"by then the [Canadian] border might be as well guarded as the US / Mexico border."
That would be the ultimate irony, American rednecks electrocuted as they try to crawl through the barbed wire and mine fields, empty canteens still in hand, with the few who do get through, being deported by the Mounties.
"This is another excellent reason to start putting more money into the space program. "
Especially, considering that everywhere near us is known to be even more hostile to human life than earth and especially since the nearest start is so close that even if we learn to double the speed of our spacecraft it will take us about 30,000 years just to get there.
Perhaps, we might just want to think about how we can insure the habitability of planet earth for the 5 or so billion years we have left, before our sun will force us out. At least that problem is a little further down the road. Right now we need to find a realistic way to get past the next 100-300 years.
Not really. Biologists know a great deal about how plants and animals responded in the past to climatic perturbation over millions of years of time. The big problem we have with AWG is that the rate at which the warming is occurring is between 100 and 1000 times faster than it has ever been recorded, except perhaps at ground zero for a few bolide impacts and volcanic eruptions. Consequently, extinctions are going to be massive.
A recent simulation taking into account expected shifts in ecosystems, suggested that within 300 years 85 percent of all ecosystems would see more than 75% species change, with the largest changes taking place through the loss of temperate forests worldwide. This is not out the realm of possibility and probably a very conservative estimate, when one considers that during 2011 the state of Texas alone lost 10% of its trees (about 500,000,000 trees) during a single year's drought. Temperatures in Texas within 100 years are expected to exceed 100 F for more than 200 days out of the year. When one considers that Texas is the second larger producer of agricultural products after California, producing $16,498,398,000 per year or 6.84% of all US agriculture that is going to be one very big hit, not even considering that similar effects would also be felt across most of the Southern United States.
" Until equatorial areas become too hot to support human life I don't even see the emergency."
If you simply move to vast regions of North East Africa you don't have to wait for even 10 years. You can experience it first hand. If you don't want to move out of the US, start a farm in West Texas. You will be rapidly convinced that we have a serious problem on our hands.
Vitamin C is water soluble, with dietary excesses not absorbed, and excesses in the blood rapidly excreted in the urine. It exhibits remarkably low toxicity. The LD50 (the dose that will kill 50% of a population) in rats is generally accepted to be 11.9 grams per kilogram of body weight when given by forced gavage (orally). The mechanism of death from such doses (1.2% of body weight, or 1.8 lbs for a 150 lb human) is unknown, but may be more mechanical than chemical.[130] The LD50 in humans remains unknown, given lack of any accidental or intentional poisoning death data.
One should not infer from this that carbon dioxide pollution is as benign as overdosing on Vitamin C.
Do you have any idea how expensive food would be if world agriculture was forced to grow everything hydroponically? A single orange can now cost a dollar or more in the market. The same for an avacado. Lots of other fruits likewise. Many fruits and nuts, such as cherry's won't produce without sufficient cold winter days. I guess though you could probably adapt, as you could afford to pay $70-100 for a single piece of fruit.
You have no earthly idea how much it would cost to buy that much fertilizer and pipe in the necessary water, assuming that you can even find it. Farming is not like writing software, where you can things up as you go.
This should be expected as the number of recording sites on the African continent is more than an order of magnitude less than anywhere else on the planet for obvious reasons. If you look at the figures in Hansen et al. much of Africa is simply given in grey (ie no data).
"Even the most rabid Warmistas aren't talking about double-digit warming anymore,"
You should tell that to the modelers at MIT, whose models incorporate the increase in methane outgasing from the melting of arctic permafrost, which may contains as much as 90 Trillion Tons of Carbon. To their credit at least their model better explains the unexpected warming of the high arctic not anticipated by other models.
"What about all those areas that are going to become better farming land due to a warmer climate?"
Yes, they sure do, and entire communities are now starving and moving out of Northern Mexico, but anyone who has spent anytime in West Texas and Oklahoma this past summer knows that the increasing heat and dryness also affected a lot of farmers north of the border.
