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Billions Face Risks From Climate Change
gollum123 writes with a link to a kind of grim BBC story. According to a report drawn up by 'hundreds of international environmental experts', billions of people face drought and famine, as well as an increase in natural disasters, as a result of climate change. Individuals in the poorest countries face the most danger, due to a lack of infrastructure and geographic location. "The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world. Eighty-nine percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world. Several delegations, including the US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft."
Siberians are happy about global warming. Siberia is now a happening place. Some Northern European countries are also digging it.
Table-ized A.I.
Locally, it means more people moving out of the increasingly thirsty eastern Oregon counties, and to the water-flush Willamette Valley. Either that or a damn good opportunity for rain catch basins as snow pak decreases in the Cascades and annual rainfall increases only to wash away into the ocean before we can use it for our hot and thirsty summers.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
People who lack this, don't exist. At least on this planet.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Care to elaborate on that? The models are available for you to play with. The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate. The satellite data indicating that the atmosphere is warming is available. The fact that we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere by the millions of tons is fairly simple to calculate.
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong, but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
The countries objecting are the 3 biggest oil consuming nations and one of the biggest oil exporting nations. Go figure that.
when technology advances, all boats rise!
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Modern scientist's have been studying how this 100 million year old planet functions for literally decades now, so I am confident that they a complete and accurate understanding upon which to base their predictions. Sure they're only 50% accurate at predicting this weekend's weather, but still...
I agree with that. We can't be certain. We've only got a few decades of really good data, and a few hundred years of approximate data prior to that. That's not enough to be certain to any degree about events that will play out over hundreds of years.
But that doesn't matter. We need to act on this whether (no pun intended) we're certain or not. The very fact we're not sure means we have no choice *in case we're right*. Not being certain works both ways. We're not certain it's a bit disaster, but neither are we certain it isn't. If we don't start taking action now then in 50 years time it may be too late. If we do take action then it might mean we all end up less wealthy, maybe even out of work if we work in a polluting industry, but is that really so bad if the cost of doing nothing is potentially the end of the human race, or even the sum of life on Earth? Sure, I'm a bit of a tree-hugging hippy liberal (lower case 'l') at heart, but I care that my children and children's children don't end up starving to death in a desert wasteland. With no trees. To hug.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
L1 is really far away (which means your mirror must be all that much larger), and is "unstable." A much better use of it is to leave it as clear as possible for spacecraft using the "interplanetary superhighway."
If you must build a giant mirror, a ribbon in any orbit small enough not to be rapidly perturbed by the moon would be more than sufficient, and much smaller in total surface area than a giant L1 disk.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
OK, how 'bout the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere is not linear, it's logarithmic. Adding more CO2 beyond a certain point doesn't have that great an effect on temperature. Changes in solar output does. I don't buy it either.
BTW, when did genuine skepticism turn into trolling?? I wasn't expecting some kind of eco-inquisition.
[Insert pithy quote here]
What's the realistic likelihood we will ever see carbon emissions mitigation?
There are too many moneyed interests who would be hurt by mitigation measures; they'll make sure we can't take any action.
There are also plenty of people convinced we'll ruin the economy by mitigating, despite the report from a former head of the World Bank (hardly a bastion of "liberal" ideology) showing the costs to the economy of global warming will be much greater than the costs of mitigation plus the costs of mitigated global warming.
we have millions of years of ice core data giving us a feel for global temperature.. and because we continue to drill we get more and more data every year.
here is a sample of that data charted
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Now we can put our Y2K supplies to good use.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Blocking solar energy is just a Really Bad Idea all around. I mean, not only does it reduce our ability to collect solar energy for electricity but it reduces the ability of plants to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Stupid stupid idea.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Or you could have people paint their roofs white and use lighter tar on the streets white instead of the pitch black crap (would make night driving better too I assume), etcetera, to send back some solar energy once it gets on earth. You could genetically engineer grass to be light/white instead of green, and be "viral" so that entire patches of normal grass would be taken over by the stuff. It should also be emo grass, so it can cut itself.
That is why the melting of the artic/antartic would be a big problem - that white ice/snow reflects energy back to space, when it gets smaller, it effectively increases the amount of energy we recieve (I guess the oceans get warmer) and makes the whole warming process go that much faster.
Anyway, a few trillion gallons of white paint would be easier to procure and distribute than sending mega mirrors up to space -- even if they are made of mylar or something similiar.
Maybe the situation is, you know, getting worse?
their reputations are based on peer review, not pupularity.. either their findings are unbiased, repeatable, and coherent with the full range of evidence or they are not..
repeated findings which show bias, lack repeatability, and/or are not coherent with the full range of evidence erodes reputation.
for example.. the ID assertions of a "great flood welling up from the ocean bottom" causing the continents to drift is a big fat steaming load which is not consistent with inch per year movement measured between alaska and eastern russia.
so no.. its not a popularity contest, it's a feasibility contest, and you have to prove their reputations if they have findings which run counter to the findings of the vast majority of the scientific community.
