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Coral Reefs In Grave Danger, Say Climate Simulations
sciencehabit writes "Nearly every coral reef could be dying by 2100 if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue, according to a new review of major climate models from around the world. The only way to maintain the current chemical environment in which reefs now live, the study suggests, would be to deeply cut emissions as soon as possible. It may even become necessary to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, say with massive tree-planting efforts or machines."
So what if all the Coral Reefs die,
Most of the sea life in the ocean will die. The reefs are a critical component of the food chain for fish of all sizes, including plenty that don't directly live on the reef itself.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"There is a very wide coral response to omega—some are able to internally control the [relevant] chemistry," says Rau, who has collaborated with Caldeira in the past but did not participate in this research. Those tougher coral species could replace more vulnerable ones "rather than a wholesale loss" of coral. "
I guess his views were not in line with the study, so his results were not included.
That'll teach them to corrupt our youth with their aspirations to become fry cooks.
This should make the so-called skeptics pay attention as it represents a very real danger to people. Those broken up bits of dead coral can really cut your face when you bury your head in the sand.
Maybe you can drown it out with your manly gunfire?
And look at what's actually happening:
Remember when scientists would discard theories when their predictions were wrong? Good times....
The basic science is sound, it's your own layer of politics that's giving you grief.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How about we all stop with the crazy predictions that only drive fear and eventually apathy, and focus on what's actually happening NOW. And stop that.
You can throw 50 different predictions at a normal person and he'll say: "Wait, this is stupid. This can't all happen? So what it is?", and they'll deny the problems that are already occurring. Instead just focus on what's happening now, with the warming of the ocean etc, and merely say: "It's bad. Very bad."
Politicians are simple. People as a group are simple. So keep it simple..
EXCELLENT link!
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
btw, I was 10 years old about 47 years ago.
KILL! Kill! KILL! Kill! KILL! Kill! KILL everything that isn't human! HALLELUJAH!
I've had it with you socialists that think that anything that isn't human should be allowed to live. Why do you hate freedom?
Maybe the increased CO and its effects lower the corals ability to fight disease. Like how many (most?) AIDS victims die from pneumonia or other infections that were only able to gain a foothold due to the weakened immune system?
I find it very upsetting that there is an abundance of people that are concerned about the CO2 output but very few that take the time to investigate and lobby for solutions that won't drive us back into the stone age. The only solution that we have now, with no need for new technological advancements, is nuclear power. We have not built a new nuclear power plant here in the USA for something like four decades. Those that are still running are undoubtedly reaching the end of their safe and profitable lifespan.
Alternatives like wind, solar, and bio-mass take considerable amounts of land. This land is expensive and competes with other vital needs like food. I recall a solar power plant that could not produce enough electricity to pay it's property taxes. They were allowed a discounted rate on the tax but they still went out of business since they couldn't pay their other bills. Bio-mass is a direct competitor to food as any land that can grow a plant suitable for energy is also land that is suitable to grow food. There just is not enough land, water, and sun to both feed us and provide our power needs. There might be enough to both fill our tummies and our fuel tanks on our vehicles but the biggest producer of CO2 is not our vehicles, it's our coal fired power plants.
Wind might some day be competitive with coal and be profitable. The problem with wind, as well as geothermal and hydro, is that it is highly sensitive to location. Wind power can share land with things like food crops but it shares a weakness with solar power, it is highly sensitive to weather.
There's a part of me that thinks this scare over CO2 output is largely a hoax. There is a part of me that just doesn't care. What I do want to see is all this arguing to stop and people put some real solutions to work. I want them to STFU and build some nuclear power plants already. I can see a perfect spot for one from my front door. It has a rail nearby, a small river flowing by for cooling water, and a ready market in the city that I can see from my back door. My only concern is that a power plant so close might shade my house.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Next time, please make sure your jokes are funny before posting.
So with the entire planet having too much for the environment to absorb and yet CO2 is trending higher, where exactly are these locations supposed to be? There's nowhere left.
This isn't a "the next generation can deal with it".
I guess that's why your link says " disease is not considered a major threat to the Reef ."
Although apparently simply reading their own links is too hard for some people...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Alarmist much? The *current* coral reefs will die, but new ones will appear at locations where the CO2 level is currently too low for them.
They are dying much faster than they are growing. It takes decades to centuries to grow a new coral reef from scratch. In the meantime the oceans bioversity would be decimated past the point of no return for many species.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And from the abstract of the actual paper referred to by the wuwt page :
"...Our empirical data from this unique field setting confirm model predictions that ocean acidification, together with temperature stress, will probably lead to severely reduced diversity, structural complexity and resilience of Indo-Pacific coral reefs within this century."
Remember when non-experts would actually listen to scientists rather than cherry pick what they wanted to hear? Good times...
Trap all that carbon in clothing, acid free art paper, hempcrete, hemp fiber composites, etc... :)
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching
We could always go out to the coral reef, and rescue the creatures living there, and put them in aquariums.
I need to restock the aquarium in my surgary.
P. Sherman
Dentist
42 Wallaby Way
Sydney, Australia
You fucking moron.... CO2 bubbling up in a limited area has close to zero impact on the temperature and the acidity of the ocean in that area. Which is what is driving the coral die-off.
Thank god that scientists are actually doing that, because otherwise they'd keep putting forward idiotic, wrong and self-serving ideas - like the ones being served up on that site. Quite honestly, when he started out, Watts was actually doing some fairly useful commentary. He was mostly wrong, but at least he was asking questions that needed answering in the public, instead of just in the scientific literature. Now.... he's just clinging to an incorrect idea that has been his meal ticket for years. He's not going to give up or change his mind, because he will have no purpose or income.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
They overlooked the part in their model where more acidic seas dissolve existing carbonate faster. Nature recycles. How do you think coral survived 7000ppm CO2?
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/Evo_large.gif
They've overlooked simple biomechanics before: "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.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/new_model_doubled_co2_sub_2_degrees_warming/
See also: There are winners and losers among corals under the accumulating impacts of climate change, according to a new scientific study. In the world’s first large-scale investigation of how climate affects the composition of coral reefs, an international team of marine scientists concludes that the picture is far more complicated than previously thought - but that total reef losses due to climate change are unlikely. Ref: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(12)00255-2"
Need Mercedes parts ?
Old enough to spell "masturbate" and "semen" correctly... Young enough to want to impress himself by posting the first thing that comes into his head that uses those 2 words... I'm guessing 14 or so.
