Slashdot Mirror
Is Climate Change Affecting Bushfires?
TapeCutter writes "After the devastating firestorm in Australia, there has been a lot of speculation in the press about the role of climate change. For the 'pro' argument the BBC article points to research by the CSIRO. For the 'con' argument they quote David Packham of Monash university, who is not alone in thinking '...excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has led to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had...' However, the DSE's 2008 annual report states; '[The DSE] achieved a planned burning program of more than 156,000 hectares, the best result for more than a decade. The planned burning of forest undergrowth is by far the most powerful management tool available...' I drove through Kilmore on the evening of the firestorm, and in my 50 years of living with fire I have never seen a smoke plume anything like it. It was reported to be 15 km high and creating its own lightning. There were also reports of car windscreens and engine blocks melting. So what was it that made such an unusual firestorm possible, and will it happen again?"
It burns! It burns!
...so it didn't cause the bushfires. Fires like this are normal. Suburbs sprawling into the bush are abnormal. Fifty or a hundred years from now it may be a different story.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The answer is no. ... we had to rely on the 22nd amendment to get the job done.
Despite Al Gore and Michael Moore's best efforts, climate change did not get Bush fired
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Some years ago, Fine Homebuilding did an article about houses that did and did not survive wildfires in California. The houses that survived had certain characteristics. They were clad with non-burning material like stucco. They had metal or tile roofs. They didn't catch heat under the eaves. They didn't have trees near the house. The plantings they did have mattered. There was one kind of ground cover that was full of water and that would burst if heated, releasing the water and cooling the fire.
The Australian houses I have seen (in pictures, I haven't been there) had almost none of the characteristics of the houses that survived the California fires. So, my question is; if you live in a country that has bush fires, why don't you build your houses to accommodate that fact?
The ever increasing severity of wildfires in Australia, North America, and elsewhere have nothing to do with any hypothetical climate change. It has everything to do with honest to Cowboy Neal human intervention.
Every year, dry areas with lots of vegetation catch fire. This is natural. Every year, humans that are stupid enough to build flammable houses in fire prone areas fight the fires and put them out. This is not natural. If the fire was let to burn out on its own, the thick and highly flammable undergrowth would turn into fertilizer for the larger, healthier, and more fire resistant plants that have historically survived such wildfires. Unfortunately, because society likes to coddle the retards that build in fire prone areas, the undergrowth survives year after year and becomes thicker and thicker. Then when the conditions are especially ripe, like during a drought and wind storm, the brush that had been saved for all those years suddenly goes up and creates a massive fire with the fury of all the years that human intervention prevented nature from taking care of the problem. Lo and behold, the massive super fire is much more destructive than the natural fires would have been. Good job.
Flood prone areas with human settlement have the same problem. Levees prevent the natural yearly floods and deprive the land of the silt deposits that would have normally been left after the flood plains have lived up to their name. This causes the land to over time sink and become less fertile, and then when the levees fail OH MY GOD BUILD AN ARK THIS IS THE WORST FLOOD EVAR!!!1
tl;dr climate isn't the problem, retards fighting nature is
...just as the current cold winter in North America canNOT be considered as casting douby...
David Packham is our foremost expert in this area, he "wrote the book".
It is clear that when you let 35-50 tonnes of fuel build up per hectare by not backburning then you will get these sized fires.
We have had similar fires in the 1850s, 1870s, 1930s, 1980s. The common factor is the amount of fuel ready to be burnt.
Shouldn't Climate Change have actually reduced fuel load by killing the trees?
It has a lot to do with the fact that the Government departments failed to conduct the necessary backburning.
There will always be arsonists, lightning strikes and stray cigarettes. We can't stop ignition. We CAN reduce the amount of fuel available to a bushfire. Climate change has nothing to do with proper back burning.
