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Study: Earth Is At Its Warmest In 120,000 Years (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: As part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, Carolyn Snyder, now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. Snyder's temperature reconstruction, published Monday in the journal Nature, doesn't estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years. Snyder based her reconstruction on 61 different sea surface temperature proxies from across the globe, such as ratios between magnesium and calcium, species makeup and acidity. But the further the study goes back in time, especially after half a million years, the fewer of those proxies are available, making the estimates less certain, she said. These are rough estimates with large margins of errors, she said. But she also found that the temperature changes correlated well to carbon dioxide levels. Temperatures averaged out over the most recent 5,000 years -- which includes the last 125 years or so of industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases -- are generally warmer than they have been since about 120,000 years ago or so, Snyder found. And two interglacial time periods, the one 120,000 years ago and another just about 2 million years ago, were the warmest Snyder tracked. They were about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the current 5,000-year average. Snyder said if climate factors are the same as in the past -- and that's a big if -- Earth is already committed to another 7 degrees or so (about 4 degrees Celsius) of warming over the next few thousand years. "This is based on what happened in the past, Snyder noted. "In the past it wasn't humans messing with the atmosphere."
we just came out of an ice age. no fucking shit! She is fucking brilliant i tell ya!
Good, enough talk about solar and wind, thank you. We can now get on working towards future tech instead of old tech.
120,000 years ago women weren't allowed to make studies like this. Progress!
It must be all that hot air coming out of Hofstra University right now.
it's because drumpf won't shut the hell up.
Plus his flatulence.
...it is the warmest it's been for about 120k years.
Of course, it might be important to note that just about every 120k years (for about the last 3 million, at least) there's been a clear spike (in some cases near vertical in geological timeframes) in temps and co2....and the last one happened to be about 140k years ago, so we are past due.
-Styopa
Are U watching this?
Trump is killing HILLLARY CLINTON.
And they implied that approximately 10K-ish years ago the climate was so warm that the Great Lakes were not as filled as they are today.. and had no connections due to a lack of consistent moisture due to the climate. It isn't all about warmth but its effects.
I'm not denying global warming as China is doing its best to simultaneously kill off their population with a blanket of unbreathable contaminants while at the same time standing up large LCD billboards to show a sunset their citizens will never see.
Push comes to shove there are tens of millions indirectly responsible for the warming effect but then again.. it would only take one Krakatoa to push us back into an ice age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa
God bless us all.
oh geez
#CanadiansForGlobalWarming
I deny that. Show me proof. No, not that proof: REAL proof! The kind of proof that we can all agree on. Scientific proof that EVERY scientist agrees on.
There have been several glacial/interglacial periods over the last 120,000 years. The peak of the current interglacial occurred about 8000 years ago. Since then temperatures have been slowly falling... up until about 150 years ago when something happened and temperatures dramatically reversed course.. Here's just the last 20,000 years by XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1732/
I have another XKCD for you: https://xkcd.com/605/
So it HAS been this warm before.
What would have releasing a significant fraction of carbon dioxide and energy sequestered over millions of years in the course of a few hundred years have to do with rising global temperatures? Correlation does not imply causation. Maybe people just multiply and industrialize more when it's warmer.
will it ever end??
it would only take one Krakatoa to push us back into an ice age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa
Krakatoa's eruption did not, in fact, push us into a glaciation, so your assertion is experimentally falsified.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
https://stream.org/xkcds-global-warming-time-series-mistakes/
Yes, but physics.
... there will be a another ice age and nothing we can do will stop it.
Is this the same idiot?
Ezekiel 23:20
It'd help if stream.org weren't apparently being hosted on a Raspberry Pi... Never freaking loaded.
Clearly: a smaller human population with no cars, no coal-fired power plants, no railroads, no airplanes, etc results in HOTTER weather. Now that we've been implementing emissions controls, our temps are headed up in the direction of the pre fossil fuels highs. I guess we'd better start cranking-up our use of fossil fuels in order to make sure the planet never gets that warm again!
See how bad causation/correlation thinking gets? Too bad the warmers keep using them in the other direction.
