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2011 Was the 9th Hottest Year On Record
The Bad Astronomer writes "Last year was the 9th hottest year out of the past 130, according to NASA and the NOAA. That's no coincidence: nine out of the ten hottest years on record have been since the year 2000. It's long past time to face facts: the Earth is getting hotter, and to deny it is an exercise in fantasy."
You do know it doesn't take humans a century to build a farm, right? It's also a very parallelizable activity. There's simply no basis in facts for your statement, which makes me wonder what your intention with posting it would be.
it's in my head
Why are you under the impression that global warming won't increase the amount of arable land?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
Bingo. One of the things that has always bothered me about the global the warming/climate change thesis that its advocates predict nothing but negative consequences. That's extremely improbable. Even if we grant that these theories are correct, it's clear that their proponents stress the negative impact because they need to induce fear to motivate funding and to justify the additional bureaucratic power that they crave.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Funny, because a lot of real scientists disagree with you. We know humans have influenced it. It's pretty simple, really. You get into politics when you start claiming "nobody knows" when, in fact, we have a damn good idea. Are you a creationist?
Great Intellect...
And this is the real crux of the issue. The only way we're going to be able to support 9+ billion people on this planet is if we keep things running pretty much the way it is now.
I think the point being made is that if it happened without us being here at all, there must be causes that we have no control over. If there are causes that we cannot control, it would be folly to waste the time and money trying to control what we cannot.
Xerxes ordered his slaves to whip the waves to keep the waves from coming in. He was trying to control something he couldn't in a way that wasted time and energy and probably lives. People who ignored the fact that the sand spit they were building million dollar houses on wasn't there 100 years ago are demanding that something "be done" to keep the spit from eroding today.
As a society, humans are very good at seeing "how things are today" and leaping to "this is how they should always be", even if that means "doing something that doesn't change what's happening".
Now they just claim it isn't caused by humans. Global warming deniers are the new creationists - moving goalposts every time they are proven wrong because they can't stand what science is telling them. They have zero credibility.
Great Intellect...
Farmers, maybe? Their profession is only...you know...the foundation of modern civilization and intimately tied to climate conditions.
Porquoi?
Only when the last tree has been cut down,
the last river poisoned,
and the last fish been caught,
will people realise that they can't eat money.
18th century Cree Indian proverb.
If we are entering another warming spell, as in the Middle Ages, then Canada definitely stands to benefit. Canada is the second largest country in the world, but a large area is only sparsely inhabited because it's simply too cold. In all likelihood, a warmer north with allow greater exploration and uncover new oil reserves. Canadians who want to stop global warming (assuming it's possible) are working against the country's best interests.
I live in Florida and all we plant in is sand. All of those oranges tomatoes and strawberries are grown in sand.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
There have been many significant climate changes over the billions of years since the Earth was formed. And you know what? They have usually been *really* bad for the dominant species at the time.
I don't trust any form of science when it's delivered in a political context.
Your words "funny that's the one study you trust" is an example of confirmation bias.
The short story is that there isn't a single pundit who won't happily grab the one "study" that confirms all his beliefs and croon it to the world while simultaneously ignoring every other story.
This problem is worse than it might first appear. It is practically intrinsic to the inferential statistics used in modern studies such that 1 in N studies will, with a degree of reliability, produce exactly the wrong conclusion. The statistics aren't perfect. Drawing random samples from a normally distributed population will sometimes indeed produce samples not representative of the distribution itself. It happens.
So normal science, even when practiced well, will occasionally throw the confirmation-bias favoring pundit and other Joe Schmoe a bone, and we end up with a nation of smug ignoramuses who preen about their confirmed beliefs, but who in fact know very little at all.
Meh.
...for all we know.
That is the crucial part of your post. It is obvious that the scientists who study this field know more about it than the average person. So why do the people who admit they don't understand the issue keep wanting to claim that the scientists are wrong.
They claim to be sceptics, but they invariably accept without question the findings that match what they want to believe - that we might have dodged an ice age or it might not be warming as fast as predicted (even though they have to gloss over the part where it is getting warmer).
Then they will make simplistic claims to argue against the scientific world as if the scientists never thought of that aspect, like that the temperature rise is just within the margin of error or that scientists hadn't considered that the temperature changes could be due to the sun. If only just one scientist would study the sun then we could settle this quickly. Oh wait, they do!
Finally, they attempt to trivialise the problem by saying that all this fuss is just about being a tiny bit warmer, or that it is just about being less snow in the world. This ignores all the things that scientists predicted that is already occurring, like increased extreme weather events and various species dying out.
My point is that this debate tends to be those who know what they are talking about and those who don't. If you were a sceptic, which side would you consider to be more trustworthy?
In reality, farmers care a great deal. Even a few days' change in the growing season, or an increase in the temperatures during the hottest part of it, will change what crops are able to grow and the taste that'll come from them. Wineries in particularly are heavily affected by even one or two days' difference in warm or cold temperatures at the right or wrong time for the grapes.
Civil traffic engineers should care, since temperature changes impact what planned maintenance needs to be done on roads. A colder or snowier winter (one doesn't necessarily mean the other, oftentimes a severe cold snap removes enough moisture from the air to limit snowfall while a milder winter can mean more snowfall) means a need to stock up on road salt and gravel. A hotter summer means a need to resurface roads more often and a need to plan against using looser surfacing that can fall apart in high heat (ever noticed a freshly pave asphalt road in midsummer a bit too far south?).