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I thought the radical Environmentalist wanted 5.5 - 6.0 billion people removed from the face of the earth.
http://www.thegeorgiaguidestones.com/Message.htm
1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I've done way too much reading on the topic, going so far as to look at the actual mathematics and stats behind it, and in conclusion am no longer as alarmed as I used to be. The average warming that we've experienced over the time period that the IPCC uses in its findings is rather inconsistent with the extrapolation (i.e. predictions) that they make as far as future warming is concerned. People can scream "conspiracy" or "personal agenda" all the want, but I'm not sure if it isn't just lazy science that arrives at what they're hoping to find. Let me find a link to something detailed... it may help... (sadly I find lots of bias in the *wording* of EVERY SINGLE PAPER on the topic, certainly including the IPCC reports that are in the habit of replacing probabilities with terms like "more likely than not" and "very likely" which serve to only make a statistician suspicious): ahref=http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/rel=ur l2html-24023http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/ > (my issue with the essay I'm linking to is that even if it's an unbiased look at the topic, it certainly doesn't seem like it. Still, I have looked at the IPCC reports themselves and find them missing the sort of information that could be used to defend those reports against criticisms brought forth by the essay...)
I like basketball!!1!
>> US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft.
Gee what a surpise that those countries are objecting, given that those are mostly the worst polluters and also the worst countries for politically spinning and socially engineering information.
Just shut your carbon hole and buy your credits from Gore's company, then you can continue to pollute with impunity.
Or you can buy credits from me. I'm still working out a pricing schedule, and I won't actually do anything, but if you pay me enough money, I'll take responsibility for your carbon sinning. If everyone does that, then the world will be nearly pollution free, except for me, the most polluting person of all time, of course!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The US and other G8 countries are spending a bunch of money to compensate for a warmer world, including things like alternative energy, GM food, and the like. The US is also apparently funneling a bunch of money through the MCA. This is all good. my question is we are spending money to hedge against the risk, then why are we not also spending some money to reduce the suspected causes of the risk. If it were a terrorist risk, we would have no problem spending $500 billion to fight even the most unlikely causes. OTOH, we can't even ask industry and individual to try not to pollute so much. It amazing me that we will fine people who throw a 1 oz tissue out a car window $500, but have not problem with the same person producing 1 kg of CO2 for every mile driven in the big truck or SUV, multiplied but the 60 commute every day. Insane.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
and for all deniers I provide this practical list, pick your poison:
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sigamajig...
Canada is also a happening place. And they take in almost anybody. And I believe and they have a homesteading program where you can get your own large tract of land for free or nearly free. If I weren't already an American, I'd go for it even if I had to steal, jump fences, work aboard a cargo ship, swim and take assumed names along the way.
People forget that never in the history of Man has the climate not been changing. We survivors are the ones that went from where conditions were not survivable to where they were better. The ones who stayed behind are history. (Note to people in southern Florida: if your children can't breathe seawater, now would be a good time to find some land that won't be under water when they're grown.)
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You do realise that it doesn't necessarily follow that global warming == warmer climate?
One example is the gulf stream that is the only thing keeing Northern England and Scotland from being under metres of ice is already starting to change direction as a result of global warming.
>> Does anyone else see there's more going on here than environmental alarmists would have you believe?
Yes, that its largely the American population (also conicidentally per capita the worst polluters by far) who are in denial and are grapsing at any available feeble excuse to avoid having to change their behviour.
There are six and a half billion people on the Earth now in vast settled communities. We're not a few thousand nomads who can just up sticks and hike across the hills to somewhere nicer. We're an entire global civilisation existing three meals from disaster. When Bangladesh floods, where should its population migrate to? Where's free? When the Midwest turns back into a dust bowl, and when China's rice fields dry out, how quickly can we identify alternative food sources and establish industrial-scale farming there? What happens in the meantime? How many millions starve? How many die in desperate wars for food and for water?
Whether we're causing climate change or not, we are facing disaster from it. Sure, it's happened before, and sure the Earth will recover in time, but that doesn't comfort me much. I for one would like to keep as many as possible of those six and a half billion alive through this.
Meanwhile we spend vast fortunes turning the Middle East upside down to hunt a guy who killed a few thousand people once. Priorities, eh?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
50 years ago ?! Computers and microwaves existed. Nuclear weapons existed. 50 years ago, parity violation was confirmed in an experiment conducted fractions of a degree above absolute zero...
50 years ago, people were building the first DEDICATED WEATHER SATELLITES ! (Launched 47 years ago...)
You don't think people could measure atmospheric temperatures accurately enough to feed into a climate model a whole 50 years ago??? Get a clue, you're just ignorant of scientific history. Accurate temperature measurement for meteorological purposes was one of the first things developed in the history of science-as-we-know-it, given its obvious utility, especially at the height of the maritime era.
Hell, during the British Empire, weather stations were dotted around the globe recording temperatures to within a fraction of a degree almost 2 CENTURIES AGO.
Just how long do you think 50 years is? My mum is over 50 years old! Maybe you meant 50 jovian years, eh?
Okay, first off, I'll pretend I fully buy into the "human-caused global warming" schtick. I don't. We may be CONTRIBUTORS, but not the root cause. But anyhoo, I'll bite in the "human-caused" thing for the sake of argument.