We need to learn a LOT more about this before allowing either side of the dispute to mess with entire economies and negatively affect the lives of millions of people. The harm from "going green" is real and now and affects actual people, while the benefit is theoretical and to the benefit of imaginary people who will be living in the future but miraculously apparently have less tech than we have now so that they need to be save by us with our current primitive tech. Personally, I believe that people a century from now will have tech from a century from now and will probably understand these issues and how to deal with them FAR better than we do and will have the tech to deal with them far more easily and at far less cost.
The real question that neither side wants addressed is this: how much is really mankind's fault? In the end it doesn't matter. The Earth's climate has LAWAYS been changing and will continue to do so no matter what. So the important question is not the blame, which is after the fat... It is what we can do. But few are about that when short-term gain is the only thing they care about.
Where is the problem then, keep burning coal and oil.
If earth managed to be warmer without us humans, our effect on global warming cannot be too catastrophic.
/s
I love XKCD, but surprisingly Randal got it rather wrong when he did the comic - in the sense that the XKCD graph is based on old and debunked views that have been replaced by better data. For the actual data in a format similar to XKCD please see:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...
For those that want to 'shoot the messenger', why don't you like the modern observational data that replaces the old and incorrect meme ? some folks are just so conservative they love eco 'doom n gloom' and don't want to accept better research that shows today's conditions are not exceptional compared to even the geologically recent past. We are still unable to farm in Greenland as the Vikings did (it is so much colder today than then that the graves of the Viking farmers there are now under 'permafrost' - because it was warm enough 1000 years ago that Greenland was green and fertile and not white like today).
How does this stupid tripe every get published? Oh right, Journal Nature - the last bastion of far right wing climate propaganda.
Both sides already "know" they're right, and no argument whatsoever could change that. Why bother continuing?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I doubt we are at our warmest in 120,000 years, mostly because I doubt the science used to determine temperatures thousands of years ago. But if true, imagine how lucky we are! Mankind has always done better in warmer times, and as we see, our food production continues to increase - in part because of technology, but also because of the warmth. The Earth is good.
The site's tagline is: "The national daily championing freedom, smaller government and human dignity."
Now while I'm sure there are genuine good people who just happen to believe government should be small - unfortunately their voices are drowned out by the insane bastards who want government to be powerless so there isn't anybody to stop them from throwing poison in your drinking water and making your air unbreathable. Climate change denial is a forte of theirs and claiming models aren't accurate (mostly by either lying about what models predicted or lying about what the actual temperature is right now) is a key part of how they deny things. The whole "we don't know and we can't know" schpiel from people claiming to be champions of science (which is the thing we use to know things with) is ridiculous. But that tagline says it all. That's not an article about maths, statistics, science or probability though it claims to be all of the above. It's an article about politics - which is being disguised because they don't want you to know it's about politics. It's an attempt to achieve a political goal - regardless of scientific fact.
When you get to the point where you will deny science and reality for the sake of your poiltical beliefs - no matter how nobel those beliefs may otherwise be - they've become evil. At the point where you want government to be too small to keep the water drinkable, the air breathable and the CO2 levels survivable - small government libertarians are no longer just people with whom I have a difference of opinion - they become an actual and legitimate threat to my personal security and the national security of all nations. Killing them becomes justified on the basis of self defence. *
You generally want to stop following the line of any ideology before the point where it becomes justifiable for other people to kill you in self defence over what you do in the name of that ideology.
*Note that I am speaking of what would be justified - not what I would actually do. I'm a pacifist and consider force the very last resort. I don't think we are *quite* at the last resort level in general yet. In a few specific cases yes, but not in general. If you live in a town where somebody is dumping poison in your drinking water though - and you kill the CEO of the company who did it and every idiot who tried to stop the government from preventing it, you are not a murderer though, that's self defence and even the most devoted pacifist will not begrudge you that.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The is unpossible. The earth is only 6.000 years old.
Or: That means that it used to be warmer once, so it can't be caused by humans.
People are so much in denial because they are either don't believe how small the earth actually is compared to thousands of years of stored energy being released at once; they are afraid about the consequenses if it is true, so they put their head in the sand like an 8 year who stole a cookie or they have no idea how e.g. the heating and airconditioning of their condo works.
If the latter, I proposes that these people have their airco and heating removed and see if they start believing. Because if they think people can not heat something, they should not use energy to do something useless.