And yet you've never learnt to stop projecting, have you?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And yet your linked article says that the increase of disease is thought to be due to the water being warmer. Yes, this is going to really put a dampener on the Global Warming campaign. And where did you get the idea that scientists will stop studying the reef just because it is thought to involve climate change?
Science doesn't work that way. The different disciplines don't go take a holiday when another group makes a discovery.
Really? Is CO2 increasing?
There is a huge difference between global warming and man-made production of CO2 - everything being attenuated by global dimming.
There is so much BS about this that I really hope anyone who has some critical thinking skills use them and make up their own mind.
http://sciencespeak.com/ in case you need a refresher.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
At this point in time you are more likely to obtain the truth by linking to a homeopathy site compared to wattsupwiththat.com.
It is only two days since the world survived its last apocalyptic prediction. I guess there is room for the next one.
In the meantime the oceans bioversity would be decimated
So....reduced by 10% then?.
Good Grief, Charlie Brown!
No - decimated means 1 in 10 left to survive, not 1 in 10 killed.
Did you leave your brains at work when you left on friday? If you could just, for a second or two, try to get it in your skull that potentially species-destroying events are not safely ignored and do not go away by wishful thinking, then *maybe* you could accept that there are a lot of people concerned about it. Maybe a tad more than the 100 lunatics you seem to think make up the entire society of "people who think it's a bad thing".
Doesn't it bother you that the news is starting to look like the introduction to Sunshine or similarly apocalyptic movies? That there are very serious issues with our entire food chain? That there are very serious issues with the ability to sustain our current standards of living if we go on like this?
The whole problem is *not* that most people think we need to give away boatloads of money to appease our conscience. That is just your personal straw man. You can keep setting it up and burning it down again, but no one in their right mind will accept your verbal hysteria as an argument. Most people just want to hold on to the standards of living we have. And not see it getting much worse, and see what their children potentially have to live through. If we do not act *now* we will never act until it is too late. And then, draconian measures will have to be implemented.
The geo-engineering measures are opposed by a lot of people because outside of a very small group of techno-fetishists, it does not *solve* the underlying issues (at best it just mitigates them - but even that is questionable), has side-effects that are unknown and potentially as lethal as the current issues we have. Since we have a very well-understood way of dealing with the CO2 issues, which is to stop spewing CO2 in the air, there is no reason to go to unproven options. Reducing CO2 output has no known harmful side-effects, except that old and established industries that cannot change their operations, will go the way of the dinosaurs. Boohoo. That's not a communist plot, that's a consequence of the bed those industries made and now have to lie in.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Wrong, decimated means every tenth soldier executed to encourage the others. Only 10% die.
Way to be a stereotype, teatard.
I like my morning madness undiluted :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I wouldn't exactly call it 'encourage[ment]'. It was used by the Romans to punish military units deemed cowardly or disobedient.
(Or maybe my sarcasm detector's not properly connected.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"This paper presents a new formula for calculating when fossil fuel reserves are likely to be depleted and develops an econometrics model to demonstrate the relationship between fossil fuel reserves and some main variables. The new formula is modified from the Klass model and thus assumes a continuous compound rate and computes fossil fuel reserve depletion times for oil, coal and gas of approximately 35, 107 and 37 years, respectively. This means that coal reserves are available up to 2112, and will be the only fossil fuel remaining after 2042." http://www.peakoil.net/publications/when-will-fossil-fuel-reserves-be-diminished
Current trends cannot be continued until 2100. There isn't enough fossil fuel. All the easily reachable oil is going to be burned and go into the atmosphere, no matter how successful the attempts to curb global warming. If we dramatically curb the use of fossil fuels, it will simply take a little longer to burn it all up. But it is all going into the atmosphere. There is no political force strong enough to tell all the people of the world they can't run their cars or heat their homes with fossil fuels any more. Since is entirely futile to stop all the easily extracted fossil fuel from being burned, there is no point in debating how to curb emissions. Our focus should be on what we can do to minimize the impact.
Plant a tree?
Are these supposedly 'educated' scientists really promoting the tree as a major net CO2 filter?
And they wonder why we don't take the entirely natural process of THE FUCKING WEATHER as a cry to end human existence?
One question: is it stupid to unite against a common enemy, if the enemy is real? Because you seem to imply that whatever the reality of AGW, as long as we have to do something together with "them darn fur'ners" it's bad.
So: if the temperatures do *not* plunge back, what new excuse will you make then? And suppose you do turn around then, how much worse will the measures have to be, thanks to people like you? Right now, the measures are actually not bad. They will kill off a few companies that are inefficient and need to dump waste everywhere in order to compete. They will drive the best companies to improve even more and out-compete the others. Capitalism at its best. But if we wait long enough, the measures that will be unavoidable then will kill much more than that.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
So....reduced by 10% then?
That's an anachronistic definition. Modern definition, as defined by the OED:
kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Colder waters. It is the acidity that kills the reefs and colder waters generally have lower acidity due to a bunch of interactions. Too cold and the reef can't live, to hot and the acidity kills the reef. So, as everything warms up, the waters that were too cold are now becoming warm enough. At least technically warm enough, again it is a lot more complex than just that.
This is a false argument. What is really happening is that the coral reef organisms are shifting location. This has happened repeatedly in the past as the climate changed before. The reality is that climate change is normal. The world has been far colder and far hotter than it is today. Humans, and urbanites in particular, are simply used to the current climate and they resist change because they simply are resistant to change and because change will cause some of them to have financial losses (coast line taking away their precious cities).
Frankly, I would rather have global warming than global cooling. During times of global cooling we have had the great die offs. During ties of global warming there has been an explosion of life and diversity. Warming is opening up more of the world to life. This is a good thing.
The real problem is that people are using global warming and climate change as a distraction from the real problem of toxic pollution. People need to pollute less of the mutagenic and toxic pollutants. This is the real danger. Global warming is merely a distraction.
What you are saying is that all AGW is science and that anything else is not science. That is your prejudice and your excuse for rejecting skeptical arguments.
Perhaps we should call you the denier because you reject the possibility of skeptical scientists. I will just call you ignorant because you clearly do not understand the scientific arguments against catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
Skeptics don't argue that the planet hasn't warmed. They also don't argue that CO2 doesn't have some part in that. They do argue that CO2 is not the main driver of climate change. The science is far from settled.
Doesn't it bother you that the news is starting to look like the introduction to Sunshine or similarly apocalyptic movies?
Yet you don't go down to the FCC get in their face, point to the (now AWOL) original mission statement, You won't lobby to take the FCC control away from the POTUS and instead have people vote the FCC panel. You won't lobby to make stations make their public file available online.