Please propose a scientifically reasonable solution as to what is causing global warming if it's not human based, and one that's consistent with 100,000+ years of earth temperature variations along with CO2 levels and solar activity, data of which we do have.
Even if the human race were to cease all industrial and agricultural output of greenhouse gas NOW (this very second), it wouldn't make a bit of difference in the warming trend. The material we've put in the atmosphere will continue this trend for at least the next century. So what exactly do they expect people to do?
You are correct that we cannot just limit everything, even the most conservative models that assume we all buy hybrids, cut down on driving, and stop increasing global population, still lead to runaway levels of CO2 in a century or so.
I attended a physics colloquium by a government scientist, the guy who actually got Bush to include the bit about alternative energy and 'switchgrass' in last years State of the Union address. So this guy answers to Bush, convinced Bush to mention this, and even this guy himself,who you might assume would thus be an oil-lobby crony, says we have to have an action plan ready within a century or so.
So seriously, show me a single professional scientist who says we don't need to do anything to stop global warming, or has a reasonable explanation as to why CO2 levels are HUGELY above anywhere they've been over the past severla hundred thousand years, and is fully consistent with CO2, solar, and temperature data over this time span.
Now anyway, what this government scientist proposed to do is immediately work on alternative energy programs and get ourselves off of carbon-based sources. One plan is do nothing, as you are implying we do, which could be an acceptable solution if you're statistically certain we're not the cause of warming and that nothing disastrous will happen. Are you statistically certain, other than your contrarian desire to say you don't buy the global warming theories?
What this guy did do is propose energy plans for all energies, from coal, to nuclear, to wind, to solar, and showed that NONE except solar are able to satisfy our expanding energy needs and to fully power the country renewably while reducing carbon footprint.
It makes perfect sense thermodynamically too, as ALL power (except geothermal) is solar energy anyway, so you get the highest efficieny if you go straight to the energy source itself. There are great improvements in solar heating techniques (ie, use mirrors to heat liquid in a pipe to turn turbines), and that is where he thought the future is.
Doing that in the next few years will allow us to reduce the carbon footprint and not get stuck in this level.
Another thing to consider are that the ocean has been absorbing CO2 for the past 100 years anyway, and when that saturates, CO2 levels in the atmosphere will skyrocket.
make world, not war
Just an interesting little aside... If you took everyone in the world - all 6.5 billion of us, and put us on the land in Texas, we'd be less dense than New York City.
There really IS a lot of land out there...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yes, a small number of cranks were pushing the global cooling story, while the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists was that it was not going to happen.
Now they're tending upwards, so we're all going to die.
See above, but vice-versa.
Oh, and there was an Ozone Hole, so we're all going to die.
Remember how we all stopped using chlorofluorocarbons?
The ice age ended and the climate changed. Guess what -- animals and people moved along with it.
OK, that works for a few thousand cavemen. Now do it with a billion.
If you were able to watch UK Channel 4's "The Great Global Warming Swindle", it's been pulled from YouTube for copyright issues. Pity. It was spot on.
Not according to Carl Wunsch, the oceanographer featured prominently in that show, who says it misrepresented him completely.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
here's a chart, though it doesnt show the 2000 levels very well, you can see a sharp spike that shows roughly double the maximum co2 levels seen across the previous 400,000 years at the '00 mark. notice how temperature (in blue) tracks with co2 levels, and shows greater sensitivity to co2 at peaks.
remember temperature is related to atmospheric co2 in the same way economic growth is related to money supply.
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I've got to start off by saying: I'm a conservative Canadian, nowhere near a vocal tree hugging liberal.
To all those that don't believe man is impacting the climate, I call BS. People said the same thing about the hole in the Ozone Layer (caused by CFC's prevelant at the time). People said the same thing about Acid Rain (caused by VERY bad emission controls on Auto's).
Let me bottom line this, read up on the melting at the poles, and at Greenland. Take a look at the average temperature per season per year for the last 20 years. Take a look at the number of Islands that have *disappeared* due to rising water levels. Lastly - consider that more people are alive today then have existed for our ENTIRE history.
The UN doesn't exist to "spread America's wealth", countries like Canada and NZ contribute the same or more PER PERSON than the US (when it pays - which is increasingly rare). The UN exists so that all the people of the World have a place and forum to voice their concerns on GLOBAL issues. I would argue that the changes we are making to our climate are perhaps the most important such issue to ever be discussed at the UN.
If after all the evidence you don't believe we're impacting the Climate, then be prepared to kiss your ass goodbye - if war and famine don't get ya, the drought will.
Killer
"All those scientists around the globe, that practice science everyday and have studied years and years worth of data are wrong. I saw something on the TV that said so."
Another favorite:
Ok, fine we have global warming, but it's not going to effect anybody.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wow, I am completely surprised at the number of posts attempting to dispute global warming. Pathetically, most of said posts attempt to call into question the impartiality of the scientists that did the research as if they have some political agenda of their own. It's more than a little ironic that the term "sheeple" gets tossed about by those who are generally regurgitating political dogma.
And for the others who point to past predictions of environmental degradation that never materialized (global cooling, for instance) as reason to ignore the current forecast -- I beg of you, please stop. We obviously still don't know exactly how everything works but when the current body of knowledge and the majority of the scientific community is predicting something severe, we would be stubborn to the point of idiocy to do anything but plan accordingly.
