California and Europe.
Removing cars by economics (because that is they only way it could be done) would take cars away from the poor rural areas that need them, and would keep them in the rich cities. Yes, people would really die. My father was the only Pediatrician (Children's Doctor) within 200 miles of where I once lived. Cars were absolutely necessary.
That is the problem with trying to decide things for others - you don't have enough information to make the correct decision. In fact, that is why the free market economy works so well, because the one making the decision is at the lowest level and has (presumably) the best information.
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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?
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.