Keep in mind that we are presently coming out of a solar minimum and have had a prolonged La Nina event tied to the SO, yet even so we had the 9th highest year on record. Coming out of this natural cyclic cooling cycle will mean substantially warmer temperatures. All those folks in Texas and Oklahoma better be ready for some real heat and dryness, not the relatively cool spell they had this past summer. Hansen et all predict it will come in 2013 or 2014, given the past record of periodicity coupled with the constantly increasing warming trend.
If you actually read the article, the article made no such claim that "we have nothing to worry about". The fact that specific organisms may well at brief times be already experiencing pH levels not predicted for the ocean as whole until 2100 is not a particularly worry free finding, since it may indicate that such organisms are already near their tolerance levels for certain periods of time. The study also indicates that total dissolved CO2 may be far more important than pH and this is precisely what those who study fish behaviors are finding. High carbon dioxide concentrations severely impacts orientation behavior and response to sounds in juvenile fishes causing them to be much less able to locate suitable bottom types and avoid predation. Consequently, the article is consistent with the findings of others that 1) increasing carbon dioxide levels in the ocean have the potential to seriously disrupt ecosystems, even though pH may not be the prime driver and that 2) the consequences of increased carbon dioxide pollution must be further studied and an increasingly fine scale of measurement.
Despite your over eagerness to misinterpret the findings to suit your ideology, your pointing the study out is appreciated.
It is perhaps a testament to just how well the human mind can repress reality that it looks to a single small scale study in one part of Africa, without even noticing an ongoing multi-decadal drought in NE Africa, which is killing millions of people each year. All it takes is a little clever advertising and poof, global warming no problem.
Just wait until the Pine Bark Beetle gets further north. Then Canada's timber industry will realize they have a major problem, among many others, along with more mosquitoes.
No they are having a problem because of storm surges are getting incrementally higher producing more erosion and because as sea levels rise it influences the water table, making it impossible for things (humans included) to grow.
Another problem is that corals themselves can not tolerate extremely high temperatures, so their growth rate decreases.
"What about all those areas that are going to become better farming land due to a warmer climate?"
The reality is that there will be very few such places, because historically they have been very poor for growing things and consequently have very poor soils. Just because the Greenland ice sheet is soon to melt does not mean the ground underneath is going to be great for farming. There is also the problem that most plants are extremely sensitive to the duration of day and night, particularly for flowering. Higher latitudes may have very long days during the summer, but have very long nights in the winter. Consequently, many plants will not grow under such conditions without massive amounts of additional energy for artificial lighting. Replicating the disastrous Biosphere II experiment on a planetary scale is not going to turn out well.
Ending carbon dioxide pollution is the only realistic thing that humans can do to assure their survival. The sooner we get started the better our chances of success.
Most people unable to do even simple calculations or totally unfamiliar with basic biology simply have no idea of just how significant a seemingly small increase in the global mean temperature will be or that fact that all indications are that it will increase 3-6 C within one hundred years. They tend to think in terms of extremes and given the large differences between daytime and night time temperature, or between winter and summer temperatures and think this small change is insignificant. However, as all models show the effects over time will be staggering, completely ignoring sea level rises of more than 1 m within 100 years. Presently Kansas City, roughly near the center of the conterminous US, experiences several days on average above 100 F per year. With a 3-6 C global mean rise, Kansas City will experience temperatures over 100 F, 50-100 days out of the year. If you are a farmer, or if you only appreciate eating, that is a very big deal.
Next time you hear a climate change denier, recognize them for what they are extremists advocating for dramatically higher food prices.
Problem is of course, one can not know regardless of bandwidth for certain that outside a certain frequency range the signal is zero. One can only assume that it is close to zero. One can not "crank up" sampling rates to infinity to overcome this as every system has finite limits and hence error. The original paper spends much time discussing the nature of the error bounds for precisely this reason.
Couldn't agree more. The Roberts court is making a mockery of the entire concept of justice. For them the first thing they check is the political angle to see if it helps any of their cocktail party friends. If it does, they tailor their judicial opinions accordingly.
All that will do is prompt people to start stealing devices, impersonating others and bring civilization to a standstill, not to mention the economy.