You won't bother actually writing A SINGLE complaint the station's "public file."
That there are very serious issues with our entire food chain?
Yet Carbon Tax, ICLEI, the UN Agenda 21 and the IPCC Fags (carbon TAX already has FRAUD as screwed up as the banksters) nevermind, it won't specifically fix any of these REAL PROBLEMS: Fukushima, Gulf Oil Spill, Sinkholes, Storage for spent fuel, Geo-Engineering, Aerial Spraying, and trillions of watts of RF energizing and manipulating the weather while denying the keyword "chemtrails" , nor this middle east war of insane stupid fucking bs.
That there are very serious issues with the ability to sustain our current standards of living if we go on like this?
The solution is simple, Tell the UN to go fuck itself, Restore the Constitution, Arrest the Oath Breakers, Arrest the Banksters, shoot those Geo-Engineering jets down, and pull the plug on Weather Modification. De-Activate the DHS, turn airport security back to the fuckin airlines. But no, you say I can't have a fire in my own fucking fireplace in the winter when CARS ARE DRIVING OUTSIDE ON THE FREEWAY 24/7/365! Seriously fuck you. Ordinances are weapons. The local city council is owned by ICLEI spewing out ordinances locally for the UN. In fact, these cocksuckers now have fucked with the electricity (SMART METERS), communications (go see EFF), water (WATER METERS and all the fucked up valves in the house had to be replaced after these fuckwads came through, then replace water supply line, then replace sewer, jesus tits my neighborhood was only created in fucking 1980, already we NEED all this BULLSHIT?! I think not), They fucked up my websites, hosting, domains with the NDAA, fucked up my job with Too big to fail, fucked up my retirement with theft, fraud, and more bullshit. While Obamacare didn't fuck up my health (which cannabis isn't on their menu), it did create uncertainty to the point that I won't hire anyone until this nightmare is gone. The same people CAUSING the problem can not be left to provide the solution.
The whole problem is *not* that most people think we need to give away boatloads of money to appease our conscience.
I don't know what the fuck your talking about, I'm sick of boatloads of money going to ISRAEL and disappearing into the black holes of WAR and unaccountable, unconstitutional, unspeakable black agencies. But you framed the conversation to make it seem like you have more numbers than you really do.
Most people just want to hold on to the standards of living we have
Yeah they're called SOCIALISTS, and practice SOCIALISM (social security), their free shit army will pick your fuckin ass clean just the same as locusts do to GMO corn.
If we do not act *now* we will never act until it is too late. And then, draconian measures will have to be implemented.
Take action doing what? Your a fucking babbling moron without street cred. Really I can't tell what the fuck your talking about. Draconian measures like steal my fucking life savings for the carbon tax fraud?
The geo-engineering measures are opposed by a lot of people because outside of a very small group of techno-fetishists, it does not *solve* the underlying issues (at best it just mitigates them - but even that is questionable), has side-effects that are unknown and potentially as lethal as the current issues we have. Since we have a very well-understood way of dealing with the CO2 issues, which is to stop spewing CO2 in the air, there is no reason to go to unproven options. Reducing CO2 ou
You link to the site of an outed Heartland Institute shill, not to mention a clearly non-scientific denialist? Haha what a fucking sheep you are, an intellectual slave.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Man, the trolls are out thick on this one. I don't understand what they get out of it.
I appreciate your attempt to reason with them, but it just doesn't work very well.
Stop spewing CO2 into the air? How do you do that? Mass genocide? People _need_ the energy we get from these sources of CO2 you want to stop in order to live. We cannot support the population of the USA while going back to farming without fossil-based fertilizers and working the land with animals instead of powerful fossil-fueled tractors, or moving the proceeds of that farming with diesel trucks and locomotives to get it to market. We cannot go about our lives at the standard of living you talk about without burning fossil fuels in the only modes of conveyance that we own. The idiotic AGW alarmists were telling us 10 years ago that we had to spend $50 trillion to "mitigate" this problem and the resultant scheme would only have lowererd the temperature increase by a degree or degree and a half by the year 2100, and not really fix the problem. No one has even proposed an actual way to completely fix the problem. But no matter, they want to spend more money than we have to continue their doomed-to-failure schemes.
But geo-engineering such as this approach:
http://phys.org/news199005915.html
goes unpurseud because, if it worked, it'd wreck things for those attempting to gain control of everyone's lives (and money) with their scarecrow. That approach would, if actually developed, give us pre-industrial-revolution levels of CO2. That would be a disaster for the doomsayers, and so we don't hear a peep about making it work. No, lets just get rid of our cars, take public transportation, and go back to living in caves.
Anyone really serious about fixing the problem would get their PHD's in some STEM areas of study, get their butts into some laboratories, and start trying to make things like those work, as well as, politically, stop trying to wreck the world's economies by opposing absolutely everything we try to do to make our lives better and promote the prosperity that will provide the abundance of resources necessary to actually develop ways to stop using CO2 generting energy sources. IOW, we're not going to successfully develop solar electricity, distribute it all over the country, develop the magic battery to make electric cars really viable, and so forth if we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap, and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power, and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't subsidies infinitely into the future, and you take away money for research on how to do the very things you want to do that may actually, maybe, someday be able to solve the problem. Prosperity is our best weapon to combat the problem technologically, but everything the AGW alarmists are doing work to diminish our chances of actually being successful by removing the monetary resources necessary for the research to solve the problem.
What does the Federal Communications Commission have to do with that?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yea, perhaps if all reefs died.
But thats not whats actually happening.
Most ACTUAL reefs are deep under water and have been studied very little and as far as current data suggests aren't nearly as frail as shallow water reefs.
Again, this is OMG LETS PANIC PEOPLE type of response.
Yes, you're pretty barrier reef may turn brown, but it really isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.
Stop being a tool.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Scientists have been studying weather control since the 1940's. There are geoengineering patents, geoengineering conferences, countries like China have a government department dedicated to weather modification, and the US does too but the government lies about it pretending they aren't doing it. People who collect rain samples from around the US have tested the water and proven the same things used by geoengineers are being sprayed in US skies (sulfur, barium, aluminum). They are playing God with the weather and doing things like causing massive drouts for multiple purposes such as pushing political agendas (carbon taxes will make some people trillions of dollars), making billions of dollars using geoengineer insider knowledge betting on Weather Derivatives that are traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, forcing small farmers to go out of business and sell their farms to mega corporations that use Monsanto seeds, strengthening and steering hurricanes for political benefit (Sandy + election = Obama victory), etc. Our favorite super villan Bill Gates happens to be heavily invested in both Monsanto and geongineering.