OTOH I think that besides a few people, the majority of the deniers falls into the first two groups. Disbelieve or denial or a combination of both. And they will use anything to defend to keep what they have.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I took away from her study that, as far as she could extrapolate from the available data on climate/temperature cycles going back 2 million years, that we were pretty much smack at the point of the two curves one would expect during this point in time
Not quite. We reached the peak of the current interglacial about 8000 years ago. That peak is the result of Milankovitch cycles and the carbon, albedo, and other feedbacks - just as the peaks that came before. Temperatures have been falling slowly since then until the last 150 years when we increased atmospheric CO2 by about 70% by burning fossil fuels. Temperatures have risen along with the recent CO2 increase, just as you'd expect. The question she's trying to answer is, if we stopped releasing CO2 today, how much more warming would we observe just due to the CO2 we've already released. She uses the CO2 and temperature correlation over the previous glacial/interglacial periods to estimate the impact of CO2 on temperatures.
Gavin Schmidt shows why this is flawed and, given our current circumstances, likely to overestimate the impact. Here is a snippet: "In the previous post, I outlined how the combination of carbon cycle feedbacks to the Milankovitch forcing and the climate system response to CO2 gives rise to this correlation and that – by itself – it can’t be used to define the latter term. Furthermore, because the regression is being defined over ice age cycles where the biggest changes are related to the (now disappeared) North American and Fenno-Scandanavian ice sheets, the regression might well be much less for situations where only Greenland and West Antarctica are 'in play'."
What happens when government itself is poisoning your water?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Unchecked power - in any form - leads to bad things. Big government crusaders conveniently ignore much of human history where governments killed their own people.
Personally, I want both the anti-government and nanny-state government type crazies - and hopefully we end up somewhere in the sensible middle.
It's a biased article, or she wouldn't have said THIS: "In the past it wasn't humans messing with the atmosphere." She's another one of these "it's all mans fault" types, hoping on some more government funding. Hey, all you "man made" global warming people...you think it is mans fault? Do the world a favor and exit the planet and leave the rest of us the hell alone!
My issue is not with the science that reports human activity is warming the planet, it's with the POLITICS surrounding it, and discussions about what should be done. From what I've read, all of the current initiatives, regulation, etc will not do squat to change the situation in anything under 200 years and even then it's marginal at best. The only real solutions seem to imply (or say rather directly) that world GDP would need to be rolled back significantly. I simply don't see that happening. With all that in mind, it seems like politicians/corporations are using climate change as means to consolidate power. In general. I'm against concentrating power in government or corporations. It never seems to work out well in the long term when that happens. I may be naive, but it seems to me the way to save the planet is to develop space and other worlds so that people can leave and take the stress off of the planet. I'm pretty sure we can do that in under 200 years.
As long as this destroys humans - I'm all for it.
I never realized it before, but the XKCD graph clearly shows that global warming was triggered by the internet.
We gotta shut this mother fucker down!
So, does that mean that 120,001 years ago it was hotter than now?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I think you have that backwards. Snyder is saying that the historical record shows that the sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide is much HIGHER than the GISS estimates. Gavin Schmidt's comment is, basically, that her data shows correlation, not causation.
I took away from her study that, as far as she could extrapolate from the available data on climate/temperature cycles going back 2 million years, that we were pretty much smack at the point of the two curves one would expect during this point in time, so to speak, on both CO2 and temperature and from that lack of deviation from expected norms then suggesting that humans have had little if any significant effect on global temperature averages
In that case, you are misled by a misinterpretation of her results.
She looked at temperature and carbon dioxide with five thousand year averaging. Five thousand year averaging says absolutely nothing about the effects of industrialization-- we don't even show up in her data. With averaging on five-thousand year bins, you only see effects on time scales that are long compared to five thousand years.
, and that the warming that is occurring and will continue for a long time at pretty much the same average rate is pretty well inevitable given past history with or without human industrialization.
A more accurate statement of that : "The activities of humans over the last 100 years have not had an effect that is yet visible on a graph plotted over million-year time scales."
To which one could accurately add: "yet".
Seeing as how industrialization in it's entirety has failed to have been shown to appreciably affect global temperature changes
..enough to be evident over million-year time scales.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...then massive, costly, and punitive CO2 mitigation schemes become pointless and wasteful.
It is a political talking point that doing anything to address the production of CO2 will be "massive, costly, and punitive". Since the response of the fossil fuel industry has been "do everything possible to cast doubt on the fact that a problem even exists, and divert all attention away from realistic thinking about possible ways to address the problem", though, this has never been thought through.