Not saying they won't try, but that won't work either. If laws are made unjust and unfair enough, people will simply break them. It would be much more effective to try to make things more affordable and hence easier to buy than to steal. Of course, a lot of lawyers and lobbyists would have to find another line of work and it would be harder to retain massive wealth inequality, but hey what's wrong with that idea. Which, of course, is precisely why the race between RIAA will continue unabated. The irony is that the price of rented videos is now so cheap that it makes almost no sense to copy illegally. Of more concern to the 1% is the passing of information other than videos freely by people who don't want to see that happen. Hence, anti-piracy legislation has become a political weapon under the guise of fighting piracy.
Well, so much for democracy, the economy, and civilization. Maybe global warming can't come soon enough to put us out of our misery.
I agree. I've pretty much stopped buying anything but food and hold out on technology purchases only when I am forced to, making sure as many escape hatches are still available to me. Once people stop buying, then they will start lowering their prices to become relevant again. The more people who do this, the further prices will fall. It might even save the planet.
Open Source Tower of Babel Project sounds like the perfect place to get started on the road to anarchy, the only toll road most will soon be able to afford. Join and start your own distinctive dialect today.
But maybe that's a good thing. If the Red Army has EEPROM these devices can just efficiently send them our data without having to type up DNS servers and network bandwidth trying to break into everyone's systems. Perhaps when it is impossible to keep secrets everyone will be forced to get along as patents, copyright, even state secrets will be available for anyone to download on the net, the only real issue now is by whom and from whom. My guess is that the cost of trying to stop it will be as successful as the drug war.
Now that their primary purpose for buying Sun's Java technology is no longer useful to them, ie leveraging Java as a way of extorting profits, will Ellison abandon Java? Both are costing him a lot of money without material benefit. At some point will he give up the ghost and just abandon the whole thing or will he keep pumping money into it, hoping against hope to hit pay dirt?
Slashdot Mirror
"by then the [Canadian] border might be as well guarded as the US / Mexico border."
That would be the ultimate irony, American rednecks electrocuted as they try to crawl through the barbed wire and mine fields, empty canteens still in hand, with the few who do get through, being deported by the Mounties.
Someone really needs to make a SCI-FI movie.
"This is another excellent reason to start putting more money into the space program. "
Especially, considering that everywhere near us is known to be even more hostile to human life than earth and especially since the nearest start is so close that even if we learn to double the speed of our spacecraft it will take us about 30,000 years just to get there.
Perhaps, we might just want to think about how we can insure the habitability of planet earth for the 5 or so billion years we have left, before our sun will force us out. At least that problem is a little further down the road. Right now we need to find a realistic way to get past the next 100-300 years.
Not really. Biologists know a great deal about how plants and animals responded in the past to climatic perturbation over millions of years of time. The big problem we have with AWG is that the rate at which the warming is occurring is between 100 and 1000 times faster than it has ever been recorded, except perhaps at ground zero for a few bolide impacts and volcanic eruptions. Consequently, extinctions are going to be massive.
A recent simulation taking into account expected shifts in ecosystems, suggested that within 300 years 85 percent of all ecosystems would see more than 75% species change, with the largest changes taking place through the loss of temperate forests worldwide. This is not out the realm of possibility and probably a very conservative estimate, when one considers that during 2011 the state of Texas alone lost 10% of its trees (about 500,000,000 trees) during a single year's drought. Temperatures in Texas within 100 years are expected to exceed 100 F for more than 200 days out of the year. When one considers that Texas is the second larger producer of agricultural products after California, producing $16,498,398,000 per year or 6.84% of all US agriculture that is going to be one very big hit, not even considering that similar effects would also be felt across most of the Southern United States.
" Until equatorial areas become too hot to support human life I don't even see the emergency."
If you simply move to vast regions of North East Africa you don't have to wait for even 10 years. You can experience it first hand. If you don't want to move out of the US, start a farm in West Texas. You will be rapidly convinced that we have a serious problem on our hands.