It's been classified more as "global weirding" rather than "Global Warming." Where I am from, it's freezing cold, and has had colder weather here than we normally have. But you can't just speculate and attribute these weather storms to global whatever. They have and will continue to happen regardless.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
let's just wait for the findings of the Royal Commission before debating the merits of global warming vs green policy vs urban sprawl. The scale and ferocity of the firestorm has devestated entire communities. The sooner politics are removed from the debate the sooner the answers may be found. Neither side of the debate is immune from point scoring or spin. The fact remains that the indigenous Australians have used seasonal burning as a land mangement practise for thousands of years.The foolish guidelines allowing people to build combustable homes within heavily wooded areas without sensible conditions has led to the worst loss of life,both human & animal in the recorded history of the continent.To say the cause of this tradgedy is global warming is stupid
There will always be arsonists,
Yes but I do think that if we made less of a song and dance about forecast fire risk days, fewer arsonists would see the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Your post ignores:
1. Science
Climate change hasn't affected bushfire occurrences significantly in any way. This is all speculation and from a very unscientific standpoint as far as I can tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfire#Significant_bushfires
Notice where many of these fires occur...Australia. And the documented dates go back to 1851. Climate change has nothing to do with anything, a bushfire is longstanding and naturally occurring event, and has been observed that way for 150 years on record.
Where is the data that shows that fires have occurred more often and burn longer and stronger AND the reason so is climate change and not the fact that suburban sprawl introduces woodland areas to power lines, lit cigarettes as litter, and other human fire related causes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_wildfire
There is the same issue with wildfires occurring in California. And an even bigger threat or cause of wildfires than global climate change is still lit cigarettes being discarded in woodland areas. More on that later.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2327145120071023
Here's a short article from Reuters discussing some basic wildfire facts in California.
* During Santa Ana conditions, fires can be easily ignited by nature, in the case of lightning, or by humans. Some are arson, while others can be sparked by machinery operated near dry brush, campfires or carelessly tossed cigarettes. Downed power lines also pose a fire hazard. Once the wildfires are whipped by the winds, they spread quickly and are extremely dangerous and difficult to fight.
* "Fire Season" officially begins in early summer and lasts through October, though officials say that as the state suffers through cyclical drought conditions, they consider the season to be almost year-round in Southern California.
http://ca.prweb.com/releases/20061010/6/prweb393120.htm
In September 2002, a wildfire that scorched 247 acres on the Camp Pendleton, California base was started by a cigarette butt tossed by a passing motorist.
In January 2001, a motorist driving along Interstate 8 in San Diego County flicked a cigarette butt onto the center median, sparking a fire that burned more than 10,000 acres, destroyed 16 homes and charred 64 vehicles.
http://www.kbtx.com/home/headlines/40452047.html
In Texas, people cause 95 percent of wildfires. The Texas Forest Service says residents should not engage in activities, such as throwing out lit cigarettes, welding and burning debris, that could lead to an accidental wildfire start.
So we are causing a vast amount of wildfires. In some places even 95 percent.
Maybe climate change plays a large role in bushfires, but I need way more evidence to convince me that it's not people being careless with litter, downed power lines, or household electrical fires, etc. causing the majority of these fires.
We wait until its too late to act.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Science is a human endeavor and subject to limitations of humans. There is one thing that has and will continue to often trump and cause the revising of science:
reality
We have - guess what the results are: the ones you ignore.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If climate change can literally destroy the planet, shouldn't we understand it before we act?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
1. Water vapor is by a feedback effect. Google "op amps" or something. Water vapor multiplies the effects of carbon (and methane, and other effects that are not modified by feedback).
2. The life that was supported was single celled algae. No cows = no steak = low quality of life.
3. Global temperature is dead accurate for 30 years. It has been measured to a high standard for a century, and has been reconstructed over millennium. It's been rising the whole time.
4. Yeah, we could shut down the THC, and screw up England and the West Coast. That would cool things down. Didn't you see the movie?
OK, The Day After Tomorrow was a little inaccurate, but the idea of global warming freezing New York does have a grain of truth, you just wouldn't get supercell ice tornadoes, or whatever they made up to make it more exciting. The process would take years, or decades. Compare it to 300 (Spaaraaa!) which was also a weird mix of real history, and crazy impossible special effects.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time. This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere. Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!