Personally, I don't need any government study to convince me that global warming is happening. Look at a satellite map of the Arctic thirty years ago and compare it to one today. Thirty years is to the planet the time equivalent of an afternoon to us. Ever get that depleted hot flush a day before the flu kicks in?
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
I see by your response that your ashamed of being a mental-midget. Don't feel bad, it's ok, and it's not your fault some people were just born that way. Just try not to dirty up forums with your foul language and militant demeanor.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
if i remember correctly, they still have a huge backlog of ice cores going back to the time of the dinosaurs they have yet to fully log..
so, in all honesty, theyll get it from the refrigerator : )
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... and use lighter tar on the streets white instead of the pitch black crap
The department of transportation started coating the freeways in the Phoenix metropolitan area with Rubberized Asphalt a few years back. At first I was like, "brilliant, dudes, brilliant", as the rubberized freeways are much blacker than they were before, and I assumed that this would increase the urban heat island effect.
Then I read about a group who actually had some numbers. They had an infrared satellite picture of the Valley of the Sun pre- and post-rubberization. In the before photo, you could clearly see where the freeways ran, as they were glowing bright orange. But in the after photo, the freeways were all black. The rubberized asphalt does not conduct heat very well, and while it does get hotter during the day (140+ deg. F, iirc), it cools down much quicker at night.
Rubberized asphalt is only good for freeways, where there won't be any pedestrians...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I have a problem with anyone who says that there's no disagreement about an issue. If you're interested in why third-world countries aren't developing at all, and if you'd like to see a different perspective on the issue, I'd recommend The Great Global Warming Swindle.
YouTube abridged documentary
Torrent of full documentary
Please don't hurt my karma too bad, I just think it's nice to consider all sides of an issue.
Heart,
Your Mom
real estate prices say different, it will be "discounted" beachfront property, only 600k instead of a cool 1.6 mil, buy now! it's a steal! (scuba gear sold separately)
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You need a lesson on chaos theory. Basically, the gist of it is that the behavior of nonlinear systems, such as the individual motion of the atoms in a gas, become impossible to accurately predict over long time scales. This says nothing, however, of the macroscopic statistical values that describe a system, such as the pressure and temperature of said gas. Compared to the atmosphere as a whole, weather is localized "microscopic" behavior, while average temperature is a macroscopic quantity.
That's an age-old argument that conveniently ignores ALL the required infrastructure for a society such as plumbing and sanitation stations, farms and food storage and distribution, manufactureing and all the factories that would produce everything you'd have, etc etc etc. Other than the farming, NYC has that infrastructure.
make world, not war
The data is quite sound (and "trivial" to gather as alluded by earlier responses). Even more important, however, is the ability to measure parameters coupled with temperature (CO2 concentration affecting temperature) from thousands of years back using ice core data. Just because you don't buy it doesn't mean it's wrong. Simply put, you should read some actual journal articles (and not summaries in various Times and Chronicles) and look at the methodology and error analysis, then try to look for drawbacks. Then, look for papers that examine said drawbacks...
example: katrina. (the city still hasn't recovered).
i honestly dont believe any actions on emissions now will show results for the next 50+ years, but in the mean time things will continue getting worse, and we should be allocating more funds to disaster relief and trying to prevent the end of this spike in co2 from getting any higher.
this denial and refusal to prepare based on "uncertainty" is like playing chicken with a freight train.. sure it "might" veer off the rails and not hit you, but all evidence points to it plowing straight on through. do you really want to be standing on the tracks when its perfectly feasible not to?
at this point the evidence is so blatant they might as well go to the airport and proclaim "man will never be able to fly"! at this point it's very much religion-like political fervor rather than weighing of evidence and reality.
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You aren't the only one. Of course we don't spend our lives shouting their facts are wrong.
Global warming is a very interesting ploy because they tell you how it works and show you models of it but the proof is very hazy. If you look deeper into the research you find more research, however at the base level a lot of research has very iffy numbers and methods. Looking at Santer's early work on global warming and the findings are iffy.
A Canadian businessman (already science types are saying "biased") named Stephen McIntyre looked into this and Micheal Mann's articles in it and found obvious problems with the data and processes they used. Originally he got an article in a science publication but got cut back to one page from two. Then half a page, then a quarter until they said there's not enough space to explain his point and the article disappears. He's just one of the many who finds that the proof isn't in the proverbial "pudding".
But this article is at least interesting because it doesn't say much about global warming, it talks about the effects of global warming and how it will affect the population of the world. That's great but at the same time it doesn't mean much if it's all BS.
Coastal floods means the enitre coast around the continent.
Talk about 100 trillion dollar project!
It would be better to start shutting down coal plants and put that money into developing an infrastructur for charging electric cars.
Stop selling combustion engine vehicals.
Exeptions:
Tractor Trailor trucks, emergency vehicals, cargo planes, planes for overseas travel.
This needs to be done globally.
Does it suck? yes it does. For the record I Love combustion cars. I love the power the speed, driving long distance between refuelling. I get all tingly just tlaking about it.
eventually it will be the norm to uses video conferncing for all sales calls, slow sprawl, creat new industries, destroy some old industries, and the market will go on.
