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Ticking Arctic Carbon Bomb May Be Bigger Than Expected
sciencehabit writes "Scientists are expressing fresh concerns about the carbon locked in the Arctic's vast expanse of frozen soil. New field studies quantify the amount of soil carbon at 1.9 trillion metric tons, suggesting that previous estimates underestimated the climate risk if this carbon is liberated. Meanwhile, a new analysis of laboratory experiments that simulate carbon release by thawed soil is bolstering worries that continued carbon emissions could unleash a massive Arctic carbon wallop."
Sitting at my personal computer, with another in my pocket, both connected to a world-wide network that allows formerly unimaginable near instantaneous communication, let me say that, "Scientists don't know nuthin' - they're just shills in it for the big bucks and I don't believe a word that they say!!!11!"
Adopt, adapt, improve.
Ha ha, captcha word, "flexible"
There's just no chance that the people with money who pay the people with guns will be able to see beyond their lust for more power and more money. This means things will go to hell with large amounts of certainty.
If there were profit in saving the world [from those who put us there] then they would be interested in saving the world. They have no interest in that. They might entertain the notion if they were guaranteed to come out on top and in control once the crisis was averted, of course, because this is all about giving up power and control.
I am an army of one. I cannot make a difference. But if I saw an army of many marching down the street, I would be inclined to join.
And beyond this, the denial is STILL out there being preached. First they said "it's not real!" Then they said "it's not our fault! It's nature!" Yet in any of this none are willing to make changes or do anything about it. But I don't blame the businesses entirely. It reminds me of the economy of slavery.
There was a town near New Orleans which abolished slavery before Lincoln did. The surrounding areas, of course, did not. Before long, local business could not compete with outside business. This town was forced into allowing slavery once again. Lincoln was successful because it was a unilateral decision. Individuals cannot make an effective change. Small groups cannot make an effective change. It takes unilateral change in order to work.
So even if the whole US stopped CO2 and other emissions today, it wouldn't matter because China and others are simply not going to change.
So you see, the kind of change we require is simply impossible without world war. And that kind of war is simply not going to happen.
And so I say, I'm ready for things to go to hell. I can't imagine a way out that is likely.
I'm recovering with a flu so I might have missed something when reading TFA, but this CO2 release seems to be in addition to the expected massive release of methane from frozen Siberian permafrost.
If so, we're fucked^2 I see no way we can avoid the positive feedback loops of AGW. Sandy will be a pleasant memory from the past, to the citizens of NYC.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This is nothing other than egghead research "scientists" trying to keep the gravy train going and looking for more of our (yours and mine) money to sit on their asses and debate the issue.
Roight, guv. Basic scientific research is so much more profitable than shilling for Big Oil. The National Science Foundation has so much more money and so much less to spend it on than ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and Fox Izvestia.
(You forgot to mention AAAAALLLLL GOOOOORRRRRE!)
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
"Genetically engineered predators"
People like you discuss me , you must have some investment in oil to be talking non sense like that , or the CO2 is life ads really messed your brain functions.
The earth has survived super volcanos , meteorites , it will still be here after global warming has hit, the problem is that 95% of life form die , now unless your a member of a southern church where the cult tend to think destroying the planet is a good thing because Jesus version will come and save them nutto case you really got no advantage to not be disgusted.
the methane in the oceans is much more of a threat. but we could harvest that and burn it off, which would solve two birds with one stone. It is much better to fear-monger over things we can't do anything about.
Global warming is bad because the result is ultimately less habitable land, for both people and food production.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
The United States would still be in debt about $15 trillion.
If they wanted money, they would be medical researchers. Environmental science doesn't pay well and doesn't generally involve very large grants.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The way you're talking you seem to have a spare Earth, can I come too?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nonsense.
I don't get how so many otherwise smart people think we're living on a world that has the absolutely perfect climate, and that any change warmer or cooler results in disaster for mankind. The fact is a warmer climate such as that found during the Cretaceous(~ +4C) is beneficial to life.
On the other hand, just a tiny bit cooler than now and you're back in an ice age, decidedly unfriendly to life.
For the record, we are *currently* in an interglacial period of the ice age that started 2.6M years ago. When/as we exit the current ice age, it's going to warm up, period.
I don't see what's so bad about global warming, especially looking out my window right now and seeing snow on the roofs of the outbuildings.
And when we have record breaking Summer temperatures that "disproves" what you say?
Even assuming the earth is warming (and we aren't confident we know why), the earth has been through many warm spells.
Yes. And? Were they as dramatic as they are now? And what was the result? Extinctions for one.
Better to spend the money trying to figure out ways to live and thrive in a warmer climate.
Yep. Fuel prices will go through the roof. Cities will flood. Crop yields will plummet, Poor people will starve - not a problem for some: they're poor for a "reason" after all and deserve it!
The sooner we realize this, the better off we'll be.
We already realize it but nobody is willing to do anything or they bury their heads in the sand. Nothing will be done until it's too late, I'm afraid.
Think China and India might stop using coal? Think they'll stop building coal-fire power plants?
Actually yes, they will. You see, the Chinese leadership made up of scientists and engineers (and I think one "lowly" economist) and they see the writing on the wall. And as it is now, they are concerned about pollution and air quality.
We need to get real about this. NOW.
Yes we do. Folks need to stop listening to the pundits who have no science background let alone one in climatology and who offer no counter evidence or data and only offer ad homminem attacks on the climatologists. If one has a real criticism about human caused climate change or global warming, I wish they'd offer evidence with data to counter the claims.
Yeah, it does support life, but keep in mind, that 3km underwater also supports life; just not *human* life.
Relax. Nobody is talking about you. But, some of the ACs on here and the original poster, just disgust me.
Discussing you disgusts me.
Well, I would but ... what good is money if there's nothing left to buy? I mean, real estate sure ain't what it used to be once it's submerged in water.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You confuse "global warming proponents" (by which I assume you mean lobbyist and such who are trying to convince the world that global warming is real) with "climate researchers".
The latter have reached an overwhelming consensus that anthrogenic global warming is real, and to deny that that is a "reasoned scienctific view" is right up there with denying evolution or the germ theory of disease, saying they're all just political movements.
It is true that there are some in the political area who have cried wolf or who have oversold things. But to deny the utter and overwhelming reality of the results of vast quantities of climate scientists (including some who came in skeptical when they started, but realized that, hey, the data say what the data say) is simply wrong.
"For the record, we are *currently* in an interglacial period of the ice age that started 2.6M years ago. When/as we exit the current ice age, it's going to warm up, period."
Vast majority of climate scientists or anonymous untrained slashdot poster? Vast majority of climate scientists or anonymous untrained slashdot poster? HELP, I DON'T KNOW WHO TO BELIEVE!
Relevant username, you are acting like a fool. The issue with global warming is due to the melting of polar ice, and the rise of sea levels. The majority of the population of the world is situated in coastal areas; areas that will be underwater if polar ice melts.
None of this is about temperature reducing or increasing viability for life - it is about widespread destruction (and death) if our sea boards are inundated with water.
Not all opinions are equally valid. Nothing specific was even mentioned in the above comment. Just mindless attacks on science. It is justly modded down for lacking anything of value.
I will "keep that in mind" as I point out that during the Paleogene, when the average global temperature was the same or higher as during the Cretaceous, mammals flourished and came to dominate. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was indeed very good for mammals. Were it not for that time period, Plesiadapis would probably not have come to be so successful, and humans today would not exist as a result.
Honestly. I am _ALWAYS_ buried into oblivion when this topic comes up without receiving a single honest response. I worked at a small soda bottler for a while and we had multiple semi tankers FULL of carbon dioxide delivered every week. If carbon dioxide is so damaging what about all of it that we're pumping into sodas? "Save the Planet but don't touch my cola"?
"I don't see what's so bad about global warming"
Because you've acquired a very poor and shoddy education.
"the earth has been through many warm spells."
Irrelevant. Modern humanity has not.
"This is nothing other than egghead research "scientists" trying to keep the gravy train going and looking for more of our (yours and mine) money to sit on their asses and debate the issue."
Based on your lack of education I think we can safely assume your productivity and thus income is significantly small that you receive more in government money than you pay in taxes.
