"and the best argument imaginable for not giving government more power to try and solve our problems."
Yes, lets all pretend that by making governments even less responsive to the challenges we face and pretending that we don't have a problem at all, will make all our problems simply go away.
The problem with your no big deal notion is that one will have to build new ports every 50 years or so, which will be extremely expensive an unsustainable, since it assumes that all the resources are going to be there each time you want to rebuild.
You should come down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to see the reality of "slightly higher than normal coastal damage". Its been 6 years since Katrina and the vast majority of the coastal infrastructure once in place is still no where to be seen. The primary cause is the higher cost of building materials, fewer available jobs given the loss of the infrastructure, and the vastly higher insurance costs.
The "its no big deal" approach to carbon dioxide pollution is little more than strident advocacy for much higher insurance premiums.
At this point in the scientific debate, it matters little what the denialists believe. They are simply mistaken and science has moved on to predicting the probable effects.
I would strongly urge scientists to take advantage of their ignorance and wisely invest in ways that will make them feel the poverty of their ignorance. That way the stridency and consequence of their ignorance will greatly diminish over time.
Hydroponics require tremendous amounts of energy and money relative to traditional agriculture. Unless you want to pay far, far more for most produce, shifting to hydroponics on a mass scale is not likely to be successful. Just go out and buy yourself 10,000 plastic buckets that it would take to grow things hydroponically for the 3 or 4 years the buckets would last just to create the equivalent of about 1 acre of soil. Then add in the cost of obtaining and delivering the water and the nutrients and I would be willing to be that you wouldn't be able to make enough selling the produce to even cover your costs relative to conventional agriculture.
"Then the soil is suitable for conventional cereal crops. "
Really? Any documentation on the dramatic increase in wheat or corn production in Florida or is this just another one of those lets make things up kinds of arguments?
Soils in Florida are sandy, but because of materials deposited by running freshwater over millions of years, they are not that sandy.
Major problem for Florida agriculture going forward will be increasingly be periods of prolonged desiccation, salt intrusion into coastal acquifers, and the introduction of tropical pest species. They will also be faced with increasingly higher prices for fuels and fertilizers needed to grow food crops at affordable prices. Of course, within a few hundred years, most of South Florida will be part of the Straits of Florida and not amenable to agriculture, so the greatest threat posed to Florida agriculture will be the need to relocate Miami and most of Dade and surrounding coastal counties. Aquiculture perhaps, but not agriculture.
"We don't necessarily know it will go badly, but it appears at least as likely as it going well. (In fact, it appears more likely, overall.) I'd rather avoid that type of situation."
Sorry to break it to you pal, but those of us who monitor the biological realm observe that, as can be expected from the nature of natural selection, things for the vast majority of species on the planet, including those we depend upon for our survival directly or indirectly, are not doing well and are, unless carbon dioxide pollution is quickly addressed, headed for extinction. Carbon dioxide pollution is pushing most species outside of their optimal fitness zones and ecosystems are rapidly either changing their species compositions dramatically or simply collapsing altogether.
They should. Birds are descendants of dinosaurian species.
The problem with the whole "so fucking what" notion is that, yes life went on, just not the kind of life that was there before.
Will the progeny of modern humans survive if extant humans continue to ignore carbon dioxide pollution? Probably not, but thermophillic bateria will just shrug,
It is a little ironic that those who take the "so fucking what" approach are so remarkably dismissive of themselves, when their denial was intended to convey the erroneous notion that they are somehow "above it all".
"One of the things that has always bothered me about the global the warming/climate change thesis that its advocates predict nothing but negative consequences. That's extremely improbable."
Actually, a preponderance of negative consequences should be expected. Basic biology tells us why negative consequences will far outweigh positive consequences.
All organisms arose through the process of natural selection. Every aspect of their genetic organization and survival strategy is contingent upon changes that have taken place during the evolutionary history of each species. Selection has produced organisms that are highly adapted to their particular environments and to the range of selective forces that are likely to be encountered during their lifetimes. Simply put, organisms that are unable to cope with their environment, simply die out and do not reproduce transferring their genes to the next generation. However, no organism can be optimally adapted to all environments. That is why we don't see all species everywhere. Because few environments are absolutely constant organisms are designed to be able to tolerate a range of environmental change. However, if the change exceeds that range they will, if they can not escape or move to a new more tolerable environment, simply die.