The problem being that a non-existent 'climate crisis' allows governments, politicians, and their bureaucracies unprecedented powers and control that they will never willingly give up.
It is a right wing talking point that if climate change is real, then the only possible way to address it is to give "governments, politicians, and their bureaucracies unprecedented powers and control."
I find it amusing that the right wing's only approach to the problem is to say that if the problem is real we need to give governments more power. It's as if their political philosophies don't have any tools to solve problems other than "give the government more power."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There were vineyards in Scotland and diaries of vikings in Iceland tell of a land as warm as Europe. Orange trees were grown in parts of temperate China and northern Italy.
When it came to an end it started the little ice age which called all of the above to this day never recovered.
http://saveie6.com/
There have been several glacial/interglacial periods over the last 120,000 years.
No. Since the last interglacial 120000 years ago (the Eemian, warmer than the current) and the one we're living in (the Holocene) there has only been a glacial period (cold ... ).
It seems the paper thus says that our current interglacial is the warmest interglacial since the last interglacial. That seems very uncontroversial.
Regarding the XKCD graph it's contradicted by its own source. The graph claims to use Marcott et. al 2013 as a source (see top right). Now, study the graph carefully. Then read the following from Marcott et.al 2013 (the abstract, even):
"Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history."
Now study the XKCD graph again.
it's in my head
https://stream.org/xkcds-global-warming-time-series-mistakes/
I didn't see any mistakes pointed out in that. All it said is that there are uncertaincies in relying upon proxy data. We know that. Nothing of value was added to any conversation by that article.
And there you go. 120,000 years ago, before cars and industrial CO2 sources, the earth was warmer than it is now. The earth goes through natural warming and cooling cycles. There is no magic mystery. Which makes complete commonsense, as it would have to of been warmer to support large roaming reptiles, and of course we have evidence of glacial periods, where the earth was much colder. It's not denial. It's let's see what the historical record truly is, when the scientists actually have the tools to gather real evidence, and not just make conjecture, in order to make plausible, a specific political agenda.
Here's why. None of it matters.
Let's talk about analogies. Remember the Manhattan Project? Probably the most significant intervention of geeks in all history. Started off with some busybody physicists and a letter from Einstein. They were convinced that they were doing a good for all mankind by contributing to the destruction of the Nazi state.
The problem was, Hitler was defeated before their bomb came to fruition. Then, some people started getting cold feet about the use of the device. Regretting their intervention in the first place, even.
General Groves' and Oppenheimer's recollections of the project talk quite a bit about prima donna scientists. What should be obvious is that they put up with the geeks for about as long as it took to get what they wanted, and then told them to go fuck themselves.
Leo Szliard found out that his opinion was worthless, as was the opinion of every one of the geeks. The politicians and military had firm control and weren't interested in power sharing or criticism. And the bombs got dropped on civilians.
The takeaway from this is that on climate change, the only time the geeks get listened to is when the politicians have a good reason to make common cause with them...mostly when the goals are congruent. The moment the congruence ends, the geeks get told to go fuck themselves. This mostly means election year pandering with no action. So, therefore, arguing about this is moot. Nothing is going to happen.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
1. The vast majority of humans on this planet (I'd estimate about 99% of them, if not more) really don't think too far into the future about much of anything. Most of them are too occupied with just surviving from day to day, week to week, and have no time to worry about 'a hundred years from now' or 'a few thousand years from now'. Trying to get them to care about something that might or might not happen even 50 to 100 years from now is a real stretch, and chances are even if you can, it'll slip their minds by the following week.
2. The above being said: Getting anyone to do much about something that may or may not happen in hundreds or thousands of years, even if you tell them it'll wipe most life off the face of the planet, is next to impossible. Note that in this case it's not entirely for lack of giving a damn, but it's flat-out not in their realm of influence to do much of anything to stop it anyway. That is almost entirely the province of entire Nations.M
3. #2 being said: Corporations, religions that believe in some coming Apocalypse or other that will take humans off the planet to {somewhere else}, and whoever else has an interest in keeping things the way they are? They'll do whatever they can to hamstring any efforts to 'save the planet' if it means their interests are not served. See #1, above, and expand it to whole corporations.