What the fuck do you think the methane will break down into?
Amen. But these kinds of people assume everyone else must be as equally self-serving as themselves, so they can't accept that someone might be motivated by something other than money.
We'll do a fine job of wiping ourselves off the globe. That's nature's way of restoring balance. Once we're gone, earth will again find equilibrium, and it doesn't care how long it takes. The dinosaurs were around for far longer than the human race has been, and I seriously doubt we'll be missed by whatever comes in another few million years. I take some comfort in that.
They're like the gollum, they stopped being people long ago. It's "my precious" all the time.
Global warming is their lava pool...
That kind of war will happen. We just have to start running out of resources first.
The depletion of resources from careless consumption and the changing climate will pit us against each other, and eventually will consume us in global war. Then as resources to conduct distant combat disappear; regional war, national war, city war, and finally neighbor war. The last war will be fought with sticks and stones over decaying rat carcasses.
Why don't we just admit it. Because we can't actually meet the people who post here, because we know almost nothing about their REAL background or history, we have no real way of knowing whether the poster is (a) a paid shill who makes his living posting well crafted propaganda, (b) a gullible idiot who reads and believes said propaganda or (c) a well meaning citizen who actually cares about scientific truth.
At least when I actually know someone, then they are accountable for what they say. If they say something idiotic, it will have consequences, both in personal and in professional relationships.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Listen guys, why thaw away all that ice? Just to look at dirt? It's the same ol dirt you have in your back yard. Seen one, seen em all. Sure add your dog's doo-doo in there, and you won't be able to spot the difference. Why stir up some ancient (probably alien, even) burial grounds of some woolly mammoths? You've seen what happens. Cept Liam Neeson won't be there to save you. And Bruce Willis is booked solid thru 2013.
Honestly, wait for winter. Then you'd have it all, right there in your own backyard! No need for costly airfare. It's a no-brainer.
I don't see what's so bad about global warming ...
Right - absolutely nothing wrong - look at Mars - still exists, total desert. Who cares in an universal scale. On a more local scale, not the first civilization messing up - Easter Islands, Maya, Ancestral Puebloans and what else there is. Only difference here is that it's much more massive as well as the amount of idiocy of some people. Even Gorillas know not to totally raid leaf trees for food so they can regrow.
Ancestral Puebloans (miss-named Anasazi) vanished = moved elsewhere during little ice age - same (climate fluctuations) goes for South American and other civilizations, often accelerated by non-sustainable practices and wars.
If one could drop the idea that all the coal and oil underground was not created by a neural pattern of a god concept in one's head but got underground in millions of years and is now burnt in a couple of centuries that this "could" have some impact on climate, it could be another step in evolution. Pretty hopeless when looking from further away - moon perhaps.
You can believe every single climate scientist. All of them say the same thing : we are currently in an ice age. There is no debate on this topic, certainly not as much as there is on the topic of AGW or on the subject of AGW being "good" or "bad" in the long run.
The real game changer would be all the methane that gets generated when all that organic starts to decompose
We need to get real about this. NOW.
At least you got one thing right.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
One thing that's readily apparent and not disputed is that our planet's temperature takes wild swings. It's seldom stable, which it seems to have been for several thousand years now. Perhaps our resolution isn't good enough or there's too much noise in the historical data, but it would seem that we live in exceptional times. For the whole system to be able to oscillate that widely, and on relatively short timescales, it MUST be sensitive to positive feedback loops. Runaway processes are apparently the rule rather than the exception.
This is not to say anything one way or the other about the forcing mechanism. I do believe humans have had an awful lot to do with it this time around. What we didn't realize is that it's like Sisyphus rolling the stone uphill. Either he's rolling it slowly and steadily upward, or it's inexorably moving downhill when he loses control. It may start slowly at first, but once it gets going it's nearly impossible to stop.
I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I recognize that global climate is going to warm up no matter *what* we do, and suggest that we should prepare for it (while debunking the claim that it's bad for "life" or farmland), and that makes me a fool? Sorry, but no. The fools are the ones that think anything we do can *stop* the coastlines from being put underwater. It's going to happen, and it does not matter if mankind causes it or not. We should be spending our limited time and resources preparing for something that is inevitable rather than trying to prevent something that is inevitable.
I'll start acting like there's a global climate crisis when the elite types start acting like there's a crisis. They're banning banning light bulbs and putting together a tax on energy collected by wall street (carbon credits), yet at the same time they're also flying around in private jets to get to their conferences and summits, spewing more CO2 into the air in one flight than the average american joe emits in a year...
If these concerned environmentalists are to be our leaders out of this "crisis", they must LEAD THE WAY in making sacrifices and exercising restraint, setting an example. If they don't personally believe in self-restraint, why the hell should we? The same rules should apply to all of us.
I'd rather risk living with some shitty climate change than further harden social class barriers (every solution to climate change I've heard of involves massive costs to the middle and lower classes).
There's a debate on climate change here with some pretty good arguments from both sides, for those interested. Video and a text transcript are available: http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/559-global-warming-is-not-a-crisis
Um, bet on it? That's sort of a reverse Pascal's Wager, isn't it? I mean, look at the decision/outcome matrix:
AGW Severity: Nonexistant, Minor, Major, Runaway.
Action Taken: Too Much, Enough, Not Enough, Don't Bother.
Outcomes: Nicer Planet, Same Old Planet, Worse Planet, Nightmare Planet, Humanity Extinct.
Write up the table. Which option gives us the best odds of a positive outcome?
Even worse still, there's a lot of methane trapped in permafrost, which is starting to thaw and release it. Methane's something like 20 times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming effects.
Katey Walter has been doing demonstrations for 5+ years to try and get it to sink in with people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa3M4ou3kvw
Then there are the gigatons of frozen methane caltrate which are destabilizing: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/24/14670511-climate-changing-methane-rapidly-destabilizing-off-east-coast-study-finds?lite
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that we've long since fucked ourselves over - and the explosion of industrialization in China and India is just sealing the deal. Even if you ignore China and India, we appear to have built up so much momentum that even if we drastically curtailed our carbon and methane outputs (like from the cattle industry) instantly, we're still screwed.
Time to start planning for the worst.
Please help metamoderate.
I don't see what's so bad about global warming, especially looking out my window right now and seeing snow on the roofs of the outbuildings.
The eastern USA and NW Europe may be in for another snow-intensive winter because of global warming. If you'd like to take a break from your knee-jerk denialism and actually learn something interesting, pick up a copy of the current Scientific American and read about the mechanism.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Funny how politicians have got us carbon based lifeforms thinking that carbon is bad. I for one support our new corporate and governmental overlords.
Just kind of funny that because Global Warming requires us to adopt many far-left solutions, many long left in the wings due to lack of any sort of evidence that they actually work in the real world, that suddenly human nature changes and becomes incorruptible when faced with any other option.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If you are just concerned about 'life' flourishing, then it doesn't really matter what the climate is or will be. Life will find a way. If, however, you are concerned about keeping the majority of human beings, and especially 'first world' human beings safe and snug in their high tech cocoons, then you should be very concerned about any abrupt change in any one of a number of critical environmental variables - climate, water, air, fossil fuels, food.
If you haven't noticed, our current civilization doesn't like abrupt change. One little hurricane causes significant damage. A multi year drought causes food prices to rise which causes food riots. A modest rise in fuel costs slows the economy down to much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.
And those are tiny little disruptions in the grand scheme of things. Now, dramatically change how and where crops are grown, change how and where water falls and rivers rise and fall. Change major weather patterns. Displace a billion people, And add that to the stresses the system is under.
No, it's not the end of the world, however it may be the end of the world as we know it. The US can't even effectively deal with two large cities (New York, New Orleans) getting inundated in the space of a decade. Now, imagine doubling or tripling the problem. Doesn't look pretty. So yes, the planet has survived larger climate shifts. You, on the other hand, might not be so lucky.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I wanna know how we're gonna stop continental drift!
http://youtu.be/HOwWfns4qqw?t=33s
"If you are just concerned about 'life' flourishing, then it doesn't really matter what the climate is or will be. Life will find a way. If, however, you are concerned about keeping the majority of human beings, and especially 'first world' human beings safe and snug in their high tech cocoons, then you should be very concerned about any abrupt change in any one of a number of critical environmental variables - climate, water, air, fossil fuels, food."