The quikest way is to put a dollar a gallon tax on all gas. That dollar goest to two places:
Education and RnD for new power sources. It would eb a temporary boon and used with that in mind
For education, it should go into High School and into making colleges cheaper.
Increase the tax by 50 cents every year for five years.
I lke my lifestyle, but what I like doesn't matter when the whole of society is at risk.
There is going to be less rain in places.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
For food, well, the Vegans (not that I am one - I believe in being an omnivore!) say you can feed a person with 700 square meters of farmland. So that means that 1 square kilometer will feed 1400 people.
Now, the US has approximately 950 million square acres of farmland, which is around 3.9 million square kilometers. That would support 5.4 billion people. Add in a bit more farmland from northern Mexico or Canada, and we have enough space here in North America for the entire population AND the farmland to support it.
Meaning that - if we really wanted to - we could leave the other 6 continents - and a large portion of North America - empty, untouched, unused.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The scientific method: Gather data; form hypothesis; make prediction; experiment and observe; repeat.
We have a whole mess of data, and we have a few hypothesis. The next step is to make a prediction based on a hypothesis and observe. We can't create an experiment for obvious reasons, but we can still observe. Last year there was a prediction. I don't know if it was a scientific prediction, or merely the collection fear mongering of the mainstream media (it's becoming increasingly hard to tell the difference). The prediction was that this year's hurricane season would be much much worse than last. What did we observe? A rather mild hurricane season. The prediction failed and the hypothesis has been proven false. In fact, nearly all climate predictions over the past fifty years have failed.
There are two major problems with the current climate scare. One of them I alluded to above: the media-zation of science. We are basing public policy not on science, but on what the media filters, edits and digests for public consumption. We aren't seeing the data, but are only being told "scientists say...". When you look at the actual data, you'll find that scientists aren't necessarily saying what the media says "scientists say...". A few might be, but not all. It's most definitely not consensus. The consensus is only that the climate is changing and that human beings probably have some level of affect. How much the climate is changing, what level of affect humans have on it, and what are the consequences, are NOT agreed upon in the scientific community.
The second major problem is that this is a very complex area of study. VERY complex. The models used for prediction are EXTREMELY complex. They've been doing modeling on supercomputers since the first supercomputer. Oak Ridge NL announced a new record breaking supercomputer today, and it will be used for... climate modeling. There are simply too many variables and too sensitive to initial conditions. If a butterfly can flap its wings in China and affect the weather in Canada, then we're going to need lots and lots of supercomputers to model all the butterflys.
Are these the models that predicts history's worst hurricane season? If so, they need to be seriously reworked.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That's what we're becoming. So totally wrapped up in the idea that we have some sort of "right" to exist that after engaging in hundreds of years of logical scientific inquiry, finding mountains of evidence that the planet's weather is dynamic, vibrant, and above all fickle, that there are regular up and down periods of cold and hot, we then turn a blind eye to it and against everything we just spent all that time digging up, and proclaim that the world should always have been exactly as it was on June 17, 1931, in Passaic, NJ or something to that effect, and that we must move Heaven and Earth to make it stay that way.
.0003 of that time?
Of course, I'm sure the ancestors of the present day people thought that as they watched the Earth begin to thaw from the last ice age, and the oceans rose to cover the continental shelves and give rise to the planet-wide myths about a globe covering flood. Except, they didn't have scientific evidence in huge piles of books showing that this sort of thing happens all the time regardless of what the bipedal monkeys are up to.
It has been warmer than this in the past. Much warmer. It has been colder than this in the past. Much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. And we know that there is NOTHING we can do at our present technological level about it. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we've only had this supposedly evil technology for only less than
Because the global warming is real and there are people in this world and always have been who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them. And so they trot out to us a false premise, that we are totally responsible for an actually natural occurence in the long span of planetary history, and another one that they can save us from ourselves if only we give them the reigns of power. Seems like the phoney-baloney oil crisis that never happened in the 70s, the phoney-baloney global starvation crisis that never happened in the 60s, the phoney-baloney Communist scare of the 50s that was horsehockey, and ten million other crises.
It seems on the surface that we are supremely full of ourselves and yet in truth we are terribly dubious, completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility. There is no faith in ourselves in this idea that we caused global warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. Only false hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of others.
Have faith in our progress and our natures that we are not so bad as we would think and as others would posit. We have greatness unknown and unmatched simply waiting to be explored. Once we dreamed of exploring the universe and doing so in style and comfort where now we dream simply of returning to primitive conditions lest Mother Earth shrug us off in anger over our insolence. Mother Earth is a nonentity and the physics of the world merely uncaring and indifferent to us. We cannot make the world stay in steady state, we can only live around it, and we are supremely capable of doing it. It was never of question if we can, but if we will.
There are problems with how we treat the environment, but growing the power of the state over the power of the individual, regressing to dreary primitive states, embracing inanities like hemp and bio diesel, and forgetting all the wonderous things we've thought up in the past to overcome each problem in turn, is to turn our back on being human, and all the best things about that. We can solve the problems and there need be no doom and gloom, and the solutions need not involve handing more power over to those who have far too much already and not nearly the wisdom to know what to properly do with it.
