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Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds
Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."
Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan
Woah there... as a philosophy geek that's done entire courses on Leviathan alone, I can say definitively that you are way out of left field with that one. Hobbes predicted nothing of the sort no matter how you interpret it. The "nasty, brutish, and short" comment was about man devoid of any form of governance such as the literary scenario he laid out for the condition of man in the past.
A horrible misrepresentation of a text like that'll garner you a C- at best by anyone who has actually read the book
Limits to Growth wasn't bullshit. Its predictions are pretty much coming to pass, and pretty much on time. There is a myth that they predicted all apocalyptic shit in the 20th century. I remember when Limits came out .... its predictions were aimed squarely at the early to mid 21st century.
Bitter and proud of it.
In the 70s they were also predicting a coming ice age.
That has been refuted even here on Slashdot IIRC. Global Cooling article in Wikipedia says:
"Of those scientific papers considering climate trends over the 21st century, only 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming."
Which doesn't mean your statement is necessary false, but you should provide some data supporting it.
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.
Though the experts were certainly wrong, let's not imply we're doing anywhere near a decent job of providing food for all mankind. Some 50,000 people die each day from starvation. Countless more live in a chronically malnourished state. True, this is not because of an inability to grow the food (probably what the experts predicted) but because of myriad other reasons from politics to economics to logistics.
Cheers.
As a social scientist I can't live with myself if I let this slip. Actually Hobbes's depiction of life as "nasty, brutish and short" is the exact opposite of a "prediction". It describes life not in the future but in the hypothetical and long past "state of nature", before the development of civilized society and the State (The Leviathan) which puts an end to "the war of each against all" that causes life to be "nasty, brutish and short" in the "state of nature". The transformation is purely social, based on a contract between individuals who agree to submit to a strong authority in exchange for personal security. The development of technology etc. does not come into the discussion in any significant manner in Hobbes, although you could argue for that as a factor independently.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Regardless of what you were taught in school 20 years ago, that's not what the actual Limits to Growth report said. There was a lot of bogus information propagated about the Limits to Growth report at the time it came out, largely by people who didn't like what it actually had to say. The reality is that the Limits to Growth report explored a number of different possible scenarios (varying assumptions such as the impact of technological change and of social policies), and found that most (but not all) scenarios seem to lead to some kind of "overshoot and collapse" in the mid to late 21st century. These were never meant to be precise predictions, but rather to provide some idea of the global system's behavioral tendencies. Interestingly, a recent study has found that the Limits to Growth "standard run" scenario tracks quite well with the actual observed behavior of the world over the last 30 years. As the abstract of that report says:
For every scientist that says "WE'RE ALL DOOMED!" another one says "Erm... No we're not." Just like "video games causes violent behaviour" and "video games don't cause violent behaviour".
Scientists generally don't say "WE'RE ALL DOOMED!", though the media sometimes spin it that way. Also, if you think scientists are equally split on the issue of climate change, you are sadly deluded.
It's also very hard to take to any talk of global warming that seriously when a large chunk of the northern hemisphere is freezing its ass off.
Please look up the difference between "climate" and "weather".
Then there's the United Kingdom. The Roman's used to grow grapes there. Now if people grew grapes there today folk would say "Look, global warming! There's your proof." Only this occurred hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution...
Grapes have been grown in the UK for hundreds of years, and they are grown there now. Except historically they were grown in the south of England, and now they are being grown in Wales. Global warming is making wine making more viable in the UK.
They're starving due to politics.
Case in point: Zimbabwe
10 years ago, it was a breadbasket that fed itself and had food left over for export.
Today it's a basket-case where people are starving to death.
The land is still there, the people are still there, and no plague, blight* or drought destroyed production. It was pure, 100% politics that sent Zimbabwe down the crapper.
(*however, Mugabe may count as a blight, plague or both)
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
I grew up in Zimbabwe and I have family living their right now. So I know perfectly well what is going on over there. And the fact remains, those people really can't feed themselves and deserve help. If you bothered reading my post, and understood it then you'd realize I pointed out two separate groups. Lazy people needing aid who actually are able to feed themselves if not for their laziness, and then you have people that need aid that are actually unable to get aid. Such as those people in Zimbabwe, or people living in a disaster or war torn area.
If by "threw up their hands" you mean "publicly funded and built a massive underground public transit system" and "pushed the adoption of automobiles by adopting increasingly auto-centric laws", then yes, they "threw up their hands".