Translation: all those huge million+ dollar houses on the coast will be in trouble in 150 years. Canada, which is larger than the US, will do alright though with new farmable land opening up.
Need Mercedes parts ?
0 BCE was way warmer than it is now. How modern do you need man to be?
And if you think you know it all, you're the last person to be talking about others education: there's two types of people that have issues with the broken CO2 hypothesis: people that know far less than you and people that know far more.
Need Mercedes parts ?
What you're pointing out is when man cuts all the trees down things go to shit. Look at a realtime real-color animation of the globe spinning. Notice that big brown part in Africa, Asia and Europe? That's where man grew up. When you take out all the trees you get desert.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2BAdNIG5Q2FJlEdac1l-KXiTSCA?docId=CNG.dfe97e07f144a2d29eb615412e0c12be.a81
"Forests soak up third of fossil fuel emissions: study
By Marlowe Hood (AFP) – Jul 14, 2011 (note the date)
PARIS — Forests play a larger role in Earth's climate system than previously suspected for both the risks from deforestation and the potential gains from regrowth, a benchmark study released Thursday has shown.
The study, published in Science, provides the most accurate measure so far of the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed from the atmosphere by tropical, temperate and boreal forests, researchers said.
"This is the first complete and global evidence of the overwhelming role of forests in removing anthropogenic carbon dioxide," said co-author Josep Canadell, a scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national climate research centre in Canberra.
"If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world's established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions," he told AFP, describing the findings as both "incredible" and "unexpected"."
Excuse me but what kind of Co2 scientist finds it "increadable" and "unexpected" (!) that trees eat CO2?
Keep that in mind next time somebody refers to them as climate "experts".
Maybe it had something to do with NASA and the NOAA point out the IPCC model forgot to include the fact plants eat CO2. "experts".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/new_model_doubled_co2_sub_2_degrees_warming/
"8th December 2010 13:24 GMT - A group of top NASA and NOAA scientists say that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise."
Note the date.
Course, the fact they admit they were lying didn't go unnnoticed:
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/23/11144098-gaia-scientist-james-lovelock-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change?lite
"James Lovelock, the scientist that came up with the 'Gaia Theory' and a prominent herald of climate change, once predicted utter disaster for the planet from climate change, writing 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."
Need Mercedes parts ?
Shift the North American grain belt a few degrees latitude north and all if sudden the US's food security is pretty much in a foreign country's hands.
Not doing something about this soon means massive geopolitical shifts in a century.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So because reality disagrees with your political ideology, reality gets the boot. How are you any different from a Lysenkoist?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Totally wrong. How about "all that arable farm land in the middle of the US will be parched desert and the thin, acidic boreal soils of Canada will be warmer, thin, acidic non boreal soils. And the Canadians might have a less than encouraging view of Iowa trying to annex Alberta.
Even more important - Northern Europe / Northern Asia might feel somewhat put out if several billion Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakastanis and various other refugees tried to come north. And so on.
It is no where as simple nor as anywhere as benign as abandoning coastal human settlements and moving them uptown. You see how much trouble is involved in siting a few million people in the Middle East (the Israeli - Palestinian dispute)? Try that worldwide. Try that worldwide and having the ground rules (so to speak) change over the course of a couple of decades.
THE MAJOR PROBLEM ISN'T THE FACT THAT THE PLANET IS CHANGING. It is that the carrying capacity for Homo Stupidicus is limited and we appear to be bumping up to those limits. We aren't there yet, but we are definitely moving along at a brisk pace. As you do that, your OPTIONS BECOME LIMITED. Moving into your neighbor's house may not go over well with your neighbor. We aren't doing such a stellar job at managing civilization at present, even without a whole lot of hard constraints.
There is a reason that the old prayer 'May no new thing arise' is just that - a prayer.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
isn't the Arctic like, mostly ocean??
I would say so.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The summary is missing the fine print, namely that this is 13% more than previous estimates and amounts to about 2 years of human carbon emissions. So, whatever is going to happen is going to happen two years earlier. Sure, it's an interesting scientific result, but hardly big news.
Really? Show me the warming:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/HolocenePeriods.png
Why do experts on Co2 not know trees eat the stuff? From last year:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2BAdNIG5Q2FJlEdac1l-KXiTSCA?docId=CNG.dfe97e07f144a2d29eb615412e0c12be.a81
Those aren't scientists. They marketing assholes.
Need Mercedes parts ?
That, or they couldn't get jobs in medical research.....
But methane is degraded pretty quickly to carbon dioxide (less than a decade), making it much less of a concern.
"The worst" as far as the US is concerned isn't all that bad: southern states will suffer, northern states will benefit.
And how, pray tell, do you know this?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A someone who used to live in Alaska I can tell you the summers are wetter and cooler even if the winters are milder. Cold wet rains hurt food production in Alberta. You might have more hot summer days where that never occured decades ago but the cold rains that normally would be spread further south hurt as much as the shorter growing season in the past.
http://saveie6.com/
Amen. But these kinds of people assume everyone else must be as equally self-serving as themselves, so they can't accept that someone might be motivated by something other than money.
I notice the same people who slam environmental scientists as money grabbers have no problem listening to Exxon funded studies showing the opposite. I sense bias and listening to Fox News, Rush, and Hannity. 10s of millions of people listen to these shows and believe it.
http://saveie6.com/
"Amen, brother."
"The worst" as far as the US is concerned isn't all that bad: southern states will suffer, northern states will benefit.
Nope, not really - as evidenced by the last hurricane. It's not as simple as "cold places get warmer, hot places get hotter."
The UK, for example, is royally fucked - they rely on the jetstream for warm air. If the jetstream continues to shift or is disrupted (as it will, as the arctic melts - the cool temperatures in the arctic are necessary), England will freeze.
Please help metamoderate.
By the definition that cryologists and climate scientists use an ice age is any period when there are significant ice sheets on the Earth. Like Antarctica and Greenland. Within the ice age there are cycles of glacials when the continental ice sheets advance and interglacials when they retreat. /pedant
But in the popular vernacular ice age refers to a glacial cycle so it's an easy mistake to make.
you seem to be under the misapprehension that the action of "too much" will only make the planet nicer and have no other effect.
But I submit that there is a strong possibility that in addition to making the planet nicer, it is pretty likely that the measures taken will also increase human misery and suffering, and may even result in wide-scale death.
Indeed, depopulation is one of the measures that you see proposed here on slashdot a lot. I assume by people who think they will be members of the group that gets to live, rather than the group that makes the grand sacrifice for the greater good.
It is also implicit in your table that the measures taken are actually effective. But there is not a lot of consensus about what genuinely effective measures would look like. It's entirely possible that jumping in and doing "something" could result in achieving the above mentioned human misery without the benefit of a nicer planet.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Well played. While I don't think that describes climate scientists in any way I laughed when I read it.
From: On the dangerous(?) naivete of uncritical acceptance of scientific consensus
"How do we non-experts decide when to take the pronouncements of the scientific consensus with a grain of salt? The reader may well find the following rules of thumb quite helpful. Be skeptical of scientific research, even that which supports, and is favored by apologists for, the scientific consensus, whenever:
1. the people paying for the research have a vested interest in the results.
2. vast concentrations of wealth and power hang in the balance on the results.
3. a prominent scientist's professional reputation and career is on the line.
4. the dominant paradigm is threatened."
I'm open to the idea of both sides of the AGW argument. Where I have an issue is the government mandates to "fix" the problem but really only serve to take money from my pocket and move it to the pockets of charlatans. These people will claim to have the solution to all of our energy needs but only if the government gives them large quantities of my money. If these people really had the solution to cheap and clean energy then they should be able to convince me to give them my money with out having to have the force of the government as an intermediary.
I don't know if AGW is real or not. I don't really care that much anymore to find out. What bothers me more right now is all the government waste in subsidies to companies that have taken my money but produced nothing in return. I'll accept that all government grants run the risk of failure but I'm no longer willing to provide government funding when billions of dollars have been spent on hundreds or thousands of solar panel, electric car, and windmill companies that produced no products or technologies that are viable.