The world will shrug. We will move with it.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
If you'd like to run some of the same experiments done in the IPCC report, you can (with a slightly older code base). The EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a graphical interface and ported to Mac/Win. You can add CO2 or turn the Sun down with your mouse, a checkbox, and a slider. Simple graphical tools are included to look at the final results (there are hundreds of variables to choose from).
Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Space and Computers.
the L5 society as I recall proposed a permanant orbiter at the L5 location. They used the name High Orbital Mini-Earth or, as they said: "H.O.M.E. on LeGrange"
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
We're arrogrant thinking our puny actions can have any lasting effect on Nature.
Sorry folks, but the Earth is five billion years old and has seen a lot worse than anything we can do let alone control.
"Man-made climate change" is a political slogan, not a fact.
In other words, you're being played by an small group of self-appointed know-it-alls who think they know what's best for everyone else, and they're doing it not for your welfare but for their own gain.
Don't be too suprised after you chase Farmer Jones off the farm to find Al and Rosie sleeping in his bed.
Environmentalism is the new Stalinism.
What?
Here's what I contend: Chinese coal fires produce 360 million tons of CO2 per year...more than all cars in the United States COMBINED. We need to work on the big stuff before we start enacting laws to force people to ride bicycles to work. Or what would you suggest to get rid of CO2 production in the US?
But gathering said empirical data and then using it without realizing what the fucking data actually shows is. Unless it's a feedback loop with CO2 and the independent variable, the CO2 levels would not follow the temperature levels by 2-800 years like they do at almost every fucking point in that special presentation graph where he's walking around stage. If it is a feedback loop, than you should also see the CO2 levels start to drop BEFORE the temperature levels, but oddly enough, that doesn't fucking happen. I wonder why? Could it in fact be because CO2, while a greenhouse gas, doesn't actually drive the temperature? Maybe it has something to do with that great big hot ball of gas 93 million miles away and it's own warming and cooling periods, which oddly fucking enough are able to change temperatures on Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, but according the great fucking Al Gore and his ilk, aren't an important driver in the earths own temperature change. God damn, when the CO2 harridans' computer models can't even fucking explain the effect of clouds upon the temperature, should you really be trusting thier computer models?
The models are available for you to play with.
The "Club of Rome" models were available, too. Yet their predictions of global disaster from overpopulation and pollution didn't come to pass.
At the time it took a mainframe surrounded by "priests in white coats" to run the models. With the advent of personal computers and broad programming education the models were run by people not part of the "club": They tracked the historical record up to the release date then diverged drastically.
So their guts were examined and they were found to have built-in assumptions that were flat out false (to the point that some consider them to be rigged).
The biggest false assumptions related to technology and invention: Major inventions were modeled as dated switch functions. Of course these all stopped at the date of the work - implying no future inventions. (And how WOULD you predict invention?) Increase in the use of technology was assumed to proportionally increase pollution, and so on.
(In fact what happened was technology continued to improve, and pollution was minimized in the process: Combustion was optimized - eliminating energy lost creating nitrogen oxides and "acid rain". Scrubbers pulled sulfur, ash, and other garbage from stacks - and they were sold as feedstocks for other processes - building material, chemical processing, etc. Recaptured sulfur alone would have paid for the equipment investment if it hadn't driven the price down to the point that sulfur mining essentally ended - another environmental benefit.
The new global warming models may be more honest. For starters, they don't track the historical record, which implies that they weren't tweaked to produce the desired result. B-) But it will take a while for the rest of the world to run them, examine them, and see whether they have flaws.
Meanwhile (like the Club of Rome's models) the agencies funding their development have an incentive to produce "scientific predictions" that can serve as an excuse for increased governmental power. Even if this doesn't bias the awarding of contracts, the perception that it might may affect the work of researchers. The models already say what the funding agencies want, so don't expect the
The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate.
So? The human contribution to CO2 is miniscule compared to the natural emissions. Water vapor is a far more powerful "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide and the water vapor content of the atmosphere swings wildly. Water condensed into clouds and fog is an even greater modulator of solar input.
Climate is complicated. There's no reason to assume that a miniscule push given by one aspect of human activity is the cause of any observed change in temperature - even if the change happens to be in the direction of the push.
Meanwhile those models don't match the historical record. Some particulars if interest:
- CO2 rise LAGS (by a considerable amount) global temperature.
- Global temperature tightly tracks sunspot activity (without significant lag).
(Can you tell me how CO2 "pollution" affects sunspots?) IMHO this is more consistent with the idea that the sun is the major controller of global temparature, with CO2 levels primarily an effect rather than a cause - driven by the reduced solubility of CO2 in warmer ocean water (which only changes temperature on millennial time scales).
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong,
We're on the same page there.
but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
When it comes to making policy that involves massive government intervention in economic activity and private lives - from crashing economies through taxing fuels into unavailability to mandating types of light bulbs - the burden of proof that there really IS a "disease" worse than the "cure" is on those who want to seize the power and use it to make the intervention.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You seem fairly certain that we can't affect the climate. Why? Because we never did it before? True, but then there were never 6 billion of us before, and we never pumped millenia worth of carbon out of the ground every year before.
