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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.
(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!
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
'Global warming' hype reaches fever pitch But critics doubting data compare ideology behind movement to Communism, Nazism
Man, they don't get past the sub-header before invoking Godwin's law. Now that's good journalism!
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
...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.
The slam against the global warming crowd by comparing them to militant feminists is just plain silly. But by the same token (from the summary article), there's just as much silliness on the other side:
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. And although the article makes a statement that 400ppm for CO2 is a critical point - it never explains what evidence supports this number. Now, the report may be correct, but when a news article reports only the conclusions and none of the methods, it is just so much fear mongering. Just as the opposing side is so much head-burying. As someone else said, the original results would be much more interesting.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Apparently we have another person who was asleep in math class when they taught the concept of rate of change. The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. They're talking about comparable changes in temperature possibly happening over the next 100 years.
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.
I'm no saint. I don't do all these things, but there's some food for thought there.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.