4. Unless every nation on the planet is unanimously agreed that they have to actively do things to prevent and reverse climate change it's not going to matter who does what. When you have nations comprising about half the humans on the planet throwing up their hands, saying "Hey, we're developing, what do you expect us to do about this?", then what everyone else does isn't going to make enough difference in the long run.
5. Most (intelligent) people will agree that even if human-caused climate change isn't a Real Thing, doing whatever we can to stop polluting the atmosphere is probably a good idea anyway. But in order to do even that much, you have to change the hearts and minds of pretty much everyone on the planet, young and old, rich and poor, individuals, corporations, and entire National governments. If you've got half the planet on board with it, and the other half shrugging their shoulders saying "we don't give a damn, we have our own concerns", then it's not going to make much difference in the long run.
Basically, unless #5 happens, we're more or less screwed, in the long run. All the Jiminy Cricket-like positive thinking won't mean a thing if you can't get everyone, everywhere on board with really changing the way we do many things that we take for granted. Ironically even some of the most well-intentioned people on the planet are actually doing more harm than good right now, by actively trying to limit our choices for energy generation.
No. Since the last interglacial 120000 years ago (the Eemian, warmer than the current) and the one we're living in (the Holocene) there has only been a glacial period (cold ... ).
My mistake. Thanks for correcting.
"Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history."
XKCD would have done well to include the error bars. They do illustrate this additional variability towards the right side between 16,000 and 15,500. If you include the error bars you can see that there is no contradiction. Even still, Marcotte was published in 2013. We're about 0.3C hotter now than the hottest observed temperature at that time: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g... . That may very well exceed even the error bars and cover that last 25%.
In summary, all you need to know is:
"These are rough estimates with large margins of errors"
There have been quite a few ice ages in the last 120,000 years- and there will probably be another one next time Ray Romano's bank account gets low.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The problem with these studies is scientist assume that the Earth is static, and the Earth isn't, but dynamic.
"Do what I say or I'll kill you."
-Every communist ever.
What about when the earth was so warm the Vikings moved into Greenland, Iceland, Newfoundland, etc. ?
That claim sounds a little far fetched.
Like something that got blurbed out at the debate last night.
Oh well. Apply enough "recent" adjustments and very selective choice of proxies and ... Voila ... instant "Talent" for the AnthroFlopocene nicks.
At least the graduate committee were fool enough to sign off on the degree.
"And the hand of Mann came thundering down."
Ha ha
Maybe. Just maybe it's more complicated than you make it out to be. If you are correct then you should be angry every time you hear the phrase "the warmest summer in recorded history." And then you find out that "recorded history" only refers to man written records (150 years) or satellite records (30 years).
... You get my point.
And yet we see that temperatures were much higher in the past. And then lower. And then higher. And then lower. And then higher
We also see that there were 26 ice ages in the last 2.5 million years. Each of these Ice Ages and periods of Global Warming between them. And interestingly enough - why did glaciation begin 2.5 million years ago? Maybe continental drift had something to do with that.
All these temperature variations have had nothing to do with people.
Oh. You say - the slope of the curve is unique for the last 150 years? Really? What was the slope of the curve for a 150 year period 10,000 years ago? 100,000 years ago? 1,000,000 years ago? Oh. We don't know that. So then how do you know that this 150 year period was unique?
On that note - the amount of industrialization 150 years ago was trivial compared to today comparable to volcanic activity. So then - the rise in temperatures 150 years ago was not a result of man-made global warming,
Your scare mongering and irrationality is not as based upon science as you think it is.
Does this mean nothing should be done? Of course not. (Too long for this post.)
You are also very wrong in thinking that small-government libertarians would do nothing about pollution and environmental depredations. Instead of rehashing talking points there are many articles and books that show a variety of ways of dealing with this problem. Here's a mental exercise - do you think that a libertarian property owner would have no problem (and no recourse in a libertarian society) if a company was dumping toxic waste on his property, destroying his crops/ranch/property/etc? Do really think that's the case? Do you really think that this was never thought of? Do you not now see the falsehood upon which your outrage was based?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
> ...that's self defence and even the most devoted pacifist will not begrudge you that.
Yes, but unfortunately doing-in so many folks takes time and planning. The exact same thing afforded by the less lethal process called legal process, suing, legislation, et al. So whilst your method may be effective, compared to other methods, it is considered vigilantism. Something done in the heat of passion or some immediate where-you-stand doctrine would actually tilt things in your favour I guess. But such lethal response to legislation in your town, despite its unethical effect, is unacceptable. Gotta march a picket line, hold a bake sale, or something more awareness-driven.