Confusing wording, but there is bit of accurate information in it. Much of the world's petroleum is believed to have been formed during periods that were warmer than now, with higher levels of C02, perhaps as much as 2-3x higher or more. While possibly a paradise for some kinds of plants and algae, it should be mentioned that such periods were also accompanied by Anoxic Events and enormous waves of mass extinctions.
Oh, y'all know there's no such thing as global warming. The bible says so.
It's about time y'all stop believing in that junk science and realize that inteligent design is how God made us.
I know this because the nice young man on AM560 said so, and he's got an associates degree in divinity with minors in atmospheric science and marketing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1. Water vapor levels aren't being artificially increased.
2. The CO2 absorbed by that organic material has been sequestered for millions of years. The climate required for our lovely little civilisation began a few thousand years ago and depends upon that sequestration.
3. Global temperatures are easily tracked back via examination of ice cores and other scientific methods, back long before thermometers and writing with which to record any observations made.
4. Global warming begets climate change, so functionally they are one and the same. Close observation of past events allows prediction of future events.
5. You have no clue and blindly parrot propaganda without consideration of facts or logic.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Nope, you can't
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.
However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.
Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high.
This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
The fires were a direct result of several actions:
1) A hot and drier than usual summer
2) A LOT of fuel on the ground
3) "Environmentally Concious" governance, including banning clearing of ANY land whatsoever, even banning clearing of land as a means of fire reduction.
4) Insufficient backburning, except for when it is too late.
Obviously 3) and 4) are the problems here. If either 3 or 4 (or both) were allowed, then the death toll and property losses would be far less.
Both 3 and 4 are the direct result of interference by greenies and environmentalists.
But seriously, these fires are nothing special. Victoria had devistating fires in the 1980s and the 1930s.
Given the relatively short time Australia has been populated, it's not hard to imagine that these fires are probably a 1 in 20 to a 1 in 100 year event.
Use the LHC to create a black hole to suck all the heat out of the planet and thus prevent climate change!
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
You seem to misunderstand what a "testable" hypothesis really is.
It doesn't mean that we need to somehow develop a laboratory test to evaluate climate change. Obviously that poses some problems.
A hypothesis only needs to explain observed phenomena and make predictions concerning future related phenomena which can be verified or falsified by observable evidence.
In that sense, climate change as caused by increasing CO2 levels is a testable hypothesis.
Consider an analogous situation: astrophysics. How can we ever "test" any astrophysical hypothesis we develop?
You entirely miss the point because you ask the wrong questions. It is not about testing climate change. During the Cuban Missile Crisis they hypothesized that if one country launched an nuke, we'd all launch them and it would be the end for us all. That was untestable, but we avoided it anyway on far less testable science than we have today to suggest that climate change is occurring and will alter life on this planet. If the sum of humanity's knowledge suggests that under a certain situation (launching a nuke, or business as usual carbon emissions) something bad has a probability very close to 1 of occurring, it is probably best to avoid it.
Science is frequently about using proxies and models to test whether something will occur without actually having to perform an experiment (which may be impossible). This type of science has been regularly used for climate change. So let's lay out the basics really quickly:
So, science hasn't given up on climate change yet. It's not as if they are saying "there, we've proved it, now we only need to respond." No, scientists are providing as much evidence as possible to help us understand just how much this will or will not affect us.
If they haven't given up on climate change yet, why have you? While you sit there convinced that it's not occurring, we continue to blindly provide an input (carbon) into an extremely dangerous system (climate). All of the knowledge we have says that there is an extremely high probability that doing so will result in extreme shifts and war, famine, drought, etc - and you want to wait for a directly testable hypothesis? Goodness.
And in the meantime while the plant might be being destroyed?
Water it and stop the cat from eating its leaves.
Actually, with the population of the earth, going back to the stone age would be catastrophic. People would build wood fires for heat, light, and cooking. That would require mass deforestation, and the burning fires would release more pollutants than we are now.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous.
You don't need to understand exactly how a toilet works to know to shut off the water if it overflows.
Similarly, it doesn't take any extreme level of understanding to recognize the benefits in limiting our emissions.
Or are you trying to make the case that the byproducts of fossil fuels are actually HELPING our environment?