Weather != Climate
All that stuff sounds expensive. So just keep telling everyone you don't believe in global warming. And praying. That's free too.
We're not going to do fuck all until it's far too late. Just like every other major problem in the world. because some people might not make as many billions if we start spending on the planet.
profit > all
And that includes the coral reefs. (that provide alot of the profit)
And your qualifications for making this dismissive assessment are...? Or do you have peer reviewed studies to which you can cite to support your position?
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
The article starts by making the statement that the "CO2 emissions" are responsible for the climate change. The nuance in this study is the inclusion of a new feature: "... include simulations of how ocean chemistry would interact with an atmosphere with higher carbon dioxide levels in the future". So the sources of error are the corelation of 'emissions' to climate changes AND the modeling of the interaction of CO2 with the ocean (and coral's hardiness in the face of change). The latter two in particular are still very very poorly understood. So the margins of error are pretty big on this new model. Bravo on the modelling work but stop with the calls for sweeping changes based on them.
If your car (or aircraft!) were designed with models of such comparably low granularity and poorly understood principles, you'd be dead ... if the governement even let them on the road (or skies).
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
[Something] in danger from Climate Change...blah blah blah.
Women and children hit hardest.
Give me a fucking break.
Gravity and relativity are not comparable to AGW. Both have been demonstrated clearly through easily observable testing, many times over, starting with "I dropped something and it fell," and then you can work out the science behind it. Or, "yep, that atomic bomb worked."
With AGW, both the science behind the observable event AND THE EVENT ITSELF are postulated. With gravity, there may be debate about why the rock fell, but it fell. Global warming isn't so simple. Even demonstrating that there has been warming in the first place requires relying on sampled data with uneven and inconsistent collection, with the sensors not placed the same from decade to decade, and use of records compiled in decades past that we're never intended for scientific study. So, there's a qualitative difference between AGW and most physics... Almost a difference between a set and a power set in what is being observed versus what is being theorized.
Citation? Or did you just pull that out of your ass? Coral reefs, in fact, only exist in very specialized locations. Losing them would be a shame, but it wouldn't kill "most" sea life. (Incidentally, ocean acidification has happened multiple times before in earth's history, so it's not a completely mystery what would happen.)
Silver and gold must have I
Or the coral reefs shall surely die
I know it's true 'cause the models say
I don't care as long as you pay
Pay me now or pay me later
If you won't pay you're just a hater
Jacques Cousteau told the world decades ago. We didn't listen, we won't listen now. Only when the oceans are dead will we wake up. Fat lot of good that will do.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Their adamant stance against anything geo-engineering is evidence of what they're up to since such geo-engineering would short-circuit their plans to redistribute wealth
Libertarians aren't against geo-engineering. They're against government geo-engineering. There is a significant difference. They're not against people going forth and deliberately changing the climate, they are simply completely ignorant of history and for some reason expect corporations to take up the challenge of their own free will because if they don't they will eventually cease to exist. The problem again is that they ignore history, which is replete with examples of corporations and businessmen acting against their own long-term gains for the purpose of short-term profit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, it doesn't bother me in the least. People have predicted mass starvation and the collapse of civilization for a long time (cf Malthus), and technological progress has always prevented that. In fact, it was the challenge caused by hitting resource limits that forced humanity to make progress and improve its living standards, and it has done so every time. I do not want to live in a sustainable society, and I have confidence that human ingenuity is up to the task of solving whatever problems global warming may cause.
Here's a tip, try searching for information at a deeper level than just googling. Maybe ecology monographs and journals on various clades of marine organisms? Did you ever consider that only endangered animals would have layman friendly SEO optimized articles written about their ecological importance, while more mundane species would have just as much if not more data about them, but mouldering away in a university library somewhere, rather than being talked about on the mainstream news sites?
I am in no way a climate scientist, so if someone could please explain this article to me, I would appreciate it.
1) It says "Coral Reefs Could Be Decimated by 2100" but then the first sentence is that "Nearly every coral reef could be dying by 2100 if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue" - decimation is 1/10, significantly different from "nearly every". Is this just sloppy language or which is correct?
2) The article says "No precise rule of thumb exists to link that figure and the health of reefs. But the Carnegie scientists say paleoclimate data suggests that the saturation level during preindustrial timesâ"before carbon pollution began to accumulate in the sky and seasâ"was greater than 3.5." and "In the absence of deep reductions in CO2 emissions, we will go outside the bounds of the chemistry that surrounded all open ocean coral reefs before the industrial revolution," meaning the reefs are "...toast". But then it also says "...No precise rule of thumb exists to link that figure and the health of reefs..." - first, a rule of thumb isn't precise (again, just bad writing?), second it doesn't seem that there's a question of precision here - there's simply no actual connection, just a hypothesis that's incredibly vague based entirely on inference?
3) The article says that the inescapable conclusion is that the reefs "...are toast." Yet ""There is a very wide coral response to omegaâ"some are able to internally control the [relevant] chemistry," says Rau, who has collaborated with Caldeira in the past but did not participate in this research. Those tougher coral species could replace more vulnerable ones "rather than a wholesale loss" of coral. "" - So really, while the currently-flourishing varieties of coral ARE optimized for the high-pH ocean, there are already-extant species that are more durable. So again, we're not talking about the 'loss of all coral' as the article implies, but more like 'a loss of the current varieties of coral that can't tolerate the coming change'?
4) As I understand it, corals are some of the oldest organisms on the planet, both individually and as a species. These organisms have survived far, far higher planetary temperatures and conditions which - to humans at least - would have been considered uninhabitable. The quote "[But] an important point made by [Caldeira] is that corals have had many millions of years of opportunity to extend their range into low omega waters. With rare exception they have failed. What are the chances that they will adapt to lowering omega in the next 100 years?" seems disingenuous. We KNOW corals have adapted to broad conditions over the history of the earth. As we're seeing with other ocean species, more durable, more tolerant, and simply tougher species (which have been marginalized by the species who have successfully adapted energetically and efficiently to today's 'optimum') are doing much better. In essence while some species bet their genetic currency on adapting supremely to current conditions but with little ability to operate outside them, others hedged for the long game remaining marginal species but having a greater ability to tolerate changes. Isn't that kind of how evolution simply works?
All in all, this article seems long on speculation, self-contradictory, and (sadly, typical) climate-FUD more intent on histrionics than presenting facts and reasonable hypotheses.
