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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."
The interesting thing is, to assuming that geoengineering as a solution is impractical as much of the scientific community seems to suggest strikes me as odd being we have basically accidentally geoengineered ourselves into this mess, assuming the current causation theory is correct. Just hope we don't act carelessly in trying to come up with a fix and end up making the problem worse.(see the park service fighting small forest fires in Yellowstone for about a century...)
I am not surprised. I have been pondering the various, strong positive feedback loops involved with climatic phenomena, like the release of gigantic amounts of methane from the Siberian permafrost due to warming, the decrease of vitality and eventual death of plankton in the oceans (main source of oxygen for the planet, as well as main source of food for fish) due to increased sea temperatures, decrease of albedo due to melting of icecaps and glaciers, decrease of rainfall and consequent decrease of forests (that the Indonesian and Amazonian forests have been mercilessly burnt, doesn't help), to mention just a few. I am sure the better informed reader can add a few more of these positive feedback loops, but in my humble opinion, these are the stronger ones, and make the process of global warming unstoppable.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.
[...]
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.
All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
So when I say Limits To Growth is "bullshit" I'm clearly being inaccurate, I should have said "horse shit" :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think they were right (about the coming ice age).
During the "mini ice age" 300 years ago, the notable feature was the lack of sunspots. Guess what the latest photos of the Sun show - NO sunspots.
Temperatures have also been going down, not up recently.
Analogy time. If you're trying to optimize code for speed you want to work on the region of code where you're spending the most time in already. It's the same as with temperature on the earth. The biggest input is the Sun. If the Sun cools down, as it apparently does periodically (periodic ice ages are fairly well documented and proven), then things get colder.
If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that. I find it remarkable the Sun stays as consistent as it does.
Anyway, the Sun is a first order effect, and anything man-made is at best several orders beneath that. We have more to worry about if the Sun suddenly becomes unstable and goes nova than this so-called Global Warming.
I'll leave it to someone else to provide a car analogy.
So I skipped the game I was heading to and spent the next hour helping a drunk concussed guy into an ambulance.
Why should I help him? What made him special? What makes it my responsibility? I was standing right frikkin' there watching, that's why.
The 'people' who 'lived off the land' for thousands of years? Mostly illiterate, innumerate, and died at ages 35-40. If they were lucky.
You don't own a computer just because you're hard-working and smart. It's because you're smart and hard-working and had the insane good luck to be born as one of the small fraction of the world's population who get a starting point good enough that that makes a difference.
I don't need to know you to know that; the fact that you can post here makes it a near-as-dammit certainty.
As you said, some people live in disaster zones or wars and genuinely need help. This 'some people' is not a few stragglers; it's tens of millions. Where the hell do you think that UN aid goes? Look it up sometime. And until you do, you've been too lazy to comment on the issue, so don't.
The ignorance in this post is depressing, even for /.
Speaking as an African... You don't know what you are talking about. Most of the starvation is caused by dumb ass politicians. Zimbabwe on its own could probably feed most of Africa, unfortunately all the farms got stolen by Mugabe and "redistributed" which means given to the party faithful and families of politicians none of whom have a clue how to run a commercial farm.
All the rest of the starving countries have similar dumb political problems.
In central Africa the ground is so fertile you can literally toss an apple core on the ground and come back 3 weeks later to see an apple tree starting to grow.
Run properly Africa could probably feed most of the world.
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train.
Well, the train was already quite mature by then, and there were several elevated lines in New York. And of course the opening of the first NY subway line falls clearly out of that time range (1904).
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/578.html
It's not like horse manure was the only problem BTW: "In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets, and late as 1916 Chicago carted away 9,202 horse carcasses. Special trucks were devised to remove dead horses; since the average weight of dead horses was 1,300 pounds, one text on municipal refuse advised that "trucks for the removal of dead horses should be hung low, to avoid an excessive lift."
The coming of the automobile dealt another large blow to the horse. Experimental motor cars had been around for a long time, but cities had always banned them. The crisis of the 1890s and early twentieth century, involving public health fears about pollution, traffic jams, and rising prices for both hay, oats, and urban land, made municipal governments and urban residents much more ready to switch to autos.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
First of all, if you think about it, horse crap could not have gotten that bad. There were far more people than horses when this article was written and they weren't worried about people crap. Somehow they could deal with that, but horses? If they had a problem it was a problem with perception. Dealing with horse manure was actually a trivial problem. And they did it. There was never instances of horse manure piling up; they had, at worst, an economic problem of how to pay for removal.
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/578.html:
While the nineteenth century American city faced many forms of environmental pollution, none was as all encompassing as that produced by the horse. The most severe problem was that caused by horses defecating and urinating in the streets, but dead animals and noise pollution also produced serious annoyances and even health problems. The normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of manure a day and about a quart of urine, usually distributed along the course of its route or deposited in the stable. While cities made sporadic attempts to keep the streets clean, the manure was everywhere, along the roadway, heaped in piles or next to stables, or ground up by the traffic and blown about by the wind.
Inventors and city officials devised improved methods of street cleaning and street sweeping became a major urban expense. Increasingly, however, it became obvious that the most effective way to eliminate the "typhoid fly" (so named by L.O. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology of the Department of Agriculture and a leader in the campaign against flies), was to eliminate the horse.
As late as the 1890s, a Scientific American writer noted that the sounds of traffic on busy New York streets made conversation nearly impossible, while the author William Dean Howells complained that "the sharp clatter of the horses' iron shoes" on the pavement tormented his ear.
In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets, and late as 1916 Chicago carted away 9,202 horse carcasses.
Yeah, right, the "Horse made problems" were just made up by the liberals and it simply wasn't that bad.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I'm so sick of this.
WE HAVE ICE CORE DATA. WE ARE NOT IN A COOLING PERIOD. We are nearing the peak of our warming period. Then for another 5K years it'll slowly decline, we hit an ice age, and slowly it works back up.
Ice core samples from all over the globe confirm this. Humans have practically NIL impact upon the cycle itself. One of my friends just did a trip to Antarctica for this very study.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So, if I get you right, you say that you will not act or even stop trying to convince other people that everything is just fine until the poles are molten, the gulf stream redirected, the climate drastically changed and with it the world economy ruined, mass extinctions going on, the oxygen in the air becoming scarce etc.?
I mean, WTF?
I do notw know which scientist got the best model for the climate but here are some facts:
Source.
WTF?
I mean, does this not sound plausible? I mean, to me it seems to be highly likely that our process of changing the composition of our atmosphere by releasing gigatons of previously absorbed CO2 would yield some big disturbing change.
So, here you are, not wanting to "believe" this "myth". Okey, so what? What if it turns out to be a real myth? And what if it turns out not to be a myth?
By the time that you will find yourself convinced of this immanent threat to humanity, it will be to late. To late for you, your children, your grandchildren, humanity. As the article tells, in a way it is already to late. Which by no means should be read as: "It is to late to act.". No, like, if you are a smoker, you might already have done some irreversible damage to your body. Which does not mean there would be no purpose in giving up smoking, right?
And what the hell do you think is convenient about your lacy ignorant "I-am-such-a-great-doubter" attitude? You get to drive your SUV without a bad conscience while ruining the planet you have borrowed from your children with it. Oh, how inconvenient that is.
You know