No it hasn't. That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Climate change isn't the theory. It is the effect. The theory is that greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the atmosphere of a planet. This has been well tested with small scale experiments and large scale observations (such as observing the atmospheric composition and temperatures of Mars and Venus). There are a lot of details that go into climate change, but the general idea is very common sense:
Step 1: Shine some light in the visible spectrum on an object through a gas that doesn't absorb a huge amount of energy at most of those wavelengths (for example, from any random object that you might see that has a 5780 K blackbody temperature).
Step 2: Choose an appropriate gas (like CO2 or methane) that will absorb a lot of energy from the blackbody emissions of that object (Stefan's Law).
Step 3: Watch the temperature of that gas rise.
Do you get the gist? It isn't rocket science. If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
That may contribute a small amount, but the main cause is ...whales!
Since we stopped hunting them(for the most part), they have been increasing in numbers.
When you have more whales, you have more whale breath- great clouds of steam!!
Cow farts? Bah! Whale farts make Neptune tremble and weep!
And don't get me started on rabbits...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
There are different ways of acting.
Stopping dumping tons of crap into the atmosphere is unlikely to make things worse. Now trying to fix things by releasing some other chemical to try to balance the problem could backfire.
The first is like "Shouldn't we understand the complete ecosystem of the lake before we stop using it as a garbage dump?". It's generally unnecessary to wait to have a 100% complete understanding. Maybe the fish are dying for some other reason, but stopping dumping junk is unlikely to make things get any worse.
The second is more like "The lake seems too acid, maybe we should compensate by dumping several tons of base to neutralize". Now this kind of solution will require a complete understanding, lest it turns out that wasn't the problem, and things become even worse than before.
You have been misinformed:
1. This is simple high school science. Water vapour in the atmosphere is at it's "satuartion point" and is totally dependent on pressure and temprature, this is why you get dew drops forming in the desert overnight. Any amount of water vapour you pump into the atmosphere will fall out as liquid within days.
2. Coal is the biggest contributor to GHG, the carbon locked up in coal, oil, etc was never present in the atmosphere all at the same time (unless you want to go back before multi-cellular life appeared).
3. Opinion that is not supported by fact or mathematics.
4. The term "climate change" was introduced by skeptics who pointed out that the term "global warming" could be construed as biased.
If you would like to post a link that backs you up we would all be interested, as it stands you are simply trolling by parroting psuedo-skeptical talking points.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...just regurgitate what famous people tell you. Like how to "save" the ice caps.
If you really, really wanted to save the polar ice caps, you'd create a time machine and travel back..say, 19,000 years ago. Back when the polar ice cap extended down into what is modern day Illinois.
Which predates SUVs and industrialization by around...19,000 years or so.
That is one of the global warming metrics, right? Save the shrinking polar ice cap, right? You'd need to go back to a time when you can't blame humans. Even then, you'd have to go back yet again to the previous ice age, or any of the numerous ice ages.
In order to understand that simple scientific concept, you'd to do more than regurgitate Al Gore and co.
The real issue is that there is currently no unambiguous method of measuring the global temperature. Because of this, the degree of interpretation required to actually test the hypothesis makes it very difficult to make a strong case either way. When coupled with the amount of money involved, (and perhaps the very continuance of our planet as we now it) almost everyone has a stake. It becomes very easy to politicize the process, because the scientific portion is so murky.
Considering the degree of pushback on evolution, a theory which has been tested in numerous places and has been well understood by scientists for over a hundred years, it's not suprising that theories involving climate change have an even higher degree of pushback.
There's little question that humans have some impact on the environment, and certainly on climate, but we always end up back at the big question: How can we mitigate the impact of humans to acceptable levels while maintaining an achievable and sustainable level of technological development and advancement?
http://www.donarmstrong.com
I have here an old family postcard dated 1902 or 1907 mailed from Australia. It is a painting of a huge bush fire. The note on the back says that they were the worst anyone had ever seen. All manner of people, lovestock, fields, forests and buildings were destroied.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I guess that you fail to consider that the "shitload" of CO2 (from all sources, including man-made) account for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So if 0.5% constitutes a "shitload", what would you call the other 99.5%?