I say we put our money into a technology that is proven to have a very low carbon footprint, is clean, reliable, safe, and creates real (not fictions of accounting) jobs and money. Let's build some nuclear power plants. Electric cars might be another way to reduce our carbon footprint but only if the electricity does not come from coal. Nuclear power works. Electric cars can work but we need to take off the government subsidy training wheels and let people see the real cost of these cars in the sticker price.
It might be true that we needed government subsidies in the past to bootstrap "green energy" but I believe that is no longer true. There are large numbers of people willing and able to develop green energy now. It is a real and honest business now. Take away the training wheels and see if they can keep moving on their own now. Subsidies now are, I believe, only holding back technological development now since these subsidies also come with conditions that inhibit the freedom they need to compete.
For the sake of argument I'll agree that AGW is real. If that is the case then we need to remove the government from the equation and let the free market figure out the best way to reduce our carbon output. I'll play along because I know that any technology that reduces carbon output has the benefit of also producing jobs and reducing our dependence on foreign sourced energy.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Another night sure to be lost wondering hoe this is going to play out.
I can't tell you you these climate feedback loops scare me. I'm planning know having kids in a few years and now I sound like my whiny hippy parents asking what they will face? Certainly here in Australia things could get very marginal very quickly.
So here's my question...why retard vital industrialisation when we know we will never accept a level of it that will significantly impact climate change?
Wasted billions if you ask me. We should be putting this money into practical research into performing projects:
Deliberate global dimming (decrease the amount of sunlight hitting the earth in vital areas like the poles and carbon trap permafrost regions)
Huge fusion investment (especially polywell and dense plasma, if we get energy production sorted we can cut emissions to reasonable levels. Once practical we must mandate its use even at large economic cost to push out carbon burning power generation).
Safer nuclear power I the interim. (LFTR and newer conventional designs put into use along with a global regulatory framework for rolling them out in non nuclear nations, i.e wholly Germanowned/operated/guarded nuclear power plant and supply chain operating in Australia).
My GREATEST fear is that we will run out of large oil reserves before suitable alternatives are found and industrialised society collapses, leaving us broken and without tools to deal with rampant climate change.
That's why every economic slow down and war is doubly devastating, it costs us precious time and money that could be used to help develop technology and strategies to deal with this, the first thing to get cjt in either case is basic science and long term tech projects. If we can survive until fusion power at the wast we will survive even if large parts of the rest of the planet are fucked. We can farm the deserts with desalination water and live in huge climate controlled cities. We can manufacture our way out of many of our problems. Hell with that much power we could filter the air and pump the worst climate offending gasses back into the ground.
I just wish I believed in a god I could pray to to let us make it that far.
-phrenzy
Why does it require "left-wing" solutions?
Let's start with basic economics. Producing more efficient methods of performing the same process will produce less waste (reducing global warming) and therefore more sellable product per unit of cost, which means you make more money. Further, this technology can be sold to others, making additional profit. This, one could argue, is a perfectly legit right-wing approach.
Ok, now on to more complex economics. The best possible result is always achieved by doing what is best for the individuals AND the group. Thus, the various industrial cartels can maximize their COLLECTIVE profit by producing more efficient methods.
There is nothing "left-wing" about any of this, it is purely cost:benefit.
I find the idea that environmental chemistry, climatology, or even basic mechanical/chemical/electrical engineering can be "left-wing" or "right-wing". And if the laws of physics are, somehow, "left-wing", whose problem is that? The universe won't change because you don't happen to like it, and if there is a God and said God created a left-wing Universe, what the hell are you doing listening to the Bible-thumpers on the right?
It's not the over-all temperatures that are what is the concern, although that does have an effect. The main concern is the melting of the polar ice caps and other glaciated regions. Adding a lot of fresh water to the worlds oceans is affecting the oceanic Gyres, the most critical currently being affected is the north Atlantic Gyre. Since the arctic ice caps started melting at a previously unprecedented rate the current has measurably slowed down. We currently cannot prove 100% that this isn't a natural cycle, but there are strong indications that this is caused by climate change.
You might wonder why the Gyre is so important ( other than ocean health and bio-balance )... without that Gyre England and other European countries would not have the nice climates they have now. England would have roughly the same climate as Nova Scotia / northern Canada / Greenland. This would affect ( shorten ) the growing season of the Russian steppes as well - one of the worlds bread baskets for grain production.
The fact is a warmer climate such as that found during the Cretaceous(~ +4C) is beneficial to life.
The reason the Cretaceous period was so populous was because where the life was most abundant the continental masses had all been situated in the tropical and subtropical zone. That is the sweet spot for life, seasons don't change a whole lot, there is no real "winter" with snow and freezing weather. Life can flourish when hunting / gathering / grazing can be done year round with no compelling reason storage or the requirement for adaptations to colder climates for at the very least part of the year. Today there is not very much landmass ( comparatively ) situated in those zones, and even less that is situated near those zones that isn't dependent on current weather patterns that would be changed if the climate was significantly warmer or cooler.
Much of the world would either die off or use all and in most cases orders of magnitude more of the current energy usage just for heating and growing what food would be possible, the weather patterns would be drastically different as well as being much more violent ( the Cretaceous period has records of huge wildfire cycles as well as floods that make anything in recorded history look like trickles ) and basically the world would be a drastically different place.
I don't get how so many otherwise smart people think we're living on a world that has the absolutely perfect climate, and that any change warmer or cooler results in disaster for mankind.
The climate warming / cooling is not the concern. The Earths climate naturally does that in long, slow cycles that generally allow ecological adaptation. What is concerning is how fast it is happening, several orders of magnitude faster than ever seen before - even from environmental dating done to hundreds of millions of years ago, fast enough that the ecological strata cannot adapt fast enough.
The possibility that climate change will be beneficial ( even in the long run ) is not zero, however from our best projections from extrapolating data from slower changes into a model with faster changes it will most likely be detrimental short term ( "short" being relative, meaning years to millenia ) and either detrimental or non affective long term.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Trust me, "scientists" don't spend 8-10 years as a student (plus more as a post-doc usually), making no money to get rich. They are mostly just intelligent, curious people with a desire to know how the world works. Your typical "scientist" isn't hauling in the cash and most of them work at tenured jobs where they'd get paid regardless of what they publish. Besides, at this point you're not grabbing anyone's attention when you say that climate change is real and that humans are at least part of the cause. This is agreed upon. No one is "debating the issue".
You are correct on one point. We do need to get real about this. We need to convince the masses that science isn't out to get them. Science just measures the world and shares its results. (And not by looking out the window.)
Really? You're saying that if we stop emitting CO2 there won't be any hurricanes anymore? Get real. If you live on the East Coast close to the water, hurricanes and floods have always been a threat. Global warming only affects their frequency a bit.
I said "as far as the US is concerned". Anyway, I've never heard of the "jet stream" bringing warm air to the UK. People commonly talk of the gulf stream being responsible for mild UK winters, but that has been disproven. And even if it were so, UK cities would be no more "fucked" than Canadian cities, which seem to exist happily at the same latitudes (and with higher temperatures, it would be even milder).
We know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in the climate the way it is.
We don't know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in a Cretaceous-like climate.
Therefore we would like to see the climate stay as much the way it is as we can manage.
What the right wingers aren't getting is that this is the conservative position, at least as "conservative" used to be defined. We like the climate the way it is. A "progressive" position might be "CO2 supports plant life, higher temperatures are good, let's raise the temperature." No sane person believes that. The position of those who call themselves conservatives is "I want my Hummer, consequences be damned!" That's not conservative and it certainly isn't progressive. It's reckless.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Just kind of funny that because Global Warming requires us to adopt many far-left solutions,
Yet another demonstation that you are insane (as if we needed one).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I don't think anyone thinks we can control *whether* coastal cities go underwater. We can just make it happen much more slowly by slowing the rate of warming. Many skeptics think that accepting AGW means thinking that we have complete and total control of the climate, which clearly isn't the case. We can control the part of climate change that is caused by human activities, which at this point seems to be most of the change in the past several decades.