Rapid climate change is forcing nearly all organisms to confront environmental regimes which challenge their limits of tolerance. Many individuals, like trees in Texas are unable to tolerate extreme drought brought on by global warming and they simply die by the hundreds of millions (500,000,000 in 2011 alone). Other species, like Pine Bark Beetles, Mosquitoes, birds, and some fish are able to move or migrate. Collection records over the past 200 years show us that for many species, we are now witnessing the greatest shifts in the geographic ranges of species ever recorded. We now have, for example, fishes that appear to be traversing the arctic ocean from essentially extreme North Pacific waters to the extreme North Atlantic waters, as well as sightings of many more tropical species in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Likewise, we see a stead climb of species upward in elevation throughout the entire tropics and temperate areas. The elevation range of American Pika is a good example. It is being forced to ever and ever higher elevations to survive. Unfortunately, they have now begun to run out of higher elevations over much of their range and because local populations are unable to transport themselves to new mountains, these populations are becoming extirpated on more and more mountain tops.
Under normal circumstances in earth history, such changes have taken place over millions of years, giving enough individuals the opportunity to evolve fast enough to either become adapted through selection to their new environment or shift. In the past such changes have often been nearly at random, often in opposite directions, essentially alleviating the problem for many species.
However, because the changes we are seeing now are man-made resulting from carbon dioxide pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, which accumulates in the atmosphere never to reverse itself as the result of natural processes, and because the largely unidirectional change is so rapid taking place over 10's or 100's of years, there is simply not enough time for organisms to evolve to adapt to such change. Consequently, many populations of countless species are simply dying off in vast numbers leading to the dramatic changes in species composition that we are now witnessing in ecosystems. One can think of species as being positioned on a parabolic curve fitness curve that points down at either end. There is an optimum environment at the peak of this curve and as long as near this optimum species in their present form do well. Moves away from this optimum will cause the species to decline or be forced to evolve. This is what we are witnessing being played out all over the world and to make matters worse for most organisms humans have so
Given that the average American's carbon foot print is about 1000 times that of most other folks, you can pretty well look forward to a future in which the vast majority of humanity will be eager to cut off your dick.
"Maybe by the time the end comes in 1000 - 100,000 years we will be fully prepared to live off world and will have colonized other star systems. "
And while we are at it, we can be prepared to live in deep space for the 70,000 years it will take those "lucky" few to get to even the nearest star, which unfortunately, has no hospitable planets near it.
It would be far better to take the "green agenda" more seriously, and move more aggressively toward eliminating the internal combustion engine as a mechanism for transportation, more efficient solar and wind technologies and more efficient battery technologies. These at least have the prospect of actually solving the problem rather than dreaming we are in an episode of Star Trek in sufficient time to address the problem posed by carbon dioxide pollution.
We don't have a lot of time so we might even consider subsidizing the fossil fuels companies to make the switch. If we can eventually generate enough cheap energy through solar and wind, then we will have plenty of time to pay for the deficit spending. We might be broke on paper, but at least we might at least have the prospect of a future.
"So my own ox isn't being Gored as much as I expect others will be.)"
You sound like the guy who wasn't affected by the collapse of the credit default swap market, because he personally hadn't invested in any.
Rest assured, it won't matter how rich you are or where you live or what you do for a living. Going forward until the effects of carbon dioxide pollution is addressed, it is going to impact your life more than any other event. It may do so indirectly and you may be too thoughtless to notice, but rest assured you will be affected far more dramatically than you currently realize.
You talk about trillions of dollars being lost addressing the problem and therefore we should do nothing but let the fossil fuel industry dictate to us the fate of the planet. Unfortunately, those costs will pale in comparison to the losses that will occur if we don't start taking action to reduce carbon dioxide pollution as quickly as possible. If you want food prices to go up, keep ignoring the problem. The cost of trucks will be the least of our worries. Without addressing the issue, eventually, there won't be enough food being shipped anywhere to need trucks.