And since you brought up observations of Mars and Venus, perhaps you can explain how the recent warming trend has also been detected on Mars? That would lead the cause of warming to be something the planets have in common - the Sun. Empirical measurements show solar output higher, so wouldn't you think that the most likely explanation would be the most logical one, rather than simple-minded "explanations" of processes that we don't nearly understand?
First, the Earth's atmosphere consists of about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and trace other gases (including water of about 0.5% and CO2 of about 0.05%). Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, oxygen is not a greenhouse gas, and argon is not a greenhouse gas. Thus, of the 32 K greenhouse effect, CO2 plays a very important role. Water is the dominant greenhouse gas, but it primarily serves to amplify the effect of other greenhouse gases since warmer air can hold more water. Additionally, water isn't as significant as it may appear (having a tenfold higher concentration than CO2) because it will precipitate out at colder elevations. Thus, CO2 and methane are the primary greenhouse gases that are really driving the greenhouse effect (with their effect amplified by the water vapour).
Second, the possible effects of a slight increase in solar intensity have been noted. They are too small to account for the increase in atmospheric temperature if they exist. And even the largest potential effect could only account for about a quarter of the warming that has been observed.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
We restrict our energy sources so tightly that we cannot continue to feed our growing population and starve to death
How would driving smaller cars and using energy more efficiently cause people to starve?
You misunderstand. The argument is not that global climate change is causing more fires but that global climate change is causing the fires to be more intense.
As another poster pointed out, this part of Australia is suffering from one of the worst droughts recorded, the week before had record temperatures and the day the fires started was a record hot day. No matter whether human caused or otherwise fires start easier in hot dry conditions.
Whether the unusual hot dry spell is caused by natural cycles or is part of climate change is hard to say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Water vapor is near the saturation point nearly everywhere in the atmosphere. The only place where this isn't true is the polar regions, where most of the water has been frozen out of the air. It's here that CO2 will have its biggest effect. Also, exactly the last place where you want temperatures to rise.
Currently existing oil was conviently put there with the deaths of billions of billions of algae cells. Lets leave their bodies where they are.
The key phrse is not just "Climate Change", but "Anthropogenic Climate Change". In other words, the climate provably changing due to specific human activities. This not only covers the greenhouse effect of CO2, but also things like overgrazing causing desterification.
Not a typewriter
By the Bushfire CRC and the CSIRO:
http://www.bushfirecrc.com/research/downloads/climate-institute-report-september-2007.pdf
From the concluding remarks:
"In this study, the potential impact of climate change on southeast Australia is estimated. Simulations from two CSIRO climate models using two greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions scenarios are combined with historical weather observations to assess the changes to fire weather expected by 2020 and 2050. In general, fire weather conditions are expected to worsen. ...
The number of "extreme" fire danger days generally increases 5-25% for the low scenarios and 15-65% for the high scenarios. By 2050, the increases are generally 10-50% in the low scenarios and 100-300% for the high scenarios. The seasons are likely to become longer, starting
earlier in the year.
These results are placed in the context of the current climate and its tendencies. During the last several years in southeast Australia, including the 2006-07 season, particularly severe fire weather conditions have been observed. In many cases, the conditions far exceed the projections in the high scenarios of 2050. Are the models (or our methodology) too conservative or is some other factor at work?"
Add to this, the fact that the place is tinder dry precisely because of the preceding 12 years of extreme drought AND the cutbacks to brush clearing and back-burning ("green" policies are an excuse for councils and state governments spending less $$$ - just like every other service they've cut), and you've got the "perfect (fire) storm" conditions we had on Black Saturday.
Given that climate change isn't going away, and that all the models indicate SE Australia will get drier and hotter, and given that governments aren't going to be increasing spending in this area any time soon (OK - maybe they'll be shamed into doing something for a couple of years before the new programmes get cut back again), it is HIGHLY LIKELY that this sort of thing will become a frequent occurrence (say every 2-3 years somewhere in SA, VIC, NSW).
