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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
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"
Watched that? Good.
Now remember that MIT oceanographer? The one they've got on there to say that CO2 doesn't matter because it all comes out of the oceans really anyway?
He was substantially misrepresented, and he's not happy at all about it. I'm especially amused by the manner in which the film maker responds to criticism: 'Go and fuck yourself.'
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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)
> 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
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It's not just the coast, it's all over the interior too. And you don't need a plane ride to see it - check out google maps satellite view:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=vancouver&ie=UTF8&z
Just unbelievable. Every single little "patch" you see there is a half kilometer long by half to full kilometer wide. I wonder how many citizens and politicians have seen just exactly how extensive it is.
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
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?
Actually, that's one thing that probably doesn't belong in the list. It's a disaster for beekeepers, and a major problem for some commercial crops that depend on honeybees. But the actual scientists (i.e., biologists) studying the phenomenon haven't generally considered it a disaster at all.
Honeybees are a domesticated species that is not native to North America. Like some of the other critters we introduced (English sparrows, starlings, carp, etc.), they partly escaped and went wild, and took over the niches that had belonged to hundreds of native species. They might not have done so well in the wild, except that humans maintained a large population that could replentish the supply as the natives evolved ways to fight them. But generally, honeybees have been a disaster for most native species of small pollinators.
Now that there are almost no wild honeybees left, the native bees and other small pollinators (that survived) have been expanding their populations. Biologists studying the phenomenon have generally treated this as a recovery of the original diversity that had been suppressed by the human-supported invader. The resulting diversity makes for a more stable ecosystem in general. And many of the native pollinators are doing a fairly good job of pollinating most of the crops. The main problem is that we can't control them as easily as we controlled honeybees. And most of them don't form huge colonies, so harvesting what honey they have isn't very practical.
The main "disaster" is the human one: We've lost much of our honey crop. But this isn't really a disaster for the ecosystem; it's just a minor local agricultural problem in one crop. And much of that problem can be attributed to something that biologists have generally warned about: It was a monoculture, depending totally on a single domesticated insect. Monocultures are inherently unstable, susceptible to crashes whenever a single parasite or disease shows up. It's not the first time we've seen crashes in a single monoculture crop, and it won't be the last.
If we want a reliable honey crop, we can't do it like we have been. We need a variety of bees, preferably of several species, so that a single disease or parasite can't wipe out the entire crop, and so that populations can be kept somewhat separate to impair the disease/parasite's rapid spread. But there's no sign that our agricultural system is learning that lesson.
There's no obvious tie-in of this with the climate change phenomenon. Nobody is suggesting that the honeybee die-off has anything to do with the warmer weather.
But the warming will allow the Africanized "killer" bees to expand farther into North America. They are good honey producers; maybe we need to learn to cultivate them. That's why people were experimenting with them South America, after all, when the big "Oops!!" happened and a bunch of them escaped.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.