"It's my belief that the current warming trends have more to do with variations in the Earth's orbit and/or solar activity than any gasses we produce in the burning of fossil fuels"
If that is true then doesn't it concern you in the slightest that there is simply no observations to support your hypothesis?
Variations in the Earth's orbit over the last 100 years are so minuscule that they couldn't possibly account for the amount of warming that has been observed in this time. Likewise, solar irradiance has not significantly varied, except over its multiyear cycle, which from high to low is less than 0.25%, far too low to account for the warming observed, not to mention the fact that the climate should have gotten warmer and colder with roughly the same periodicity, which it hasn't.
I guess its all in one's perspective as to what legacy one wishes to leave to one's progeny. Climate deniers want to insure that they leave nothing for their progeny or anyone else's, perhaps preferring to indulge themselves to the fullest. Others see a more responsible position. If Hansen is right, I think in about 10-20 years people won't be arguing with the deniers any longer, they will be locking them up in asylums for the good of society.
"I think the point being made is that if it happened without us being here at all, there must be causes that we have no control over. "
You are confusing the cause of the warming in the past with the cause of the warming in the present. Although carbon dioxide has been the primary driver of climate change for the past few hundreds of millions of years at least, the rate at which it changed in the past was significantly smaller than it is today.
In the past the primary net producer of additional carbon dioxide is volcanoes, which on average produce on the order of 225,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Yes plants take up much carbon, but they also release it both annually and over the course of their lifetimes, so that effectively the force of carbon fixation and release upon decomposition roughly balance one another.
The big net difference is obviously humans, particularly in the burning of fossil fuels. Humans generate about 330,000,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. We know this by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and by calculating the amount produced from the amount of oil pumped and coal mined, neither of which are stockpiled for extended periods of time. The fact that both sets of numbers largely agree, leads to the inescapable conclusion that these re the sources for the carbon dioxide (not to mention the fact that no one has noticed about 1000 extra hidden volcanic eruptions).
Consequently, the radiative forcing produced by C02 given that it absorbs and reradiates IR energy given its asymmetrical configuration, is about 4 W/m^2. We know that although the sun produces a tremendous amount of energy, the variability of its irradiance is only about 0.25 W/m^2 so perturbations in solar output can not be responsible for the amount of warming we are seeing, because its simply not enough variability in solar output. Thus one is forced to conclude that what is causing the warming is carbon dioxide primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, although land use, particularly clearing forests and building cities also adds to the warming but the relative effect is small in comparison to the burning of fossilized carbon based fuels.
This IS something we can do something about, but only if we hurry. That is what the climatologists are telling us.
Perhaps so, but that doesn't mean it will not effect us in very profound ways, particularly if it continues to get hotter at the rate that it is, which is about 100-1000 times faster than ever seen in the historical baseline for hundreds of millions of years for which we have data.
"but I think it's an unwise rhetorical strategy in the long run."
Perhaps so, but the reality is that science has nothing to do with rhetoric. Rhetoric is an artifice used to convince people who don't make decisions rationally. Sure there is a measure of politics in science and yes some ways of wording things can be more persuasive, but ultimately it is the fundamental understanding of the phenomena involved that establish whether or not a scientist knows what she is talking about, not her rhetoric.
This is the great divide in the discussion. The deniers fall back on using sophism to make their arguments, but to scientists these are totally irrelevant. Sadly, the denier simply lack sufficient training to be able to overcome their own ideological biases.
Slashdot Mirror
"To me, the world is not a hot place. "
Death Valley is clearly the place for you to visit in late July. You'll love it.
"and the best argument imaginable for not giving government more power to try and solve our problems."
Yes, lets all pretend that by making governments even less responsive to the challenges we face and pretending that we don't have a problem at all, will make all our problems simply go away.
The problem with your no big deal notion is that one will have to build new ports every 50 years or so, which will be extremely expensive an unsustainable, since it assumes that all the resources are going to be there each time you want to rebuild.