By the way, NASA have a fantastic pic showing how anomalous the heatwave leading up to Black Saturday was against recent summer averages:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36900
Of course, while we were burning down south, the banana benders up north were setting new records for floods.
Your first concern if you're a renewable energy skeptic shouldn't be climate change. It should be how we support a 6 billion person population that is growing exponentially on non-renewable resources which are finite. Imagine the volume of the earth were completely filled with petroleum, and the population of the earth grows at 1.7% per year. The world consumes 4.8 cubic kilometers of petroleum per year. How long before this hypothetical sphere would be depleted? How long before 0.5% of this hypothetical sphere, which is a generous estimate of world petroleum supplies, can't keep up? It's a first year calculus problem, and the results aren't pretty.
I was working under the assumption that the GP was indicating that we were suggested to step back into the stone age. That would be the entire population of earth, without modern technology to assist us. Really, I think the farthest back we would go would be to agrarian society, but that would have significant drawbacks.
Say something cataclysmic happened tonight, and in the morning there was no power grid, no city water, no supply chains for food, fuel, etc. I'll focus on only the United States, because I am more familiar with it, and finding numbers relating to it.
According to the 2000 US census, just about 226 million people lived in 3,629 population centers that could be considered "Urban". That's just over 79% of the US population.
Assuming these people had exactly what they started out with before they went to bed, they typically would have 0 to 14 days of food supply on hand, and assuming the use of any water supplies available (i.e., toilet tank water, bottled water, etc), they may have a 3 to 4 day supply of water. Right now, if there is sufficient snow on the ground, some people may be smart and gather all the fresh fallen snow that they can. Virtually no one has any provisions for collecting rain water for drinking or cooking use.
In up to 11 days, people will begin dying of dehydration. In up to 28 days, mass starvation would take effect. Sometime between day 1 and day 10, people will begin using force to horde supplies from weaker people.
Some people will realize the futility of remaining in an urban area, and attempt to leave. In a best case scenario, starting with a fully fueled vehicle, and ideal cruising conditions, passenger vehicles can travel 400 miles. That's a best case. In reality, it won't be just one person saying "we have to get out of here", it will be hundreds of thousands. One accident, vehicle running out of fuel, or mechanical failure, and all vehicles behind them will come to a stop.
The 21% living in "Rural" areas may have a better chance. If (IF) they are lucky, they have a fresh water supply that does not depend on electricity. Most rural homes I've seen are supplied with water from electric pumps. If they are lucky, they have a good on-hand food supply. If they are lucky, they already have a food crop that can be harvested on a regular basis.
In reality, the numbers dwindle. Less than 1% of the 79% of the urbanites will be lucky enough to get to somewhere survivable, but they won't be alone. Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel). How do you trade bare essentials with your neighbors who you can't reach without a car (no fuel).
But, if the 285 million people in the United States did manage to disperse from the urban centers, to areas that could sustain them temporary for food, water, and shelter, and they managed to have or improvise hand tools to cut down trees, make fire for warmth and cooking, it would be absolutely disastrous for the environment.
This is an easy game to play. Go into your garage and shut off the main breaker (or pull the main fuse in older homes). Shut off the water and gas mains. Take all the money out of your wallet, and your credit cards, and stick them in an envelope somewhere safe that you won't touch them. Now, survive for 6 months.
In reality, if we stepped back to the "stone age" tonight, only small pockets of humanity would survive, and they would be the rural dwellers who live in fresh water rivers, have farms, and can live off the land. Everyone else will die.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Thank you for reminding me of "Threads"! Don't forget, there's a lot of water in your hot water heater. But you are correct - "civilization" is defined as the method by which we convert petroleum into food. Without the ability to convert petroleum into food, we perish.
Did you even read the page you linked to? The controversy is long over and the result is considered valid.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
I don't think stone age people can clearcut forests....
Why not? The more common way would be burning the forest, but 6 billion people with stone axes could get rid of most forests rather quickly.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The point is we don't know. If our survival depends on a strict range of natural conditions, then removing too much CO2 from the environment could spell disaster as well.