You ought to rethink your position, and make sure it isn't just a self-serving delusion whose sole purpose is to make your feel better. The fact that the consensus view of the scientific community (that same scientific community whose other results you happily rely upon every day in every aspect of your life) is otherwise ought to be a wake up call.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
They didn't destroy the ozone layer because we stopped emitting them in such large quantities, and now some of the damage caused is beginning to reverse. People who say we cried wolf over acid rain, the ozone, ddt, etc. are being disingenuous. These disasters didn't come about because we did something and the policy worked.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE ECO-INQUISITION!
first off.. those natural warming and cooling trends from the sun could very well be the reason for the historic spikes you see in that graph.. all be it indirectly:
plants are sensitive to temperature and water availability, and also cleanse co2 from the atmosphere.
A lot of solar radiation is reflected back into space and not retained in the atmosphere, though that percentage grows with co2.
so.. the increases in direct solar radiation from the sun's cycles cause greater evaporation rates and therefore large patches of drought, less plants grow, less co2 is absorbed, this persistent co2 holds in more heat.
the sun cycle abates, the direct solar radiation decreases, more water is available and those drought areas shrink.. more plants grow and absorb more co2.
additionally, others have pointed out it's been lab tested, and their previous results with the ozone layer give them more credibility than parties with obvious conflicts of interest trying to inflate anything else as the cause.
so now we have a new force creating co2 and eliminating foliage, human industrialization, and surprise, the global temperature is rising, but this time the co2 is continuing to rise, where do you think the global temperature is going to go as we make the greenhouse blanket thicker.
i really wish gore had shown the R^2 value for the model (or did i simply forget he did), that would have put such arguments to rest already.. if it was high these people would have no leg to stand on.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You are going to die eventually. Therefore you should do nothing to stop me from killing you now.
It's a ridiculous argument. The climate is always changing, the fear is that it's going to change very fast, and that it's the result of our actions.
And people living on shorelines has nothing to do with subsidies. Population centers have always formed on shorelines for as long as human civilization has existed. Hint: fishing and shipping. Moving everyone away from shores would be ludicrously more expensive than any emmissions control.
The enemies of Democracy are
Consider, over 80% of fish in the oceans are under threat from extinction due to over fishing.
Consider, there is currently a honey bee plague that is killing up to 90% of hive populations in N. America. How fucked up is that?
Ground water is being used up at unsustainable rates in China and India. --- as well as in all developed countries
See, most people in the west don't hear about these disasters that are *happening* right now because they don't effect most of us... yet.
But everything is connected and eventually the shit is really going to hit the fan.
I live and work in Kenya and experienced the drought last here personally. Picture every day thousands of people carrying a small 5 gallon pail on their head, leaving slums in search of a little bit of water. Picture starving cattle --- so thin you can count their ribs, being driven into the city center to graze upon grass in the ditches and in parks. That is if they don't just drop dead on the side of the highway. (during the drought I saw...and smelled dozens of rotting carcases littering along the highway).
I"m an optimist at heart. Human can solve their problems, but MOST people have no FUCKING clue of what is happening and how it will get MUCH worse.
I'll tell you what though, democracy as we know will change. Governments WILL ration what we eat, drink, and manage the energy we consume. In developing countries this is the NORM. Soon it will be the norm everywhere. Doom and gloom??? No, just REALITY.
The simple truth is that most people are greedy bastards and will do all they can to enrich themselves and damn everyone else. I mean WTF, we are only on this earth for 60 odd years, so who cares right?
This is the world we have made for ourselves, we all have to educate ourselves and everyone needs to make better choices. However, I think increasingly we will need to rely on our governments to carry out responsible mandates if FREEDOM as well as EQUITY are to survive what is coming.
Lets start with the great lakes...polluted mess. They are full of non-native species that are killing off all those beautiful fish that used to be there, not that it matters with all the toxic runnoff from factories and pulp and paper mills.
Speaking of pulp and paper mills, have you ever taken a plane trip over the coast of British Columbia? Its a mighty depressing sight to see the checkered landscape from all the clear cutting. Where do you think all that wood comes from that gets dumped on the US market? Sure...some is being replanted. Just come back in a century or two when it grows back ;(
What about Alberta...yikes they are strip mining the whole province as fast as they can to get at all that oil. DO I even dare mention the ENORMOUS quantities of water they are using in the process? It might just make you sick. (I grew up in Alberta)
I'll tell ya something else about Canada...we are getting pretty damn selective about who can emigrate. Not that I agree with it mind you. But Unless you are educated and have a good amount of money, chances are you will have difficulty in getting into the country...let alone getting a job or buying land. Ha! Homesteading? What is this the 19th century? There are no small time farmers left in the prairies --- they have all gone corporate long ago. Planting vast tracts of genetically altered sunflower seeds and other USELESS products so we can eat our fast food and become even more obese.
I'll tell ya though, I lived in the northwest territories (north of 60) for several years and THAT my friend is what I call untouched wilderness, complete with killer bears, herds of buffalo, and northern lights so close to the ground that you can almost touch them. But its damn cold.