>the amount of industrialization 150 years ago was trivial compared to today comparable to volcanic activity
And you were doing so well. You almost sounded like what you were saying wasn't complete bullshit... and then you come up with this such and complete and utter fabrication that it's impossible to believe somebody could actually still seriously claim this.
The good news is - we don't have to guess, we have actual numbers. See the American Geophysical Union - who are pretty much the premier experts on volcanoes - actually answered the question. The average annual total CO2 output from volcanoes is 0.025% of what is put out by coal power plants. Just power plants, and just coal. That's not counting cars, or oil plants, or gas plants or any of the other emission generating fossil fuel industries. Just power plants alone put out 4000 times as much CO2 every year as all the volcanoes in the world.
Oh and volcanic climate change, more often than not, is cooling - not heating. Volcanoes are more likely to cover the atmosphere in sun-blocking ash and sulphur, which makes it colder. It was a volcano, after all, that gave Europe it's infamous 19th century year without a summer. Volcanic heating from CO2 is actually extremely rare. It's just not a factor - which is why we believe that most previous major shifts in climate had to do with solar activity or changes in the eath's orbit. Things which are not happening to any significant degree at the moment.
>So then - the rise in temperatures 150 years ago was not a result of man-made global warming,
Firstly, the industrial revolution started in the 18th century, not in the 19th, and was well along by 150 years ago - so your claim about the level of industrialization is another flagrant lie easily disputed by anybody who passed high school history class. Now high school history classes tend to be less than stellar in accuracy, being more obsessed with propaganda than actual history but they do tend to get the damn *dates* right.
Besides which - nobody claims there was a significant rise 150 years ago because there wasn't. What there was, was the beginning of the rise that is significant TODAY. It started then, small, and has been accelerating ever since.
>do you think that a libertarian property owner would have no problem (and no recourse in a libertarian society)
Recourse isn't good enough. Recourse cannot happen until after somebody did something bad - perhaps fatal. The ONLY reason to have recourse at all, since there is neither justice nor any other good served by vengeance, is as a deterrent. Prevention is what we actually need.
It's not GOOD enough to punish the ones who did it for what harm they cause - you need to make it so damn scary that they don't try. Civl lawsuits don't work for that, we have them now - and they are not working (that was what Murray Rothbard proposed and it's pretty much the only well developed libertarian theory on the subject).
And what's worse is that the court system as a whole - and indeed any recourse system - is fatally flawed as a way of dealing with this and property rights even moreso. For several reasons:
1) Poluting your OWN land is STILL evil - because polution doesn't obey land borders
2) Recourse need to exist for people who don't own land as well - in fact, currently, they are the ones most in need of protection, most current toxic polution events happen on land without clear single-person ownership under western law.
3) It's extremely hard to prove, how *do* I prove this poison came from YOUR factory and not your competitors ? What about air polution ? A recent study showed that a sigificant portion of the smog in LA originates from factories in china. Polution not only doesn't obey land borders - it doesn't even obey national borders. All polution is global polution. That brings up matters of jurisdiction, huge costs and difficulty proving the guilty party and then proving that the harm you suffered was from that polution. It's a nightmare and, generally, only rich people g
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Oh, and all this is academic. Lets assume your insanity is true and climate change to this degree is normal and the historical record actually supports that claim. It's bullshit but lets pretend it was real.
See we have other records - archeological, anthropological etc. etc and the thing is - they show that every major climate shift humanity has experienced was a major calamity and we very nearly didn't survive any of them as a species. Every single one came close to an extinction level event for us. Every single one caused massive displacement, starvation and wars.
And we are MORE vulnerable now than we were when those happened. They happened when displacement was a much smaller problem. If you went somewhere else, there was a good chance you could find somewhere that somebody else wasn't already living and prepared to fight to keep you out off... there are no such places anymore. There is nowhere for the displaced to flee but to your country. America can't figure out how to deal with a few hundred thousand refugees from wars they caused - how the fuck are you going to deal when there's a few hundred million or more fleeing starvation and hunger and drought ? Sure it may make some places green which aren't now. Those places won't be producing much food anytime soon though - most of them are areas where the soil is not conducive to farming. No matter how much warmer and wetter you make it - Siberia will not have productive farmland for centuries. The soil is just to dead. And meantime - the places that were good farmland won't be anymore.