Vitamin C is water soluble, with dietary excesses not absorbed, and excesses in the blood rapidly excreted in the urine. It exhibits remarkably low toxicity. The LD50 (the dose that will kill 50% of a population) in rats is generally accepted to be 11.9 grams per kilogram of body weight when given by forced gavage (orally). The mechanism of death from such doses (1.2% of body weight, or 1.8 lbs for a 150 lb human) is unknown, but may be more mechanical than chemical.[130] The LD50 in humans remains unknown, given lack of any accidental or intentional poisoning death data.
One should not infer from this that carbon dioxide pollution is as benign as overdosing on Vitamin C.
Do you have any idea how expensive food would be if world agriculture was forced to grow everything hydroponically? A single orange can now cost a dollar or more in the market. The same for an avacado. Lots of other fruits likewise. Many fruits and nuts, such as cherry's won't produce without sufficient cold winter days. I guess though you could probably adapt, as you could afford to pay $70-100 for a single piece of fruit.
You have no earthly idea how much it would cost to buy that much fertilizer and pipe in the necessary water, assuming that you can even find it. Farming is not like writing software, where you can things up as you go.
This should be expected as the number of recording sites on the African continent is more than an order of magnitude less than anywhere else on the planet for obvious reasons. If you look at the figures in Hansen et al. much of Africa is simply given in grey (ie no data).
"Even the most rabid Warmistas aren't talking about double-digit warming anymore,"
You should tell that to the modelers at MIT, whose models incorporate the increase in methane outgasing from the melting of arctic permafrost, which may contains as much as 90 Trillion Tons of Carbon. To their credit at least their model better explains the unexpected warming of the high arctic not anticipated by other models.
"What about all those areas that are going to become better farming land due to a warmer climate?"
Yes, they sure do, and entire communities are now starving and moving out of Northern Mexico, but anyone who has spent anytime in West Texas and Oklahoma this past summer knows that the increasing heat and dryness also affected a lot of farmers north of the border.
Keep in mind that we are presently coming out of a solar minimum and have had a prolonged La Nina event tied to the SO, yet even so we had the 9th highest year on record. Coming out of this natural cyclic cooling cycle will mean substantially warmer temperatures. All those folks in Texas and Oklahoma better be ready for some real heat and dryness, not the relatively cool spell they had this past summer. Hansen et all predict it will come in 2013 or 2014, given the past record of periodicity coupled with the constantly increasing warming trend.
Watch for meat prices to climb.
If you actually read the article, the article made no such claim that "we have nothing to worry about". The fact that specific organisms may well at brief times be already experiencing pH levels not predicted for the ocean as whole until 2100 is not a particularly worry free finding, since it may indicate that such organisms are already near their tolerance levels for certain periods of time. The study also indicates that total dissolved CO2 may be far more important than pH and this is precisely what those who study fish behaviors are finding. High carbon dioxide concentrations severely impacts orientation behavior and response to sounds in juvenile fishes causing them to be much less able to locate suitable bottom types and avoid predation. Consequently, the article is consistent with the findings of others that 1) increasing carbon dioxide levels in the ocean have the potential to seriously disrupt ecosystems, even though pH may not be the prime driver and that 2) the consequences of increased carbon dioxide pollution must be further studied and an increasingly fine scale of measurement.
Despite your over eagerness to misinterpret the findings to suit your ideology, your pointing the study out is appreciated.
It is perhaps a testament to just how well the human mind can repress reality that it looks to a single small scale study in one part of Africa, without even noticing an ongoing multi-decadal drought in NE Africa, which is killing millions of people each year. All it takes is a little clever advertising and poof, global warming no problem.
Just wait until the Pine Bark Beetle gets further north. Then Canada's timber industry will realize they have a major problem, among many others, along with more mosquitoes.
No they are having a problem because of storm surges are getting incrementally higher producing more erosion and because as sea levels rise it influences the water table, making it impossible for things (humans included) to grow.
Another problem is that corals themselves can not tolerate extremely high temperatures, so their growth rate decreases.
"What about all those areas that are going to become better farming land due to a warmer climate?"