If you actually knew your history rather than assuming that things then were as things now, you'd know that the public transit system in New York was not built by the government, but by private enterprise looking to make a buck. The move to put it underground was funded by city bonds, but it the elevated train system was already there. Furthermore, "auto-centric" laws came as result of the mass adoption of automobiles by the public at large, not the other way around.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Weather is not even close to the same thing as climate. Remember when we learned that in High School freshman science class? I can say the average temperature will go up over the next number of years, but that doesn't mean I know if it will be cloudy on March 5th, 2010.
Global warming brought to you by the same people who can't tell you what the temperature will be next week, yet they can tell you what it will be a thousand years from now.
I can't tell you what temperature it will be tomorrow. We've had days as cold as -15 or so (with wind chill) and as warm as 50 degrees Fahrenheit, all in the same winter.
But I can tell you that it is winter, and without looking at the forecast, I can tell you that it will probably be cold. And I can also tell you, without much difficulty, that summer will be mostly warm, and winter will be mostly cold.
Like the REST of the planet has NOTHING to do with the climate.
Before humans, were forests ever clear-cut? There were forest fires, as a healthy part of the lifecycle of a forest, but were they ever completely cut down to roots?
Before humans, was there ever an atomic explosion on the surface of this planet?
Before humans, was there a way for animals on the opposite end of the planet to communicate with each other?
So why is it so hard to believe that humans could be raising the average temperature of the planet by a few degrees every year?
There may actually be good arguments against global warming, but you're just embarrassing yourself, here. Ice shelves are melting. They are melting farther than before, and faster than before. There is more carbon dioxide, and the average temperature is rising.
Yes, we've had ice ages in the past. Yes, it's possible the planet will survive us -- in fact, it's more than likely that "the planet", the dirty ball of rock hurtling through space, will still be here. But I don't particularly want to live through an ice age, if I can help it -- or the opposite.
Let me ask you something. Since most scientists who actually have more than a passing familiarity with the subject overwhelmingly agree that climate change is happening -- since Ford himself has outright admitted that global warming is real, and that the internal combustion engine is contributing to the problem -- where's the motive for such a vast conspiracy? Or if it's vast stupidity, don't you think an intelligent scientist would have shown it to be so, and provided evidence to that effect -- rather than yet more evidence to support that the climate is changing, and that we are doing it?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did popularize the issues and did a lot of direct work on solutions, which helped speed these innovations (implementation starting before the automobile was conceived, and a long time before the automobile became a significant factor):
These and similar endeavors received support from city governments through ordinances, city brokered bond issues, changes in laws. Between 1897 and 1910, they significantly altered city transportation systems, and through that, all aspects of city life. So the changes were in place before the number of automobile drivers had reached significance.
The annals of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) documents this with respect to bicycles. Known as the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) until updating its name in 1994, it was founded in 1880 and had become a major lobbying group for paved streets and sensible and consistent traffic laws by 1895. It is one of the very few organizations that had a political impact on urban affairs before 1900 that is still effective and relevant today. The LAW acronym was very deliberate: this group has had more impact on traffic law development than any one else, including the automotive industry, which mostly tweaked traffic laws that had been developed for safer bicycling. Wikipedia article on LAB gives a quick, highly glossed 3rd party description of the organization.
Parent post asserts that
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.
This is false.
The changes were in fact brought about through local political processes like committees using mostly well established technologies like horse drawn trolleys and livery services in controlled ways. Wide area organizations like LAW provided input and attempted to shape the local processes. Arguably the most important innovation during this period was a change in pavement from cobblestones to brick, asphalt, and oiled surfaces-- to improve bicycling conditions.
This is kind of important stuff to know today, because in the city nearest you, there are definitely efforts to reshape the transportation system to something greener, and these efforts involve the same processes that were in extensive use 110 years ago, before the automobile.
Because the net atmospheric concentration of CO2 has gone up 40% over the last century or so. That's a very significant change, and it's basically all due to human activity. In the laboratory, it is more than enough to cause significant greenhouse warming.
As for the rest of your argument: "Although natural sources represent most CO2 emissions, they do not contribute to the recent observed increase in concentrations because natural sources are balanced by natural sinks that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The increase in carbon dioxide concentration arises because the increase from human activity is not completely balanced by a corresponding sink." -- USG via Wikipedia
For about the billionth time on this site: It was only one or two articles in news magazines and a collection of scientifically ignorant journalists who were saying there was going to be another ice age. Global warming was well accepted even then. Which brings me to a more important question. Why do you constantly repeat such easily debunked falsehoods? You are like a creationist who still rants about the Piltdown Man or irreducible complexity.
Similar to the upcoming US election results