-Styopa
How is a MODEL which predicts events happening 100 years from now testable? Hell, every time a predicted event does NOT come true, all you hear is WELLLL that's true, but we've just changed our model and now it shows the data to fit global waming! Tada!
Cassandras are back again. Please stop forcing your global warming religion onto free society. We have separation of state and church. Take you AGW religion back to your church and stay there.
JAM
I have a degree in biology from a uni in a tropical island country - there are so many non endangered yet critical species the mind boggles to drill down to specifics, the example I gave of monographs and journals was relayed from actual experience and not speculation; but if I must satisfy your laziness, then I shall provide as my example: the family of crustaceans generally known as krill. They are a cornerstone of the food web in sub-temperate and polar waters, with a diverse array of species feeding directly or indirectly from them, such as salmon, blue whales and penguins. They are also not nearly close to being endangered, yet if they did become endangered, the food security of several temperate and sub-arctic countries could be called into question.
you're not paying attention to grammar. the statement wasn't "when" but "if". allows for the possibility that the temperatures might not fall back. if so then the solution is the same as it has been throughout time, adopt, adapt and improve.
already known that seeding ocean with iron will cause huge increase in plankton, which cuases huge increase in fish population. the plankton take carbon to the bottom of the sea in their shells when they die (as they always have). Carbon is thus removed from the atmosphere, and the ocean. problem solved. already tested on small scale and entirely natural
Nice dude! That's the most epic strawman I've seen from an AGW acolyte all day.
The recently leaked IPCC AR5 report acknowledges that there is little evidence to support the existence of positive feedbacks that would lead to catastrophic AGW.
It looks like a doubling of CO2 leads to approx. one deg. C of warming. There is some evidence that negative feedbacks will offset that but there's no consensus on that yet. In any event, hard core deniers and alarmists aside, the science is settling. CO2 will make it somewhat wamer than it would otherwise be. Dry places will become somewhat drier. Wet places will become somewhat wetter. Extreme climate events will not become more common.
The non-activist scientists on both sides of the issue are coming a lot closer together. The activists will continue to rant but one hopes that people will quit listening to them.
Saying that its ok if the shallow water corals die because we still have the deep water coral shows you have no understanding of the role of coral reefs. Its like saying its ok if all the evergreens die because I still have an aluminum christmas tree in the garage.
You typed so many words with so little substance. Well, you sure gave quite a few insults, and made a few claims to having knowledge of the scientific process, but you didn't give any substance (or evidence) at all. I think you have a solid career in politics ahead of you.
Doing my best to give you the benefit of the doubt (I admit I am going out in a limb here), you seem to be operating from the position of basic philosophical skepticism. That is to say, you hold that there is simply no means by which humans can ever know the basic truths about our existence, at all. While religious belief is obviously guesswork, the scientific method is also guesswork, just less obviously so. Specifically: it cannot be proven that our senses give us accurate information about reality, and the logical soundness of inductive inference cannot be demonstrated. The scientific method assumes both of these on blind faith.
Just because something happened the same way over and over again in the past, a scientist thinks he has established that it will happen that same way in the future? That is an utter guess!
I don't know if this is your position...I am just assuming it is because that seems to be the essence of your polemic. I apologize if I have misread you, which would make my post an enormous straw man fallacy. But it wouldn't be my fault, as you did not make your position clear.
These two guesses are properly called the "metaphysical assumptions" of the scientific method. However, these two assumptions are also made by every human being in the ordinary living of his ordinary life. In order to operate in the world word, humans must assume that what we see and feel are real, and that our prior learning applies to the present. Without that assumption, we wouldn't even be able to feed ourselves (since we wouldn't trust that what we are smelling is food, nor would we believe that stuffing it in our mouths would sate our hunger, not that we would believe in hunger anyway, etc.). So, while this is a guess, it is realistically impossible to operate without this guess. Rejecting the accuracy of our senses (and applicability of prior learning) is just a matter of taking intellectualism to an unworkable extreme.
So the scientific method begins with this absolute bare minimum that cannot be escaped, and accepts it. Religious thinking, by contrast, assumes quite a lot more than this. It also makes guesses about supernatural beings, a great supernatural drama in which we are caught, an afterlife, and on and on. All of these assumptions are made in addition to the same basic assumptions made by the scientific method, with no justification (you don't have to assume this in order to be functional).
So, that is an important difference in what we might call "scientific faith" and "religious faith." Scientific assumptions are paltry and inescapable, whereas religious assumptions are enormous and needless.
And, about the other points.....
Scientists were wrong in the past because they are only as good as their data, which is constantly accumulating. That is no justification for rejecting the scientific method as useless. The very computers we are now using stand as a testament to the power and rightness of science and the scientific method, as they would not exist at all without it. Prior wrongness simply proves the honesty of science: we aren't claiming to know anything by divine revelation, but are struggling to figure it all out through experimentation. We would expect mistakes, but that doesn't justify total rejection.
The acceptance of modern scientific claims feels a lot like religious faith to people who are not themselves trained scientists, and who have not themselves reviewed the experiments and the evidence. That does not mean that accepting scientific claims is the same as accepting religious claims, because in the former case it is still possible to do the research yourself, whereas in the latter case you are forever dependent
The broadcasters are required to keep track of political airtime sold or donated. The FCC enforces public access to this file. Broadcaster mind control is all covered in the 1983 documentary "Videodrome" (James Woods, Debbie Harry).
It is really very grave!!! OK... MAYBE!
Simulation is a software fed with some input data, then said software performs calculations, iterations, and so on.
If political agenda is part of input data, then whole simulation becomes a lot trickier. It is tricky from start - as we assume software writer had good model, programmed without errors... When input data is biased towards particular political goal, then all bets are off. And anybody following whole climate "discussion" knows how objectivity is long dead.
Never cry wolf, it was said... I hope we will not pay gravely for past abuse of cry-wolf.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
Wow. Seems I have a stalker on my hands with mod points. A single mod-down in some of the gun/AGC threads that I posted in over the last few days. Nice.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
St.Creed did not specify how carbon emissions were to be reduced; The user merely stated a preference for solutions that involve reductions in carbon emissions (over solutions that involve geo-engineering).
(1) Why do you assume that the person you are replying to favours genocide as the method of reducing carbon emissions? You must have some reason or else you wouldn't have listed it as your first assumption.
(2) Genocide is a very serious accusation and I see no support for it in the comment that you are replying to.
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"I do not want to live in a sustainable society"
Please momentarily remove your political polaroid eyeglasses, and ponder the *literal* meaning of that phrase..
Coral reefs directly house 25% of the marine species in the world. That doesn't count the ones like tuna that rely on the "bait fish" that breed there.