You should come down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to see the reality of "slightly higher than normal coastal damage". Its been 6 years since Katrina and the vast majority of the coastal infrastructure once in place is still no where to be seen. The primary cause is the higher cost of building materials, fewer available jobs given the loss of the infrastructure, and the vastly higher insurance costs.
The "its no big deal" approach to carbon dioxide pollution is little more than strident advocacy for much higher insurance premiums.
At this point in the scientific debate, it matters little what the denialists believe. They are simply mistaken and science has moved on to predicting the probable effects.
I would strongly urge scientists to take advantage of their ignorance and wisely invest in ways that will make them feel the poverty of their ignorance. That way the stridency and consequence of their ignorance will greatly diminish over time.
There is an emerging new site dedicated to addressing climate change denial. It can be found at: http://ncse.com/climate
They discuss the three pillars of climate science denial and note they are extremely similar to the three pillars denying evolution.
No doubt most will be wishing that folks with attitudes like yours will be among the first to go.
Hydroponics require tremendous amounts of energy and money relative to traditional agriculture. Unless you want to pay far, far more for most produce, shifting to hydroponics on a mass scale is not likely to be successful. Just go out and buy yourself 10,000 plastic buckets that it would take to grow things hydroponically for the 3 or 4 years the buckets would last just to create the equivalent of about 1 acre of soil. Then add in the cost of obtaining and delivering the water and the nutrients and I would be willing to be that you wouldn't be able to make enough selling the produce to even cover your costs relative to conventional agriculture.
"Then the soil is suitable for conventional cereal crops. "
Really? Any documentation on the dramatic increase in wheat or corn production in Florida or is this just another one of those lets make things up kinds of arguments?
Soils in Florida are sandy, but because of materials deposited by running freshwater over millions of years, they are not that sandy.
Major problem for Florida agriculture going forward will be increasingly be periods of prolonged desiccation, salt intrusion into coastal acquifers, and the introduction of tropical pest species. They will also be faced with increasingly higher prices for fuels and fertilizers needed to grow food crops at affordable prices. Of course, within a few hundred years, most of South Florida will be part of the Straits of Florida and not amenable to agriculture, so the greatest threat posed to Florida agriculture will be the need to relocate Miami and most of Dade and surrounding coastal counties. Aquiculture perhaps, but not agriculture.
"We don't necessarily know it will go badly, but it appears at least as likely as it going well. (In fact, it appears more likely, overall.) I'd rather avoid that type of situation."
Sorry to break it to you pal, but those of us who monitor the biological realm observe that, as can be expected from the nature of natural selection, things for the vast majority of species on the planet, including those we depend upon for our survival directly or indirectly, are not doing well and are, unless carbon dioxide pollution is quickly addressed, headed for extinction. Carbon dioxide pollution is pushing most species outside of their optimal fitness zones and ecosystems are rapidly either changing their species compositions dramatically or simply collapsing altogether.
"In fact, the South Ocean stands to benefit hugely with really nice weather in the models I've seen, but there's no farmland there."
Hate to break the bad news, but productivity in the Southern Oceans is down not up.
They should. Birds are descendants of dinosaurian species.
The problem with the whole "so fucking what" notion is that, yes life went on, just not the kind of life that was there before.
Will the progeny of modern humans survive if extant humans continue to ignore carbon dioxide pollution? Probably not, but thermophillic bateria will just shrug,
It is a little ironic that those who take the "so fucking what" approach are so remarkably dismissive of themselves, when their denial was intended to convey the erroneous notion that they are somehow "above it all".
"One of the things that has always bothered me about the global the warming/climate change thesis that its advocates predict nothing but negative consequences. That's extremely improbable."
Actually, a preponderance of negative consequences should be expected. Basic biology tells us why negative consequences will far outweigh positive consequences.