Oh and the plagues... you are having a political crisis trying to deal with Zika right now. Malaria kills more people every year than any other cause. Even a small increase in the global average *massive* increases the areas where these diseases can spread. Many economists have calculated that Africa's economic woes can be *entirely* attributed to Malaria. Sure we have wars and corruption but so does everywhere else. We alone have malaria to deal with. With all those productive people dying young. All those kids missing school because mommy is sick, husbands and family missing work to take care of her and all that money wasted on funerals in a classic broken window fallacy.
Imagine America with Africa's economy - all your wealth destroyed, all your resources spent just trying to avoid complete collapse - and for the same reason.
That's the thing you think is not a major problem. Just because nature can be a bitch doesn't mean it's not idiotic to horrible things to ourselves. The lesson to learn from natural climate shifts is not that climate shifts is just something that happens and so what... the lesson is that it has come pretty close to eradicating our species several times, and never failed to cause enormous hardship and uncountable deaths and it will be *worse* next time.
And, much like the zombie appocalypse, in a major climate change scenario - the single greatest threat is not the weather, it's the other humans. Who will happilly kill you for the water you have.
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You don't get that much agreement among scientists (always a quarrelsome lot) from a specific political agenda. If a solid majority of US climate scientists claimed we were going to have problems from AGW, that's localized enough that it could be a political agenda. Almost complete agreement among climate scientists all over the world means that there is very strong evidence that it's happening.
If we warmed up like this over a period of ten thousand years, it'd be fine. It's the extremely rapid changes (by geological standards) that are the problem.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My point wasn't about efficacy - frankly I don't believe it would be very effective, mass murder rarely is. Such a process would also require enormous resources, which creates a breeding ground for corruption. In practical terms - it would not be an effective way to achieve the goal and would open the door to many genuine atrocities.
My point was to put into perspective the point where libertarians ought to stop being libertarians - because of what becomes justified (justified != a good idea) when they do. People have a right to freedom of religion - but when you start believing you have the right to blow me up in the name of your deity I get the right to shoot you first. People have a right to freedom of speech - but when you are advocating that people should kills gays - we bloody well will lock you up, even in the USA. On the other side - I am (a kind of) socialist in my thinking, but at the point where socialists advocate violent revolutions I no longer support them. Those have historically caused massive hardship and slaughter of innocents, installed dictators and consistently failed to produce socialist outcomes anyway - the most successful socialist states achieved it by peaceful and democratic processes.
No matter how good your idea is, no matter how nobel your goals may seem to be - all ideas have limits, and that limit is where other people can make a reasonable argument that your pursuit of this idea puts their welbeing at risk.
Even if libertarians claim they would offer workable alternatives to government prevention (and so far none has - all I've heard is 'recourse' which is the old Murray Rothbard argument and doesn't offer anything resembling a workable solution but they like to push that one because it *sounds* like the are solving the problem without actually stopping anybody from killing you) a sane version would declare that all laws and regulations on matters of public safety will stay intact until AFTER their alternative systems are in place, tested and working.
You don't create a vaccuum in which slaughter can happen while going through the arduous process of building something else, even if you think that something is better (by whatever measure you decide it is better). You build the alternative BEFORE you dismantle the current one.
Because a bad system for public safety is still better than none at all, even if it's briefly - and legal changes are never 'briefly'.
I absolutely do agree that the best way to deal with the particular threat posed by libertarians is not through killing them in self defence. Hell even if somebody attacks you and wants to kill you right now my belief is that you shouldn't kill him in self defence if you have any other options. If you can escape - then you shouldn't kill. If you can disable without death then you should take that option.
Killing, even in self defence, is a last resort. I wasn't advocating we kill libertarians - I was merely putting into perspective the risk they pose. If you believe in libertarianism, fine, we will never agree but we can live alongside each other. On issues of social liberalism we could even be allies even if our economics will always be as opponents.
There's nothing wrong with that. But you ought to stop being a libertarians BEFORE the point where it risks the health and safety of other people. Just as you ought to stop being a christian BEFORE the point where you bash gays.