Amphipods. Countless billions of them. Far from endangered, absolutely essential.
Absolutely. In the meantime, I highly recommend driving without a seatbelt. You can put it on once the collision is underway.
Strawman, strawman and more strawman. No environmentalist I know has ever said we should stop producing CO2 overnight, not that we should go back to the stoneage. The real-life solutions are a bit more nuanced than what can be captured in a soundbite. For solutions that work, look at the EU as a whole. Yes, progress has been uneven both geographically and in time, with for example the current anti-nuclear scare in Germany leading to a shameful boom in coal power. But they're still emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US. And so does the EU as a whole, while having a similar spectrum of climate zones. And all the while, EU civilian infrastructure is being maintained much better and is generally more technologically advanced than what I see here in the US. I think we should coin a new term "CO2 reduction alarmist". Who is the alarmist now?
Yes, societies need to change, renew, and transform themselves. Look at the kinds of crooks that promised a thousand years of stability, appealing to a fear of change and progress in their people.
Haha what a fucking sheep you are, an intellectual slave.
Says the intellectual coward who ignores people when they tromp all over them, with factual information and then play the "you're just an ignorant hick" card.
Good times, carry on.
Devistated is nearly all of them dying out. They are being decimated now, by 2100 they will be devistated.
People in Country A don't get an increased risk for lung cancer because Country B has a lot of smokers.
You mean like the Montreal Protocol? That 'ineffective' and abusive regime?
Cooperation on AGW has to be international for multiple reasons. Two of them are 1) Atmospheric conditions at this scale affect everyone, and 2) Cooperation has to bring competitiveness to heel on this issue, so that anyone taking an 'If they don't do it, we will' attitude to high-GHG modes of production will be made to feel the pressure.
The suggested relationship between these facts and the topic at hand is erroneous as pointed out by numerous sibling posters, I can ignore them for the purpose of this argument.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No strawman - these environmentalists keep trying insane schemes like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade nonsense, and suing every form of energy production to attempt to kill it all as effectively as possible. There's no other conclusion to be drawn except that they want everyone to go back and live in caves, and burn wood to heat them because they're trying to deprive society of coal, natural gas, oil, etc. You may be able to tell that I'm really sick of it, because it harms prosperity, which is absolutely necessary if we are to have the money to actually solve the problem. And, thanks to natural gas fracking, we're actually converting the coal fired power plants to natural gas, as it is getting really cheap, and OBTW it is MUCH cleaner. The USA has made the greatest headway into actually reducing CO2, more than any other country, due to the natural gas boom. But the environmentalists are still trying to stop it.
Environmentalists make no sense, they are never FOR anything that WORKS NOW, but always try to stop EVERYTHING. They even had Nancy Pelosi attempting to lock up the Mojave Desert so no one could put solar farms on it, and just a few weeks ago the Obama administration put millions of acres of western shale off limits to development. (We should be in for 4 more years of recession, as this guy placates the loony left that abhors advancement and prosperity.)
And that translates into "most of the sea life" how?
Remember when we disagreed about a scientific hypothesis and could talk about it rationally? Good times...
You don't happen to believe in string theory do you? Or Intelligent Design? You can't reason with those people.
Because it is the only method that would actually work? Whether cause, or effect, reducing CO2 consumption without corresponding increase in nuclear tech would either cause or be the result of genocide. You can't just make a decision to emit less CO2 without seriously inconveniencing yourself, so it won't happen for 99% of the population.
the anachronistic definition is cool. The modern definition is kinda lame.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Don't be obtuse, I wouldn't be the first to waste my breath on you:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335397&cid=42373765
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's a great crime because it will lower my standard of living. There have been countless dramatic climate changes and the world conspicuously fails to end. My world will end when I die. After that, who cares? Specifically not me. Between now and then I intend to live a life of oil based luxury.
Let us pretend then that it is impossible to achieve a carbon neutral society without either increasing reliance on nuclear power *or* resorting to genocide (a proposition that I deem to be highly dubious):
... To summarize: From what I have seen rally2xs's allegation of support for genocide are baseless and inflammatory.
Show me where St.Creed has ever stated an opposition to building more nuclear power stations. Link to it. I'll want to read the comment for myself.
I have looked over St.Creed's comments in this thread and s/he has made no mention of opposition to (or support for) nuclear power.
Scanning through St.Creed's comment history I see a couple of mentions of the use of nuclear power in space.
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Ok, you go play pretend with the rest of the AGW people. I will be sticking with reality.
Who the fuck cares about ST.CREED? You are ignoring the argument in favor of personality. It's some strange form of ad hominem in reverse.
The quality of the argument can be improved by reducing the number of baseless accusations it contains.
My comment serves to draw the attention of the moderators to rally2xs's flamebait comment and to moderate it accordingly.
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So the sources of error are the corelation of 'emissions' to climate changes AND the modeling of the interaction of CO2 with the ocean (and coral's hardiness in the face of change).
As the correlation of CO2 emissions to climate change is 100% ...
So the margins of error are pretty big on this new model.
So we likely can reduce the error by some magnitudes (according to your logic)?
If your car (or aircraft!) were designed with models of such comparably low granularity and poorly understood principles, you'd be dead ... if the governement even let them on the road (or skies). Since when do you need a model to build/design a car or a plane? Yes, we use models to make them more efficient ... but you don't need a model to build one.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Coral reefs have existed for hundreds of millions of years, although not in current locations. They survived the death of the dinosaurs and preceding extinctions. If they can't survive this, what hope do we have?
While we're on the topic of opinions that people hold about climate change: I have to admit I've never seen a survey of proponents of the scientific theory of Global Climate Change, but I seriously doubt that there is much support among so-called "warmists" for genocide.
I can only say for sure that I'm a supporter of the action plan put forward by the brilliant Dr. Sagan:
"For our own world the peril is more subtle. Since this series [Cosmos] was first broadcast the dangers of the increasing greenhouse effect have become much more clear. We burn fossil fuels like coal, and gas, and petroleum putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and thereby heating the earth. The hellish conditions on Venus are a reminder that this is serious business. Computer models that successfully explain the climates of other planets predict the deaths of forests, parched crop lands, the flooding of coastal cities, environmental refugees; wide spread disasters in the next century, unless we change our ways. What do we have to do? Four things:
(1) Much more efficient use of fossil fuels. Why not cars that get 70 miles-per-gallon instead of 25?
(2) Research and development on safe alternative energy sources, especially solar power.