All organisms arose through the process of natural selection. Every aspect of their genetic organization and survival strategy is contingent upon changes that have taken place during the evolutionary history of each species. Selection has produced organisms that are highly adapted to their particular environments and to the range of selective forces that are likely to be encountered during their lifetimes. Simply put, organisms that are unable to cope with their environment, simply die out and do not reproduce transferring their genes to the next generation. However, no organism can be optimally adapted to all environments. That is why we don't see all species everywhere. Because few environments are absolutely constant organisms are designed to be able to tolerate a range of environmental change. However, if the change exceeds that range they will, if they can not escape or move to a new more tolerable environment, simply die.
Rapid climate change is forcing nearly all organisms to confront environmental regimes which challenge their limits of tolerance. Many individuals, like trees in Texas are unable to tolerate extreme drought brought on by global warming and they simply die by the hundreds of millions (500,000,000 in 2011 alone). Other species, like Pine Bark Beetles, Mosquitoes, birds, and some fish are able to move or migrate. Collection records over the past 200 years show us that for many species, we are now witnessing the greatest shifts in the geographic ranges of species ever recorded. We now have, for example, fishes that appear to be traversing the arctic ocean from essentially extreme North Pacific waters to the extreme North Atlantic waters, as well as sightings of many more tropical species in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Likewise, we see a stead climb of species upward in elevation throughout the entire tropics and temperate areas. The elevation range of American Pika is a good example. It is being forced to ever and ever higher elevations to survive. Unfortunately, they have now begun to run out of higher elevations over much of their range and because local populations are unable to transport themselves to new mountains, these populations are becoming extirpated on more and more mountain tops.
Under normal circumstances in earth history, such changes have taken place over millions of years, giving enough individuals the opportunity to evolve fast enough to either become adapted through selection to their new environment or shift. In the past such changes have often been nearly at random, often in opposite directions, essentially alleviating the problem for many species.
However, because the changes we are seeing now are man-made resulting from carbon dioxide pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, which accumulates in the atmosphere never to reverse itself as the result of natural processes, and because the largely unidirectional change is so rapid taking place over 10's or 100's of years, there is simply not enough time for organisms to evolve to adapt to such change. Consequently, many populations of countless species are simply dying off in vast numbers leading to the dramatic changes in species composition that we are now witnessing in ecosystems. One can think of species as being positioned on a parabolic curve fitness curve that points down at either end. There is an optimum environment at the peak of this curve and as long as near this optimum species in their present form do well. Moves away from this optimum will cause the species to decline or be forced to evolve. This is what we are witnessing being played out all over the world and to make matters worse for most organisms humans have so
Well, that is at least marginally better than here on slashdot, where the global warming deniers are insisting that the world revolves around them.
Judging from the rates at which republicans are disappearing in California there is reason to hope.
Given that the average American's carbon foot print is about 1000 times that of most other folks, you can pretty well look forward to a future in which the vast majority of humanity will be eager to cut off your dick.
This guy doesn't realize why Alaska as big as it is only produce 0.02% of all agricultural products in the US.
No we are at a solar minimum at present. Did you even read the article?
"Maybe by the time the end comes in 1000 - 100,000 years we will be fully prepared to live off world and will have colonized other star systems. "
And while we are at it, we can be prepared to live in deep space for the 70,000 years it will take those "lucky" few to get to even the nearest star, which unfortunately, has no hospitable planets near it.
It would be far better to take the "green agenda" more seriously, and move more aggressively toward eliminating the internal combustion engine as a mechanism for transportation, more efficient solar and wind technologies and more efficient battery technologies. These at least have the prospect of actually solving the problem rather than dreaming we are in an episode of Star Trek in sufficient time to address the problem posed by carbon dioxide pollution.
We don't have a lot of time so we might even consider subsidizing the fossil fuels companies to make the switch. If we can eventually generate enough cheap energy through solar and wind, then we will have plenty of time to pay for the deficit spending. We might be broke on paper, but at least we might at least have the prospect of a future.
"So my own ox isn't being Gored as much as I expect others will be.)"
You sound like the guy who wasn't affected by the collapse of the credit default swap market, because he personally hadn't invested in any.