Likewise, you're going to die some day, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned about your health because you're going to die no matter what you do.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yes,
MFG, omb
yet at the same time they're also flying around in private jets
Hah! What environmentalist flys around in a private jet? Environmentalists I know prefer not to fly, and when they do, many pay the carbon tax (by buying an offset):
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/publications/resources/2009/purchasing-carbon-offsets/?gclid=CLuRyLjgi7QCFcN_Qgodi1QA_w
Besides, what sway should the behaviour of a rich "elite type" have on your choices? Why do you care what they do?
And actually, if families, communities, nations used less energy and were able to generate some of their own energy (roof mounted solar panels, personal wind generators) they would be more financially independent. Same goes for growing your own food in a garden, composting much of your own waste, etc.
Sure McDonalds is cheap but home grown food is cheaper. Sure, your old beater car is cheap, but the bus is cheaper. Sure, coal is cheap, but when global warming ends up turning all our crop lands into deserts, there are going to be a lot more hungry lower class people around.
btw, here's how true environmentalists live: http://noimpactproject.org/experiment/
We can control the part of climate change that is caused by human activities, which at this point seems to be most of the change in the past several decades.
I wonder about this, as it seems like the most important point, and the one that gets argued about the most.
It might well be that I just haven't been engaged enough to be comfortable with research on the subject, but I think it's worth developing a (near) consensus on the subject.
If the previous climate science was any good, meaning that future estimates were unbiased expressions of the best available current knowledge, then p = 0.5 that any single factor they drill into produces either more (or less) than previously estimated.
If the media coverage is unbiased, we hear about both cases equally often. For every "Oh my god we're all going to die" headline there's a corresponding headline "Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead" (apparently this headline once made it past a sleepy night-desk editor).
No, those are business majors you're thinking of. Environmental science requires a fairly deep personal commitment to pursue, precisely because it isn't lucrative. Climate monitoring just doesn't cost that much.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Yes. And since that will benefit some and harm others, the prospect of a global unified effort to prevent it - which is required - is pretty much not going to happen. Do you think Russia is really opposed to global warming? Look at a globe.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're just now realizing we're screwed?
There's a 30 year lag from the introduction of additional CO2 to when it's full effects are felt. So you are correct, even stopping now we would still continue to reap the "benefits" of a warming planet for several decades.
With our current planetary political insanity when it comes to AGW, I'm expecting we're going to ride this thing whole hog up to the 6C warming mark. When numerous species die off, farmlands become deserts or infested with invasive species, coastal cities become inundated, and lots of people die then maybe something will be done about it. But don't get your hopes up.
~X~
Didn't new evidence in recent months or years suggest that another major contributing factor to climate was cloud cover? I mean, the Earth had periods of low and high Carbon Dioxide, and the overall temperature didn't shift much beyond the 10-15 average global temperature, and sea levels were always at their current levels give or take a few dozen meters... Why wouldn't clouds kick in yet again and rebalance things in the long run (Nevermind that NYC might be beneath sea levels in the meanwhile.)
We know the arctic has melted before. So why is it a problem this time?
And what if some don't want to cooperate, or want to put crushing conditions on it? What if canada decides they want to jack up the price of grain to extortionate levels?
If short term self interest dominates the AGW debate now, do you think those who hold the cards in 50 or 100 years will be any different?
Beyond that, why not start now? Do you think that once AGW is seriously fucking up the global economy and food supply that we will be in a better position? Or are we just going to foist this on to our grandchildren?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If right wing types would just accept the evidence for global warming, they could start coming up with right wing solutions for it. There's nothing about global warming which says it MUST have left wing solutions...it's just that left wing types are the only ones even putting forward solutions. This is perhaps the worst thing about the right wing refusal to face global warming...it's depriving us of half of the possible spectrum of solutions to the problem.
I don't give a damn if the solutions are left wing or right wing. I just care if they work. What solutions would you propose from a right wing POV? If you reject climate science because you perceive the only answers to the problems it presents are what you consider left wing then you're doing it wrong. Don't put the cart before the horse.
Glad you brought up smoking. That same chain smoker puts out quite a bit of CO. CO leaches the O2 from the atmosphere so not only is there an eventual increase of CO2 but also a decrease of O2.
No, it is not better for the planet for us to keep ignoring AGW. It is time for us to take aggressive legislative action and the first step is a global ban on tobacco.
Hello. This is Canada. We want Puerto Rico, and Disney World. And we want border agents on the border formerly known as the Canadian Border to all be girls wearing bikinis. Or we pull off the Big Tarp we got thrown over the permafrost. We call it the Big Tarp. It's a tarpolin^h^h^h^haulin. And it's big. It's very likely not all in my imagination. You want 5000 degrees in Nevada? I know what you're thinking. It's already 5000 degrees in Nevada. Ok fine. But riddle me this: why doesn't the New Jersey mob bury their work in Nunavut? I know right? Permafrost right? You want the NJM burning all that gas driving 5000 km each way just to intern^h the whacked? That's not very ecologically wise is it? Is this not in any way less than unclear? I though so. All replies through Santa's village, North Pole, Canada, H0H 0H0. Hosers.
Edit: This is the wife speaking. Or boys wearing thongs, but only nice ones like Jeff Goldbloom in The Fly, not Jeff Goldbloom in The Switch. Eww.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Their conclusions are projections, not hard evidence, and they are also of unclean hands because their funding is overwhelmingly political in nature.
You are denying the bigger problem in favor of a political creation.
I normally don't tell people they're "simply wrong," but after reading your pompous reply to me, I felt turnabout was fair play.
Futurist Traditionalism
In my experience of layperson debates on the subject, like this one, that particular observation cuts both ways. Both sides *do* think we can, ultimately, decide if the coastlines (as they are now) are put under water or not. The skeptics think it's hubris to assume man has any impact besides a negligible one, while the alarmists claim the reverse -- that it's the natural course that has the negligible impact.
This is a very poor analogy. In the climate change argument, you can (with enough resources and determination) reduce the negative impact of the inescapable outcome to near zero. You cannot mitigate the effects of death. If you want to equate it to some healthcare scenario, it's more like the abstinance vs. protection argument. The alarmists are preaching abstinence, while I'm advocating for invention of the condom since abstinence is never going to work in the long run.
How much would it cost to protect (or move) NYC? An unimaginable amount of money. How much will it cost when it finally does go underwater, if unprotected? Even more.
At the very least, the two costs should be plotted vs. time so a sensible course of action can be taken, whereby we spend only as much to try and prevent the situation as is needed to ensure the preparations are completed before it happens with some amount of certainty.
Michael Crichton's attack on global warming was particularly devastating. But what the crowd wants to believe, they simply pretend is reality and call the rest of us "ignorant."
Futurist Traditionalism
Moddiing me troll? Shows you just how intellectually bankrupt the pseudo skeptics truly are.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You know, the problem I have with this is that the notion that sea levels will rise when Arctic ice melts. However, it's a known fact that liquid water has a higher density than solid water - which is why ice floats - so, if anything, the sea levels should *drop*.
I found myself in a very embarrassing position after casually mentioning the rising sea levels to a colleague. He asked me to explain how - if melting ice took up a smaller volume than when frozen - that the sea levels would rise. Yet this "fact" of sea level rise has been endlessly repeated by proponents of AGW.
Perhaps someone else can explain it better - but it seems rather obvious that melting arctic ice would have a mitigating, rather than an aggravating, effect on sea levels.
How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.
The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.
The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.
farmlands become deserts or infested with invasive species
Farmlands by definition are infested with invasive species.
With our current planetary political insanity when it comes to AGW, I'm expecting we're going to ride this thing whole hog up to the 6C warming mark.
I doubt the AGW hysteria will survive that long. As evidence, I point to all these scare stories coming out about "climate change".What breakthrough has resulted in all these radical changes to climate models? Last I checked, it's just relatively large increases in greenhouse gas emissions by China and India. That's not much to go on.
Perhaps you could point to the research that says 0 BCE was way warmer than it is now so we can judge it for ourselves.
I always thought Lovelock was over the top. Now he's come back to reality. But for him to say "The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing." is probably just as wrong as his previous position. But Lovelock is not a climate scientist. A real climate scientist would say that 12 years is not enough time to change a long term trend.