(3) Reforestation on a grand scale.
and (4) Helping to bring the billion poorest people on the planet to self-sufficiency, which is the key step in curbing world population growth.
Every one of these steps makes sense apart from greenhouse warming! Now, no one has proposed that the trouble with Venus is that there once was Venusians who drove fuel inefficient cars, but our nearest neighbour nevertheless is a stark warning on the possible fate of an Earth-like world."
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (episode 4: Heaven and Hell (update - 10 years later))
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My data says that the coral reefs are going to expand by 500 percent by the year 2100.
Isn't "data" cool?
Plastics from the oils in algae? That's the first good idea I've heard in ages. Most people worry about their SUV when they think of oil shortages, but lacking raw materials for plastics is a lot more dire.
Journalists are qualified to work with words. If they can't even get that right, they are total oxygen thieves and not to be taken seriously.
The modern way of using the term is more drastic ;D
And historically it was not 10% either but a bit less ... why it is less is left to you as an exercise.
And also I would not call it "to encourage the others" ... it was a punishment for a lost battle/bad fighting.
I doubt it encourage much if you, or your left neighbour or your right neighbour "randomly" gets executed.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Who really thinks we'll have any need for a natural environment to create food by 2100?
Honestly, first world countries don't even really need it that much right now.
Stop spewing CO2 into the air?
Yes.
How do you do that? Mass genocide?
Nope, by reducing emissions. Thats enough.
People _need_ the energy we get from these sources of CO2 you want to stop in order to live. No, they don't. Energy and people do not care where it comes from, may it be solar, wind, or nuclear or tidal or rivers.
We cannot support the population of the USA while going back to farming without fossil-based fertilizers Fertilizers are not fossile based. Except you mean they use energy to be produced.
and working the land with animals instead of powerful fossil-fueled tractors ... or use bio diesel, or use bio gas to move them.
You can use electric tractors
or moving the proceeds of that farming with diesel trucks and locomotives to get it to market. This is a good argument for countries where trains use electric power ... why the fuck should a locomotive need diesel?
You live in a 3rd world country I guess? Your education seems even below a 3rd world country ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Genocid would only work if you would start with the population that produces the most CO2 ...
Even if you kill everyone except the inhabitants of the USA the climate would collapse ...
Or you could kill all of the USA and all of China, and stil the planets climate would collapse ...
So proposing genocide, even for arguments sake, is stupid beyond believe!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, progress has been uneven both geographically and in time, with for example the current anti-nuclear scare in Germany leading to a shameful boom in coal power. ... if you did not catch the news, we replace nuclear with solar and wind.
This is wrong.
The new coal power plants are used to replace older ones with higher/dirtier emissions.
There are bottom line no new (coal) plants build
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable
You are crawling around in poverty because 99% of your countries wealth is owned by 1% of its people.
by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap,
Last time I checked, you still use coal. And your energy is still cheap. What exactly are you mourning about?
and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, ...
Fracking is expensive, that is why gas prices are rising. On top of that, the USA has no "normal" gas reserves anymore. So you need to import. Another reason why it is expensive. Environmental issues set aside
and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power,
Solar power can be distributed with the current grid. You don't need a new grid for that. Your claim is idiocy.
and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high
...
How does a railway make everyone poor? Europe has an excellent railway net, and as far as I can tell most people are considered rich
speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't ... speculation at best.
How do you know it costs millions per mile and no one is using it? You have no railways right now, so claiming anything about costs or usage if you had them is
subsidies infinitely into the future, and you take away money for research on how to do the very things you want to do that may actually, maybe, someday be able to solve the problem.
We don't need research to solve the problem. We only need to implement the solutions we already have.
Prosperity is our best weapon to combat the problem technologically, but everything the AGW alarmists are doing work to diminish our chances of actually being successful by removing the monetary resources necessary for the research to solve the problem.
From whom is money removed? Money is just like blood, it either circulates in the economy: good, or it is stocking somewhere: not good. Unlike a human body an economic entity can not bleed. The blood is always inside. The question is how to distribute and utilize the blood/money.
Claiming that a trillion dollar economy is not able to switch completely to wind and solar in a decade is utter nonsense. On top of that money is constantly new created. Can't be so hard to find 500 billions somewhere to start an energy revolution.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Doesn't it bother you that the news is starting to look like the introduction to Sunshine or similarly apocalyptic movies? That there are very serious issues with our entire food chain? That there are very serious issues with the ability to sustain our current standards of living if we go on like this?
Yes all that is true....no, it does not bother me at all.
You or I telling about it on Slashdot changes NOTHING.
I am prepared. Are you?
If we do not act *now* we will never act until it is too late.
Who is this "we"? If you are expecting people as a whole to act before it's too late, then you are naively mistaken. Nobody is going to do shit until there is utter disaster. Your heightened blood pressure and yapping about it here there and everywhere changes nothing. People will just roll their eyes, or nod their heads and continue business as usual. Your energy would be better spent preparing for this eventuality.
No, _reducing_ CO2 does not fit the definition of "stop." You then bring up a bunch of technologies that are incapable of supplying the same amount of energy as fossil fuels, which means you are talking thru your hat. There are no electric tractors, and their production at a reasonable price is not possible (yet.) Locomotives in the USA run on diesel. It would be decades before they could be converted to external electrical power and we don't have batteries like that, either. Stringing overhead wires for locomotives that run hundreds of miles is a LOT of wire, and it is expensive, as well as its installation being expensive. Not financially doable. And it appears I know a whale of a lot more about reality, and what can be done within its confines than you do.
we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable
You are crawling around in poverty because 99% of your countries wealth is owned by 1% of its people.
Wrong. Its because pinhead environmentalists are attacking the sources of cheap fossil fuels.
by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap,
Last time I checked, you still use coal. And your energy is still cheap. What exactly are you mourning about?
"O" is using the EPA to make coal impossibly expensive. Just a few months ago, 1200 miners were laid off because of this, and we lost their production of coal. This is going to continue, and electrical prices are going to (continue to) rise.
and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, ...
Fracking is expensive, that is why gas prices are rising. On top of that, the USA has no "normal" gas reserves anymore. So you need to import. Another reason why it is expensive. Environmental issues set aside
No gas reserves? You are totally wrong, wrong, wrong. We have OCEANS of gas.
and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power,
Solar power can be distributed with the current grid. You don't need a new grid for that. Your claim is idiocy.
