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Last Time CO2 Levels Were This High, There Were Trees at the South Pole (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Trees growing near the South Pole, sea levels 20 metres higher than now, and global temperatures 3C-4C warmer. That is the world scientists are uncovering as they look back in time to when the planet last had as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it does today. Using sedimentary records and plant fossils, researchers have found that temperatures near the South Pole were about 20C higher than now in the Pliocene epoch, from 5.3m to 2.6m years ago.
Many scientists use sophisticated computer models to predict the impacts of human-caused climate change, but looking back in time for real-world examples can give new insights. The Pliocene was a "proper analogy" and offered important lessons about the road ahead, said Martin Siegert, a geophysicist and climate-change scientist at Imperial College London. "The headline news is the temperatures are 3-4C higher and sea levels are 15-20 metres higher than they are today. The indication is that there is no Greenland ice sheet any more, no West Antarctic ice sheet and big chunks of East Antarctic [ice sheet] taken," he said.
Yes, we must figure out what humanity did 5.3 million years ago to change the course of climate change so that we don't destroy ourselves.
This is yet another demonstration that CO2 by itself is not causing much warming. There are other factors involved, including solar output...
That's the worst thing about the whole scare-mongering over global warming, the misleading people into believing such a simplistic picture of a complex system. It lets many believe they are doing something to help, when in fact they are doing nothing or possibly making things worse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't let the lumber industry hear about this.
Co2 is plant food. the more Co2 the more plants and a greener world. Just what do climate change opponents have against trees?
**Life is too short to be serious**
We weren't here the last time CO2 levels were that high. Yes, the Earth survived. Hell, the Earth survived the Dinosaur Killer strike, but a shit ton of species died.
It's hard to assess with statements like that whether the poster is just playing a rhetorical game, or is indeed a complete fucking moron.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Long before sea levels rise 20 m, annual weeds would have become perennial. Bugs and vermin killed by annual frost will thrive year around. Pesticide and weedkiller usage will skyrocket, and all the farm hands will die of cancer or leave the fields. When the North American break basket is lost, the global famine will wipe out most of the infrastructure and civilization. The surviving Homo sapiens postapocalipsia will simply pitch their thatched huts on higher and higher ground from the seashore.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Your all-or-nothing thinking shows you're not smart. We don't have to """dismantle""" society. We have to CHANGE THE WAY WE DO THINGS. Fucking deal with it.
None of the things you point out are a bad thing, but you have to consider that the climate will change in places that aren't the Sahara, and not always for the better. People generally don't like big changes in life. It's not as bad for countries like the U.S. which due to industrialization and less rigid societal norms are undergoing rapid change on a continual basis, but for people who have been herders in a region for hundreds or even thousands of years, the changes are much more jarring. The world has shown how little ability it has to deal with migrants from Syria due to conflict. What do you think will happen when 200 million people need to move because climate change has suddenly left them unable to continue on as they have been doing for generations?
First time in my life I have been called a right-winger LOL.
I do like poking people's assumptions whther on the right or the left and the climate change industry has become a gravy train for too many and their bubble needs to be poked.
**Life is too short to be serious**
The solution is to move towards a border free world
In a border-free world you will be ruled over from half a world away by those who are the most ruthless, authoritarian, and driven to attain ever more power & control.
Sounds lovely. Don't worry, everybody gets a Harkonnen-style heart-plug. /s
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Trump trying to fix the climate? Good god are you dishonest. He's taken numerous steps to dismantle environmental protections. Heck boosting coal use is explicitly a major part of his platform. He's appointed numerous climate change denying energy industry cronies to the EPA and they've suppressed information and dismissed staff that won't play ball, or just because they're scientists who've pushed research and policies that contradict the pro-coal and CO2-is-good agenda. Some conservative leaders in the past indeed promoted policies that strengthened environment protections, but Trump is absolutely not one of them, and you're continuing your non-stop propaganda where you confuse what the right is saying they're doing with what they're actually doing. You have to be totally brainwashed to read the article you linked and conclude it portrays someone supporting environmental protections and not gutting them, especially considering what's omitted.
I'm right there with you about the left's ridiculous opposition to nuclear... but this seems to be an ongoing trend with the right, you're great at pointing out the problems with the left, but supremely intellectually dishonest about how much worse the right's alternative is. Sometimes I think SuperKendall is Kellyanne Conway or Sarah Huckabee-Sanders with all the double-talk and lying about conservative policy outcomes like "well conservatives said policy x will help y too, therefore it does" in spite of overwhelming evidence it will hurt, not help y. Trump is weakening environmental protections and you damn well know it. If you think that's fine because the dangers of AGW are exaggerated and pollution isn't all that bad, that's one thing, it's stupid sure, but to outright deny what he's doing is just dishonest.