My uncle died on breezy point. That being said, we seem to have dealt well with the impact of sandy, so I would disagree with the statement that we are not dealing with the inundation of New York effectively. That being said, a relatively instantaneous release of carbon in arctic soils coul possibly push the rate of climate change beyong the ability of most areas of the planet to cope with. I don't think North America is one of those areas. North America generally benefits from increased dysfunction in the world economic system. This has been shown time and time again. Financial collapse generate by wall street that rippled worldwide has resulted in people buying dollars for their percieved stability, allowing the US to maintain huge trade deficits, budget deficits, and a relatively stable currency. The chaos of world war II helped america become the dominant economy of the twentieth century. The USA's good relationship with canada, canada's small population and willingness to accept educated immigrants may,with massive damage to the climate of areas of the world that are already overstressed and overpopulated could be very much in the interest of the united states. This would cause disruption in the short term but may set north america up as the last standing first world country after all is said and done.
The Arctic ice is not a problem for rising sea-levels. Melting ice from Greenland is.
Suddenly, annexing Canada sounds like an idea I can stand behind... ;oD
Can I mod you UP? Twice? K, thx, bye...
"Democracy." It's just a slogan.
Exactly. Less protected countries with substantial resources will either have to cozy up to powerful neighbors and guarantee a goodly portion of those resources or simply be annexed. All this "for the good of mankind" nonsense will mean nothing if they try to stand up or profit from their resources.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If it's all about when you're going to be dead, why not avoid the rush and leave now?
plant more trees! they breathe carbon, right?
this solution came to me so easy, I'm still boggled at why I haven't been begged to be President of Earth yet.
"For the record, we are *currently* in an interglacial period of the ice age that started 2.6M years ago. When/as we exit the current ice age, it's going to warm up, period."
For the record, I'm going to repeat a cherry-picked fact that I picked up which matches all of my preconceptions on the matter, and that I will use to refute all of yours...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Why didn't it all pop off in the last interglacial? (Or did it?)
Many people haven't gotten the memo, but Exxon Mobil CEO Rex TIllerson has now said that AGW is happening but that the best course of action is to adapt to it.
Since Exxon Mobil was funding the astroturf denialist organizations, it's surprising that the noise hasn't died out yet. Momentum, maybe?
An insightful and underappreciated point.
Conservatism, in the old sense, included prudence and harm avoidance. In the newer sense, Cheney said we should go to war if there was even a 1% chance of someone attacking us.
So, conservatives: do you think there's a 1% or better chance that the people counting tree rings and tramping over glaciers know what they're talking about?
You stupid fuckers can't even poll before an election properly, and you want us to think you understand science and global warming, or that it is all some silly political construct? Have you noticed that nuclear plants are not getting as much of the stink-eye from the left that they once did?
Actually, no.
I am not under the misapprehension that the action of "too much" will only make the planet nicer. Obviously, excessive/misdirected resources spent on any problem X can mean less resources available to spend on other problems not X. However, while we might expand the table to take this into account, we are then expanding the scope of the matrix beyond X. This is an initial approach matrix, not a comprehensive systems analysis.
Secondly, you mention depopulation as a solution proposed by others that you find unacceptable. I also find it unacceptable - and since my post was not about specific solutions, and you do not mention any proposals that you do find acceptable, I caution you against the use of strawman arguments.
Nor is it implicit in my table that the measures taken are actually effective. Indeed, the opposite is true (the action "Not Enough" covers this). Finally, regarding consensus and genuinely effective measures, I again reiterate that this is an initial decision matrix, so consensus or the lack thereof on effective measures is irrelevant to it.
Really? Show me the warming:
Okay look at some of these.
google images of global temperature charts
Why do experts on Co2 not know trees eat the stuff? From last year: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2BAdNIG5Q2FJlEdac1l-KXiTSCA?docId=CNG.dfe97e07f144a2d29eb615412e0c12be.a81
Funny, the article states how important forests are to absorbing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and then goes on to suggest that the deforestation we are causing is responsible for adding to the atmosphere 12 to 20% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide per year. So instead of using forests as carbon sinks and perhaps planting many more, instead we are slashing and burning them and dumping those carbon sinks into our atmosphere. Then the article describes how a very bad drought in the South American rainforest caused a significant reduction of the tropics to absorb carbon, and how an even worse drought happened in 2010.
Did you actually read the article? I do not think it means what you think it means.
-- QED
Your Holocene Periods graph only covers to 1950.
The CO2 emitted by burning tobacco is from carbon that is already in the carbon cycle so it doesn't cause a net increase, just changes the location of it from some plant material to the atmosphere. The next crop of tobacco will reabsorb an equivalent amount of CO2 and the cycle goes on. Same thing for the CO2 you exhale, it comes from the plant and animal materials your body burns to run your metabolism. It's the carbon we dig up and put back into the active carbon cycle that's been sequestered for millions of years that is causing the problem.
I'm open to the idea of both sides of the AGW argument. [...] I don't know if AGW is real or not. I don't really care that much anymore to find out.
Hmm. It sounds to me like you really aren't that open. In fact you sound like you've made up your mind based on a bunch of propaganda. If you really were open to the science then you would be willing to do the minimal effort needed to realize that climate change is happening and we are causing it. I'm assuming, because you are on /. that you have a technical degree of some sort and you have a basic understanding of the scientific method and how science works. Spend and afternoon and actually look at the science.
-- QED
Adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the quantities humans are adding is madness. In addition to warming the planet faster than ecosystems can adapt, we are making the oceans more acidic. Already here in Washington state the oceans are too acidic for some oyster larvae to survive. Oyster farmers are having to raise oyster larvae in less acidic Hawaiian waters and then shipping them here to finish growing. And as the glaciers and ice caps melt and oceans rise, at some point it will bring an end to most world trade as harbors around the world flood. The costs to adapt are unimaginable. As sea levels rise faster and faster, how are coastal areas going to cope? When you have to move a city like New York or Shanghai, how far inland do you move it? Move it far enough inland to cope with another 50 years of ocean rise, or 100 years of ocean rise? What about the ports? Do you keep rebuilding them to last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? Who is going to absorb the cost to keep rebuilding this coastal infrastructure?
Friendly to life like viruses? Bacteria? Being warmer doesn't help people but it sure helps out all the stuff that like to make us sick.....
Um... I think you meant the Gulf Stream. The jet stream moves all over the place.
"0 BCE was way warmer than it is now. How modern do you need man to be?"
Humanity, not man. If 0 BCE was "way warmer" then it is now, the world population was also a tiny fraction of the current figures, urban centers were not dependent on a global web of food production and transport, local economies weren't interconnected to a global system, and humanity's response at the time to large scale environmental problems was typically to die in vast quantities. I personally don't want to approach environmental problems in the way they did in 0 BCE.
Yes, trees eat the stuff. Then the trees die and rot and that stuff goes to the atmosphere again and the cycle continues. Trouble is, humans are releasing carbon into the atmosphere in addition to the (recent) natural cycles. And according to the white rot fungi theory, woods cannot be used to sequester carbon since the white rot fungi are around.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mushroom-evolution-breaks-down-lignin-slows-coal-formation
Gulf stream, not jet stream, but otherwise correct.
The position of those who call themselves conservatives is "I want my Hummer, consequences be damned!" That's not conservative and it certainly isn't progressive. It's reckless.
I realised a couple of years ago that those with the money, those who get to decide our fate don't give a damn.
I also realised; life is short... so I went out and bought a fast sportscar bceause I can either sit here shaking my fist at the idiots in power or I can just get on and enjoy what is left of my life before it all goes to hell. It is guaranteed to go to hell now, we have gone too far down the slippery slope.
I am hopeful that it won't go to hell in my life time but there will come a point where a significant amount of the trapped CO2 and Methane is released, quite possibly in a chain reaction event that takes place over a relatively short period of time, at that point life as we know it ceases to exist, the planet will go on, life will go on, homo sapiens however probably will not.
Man cannot destroy this planet, he does not have the means to do so but he has lit the fast burning fuse that will ignite the ticking bomb....
The obvious solution is a large increase in nuclear power. Preferably fast breeder reactors
I'll take :
Minor, Don't Bother, Nicer planet for the rest of my life, Alex....
Letting the free market find the solution to a global survival problem leads to a corporate oligarchy.
The idea that the "free market" is the magic solution to everything is... well... insane.