You're crazy. Solar is best generated in the desert southwast. You then have to get it to the rest of the country. Ever hear of IR loss? Radiative loss? Minimizing those means building million-volt or more electrical "hi" lines, that will take lots of money and years to complete. Using anything else will result in most of the power produced being used to heat the electrical distribution wires of AC low-voltage distribution, as well as radiating a lot of the power into outer space.
and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high
How does a railway make everyone poor? Europe has an excellent railway net, and as far as I can tell most people are considered rich ...
Europe isn't the United States. You really show your ignorance of things tech here. We have a much lower population density, and vast expanses with few people that want to travel thru them. So, building rails there is necessary, but won't generate a commensurate income to pay them off. And when you get to places like California, you have exactly the opposite problem, with TOO MANY people living where the rails have to go, resulting in huge costs in litigation to acquire the right of way, as well as extremely high costs to compensate the current owners of this land. Then, after you get all that done, you don't have riders because we're currently at least moderately prosperous, so much so that people drive their cars to wheverer they're going, and incidentally compare favorable with 200 mph trains that run on schedules, since that slows everything down, while people can leave for a distant destination at 4 AM, maybe 3 - 4 hours before the train is scheduled to leave for the same destination. And on and on, people have lots of reasons for not riding trains, the biggest being that the fare would be several times as much as it would take to simply drive the distance. In order to make even some people ride it, the fare has to be lowered, so that's where the gov't subsidy comes in - making the fare artificially low. We're better off just not building such trains.
speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't ... speculation at best.
How do you know it costs millions per mile and no one is using it? You have no railways right now, so claiming anything about costs or usage if you had them is
People do studies before they build things. They ask people "what if" questions. There's been a proposal to build HS rail in Florida for decades, but it gets killed every time when the results of the surveys of the people that MIGHT ride it mostly say they'd dr
top being a stool.
The USA has made the greatest headway into actually reducing CO2
Numbers or it's wrong.
Also, cap-and-trade did work very well for sulfur emissions - no end of the world as we know it. You're saying "it harms prosperity" yet I have seen nothing like that happening yet; what has been harming prosperity so far is a long recession that could perhaps have been avoided and that not even the most rabid oil industry lobbyist is blaming on environmentalists. They would just lose credibility. Like you - I finished reading your post concluding you're living in a fantasy world.
I was not referring to the building of new coal plants but to the increase in mining and burning of coal since the "panic shutdown" of most of the nuclear plants. And I admit it's a bad example for a lot of reasons; primarily that the increase can be seen as a temporary spike following decades of decrease, and that the percentage of German electricity that comes from coal is still way below the US. That's kinda my point. The EU is far ahead of the US by any reasonable measure yet has failed to return to the stone age as rally2xs asserted.
I did not know about it, so the explanation might help others: omega measures the presence of aragonite in water. Aragonite is a flavor of calcium carbonate, and coral use them as building block. It is also found in mollusk shells.
CO2 released in the atmosphere gets absorbed in the oceans, lowering its pH, which in turn breaks up aragonite, as I understand.
I don't think we burn more coal ... we rather lowered the energy exports. But I have no actual/recent numbers at hand.
Well, germany already has lowered its CO2 footprint by over 20% in the last 10 years. Mainly by efficiency improvements and house insulations.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No gas reserves? You are totally wrong, wrong, wrong. We have OCEANS of gas.
The USA have natural gas reserves about the size of two years consumption. Thats why you are fracking.
The rest of your post is utter nonsense.
You are poor? Define poor? Since when? Since yesterday? So before we talked about AGW you where rich? Wow, what are you doing against AGW? Nothing! So how can it be that any energy politics whatsoever made you poor?
You just talk nonsense ... and have certainly no idea about the stuff you are talking.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Stringing overhead wires for locomotives that run hundreds of miles is a LOT of wire, and it is expensive, as well as its installation being expensive. Not financially doable.
If other countries could do that, the USA can do as well.
And it appears I know a whale of a lot more about reality, and what can be done within its confines than you do.
Obviously not. As all you claim impossible is already done elsewhere.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Our country is far larger than the European countries, and our freight rail is massively expansive, and the envy of the world. NOBODY ELSE has wired up power for anything like it.
NOT FAIR! The whole point of not making a hyperlink of that URL was probably so that you would only read the address, not the contents.
I can write a simulation that has the results to be anything I want it to be.
It is sad but something that may or may not be avoidable. 99% of all species to ever walk the earth are now extinct...so maybe, as humans consider ourselves lucky or maybe just to damn good!
More of their models? The same models that have got almost every prediction WRONG so far? Yea those models. How about getting your head out of models and check out reality for a while. You know actually do some real wold OBSERVATION?
Destructive fishing practices are the biggest threat to coral reefs not CO2.
I am amazed that coral could survive at all throughout geologic time with CO2 levels 3 to 5 times higher than present for millions of years. Yet we focus our energy and efforts on the worthless CO2 angle rather than doing something about the very real destructive fishing practices.
" Reducing CO2 output has no known harmful side-effects". WTF? You have got to be kidding. During the last ice age we got down to 170 PPM and if we had dropped another 8-10% we would be here. At 150 PPM plants don't survive above sea level and all other land life follows them quickly to extinction.
Throughout most of our planets history CO2 has been much higher than today and life bloomed. For millions of years CO2 was well above 1000 PPM. We are in way more danger from having CO2 go too low than too high.
Oh by the way if you want to stop the next ice age with human activity putting more CO2 into the atmosphere won't do it but opening up the Panama canal probably would. It was the closing of it ~2 million years ago that cut off ocean circulation and caused our recurring ice ages (along with the orbital characteristics of our planet).
If you think Milankovitch was wrong because of the disconnect between the orbital cycles and the volume of ice it appears to match almost perfectly with the rate of change. So we may have been measuring the wrong thing:
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/Publications/MilanDefense_GRL.pdf
So because hurricane Irene wasn't bad, that means Hurricane Sandy won't be bad?
There is an official philosophic term for this but I prefer the term 'idiocy.'
Go with my grandmother's saying: That's funny the horse died. He never died before.
You are missing a couple of current technologies. 1) Single sourcing energy is a horrible idea period and PV is not the only form of solar power condensers get efficiency closer to 30% 2) Read up on the Tesla Roadster electric vehicle gets about 300mi to a charge and is darned close to your 0-60 number. Charge time still needs to be worked out but might be down to less than an hour soon.
Go read a book ... or get otherwise some education.
You sound like a 5 year old boy that saw his first cartoon on TV.
The world evys the USA for noting. You are just a third world country with a 4th world judicial/political/law system and having by coincidence a 1st world army/navy. Besides your military power your country is basically nothing and in 10 to 30 years it will be gone from worlds main theatre.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.