Satellite pictures clearly show a greener Sahara.
This is complete bullcrap. Satellite photos show the exact opposite: The Sahara is expanding southwards into the Sahel, and the Sahel is expanding into the grasslands further south.
Google for "Sahara expansion" and you will see dozens of articles and satellite photos documenting it.
Google for "Sahara greening" and you will see a handful of small projects to grow crops in the desert by draining non-renewable aquifers, along with a few denialist websites that refer to "doomsday-obsessed media, activists and ruling politicians" but are devoid of any actual evidence.
A warmer world might mean more rains.
But not necessarily at the spots you want it, see: https://www.bbc.com/news/world... or https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/...
Assuming that the upcoming climate change has anything *good* in it, is just idiotic.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That article doesn't mention the Sahara Desert at all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's hard to assess with statements like that whether the poster is just playing a rhetorical game, or is indeed a complete fucking moron.
No, that isn't hard. Just toss out your false and baseless assumption that you should choose between the two things that there is evidence of. The more likely answer of course is that they're complete fucking morons playing rhetorical games.
All your questions have been answered and the result is that we have to reduce the amount of CO2 we emit enormously if we want to keep a nice planet to live on. Everybody who reads a good newspaper every now and then knows that. So why are you still asking those questions?
-- Cheers!
Trumo trying to fix the climate? I laughed out loud reading that. And if you would have taken the time to actually look at what your link points to you would see that Trump is still the same second hand car salesman we all know and hate.
-- Cheers!
I think you have vastly underestimated the impact of rapid climate change. A 20m sea level rise would affect every major city on a coast and as well as flat, low lying areas which are often highly populated. The shutdown of the gulf stream would not just affect the UK but all of Scandinavia as well as France, Benelux, Germany since their climate would all switch to being similar to central Canada and, having lived in both locations, not many European plants will survive a Canadian winter where it freezes in November, hits -30 to -40C in January/February and the snow only fully melts in April (we still have some on the ground now).
Of course, Canada and Russia will be doing great as more land becomes farmable and the permafrost retreats further north but when water supplies start running out in the US and elsewhere governments are going to have to take action to secure the water their citizens need to live. This is going to cause political instability and probably wars.
Climate change is definitely survivable as a species but the death, instability, famine and ecological damage it will cause is going to be terrible.
The large map at the top of the article in your link is titled "Change in Leaf Area (1982-2015)" and the bulk of the Sahara is depicted in shades of gray rather than the colors in the legend because there is no leaf area to measure in the Sahara. However, the Sahel, the region on the southern edge of the Sahara, is depicted in reds, oranges, and yellows, which according to the legend correspond to areas of declining leaf area. So according to your source, the Sahara is browning, the exact opposite of what you claimed. I don't know if you are a troll or just an idiot, but in my experience there's very little difference.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
BTW, what part of a Warm Earth makes this "not a nice planet to live on". More plant life, more arable land, basically the current tropics as year-round weather everywhere. Seems quite nice to me.
One of the predicted outcomes of the global warming are non-survivable areas. Right now a healthy human with access to shade and sufficient water can survive natural heat anywhere on the Earth. If the climate warms some more, there'll be regions where humans can't phsyicaly survive without air conditioning.
The predicted locations will be in India and Asia - the opposite of what you'd call "Western countries". See: https://insideclimatenews.org/... or http://climateguide.nl/2018/12...
Oh, and Texas is predicted to be affected too.
"Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease."
The 'disease' may be FATAL; you really want to deal with that? The 'cure' is NOT FATAL. At worst it'll be a little inconvenient. But if someone (You?) can't be bothered to change even ONE THING about the way you live, in order to ensure the Human Species gets to continue and the Earth remains habitable, then you're the problem, not the 'cure'.
We do not NEED to keep using fossil fuels. There are viable alternatives, including nuclear power.
We can all move to plug-in electric vehicles.
Those two alone would mitigate a big percentage of human CO2 release into the atmosphere, and it would be more or less painless.
Don't be such a big baby about this.
But the alternative is not global cooling, isn't it? Even if we somehow return to pre-Industrial concentration of CO2, the ice age won't come until the next glaciation cycle several thousand years in future.
On the other hand, unchecked CO2 emissions will result in a plethora of changes, most of them will be bad and/or require very costly mitigation. Like abandoning coastal cities (Miami, Houston, Shanghai,...) and even whole countries (Bangladesh).