Removing CO2 from the environment isn't a concern. That won't happen for a long long time.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Of course, there are other variables, such as supplies in urban areas that would be looted. Also barring some extreme act, we would be unlikely to have no governance (e.g. in the event of a catastrophic final economic collapse). Here in Ireland for example, it is likely that electricity could be provided for maybe an hour a day just using native resources and the handful of older hydro/peat power plants we have (of course, here the electricity company is semi-state owned/run, other places may not have that luxury). Many essential services have at least a couple of days grace period (battery/fuel back-up) that may allow further time for emergency measures to ensure native resources can be utilised to keep very basic services going. In a sense, I'd expect Ireland, at least outside Dublin, to be more back in say the 1930s (the era of rural electrification just beginning) than complete collapse of society.
Personally, our approach is to have stockpiles for a week or two of disruption - anything beyond that and we are all pretty stuck anyway! A couple cans of fuel and generator will keep the freezer going (10 mins per hour) and charge the UPS (for broadband/phone) and one laptop (for uncensored outside news). Our telecoms infrastructure has at least a week's back-up (state-run TV/radio plus land-lines, some mobile telecoms and wireless broadband) and a special crisis mode that TV services are switched to in the event of an emergency (tested just a couple weeks ago at 3am).
We probably have native food production to last for a short time (e.g. native power can probably ensure continuation of minimal milk production for example), long enough to switch farm production to essential supplies (probably not enough for anything beyond rudimentary survival for the first year). It would be worse than during WWII though ("The Emergency" as it was called here - the State did go into crisis control-mode, and took direct control of many sectors of society to see us all through it). Undoubtedly many people would be doing manual labour again - e.g. if we kept the peat power stations running and wanted winter fuel, hundreds if not thousands would be in the Midlands cutting turf manually rather than the machine harvesting that occurs at present. Native gas supplies would be used only for essential power/industry - our heating would be switched off (it would be bad - but tolerable for most in the Irish climate).
Particularly with the past threats of nuclear catastrophe, I would expect the US to have plans for a special emergency mode - I suppose with it being a bigger place, not everywhere will be attended to, but I doubt loss of control would be absolute or even the majority of regions.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Climate hange cannot destroy the planet, the life on it, or even the human race. It can - and very likely will - simply make things extremely uncomfortable (= billions die) for us, as growth zones of various plants change and weather patterns become chaotic for the duration of the change.
However, those who most profit from not cutting fossil fuel consumption will be able to use those profits to shield themselves from the consequences, so resistance is useless.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it."
Yes, CO2 does rise with temprature however this is a deliberate misunderstanding of cherry-picked facts by the person who popularised this peculiar fiction.
The ice core data does indeed support the half-truth you state but the reason for the initial temprature rise at the end of an ice age is clearly related to the Earth's orbit. When this causes the ice to receed the permafrost melts releasing large amounts methane and CO2 which then ADD to the warming (ie a feedback). In the current situation humans are the ones who are adding CO2, which then causes the globe to warm, the ice to melt, and more CO2 and methane released from the permafrost.
We have had many exchanges in the past and I recognise you have the right to ignore the prefered cap and trade solution and rant against a tax solution in order to misinform and push your own politicaly inspired anti-science agenda.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked."
The hockey stick has not been debunked, in fact it has been made more robust by a recent follow up paper. If you are genuinely interested in the science as opposed to the politics then I urge you to re-read your own wikipedia link, particularly the first paragraph in the "updates" section.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
you're deluded, most of the results of modern physics are in fact statistical. Every new particle "found" in the last few decades was in fact just a statistical clustering of results that conformed within statistical margin to model being tested. And our physics most certainly does NOT describe all that is known. For example, we don't have a gravity model that can be verified. We don't know if the Standard Model will hold at higher energies. We don't know how many dimensions the universe has. We don't know why high temperature superconductors work. And the list goes on and on.....
Also, for all of us who doubt all the global warming CO2 spoonfeeding, that would like do have some DIY experience; do these steps;
Did you know that there were about twice as many sunspots in the last decades of the previous century as in the early 1900s? And three times as many as in 1830?