Good News! The world bank dude Expert on Global Warming spoketh on the NPR: They are steadfastly committed to preventing third world development, 97% of scientists agree, Crest gets teeth cleaner! That means, for the learning impaired, no real New competition after the Chinese bubble goes Boom Boom Boom! Out go the lights. (Note from Forgotten Ancient Historic Detail of Century 20? State run economy is Big Fail!) (so is best to have deciders just kill all hungry people and inconvenient disagree-ers)
We must tax trees for emitting CO2 at night when they respirate. Then use the taxes to pay for clean up.
You have to understand that also science and research is heavily influenced by politics. Research is simply spent only on things people want to find out about. If a politician wants to find research that supports the political views his party represents he will only fund such research and not research that refutes his views. Also scientists want and need money for their research. In fact, they need the money to keep their jobs and do what they like to do; research. This seriously tends to make research heavily biased and just because a person wears a lab coat and has a PhD degree it doesn't mean you can trust him and what he says. There is a famous quote from the Ghostbusters movie:
"Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say. "
The same goes with research and so called experts. There is another example of how research can get biased by politics: In Scandinavian regions a feministic political agenda is pushing through and influencing people in various ways. There is also a strong influence of anti-racism (some people refer to this ideology as anti-white) and multiculturalism in the politics of western Europe.
Under these political views the sexes are both perfectly equal and actually born the same. The book "Men Areähg from Mars, Women Are from Venus" by John Gray is almost as taboo as "Mein Kampf" in a Jewish community and e.g. research that would indicate that some ethnic groups would have a higher (or lower) IQ level than other is highly unethical and banned in these countries. Also scientifically trying to find evidence that would support that there would be some physiological differences between homosexuals (and other HBT people) and normal heterosexual people is a definite no-no.
I recommend watching the following Norwegian documentary Hjernevask (Brainwash):
Brainwash (1/7) - The Gender Equality Paradox
It is the first of a 7 part documentary that explores the concepts of what I mentioned above. The subjects themselves are not as interesting as how the research institutions in Norway are totally blinded by the political ideologies they are trying to uphold. It shows how you can conduct research into something over years and years and yet be totally blind to the truth. Norway is far from the only country with these problems and I seriously believe that a lot of this "environmental research" suffers from these issues as well.
The CO2 used in carbonating beverages was taken out of the atmosphere by fractional distillation of liquid air at a plant like those run by AirGas or Air Products companies.
This particular CO2 is merely recycled in and out of the atmosphere and does not affect the total amount at all.
"Preferably fast breeder reactors" The problem is fast breeder reactors are hideously expensive and have reliability issues. There's a reason that after large expenditures into R&D nuclear nations have backed off of instituting breeder reactor programs, and the breeder reactors actually built frequently spend long periods of time out of commission, frequently due to the technical limitations of sodium cooling.
Of course we do. If it weren't for that climate, there wouldn't be any human life to begin with. The explosion of mammalian life, including one of our direct evolutionary ancestors, first appeared during the PETM. As for advanced civilization, it seems to thrive just fine in the tropics now, thus it will also thrive if there are more such areas.
No, this is just the pigeonhole the liberals want to put them in, to feel better about themselves while they envision themselves as environmental and social stewards. It's the same mentality that leads to them to call voter ID laws "racist", as if that word doesn't actually mean something already. The overall conservative position is economic and pragmatic. Spending money trying to avert something we cannot avert in the long run is pointless, and nothing the industrialized world can do WRT CO2 output is going to have any impact if the developing nations won't also play ball -- and they won't. You're not going to convince China or India to curb growth due to environmental concerns a century out.
I'd better start playing the Fallout series again !!!
You know, you make a good point, It's too bad we don't have unpopulated and unfarmable desert areas that we can dig out and build massive holding tanks in. It's not like we have the technology to create a network of cross-country underground pipelines; and even if we did, it's not like we have the technology to pump anything through them. There's no way we could ever pump oceanic waters into storage in otherwise unused and unusable inland regions.
And doing so, even if it were possible, would have no added benefit. The evaporation of that water wouldn't cool the climate in those areas, that water couldn't be desalinized to provide potable water for drinking and agriculture, and even if it could, it's not like we'd have any use or all that salt, right? We totally couldn't turn inhabitable desert land into habitable land, possibly even farm land, while at the same time maintaining ocean levels. That could never happen.
Sadly, though I was being sarcastic through all of that, the second paragraph is probably fairly accurate. Not for technical reasons, mind you, but because there simply would be no immediate profit involved, so we'd have no government or corporate backing to get it done. And we've proven, time and time again, that without that, there's everything we can't do.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.
The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.
The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.
You know what wasn't really around that time? Modern human civilization.
You know the harmony of nature? Yeah that's a lie - it's harmonius because the war is at a gentle simmer, and one species hasn't succeeded in eating all the members of the other. And it's fascinating when you're an outside observer, rather then a member of any of the things involved in it.
North America has been extensively deforested since that time. And the conditions which led to the first temperature rise are not the same conditions which are leading to the next one, nor likely to have the same impacts in the same regions all over again. The explosion and diversity of life rather implies that no one species was successful in remaining dominant during that time, and none of those species were a structured human civilization sustaining more alive members then at any other time in it's history via a complex global economic system.
The paleoscene, was 56 million years ago. The very continental plates were different at that time. Mountain ranges didn't exist in parts of the country (the Rockies were still forming - and that would have a dramatic effect on local climatic conditions due to global effects).
Which goes back to the ColdWetDog's post: if your only concern is life going on, then you need not worry. Frankly I don't care about life going on, I do care about human life going on, my children's life going on, my life going on. And if I care about those things, then I very much need to care about major shifts in climate disrupting the established settlements of billions of people. And the US frets about a few thousand Mexicans fleeing drug wars each year.
Hollowing out the eggshell.
It's resilient until it isn't, and it's incredibly stupid to assume a nation's resilience means you should do nothing to remedy it's problems. The US's centers of government, technology, society and culture are all located on it's coasts - along with a sizable number of it's population. The US's fiscal advantage - the perceived stability - is exactly that, a perception. You may tank that avoidably due to your internal politics within the next decade - but if the US is perceived to be constantly overspending due to natural disasters, you'll see the slow - but sure - move of dollars to other safe haven's, perceived to have more able governments (China would be a good candidate since it has no trouble doing what's necessary for an opportunity, but the EU - with it's diverse and inland member states, is another option).
What does the US do if it's not just New York recovering from flooding, but also 2 or 3 other cities? What do you do if before repairs are ever considered complete, you're facing yet another storm? Everyone will knuckledown and speak of resilience, but the reality is you'll have streams of people leaving those cities, and welfare systems full of what politicians will call "moochers" because it'll be a more convenient lie then the reality which is they'll be the former-middle class.
Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways to produce power. I'm not against nuclear per se but I wonder why I should pay for it when there are less expensive alternatives.
Haha, you know there's no such year as 0 BCE, right? Right?
Letting the government find the solution to a global survival problem leads to tyranny.
The idea that only a government is the magic solution to everything is communism.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The new "The end is near" nonsense comes from a Canadian article. Quote:
"Combining the 20 years of accumulated data from 10 different satellites -- including Canada's RADARSAT-1 mission -- and ensuring that the data was all applied over the same geographic area, using the same time spans, and using the same models for surface melting of glaciers and for the rise of land-mass due to glacial melting (known as post-glacial rebound), the team found that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctic have been losing mass at an accelerated rate since the early '90s."
I'm not sure how they square that with the fact that we have not seen increasing planetary temperatures in seventeen of those twenty years. But notice the "models" for surface melting; I was under the impression they were actually supposed to be measuring ice mass itself.
Well, it turns out to be more complicated than that. See, satellites pass over the same places at the same time every day. Also, how do you tell how much ice is over a spot? How do you tell how dense it is? Satellite coverage is far from complete for the whole Arctic or Antarctic, and so models have to be employed and extrapolations made. If ice is seen as disappearing in one spot it is assumed to be disappearing in spots that the satellites aren't getting a good look at. So models have to be used to make that extrapolation. It's part of why the National Snow and Ice Data Center accidentally "lost" Arctic ice -- about 193,000 square miles of it -- when they changed methods a few years back. This was a result of "sensory drift" and algorithmic problems.