The reality is that there will be very few such places, because historically they have been very poor for growing things and consequently have very poor soils. Just because the Greenland ice sheet is soon to melt does not mean the ground underneath is going to be great for farming. There is also the problem that most plants are extremely sensitive to the duration of day and night, particularly for flowering. Higher latitudes may have very long days during the summer, but have very long nights in the winter. Consequently, many plants will not grow under such conditions without massive amounts of additional energy for artificial lighting. Replicating the disastrous Biosphere II experiment on a planetary scale is not going to turn out well.
Ending carbon dioxide pollution is the only realistic thing that humans can do to assure their survival. The sooner we get started the better our chances of success.
Most people unable to do even simple calculations or totally unfamiliar with basic biology simply have no idea of just how significant a seemingly small increase in the global mean temperature will be or that fact that all indications are that it will increase 3-6 C within one hundred years. They tend to think in terms of extremes and given the large differences between daytime and night time temperature, or between winter and summer temperatures and think this small change is insignificant. However, as all models show the effects over time will be staggering, completely ignoring sea level rises of more than 1 m within 100 years. Presently Kansas City, roughly near the center of the conterminous US, experiences several days on average above 100 F per year. With a 3-6 C global mean rise, Kansas City will experience temperatures over 100 F, 50-100 days out of the year. If you are a farmer, or if you only appreciate eating, that is a very big deal.
Next time you hear a climate change denier, recognize them for what they are extremists advocating for dramatically higher food prices.
Problem is of course, one can not know regardless of bandwidth for certain that outside a certain frequency range the signal is zero. One can only assume that it is close to zero. One can not "crank up" sampling rates to infinity to overcome this as every system has finite limits and hence error. The original paper spends much time discussing the nature of the error bounds for precisely this reason.
With the Laws of Physics Against Them, they have decided to turn to Public Relations a tried and true way to overcome conservation laws.
Couldn't agree more. The Roberts court is making a mockery of the entire concept of justice. For them the first thing they check is the political angle to see if it helps any of their cocktail party friends. If it does, they tailor their judicial opinions accordingly.
All that will do is prompt people to start stealing devices, impersonating others and bring civilization to a standstill, not to mention the economy.
Not saying they won't try, but that won't work either. If laws are made unjust and unfair enough, people will simply break them. It would be much more effective to try to make things more affordable and hence easier to buy than to steal. Of course, a lot of lawyers and lobbyists would have to find another line of work and it would be harder to retain massive wealth inequality, but hey what's wrong with that idea. Which, of course, is precisely why the race between RIAA will continue unabated. The irony is that the price of rented videos is now so cheap that it makes almost no sense to copy illegally. Of more concern to the 1% is the passing of information other than videos freely by people who don't want to see that happen. Hence, anti-piracy legislation has become a political weapon under the guise of fighting piracy.
Well, so much for democracy, the economy, and civilization. Maybe global warming can't come soon enough to put us out of our misery.
I agree. I've pretty much stopped buying anything but food and hold out on technology purchases only when I am forced to, making sure as many escape hatches are still available to me. Once people stop buying, then they will start lowering their prices to become relevant again. The more people who do this, the further prices will fall. It might even save the planet.
Open Source Tower of Babel Project sounds like the perfect place to get started on the road to anarchy, the only toll road most will soon be able to afford. Join and start your own distinctive dialect today.
But maybe that's a good thing. If the Red Army has EEPROM these devices can just efficiently send them our data without having to type up DNS servers and network bandwidth trying to break into everyone's systems. Perhaps when it is impossible to keep secrets everyone will be forced to get along as patents, copyright, even state secrets will be available for anyone to download on the net, the only real issue now is by whom and from whom. My guess is that the cost of trying to stop it will be as successful as the drug war.
This should make the 1% happy and those among the 99%, like their fawning Tea Party who protect them, a purpose in life.
Now that their primary purpose for buying Sun's Java technology is no longer useful to them, ie leveraging Java as a way of extorting profits, will Ellison abandon Java? Both are costing him a lot of money without material benefit. At some point will he give up the ghost and just abandon the whole thing or will he keep pumping money into it, hoping against hope to hit pay dirt?