Anyway, in summary,
Canada has a poor environmental record. Its just that we are such a FREAKIN huge country that most people don't notice. But trust me, our giga corps are doing their best to rape our land as they are yours.
Can you link to those studies? Every one I've ever read has pretty conclusively refuted this red herring. Above all, solar radiance has been constant for the last 30 years. I agree with you that there is uncertainty, and by that very logic, a rational being must begin to think probabilistically. By far the most probable culprit for what we are witnessing is our own behavior, and our response should be weighted accordingly.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
"Remember how bad Freon and CFCs were? They were going to destroy the ozone layer."
d /27493/newsDate/4-Oct-2004/story.htm
Remember how we had that big hole in the Ozone that kept growing when we were using Freon and CFCs? And then we stopped using them and the ozone hole got smaller?
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsi
Yah...
Did anybody notice all the news bits about how Al Gore's monthly gas and electricity usage is about equal to what the typical household uses in a YEAR. It's wasteful for the Average Joe to waste gas and leave energy-hogging incandescent lights on when they are not being used, but Political Bigwigs are perfectly fine when it comes to keep their mansions nice and comfy.
Pepole would probably pay much more attention to him if he wasn't so over-hyped and politicized. That, and he could give himself more credit if he practiced all the crap he preaches.
Al Gore, Media Whore.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Yes mankind is producing more CO2, but still it's insignificant compared to other natural sources such as volcanoes and vegetative decay. Your views on our industrialization, and the slightly increasing temperature is a loose correlation.
Vegetative decay is a yearly cycle and not a net producer of CO2, unless the vegetation doesn't grow back next year. Clear cutting forrests being a prime example, and an effect of industrialization.
Volcanoes are not a larger source of CO2 than industrial output, and i'd be interested to know your theory of how volcanic activity has dramatically increased in the last 100 years compared to the previous 600,000. That doesn't correlate at all with the ice core data, much less loosely.
The planet is warming up a bit because of increased solar flux, and not man-made CO2. That's what the data says.
Solar flux means the net transfer of solar energy at the earth, and is affected by both the amount of energy received at earth and the amount of energy retained. Increase in solar output by itself can only account for 30% of the measured temperature increase, ergo the remainder is an effect of increased solar energy retention, exactly how the CO2 greenhouse model predicts. That is what the data says.
The enemies of Democracy are
Looking back up through the discussion the majority of posts have been from skeptics, and none of them have given particular reasons why the IPCC's report is wrong. We have
I've never heard of a massive conspiracy between the loosely knit scientific community before, but this is basically what skeptics are saying. Our kids might look back at discussions like this and wonder what the hell skeptics were thinking and why they couldn't accept that they had to make small lifestyle changes.
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The skeptics recognize that the global warming community has a vested interest in receiving vast sums of money in government handouts. If there is no crisis, there is no funding. This is the downfall of government-funded science. The status quo is also bad. Government subsidies to petroleum companies helps no one. Businesses should be profitable in their own right, or there's no sense building them.
Some of the things you name are great ideas. Decentralization, efficiency, self-sufficiency are all great goals. Unfortunately, what the global warming community most represents is arbitrary government force keeping us from energy independence, blockading the paths to efficiency and self-sufficiency whether it be more American drilling or more nuclear power plants.
Speaking for myself, it's not that I prefer the status quo of centralized petroleum power (there are successful tidal generators that produce free energy out of the ocean -- yet they are not emulated!), it's that the environmentalist's gaia-worship-by-force alternative is so very, very bad. One of the largest roadblocks to the third world getting the tools they need to fend off starvation and poverty is environmentalists. They want and need power plants for their communities to develop. Instead, the wealthy foreign environmentalists step in and all they can get their hands on are a few rickety solar panels. You can't build a city that way.
Parent post is not a troll. One of the forecasted impacts is less snow in the Western US. Oregon has several cities (I live in one) that receive their water supplies from snow pack. Oregon agriculture is *extremely* dependent on snowpack.
If the resource changes, we may well end up adding more infrastructure to use it more efficiently. Also, census data show several eastern (desert) counties losing population, while Willamette Valley populations are growing rapidly.
*Nothing* Marxist Hacker 42 posted was trollish.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
The highest point in Florida according to this page is Britton Hill, at 345 Ft. According to this page the highest city is 500 feet. The average elevation of the entire state is 100 feet.
From the Army Corps of Engineers: hot topic
Today the lake is at 10.166 Feet above NGVD29. Historically, the elevation of this fourth largest lake inside the US has been as little as 10 feet above NGVD29 (mean sea level as measured in 1929). Review the part above about "very low levels" again.
From Wikipedia:
Now do the math. Even if your "one foot in the next 50 years" is accurate, one foot is very significant when high tide and storm surge is already enough to put a 150 mile wide swath of your home state under seven feet of seawater. The numbers I've been reading are not one foot. I'm hearing a meter or two. At that rate one good hurricane could remove the part of southern florida that survives from the mainland entirely. None of this considers an Atlantic Tsunami, which has happened and is predicted to happen again and would just wash right over central florida barely slowing down.
If you're reading this from south Florida, you should consider carefully your choice to stay where you are.
Help stamp out iliturcy.