If, in fact, the melt was as severe as greedy folks wanting more money say - wouldn't the ocean levels be rising?
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2001:
"No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected."
And in 2007 the IPCC reported:
"Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm per year. Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear."
The Artic Ice caps have been melting a bit ever since the last ice age ended BTW - and we the oceans have been rising - a few millimeters a year - ever since.
Remember folks, nobody ever got rich by telling you that we really don't know exactly what is going on. You can only get rich by saying if you don't send boatloads of money today, all hope is lost. Speaking of that, all hope is lost unless you send me money right now.
Murphy was an optimist
Al Gore being a perfect example of this, of course. Man Bear Pig is real, I tell you, I've seen it.
Murphy was an optimist
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2001:
"No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected."
And in 2007 the IPCC reported:
"Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm per year. Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear."
Murphy was an optimist
I'm talking about the greedy deniers. If you thought I'm supporting that scum, we have an additional problem.
Right, because I don't believe as you do I must have obviously been fed propaganda.
I have done considerable reading over the years on global warming. What I have come to see is that there are many on both sides that will benefit greatly in money and power if they get the public to believe them. Finding a truly independent and impartial source of information on this has been shown to be difficult.
What I have seen is that there is a large portion of the people that support the AGW theory tend to be motivated more by politics than anything. These people are either politicians themselves or are in positions where they can gain from government spending. This leads to "solutions" to AGW that involve the government dictating more of how I can live and how I can spend my money. I might be more willing to believe them if they spent more time educating me and less time insulting me.
I've come to believe that a large portion of the AGW crowd are "watermelons", green environmentalists on the outside but red communists on the inside. I'd be more willing to believe the AGW theory if the "solutions" they propose didn't involve more government and taxes. We don't need more government to save the world, we need people providing real solutions.
Take the CFL mandates for example. I had my choices in light bulbs reduced by government mandate. If the government was really concerned about carbon output from lighting then they'd allow for more nuclear power plants to get built. If our power came from nuclear power then it would not matter what kind of light bulb I had.
Even the greatest proponents behind AGW have had to admit things like we have not seen global temperatures rise for 15 years, and that corn ethanol might not actually reduce carbon output. The "science" has been falling apart but I'm willing to still believe in it if we see some actual science being applied here.
Science tells me that wind power does not reduce carbon output, nuclear power does. Science tells me that corn ethanol is a really bad idea to reduce carbon output compared to natural gas. If the problem is carbon dioxide then offer me some solutions that actually reduce carbon output. Give me my nuclear power. Let me buy a natural gas vehicle that isn't some tiny little tin can. I'm a big guy that has to drive over some rough roads. I'll buy a natural gas truck but someone has to make one first.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
You're just now realizing they just realized we're screwed? I realized this last week when the article was in the firehose!
Ah, you're right, I didn't pay enough attention to the parent of your post. Sorry. It still made me laugh.
A question for everyone who is of the opinion that CO2 is the biggest issue causing the earth to warm.
How long with rising levels of CO2 and flat temperatures before you admit that theory is wrong? 15, 20, 25 years? Never?
It has been 16 years with no increase in temperature and yet CO2 has gone up 8-9% in that time.
IANA(climate scientist or palaeontologist or astrophysicist), but.. When it was very warm on Earth in the Ordovician, half a billion years ago, the Sun itself was actually a lot cooler. Absolutely speaking, our Sun is in the middle of the very slow changes of the main sequence (see the picture of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, we're in the middle of the diagonal now, G type star). Now the Sun is mostly fusing its Hydrogen but the percentage of other, "hotter" fusion reactions is larger than 500 million years ago as it gets slowly brighter, long before it enters its Red Giant stage (sorry can't find a link for you).
So the gist is that if we'd have the same atmospheric composition now as during the Carboniferous (that's when all that coal went *into* the ground), we wouldn't just have 45C equatorial swamps and 200 m sea level rise and Meganeura dragonflies with a half meter wingspan, but it would be a lot warmer now as well.
Please correct me if I'm wrong; this discussion is full enough of bullshit as is.
If you are seriously concerned that CO2 is a problem and that humans are the biggest part of that problem then please go talk to China! The USA has had a declining carbon footprint due to natural gas replacing coal so not only is the USA CO2 on the decline China's is entering exponential territory. So please go talk to China. Without that NOTHING THAT EVERYONE ONE ELSE DOES COMBINED MATTERS.
Go look at the numbers.
The reaction enthalpy (delta-H) for reacting carbon with oxygen at standard temperature and pressure, is negative (-393 kJ/mole, see table). Ditto for higher than standard temperature and standard pressure. You learn this in high school. (I'm sure there's also an entropy term that increases as solid carbon is burnt to gas, but lets ignore that for now). This means that the reaction equilibrium is such that in a combustion engine of a car, you put in the hydrocarbons (gasoline or diesel or LPG or ethanol) and burn it in air and the CO2 and H2O comes out. That reaction is "exothermic" (the motor gets hot and needs to be cooled). The reaction doesnt really go the other way, not significantly anyways.
In other words, your first sentence "Oh lets develop cars that runs on CO2 and emits oxygine", was stupid. Sorry.
It takes a while for glaciers to melt. The interesting part is whether it got warmer. Because once the ice melts, there's very little chance to stop it because once started it is self amplifying (with fewer white areas reflecting light more heat stays on the planet).
Well, why should I worry? I'm living about 400 meters above sea level, by the time the water hits me I'm probably already dead anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Surely you're not defending glaciergate... As that fantasy was completely debunked. Same as sensorgate, where NASA actually placed temperature sensors on rooftops next to HVAC units spewing heat. Same as polargate, where a few pictures were used to convince people things were much worse than they were. Same as polar-bear-gate, where we were lead to believe that less ice harms polar bears (actually, it helps them, and their numbers are increasing).
The plain truth is that climate science has been so totally corrupted by governments and greed that we know LESS about the climate now than we did 20 years ago.
That is the real crisis. Not AGW. The corruption of science, in the long run, that will do more harm to the human race than climate change. And unlike climate change, this crisis is actually happening, today, and nobody is doing much about it.
Being published - is more important than doing science. LYING to get published - now acceptable. FAKING DATA to get published - acceptable. Selectively choosing what to study... Deciding in advance what the results should be... Openly suppressing dissenting opinions instead of encouraging them... This is the real crisis, that receives almost no attention, because people not trained in science don't understand it. Unless one chooses to study the "right" kind of science, to produce the "desired" results, one gets no funding and has almost no chance of getting published. The result of this is that no real science is being done - at all. This kind of junk science, on both sides of the issue, is worse than propaganda.
When the temperatures study that faked the data - the so called "hockey stick" graph is believed by more people than later studies that showed different results (as it turned out no matter what data one put into the formula you always got a hockey stick) -- and instead of having an open, honest discussion about methodology we have two sides screaming at each other that the other side is stupid, ignorant, etc. we have collectively thrown the scientific method out the window. This is a path backwards for the entire human race, a giant leap back to the stone age.
Murphy was an optimist
Right, because I don't believe as you do I must have obviously been fed propaganda.
No I am under the impression that you are swayed by propaganda because you are spouting big oil's propaganda talking points.
-- QED
Really? Since when has "big oil" been asking for nuclear power plants and natural gas vehicles?
I don't like oil because so much of my nation's money goes to other nations. These other nations are typically ruled by tyrants that don't like us very much. If we can get off of oil then we will no longer be funding our enemies.
Do I still sound like a mouthpiece for big oil?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The problem remains that erring on the wrong side is disastrous. What's the outcome if we fight global warming and nothing would have happened? Well, we spend more money on cleaning up and increase production cost. What's the outcome if we don't fight it and it happens? Millions die, climate zones change and sizable parts of this planet become uninhabitable, be it because they're submerged in water or be it because they're deprived of it.
I dunno, but for me it's pretty easy to choose on which side to err.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do you know where gas comes from?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Everything you say is 100 percent correct. All I'm saying is that North America is poised to weather the coming storm better than anywhere else, save perhaps australia, and the differences will be so extreme that we actually maintain and acccelerate our domination of the world economy.