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There have been several glacial/interglacial periods over the last 120,000 years. The peak of the current interglacial occurred about 8000 years ago. Since then temperatures have been slowly falling... up until about 150 years ago when something happened and temperatures dramatically reversed course.. Here's just the last 20,000 years by XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1732/
One reason for climate change, from my thinking, is that the earth's spin is slowing down. At one second per year or decade or century, that slow down has a side effect. The sun is able to do one second more melting of ice.
And of course, birmomg fossil fuels also causes a side effect. Altogether, I can, in my mind, rationalize what we are experiencing as "global warming"
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
There are also the small matter that due to glaciation there would have been much less plant life, and animal life to either consume or exhale CO into the atmosphere. In addition those same ice sheets also increase the albedo of the planet, reflecting more sunlight than it would have otherwise, which would also have impact not only on temperature but potentially the interaction of greenhouse effect in the atmosphere.
This is a good part of the criticism of interpreting her correlation. Much of the correlation comes during the retreat of glaciers from the northern hemisphere. But the glaciers have mostly already retreated from the northern hemisphere-- this effect isn't likely to operate.
That said I think it is a no brainer that there is obvious correlation of CO and temperature. Only that it isn't that simple in all but probably the models being built.
The modelers have a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. When the models are simple, people snipe "but the models are too simple; they can't be right." And then when the models are more complicated, people snipe "but the models are too complicated; you can't understand all those feedback loops."
Heck the simple fact that there are Billions more mouth breathers on Earth are likely going to impact the CO levels regardless of industrialization and using sequestered carbon sources (oil, coal, wood, etc...).
Respiration turns out to be a pretty trivial source of carbon dioxide.
(Cutting down forests, though, may be more important effect.)
...The issue is, and always has been a political one and convincing less developed countries to not do what the developed countries did to get ahead, which as you can imagine is pretty hard to do.
If the developed countries find ways to maintain a high standard of living with less carbon usage, I think it's likely that the less developed countries will adopt the same approaches.
...It is all well and good for countries to try and limit their production of CO, but ultimately to do so they tank their own economies (and election hopes), for little good when other countries do not follow suit and are not about to.
It has been a right-wing obsession that reducing carbon dioxide emissions must "tank the economy" but I see no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. We are very very good at resource substitution. Energy is a resource. There is no physical reason we need to burn six tons of carbon per person per year to maintain our standard of living, we just happen to find it convenient to do so.
In the end, it really is a technical problem, and, hard though it is to believe it in this cynical era, we are actually very good at solving technical problems.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Take a look at a graph of coal production. Coal use grows at an exponential pace.
A quick search shows the graphs linked to below. Coal use is grows exponentially but only becomes significant around 1850. Coal production in the 18th C was minimal in comparison to that extracted and used in 1850, and close to insignificant to today.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/201...
http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-Fos...
The comparison to volcanos was not coal production in the year 2000 but coal production in the year 1850.
Coal production before 1850 was in the 30-50 million tons / year. Today it is 8,000 - 10,000 tons / year.
Coal production was approximately 0.003 of what it is today. So you can see that it is comparable to volcanic activity.
http://www.indexmundi.com/ener...
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Snyder said if climate factors are the same as in the past -- and that's a big if -- Earth is already committed to another 7 degrees or so (about 4 degrees Celsius) of warming over the next few thousand years.
Sounds like a stock market disclaimer: "Past performance is no guarantee of future performance"
And we all know that any successful investor focuses on minimizing RISK first. Just like (we) should with climate!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Okay, so what you are saying is that over the past 150 years we've stepped up CO2 production so much that what is considered one of the largest drivers of natural climate change (the largest after orbital shifts and solar changes) is now nothing but noise... and somehow this is an argument for the denier side ?
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No. I'm saying that human CO2 production until 1850 was negligible. Infer from this what you will. If there was a huge increase in global warming starting in the 18th C then it had nothing to do with human activity.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Are you stupid or just lying ?
That's not what the word 'starting' means.
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Good point. Unnecessary choice of words.
Look at a graph of global temperatures and you see a huge variation over the hundreds of millions of years. And I'm not talkig about the swing in temperatures pre large-fauna. Even 50 million years ago when mammals comprised the dominant species the temperature and CO2 levels were far higher.
Remember our original posts were focused on the rise of temperature starting 150 years ago.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
A slower spin would result in cooler temperatures: http://www.drroyspencer.com/20...