Rest assured, it won't matter how rich you are or where you live or what you do for a living. Going forward until the effects of carbon dioxide pollution is addressed, it is going to impact your life more than any other event. It may do so indirectly and you may be too thoughtless to notice, but rest assured you will be affected far more dramatically than you currently realize.
You talk about trillions of dollars being lost addressing the problem and therefore we should do nothing but let the fossil fuel industry dictate to us the fate of the planet. Unfortunately, those costs will pale in comparison to the losses that will occur if we don't start taking action to reduce carbon dioxide pollution as quickly as possible. If you want food prices to go up, keep ignoring the problem. The cost of trucks will be the least of our worries. Without addressing the issue, eventually, there won't be enough food being shipped anywhere to need trucks.
"It's my belief that the current warming trends have more to do with variations in the Earth's orbit and/or solar activity than any gasses we produce in the burning of fossil fuels"
If that is true then doesn't it concern you in the slightest that there is simply no observations to support your hypothesis?
Variations in the Earth's orbit over the last 100 years are so minuscule that they couldn't possibly account for the amount of warming that has been observed in this time. Likewise, solar irradiance has not significantly varied, except over its multiyear cycle, which from high to low is less than 0.25%, far too low to account for the warming observed, not to mention the fact that the climate should have gotten warmer and colder with roughly the same periodicity, which it hasn't.
I guess its all in one's perspective as to what legacy one wishes to leave to one's progeny. Climate deniers want to insure that they leave nothing for their progeny or anyone else's, perhaps preferring to indulge themselves to the fullest. Others see a more responsible position. If Hansen is right, I think in about 10-20 years people won't be arguing with the deniers any longer, they will be locking them up in asylums for the good of society.
"I think the point being made is that if it happened without us being here at all, there must be causes that we have no control over. "
You are confusing the cause of the warming in the past with the cause of the warming in the present. Although carbon dioxide has been the primary driver of climate change for the past few hundreds of millions of years at least, the rate at which it changed in the past was significantly smaller than it is today.
In the past the primary net producer of additional carbon dioxide is volcanoes, which on average produce on the order of 225,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Yes plants take up much carbon, but they also release it both annually and over the course of their lifetimes, so that effectively the force of carbon fixation and release upon decomposition roughly balance one another.
The big net difference is obviously humans, particularly in the burning of fossil fuels. Humans generate about 330,000,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. We know this by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and by calculating the amount produced from the amount of oil pumped and coal mined, neither of which are stockpiled for extended periods of time. The fact that both sets of numbers largely agree, leads to the inescapable conclusion that these re the sources for the carbon dioxide (not to mention the fact that no one has noticed about 1000 extra hidden volcanic eruptions).
Consequently, the radiative forcing produced by C02 given that it absorbs and reradiates IR energy given its asymmetrical configuration, is about 4 W/m^2. We know that although the sun produces a tremendous amount of energy, the variability of its irradiance is only about 0.25 W/m^2 so perturbations in solar output can not be responsible for the amount of warming we are seeing, because its simply not enough variability in solar output. Thus one is forced to conclude that what is causing the warming is carbon dioxide primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, although land use, particularly clearing forests and building cities also adds to the warming but the relative effect is small in comparison to the burning of fossilized carbon based fuels.
This IS something we can do something about, but only if we hurry. That is what the climatologists are telling us.
Perhaps so, but that doesn't mean it will not effect us in very profound ways, particularly if it continues to get hotter at the rate that it is, which is about 100-1000 times faster than ever seen in the historical baseline for hundreds of millions of years for which we have data.
"but I think it's an unwise rhetorical strategy in the long run."
Perhaps so, but the reality is that science has nothing to do with rhetoric. Rhetoric is an artifice used to convince people who don't make decisions rationally. Sure there is a measure of politics in science and yes some ways of wording things can be more persuasive, but ultimately it is the fundamental understanding of the phenomena involved that establish whether or not a scientist knows what she is talking about, not her rhetoric.
This is the great divide in the discussion. The deniers fall back on using sophism to make their arguments, but to scientists these are totally irrelevant. Sadly, the denier simply lack sufficient training to be able to overcome their own ideological biases.