Tourism? Shifting weather conditions can reduce the skiing season in many regions. Even one lost week can mean going out of business if it happens 2-3 years in a row for the smaller operations such as restaurants or private home renters, and the employees suffer too since they don't just lose tips; most of them lose working hours. Too-hot summer weather makes people avoid some destinations in the middle of summer as well.
Don't forget your power bills. Use a lot of air conditioning?
I do predict, however, that eventually the terms of the debate will change, and the deniers will start changing their argument
You got the tense wrong - I've been noticing a steady shift in online arguments over the last few years. The sequence goes approximately like this:
At this rate, in a few years I expect to see the "skeptics" claiming that we have a profound moral duty to avoid public transportation, run our SUV engines and AC in the parking lot, and convert all of our solar and wind facilities into coal-fired plants. (Think of all the Eskimo children who will be saved from hypothermia!)
Changing it back might be foolish, but it'd be nice if we could at least try to stop the change that is still occuring.
Dilbert RSS feed
So let me put it to you this way: The Earth's temperature is rising. So fucking what? It has been much higher in the past. Life not only survived - it kicked ass.
What are you, some kind of earth-mother-worshiping hippie?
Yeah, of course life will survive. It's survived far worse than we've thrown at it -- the KT event, the Oxygen Catastrophe -- and yet life kept on ticking.
"So fucking what?" says the dinosaurs, says the anaerobic bacteria, says every species that went extinct while life went on.
Life on earth is extremely robust. Individual species, not so much. Or just our societies. Frankly there's a wide range of consequences that I care about from the extinction of the human race to simple political upheaval as the locations of arable land change that I don't want to face; the fact that "life" will continue on blissfully uncaring not making one fucking bit of difference to me.
The enemies of Democracy are
Actually, the third world countries tend to care the most... This (I'm an American) First World country is usually the one holding everything up.
Go look at the handy map on Wikipedia about which countries wouldn't get behind the Kyoto protocols...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
Yeah. And they all managed that without a world government or death squads. No destruction of all human life. So.. bascially, you're an idiot.
Ohs Nos! Those poor kids in Canada are going to go without 20 feet in snow!
That 20 feet of snow becomes our drinking and irrigation water in the summer.
Without it, there could easily be a month of no irrigation. That's a big fucking deal.
And the further south you go in NA, the more months without irrigation / drinking water. Hope no-one plans on moving north when the water runs out in the south during the summers; by then the border might be as well guarded as the US / Mexico border.
Ah but you see, the argument is that this time it's the dominant species' fault. So let the climate alarmists be consistent, take the blame like the higher human beings they claim to be and at long last shut the fuck up. Meanwhile the rest of us can adapt to the change like nature expects us to do or die trying.
Do you think evolution works like an X-Men comic? Are you expecting to grow gills, or absorb infrared radiation in the next couple of decades?
Most climate "alarmists" (aka scientists) are not worried about "harming Gaia" or somesuch bullshit (though *you* were the one to anthropomorphize "nature", which doesn't "expect" anything, so I'm not sure what that's all about). They are pointing out that yes, many of the changes ARE the dominant species fault, and are collectively blaming that species of which they are members. And they are hoping that the data they provide will help this species - through technology, and not fantasy - better understand just *how* to adapt (both by reducing the change and compensating for it) to what's happening.
Of course the world won't end. But if you don't think it's a good idea to plan ahead and try to reduce potential disaster to the human race long term, you might as well just restate your position as "fuck everyone else". But then don't be surprised when everyone else tells you to go fuck yourself...
Please tell me what the "correct" average temperature is for the Earth? Even if you could, based on 130 years of temperature data why would you pick the temperature today as the point at which you would stop the change as "correct", when the Earth has been around for 1000s (throwing the biblical types a bone here) to billions of years and based on THAT scale the "correct" temperature might be some thing far different (much hotter, in fact, even if you only include the last 65 million years?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png (ok, not billions of years, but the geologists are working on improving that, I am sure, and it won't look any better for warmists)
I am all for reducing for man made emissions as it is economically feasible to do, I am all phasing out the use of petroleum products for transportation and other purposes as we find ways to do it that don't require making Peter destitute to subsidize Paul to do it. But I just don't have the hubris to say today (or any in the last 30 years) is the "correct" average temperature for the earth and not 2 or 3 degrees warmer or 2 or 3 degrees colder based on a starting date for data that makes today look bad when other examinations of data based on different starting dates make it look like today is really cold compared to where the Earth more commonly has been. I also can't ignore the fact that ice ages come and go and they tend to do so with great rapidity. The only constant is change. If scientists and engineers actually could create a stable environment at a particular temperature set point, chances are we would find out the results of that would be far worse for people than any predictions of anything short of a runaway greenhouse effect.
"What about all those areas that are going to become better farming land due to a warmer climate?"
The reality is that there will be very few such places, because historically they have been very poor for growing things and consequently have very poor soils. Just because the Greenland ice sheet is soon to melt does not mean the ground underneath is going to be great for farming. There is also the problem that most plants are extremely sensitive to the duration of day and night, particularly for flowering. Higher latitudes may have very long days during the summer, but have very long nights in the winter. Consequently, many plants will not grow under such conditions without massive amounts of additional energy for artificial lighting. Replicating the disastrous Biosphere II experiment on a planetary scale is not going to turn out well.
Ending carbon dioxide pollution is the only realistic thing that humans can do to assure their survival. The sooner we get started the better our chances of success.