Okay, I followed your steps (well, actually I followed some similar steps a while ago) and the result was this. Historically things don't look to bad, but the last 50 years or so show a distinct divergence in sunspot activity and temperature trends. That divergence happens to line up nicely with CO2 trends. Your claims of clear correlation in sunspot activity with recent warming just don't hold up upon inspection of the data. Yes there are clear correlations between sunspot activity and global temperature; that should come as no surprise: of course changes in solar activity affect climate. Those correlations do not in any way account for the current observed rise in temperatures however.
The python code to generate the plot (pulling the latest data directly from online sources) is included on the linked page, so if you want to play, have at it.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Is any of this based on fact or research or is it simply just guesswork?
One thing that stood out to me was this:
"Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel)."
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance? but even without that kind of water supply, in the America's plants like cacti provide a good supply of water to keep you hydrated. Having butchered many myself I can assure you that sucking the liquids out of them is fairly easy, much like any fruit such as a kiwi only they're much more efficient at storing it than most other plants. Saguaro (Carnegia gigantea) in Arizona/California for example at their hydrated peak consist of around 90% water and can soak up 200 gallons. The other 10% consists of woody stems, the skin and spines. Many cacti can survive over 2 years without a drop of additional water than that already stored in them and if you chop them they'll callous over quickly. Effectively what this means is if you chopped down a large cactus, you could suck or extract a lot of liquid from it, let it callous over and it would effectively act as a self-sealing water storage device. Many desert areas that are human inhabited in the rest of the world where cacti don't grow (at least natively) have similar plants, commonly Euphorbia. Areas that aren't desert like wont have much of an issue with water supply anyway!
I see little reason why rural populations couldn't survive in almost their entirety. The biggest issue would be the urbanites that did escape and if they overwhelmed the rural populations, but in general they wouldn't necessarily lead to a decline in the rural population, if anything an increase unless they started getting reckless and killing each other for resources. It'd almost certainly be more likely the cause of human actions that would lead to mass deaths in the rural areas if anything than it would people unable to find what they need to survive there.
Taking into account humans killing each other due to scarcity of resources this happens all the time and has since man figured out how to kill each other wouldn't have much effect on long term rural populations as when they'd killed enough of each other, resources would no longer be so scarce they'd be worth fighting over.
I'm not really sure why you make the assumption that if people's water pumps failed that they'd be wholly unable to gather water themselves from a stream, from rainfall, from plants, from a well?
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
The real issue is that there is currently no unambiguous method of measuring the global temperature
No, the real problem is that "global temperature" isn't a meaningful thermodynamic quantity. Global atmospheric heat content is, but no one has a clue what that is because we need to know both temperature and humidity (ie, both wet and dry bulb temperatures) to determine it.
However, global ocean heat content appears to be measurable, and appears to be rising.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
You're forgetting that some of the louder proponents of 'big chang' to address global warming envision ideological side-benefits for those changes.
Climate change will not destroy the planet, in fact all environmental change generated by humanity will not destroy the planet. The logical target of all environmental protections is not to preserve the planet but to preserve the conditions under which we evolved. The further those conditions change from what our bodies have adapted to the more problematic and difficult our survival becomes. The more new chemicals we introduce into the environment that we have not evolved protections against the more we will suffer.
Climate change has it greatest impact not directly upon people but upon the infrastructure of society. So destroyed coastal cities, rural economies disrupted due to climatic shifts and, of course unpredictable weather extremes, will all cause significant disruption to society. People of course being the short haired, cranky, rock throwing monkeys that they are will not react well to those disruptions and start killing each other (not that they need much excuse to do that) passing around the blame and the violence for the damage done to the environment.
The planet and all life on it will continue to grow and evolve long after the minor dip of humanity in life value of the planet has disappeared. Meanwhile the minority rich and greedy will continue to exploit the planet at the expense of future generations, with a complete lack of feeling, remorse or any guilt, why, because they are hard wired that way, they really do lack any shared measure of empathy for the harm and suffering they cause. It is really amazing that such a mentally ill minority in fact just minor percentage points can lead the rest of human society down such a destructive path, literally thousands killing hundreds of millions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen