While 3.6 mm per year might not be a lot right now, there are two things to consider 1. That's still very fast in geological time. 2. It's accelerating and is not a constant. Currently a good chunk of the increase is in the form of thermal expansion (a warmer ocean takes up more volume) and ice melt isn't so bad. After all, ice melt in the Arctic doesn't really affect the ocean level (like an ice cube in your glass melting) - but the current rate doesn't include what happens when ice shelfs start melting water into the oceans at a great rate - which is where you see the larger increase. That 3.7mm was 3.4mm not so long ago, and the rate will keep going up. And while you may not think 2.9 inches is a big, deal, ask people in Miami how much difference a water table of a few inches higher makes in terms of flooding.
people in Miami should be reconsidering living in Miami. Or suck up the extra expense and risk of continuing to live there. You know who else seems unconcerned about oceanfront property values and risk? Obama has in the past five years purchased oceanfront homes on Martha's Vineyard and in Hawaii. Doesn't seem to bother him. I'm good with following his leadership on the issue.
This is not really relevant. Martha's Vineyard and Hawaii have different elevations and are different distances from glaciers and polar caps. If you want to take your cues from leadership then check their initiatives and involvement in addressing climate change and respecting the science.
I'm not saying buy or don''t buy ocean front property because it's going to be under water. I am trying to say this warming is not the same as trend as coming out of an ice age. First of all it's much much faster, and secondly, we're suppose to be going into another ice age, not warming up. So look, some warming wouldn't be bad as going into an ice age isn't great. But what is happening is mechanisms that are not easy to turn on or turn off. I am sure Martha's Vineyard will be fine in 20 years. But 50? 80? Not so sure, and that time scale is very very short on geologic terms. Keep in mind that a lot of the ocean rise will happen later in that period as it takes time to accelerate and pick up speed. For me, the biggest immediate concern with climate change is the impact on the food supply and ecological impact, specifically what happens with the mass die off that is happening in the oceans - life on land is highly dependent on what happens in the oceans.
I get that. And I'm gently (hopefully) playing with you. I accept that most scientists are catastrophists on this issue--or at least they lean toward catastrophism. I on the other hand sincerely believe catastrophism is mistaken as a general philosophical position. Catastrophism has ancient roots and is a constant throughout human history. Read Lovejoy and Boas's Primitivism in Antiquity and you'll see that. The sky has always been falling and the end has always been near. I believe humans and the world will survive this crisis and eventually move on to the next one. The world is resilient and so are humans. The oceans are resilient and the life on land that is highly dependent on what happens in the oceans will adapt. Will it be easy? probably not. But the change that you are predicting again will take place over extremely long periods of time--time that will allow humans the opportunity to plan, adjust, and adapt. I think things like wars and pandemics are for the most part much more important to worry about than climate change. Again, not that climate change is unimportant. You mileage as always however may vary.
here's what folks should read, "Aliens Cause Global Warming," by Michael Crichton. worth a look. https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
CO2 toxicity is a thing. Kill you pretty quickly if breath in too much of it. But that's pointless as related to climate change. What's your point wrt to climate change?
That climate change is not sufficient justification to classify CO2 as a pollutant. Like COVID, regulating CO2 is just a useful pretense to exercise extreme control over everything we do, since carbon use is so ubiquitous.
This is one of the most ridiculous arguments. Yes plants need CO2. Too much CO2 isn't good for plants either. There is a reason why Venus has no plant life, or at least none that we can detect, even though it has many times more CO2 in their atmosphere than Earth. We know as a scientific fact that CO2 traps heat in an atmosphere, again look at Venus. We know that burning of fossil fuels releases a lot of CO2 that had previously been stored in the ground. There is a vigorous debate over the extent of how much that CO2 leads to a warming of the planet but there is little doubt that atmospheric CO2 increases warming.
The Supreme Court ruled that it fit under the definition and so can be regulated by the EPA. Covid is a very recent good example of how your fear of gov extreme and forever control is wrong. Pretty much every nation (except China/HK) has relaxed what is now clearly seen as temporary control for public health reasons. You wrongly discounted that it was for public health but only for some crazy gov scheme to control people. You are having the same similar wrong thinking toward greenhouse gases and the gov of the world trying to do what's best for our future - that's the goal, not some crazy conspiracy about gov control just for the sake of it.
I know you are playing with me a bit - but how much is that bit? That's the question! The reasons scientist seem alarmists is because they see the future and it is scary. Yes humanity will survive and go on, and in 10,000 years this will likely be something that is notable in human history that is studied in history class. But I am not sure if people, including you, really understand how much pain people will suffer. We live in a world where Greece defaulting on its loans can send the whole world into recession. And a world if the default rate of American mortgage buyers exceeds 10%, the whole world can tumble into a depression (it nearly happened 15 years ago). It doesn't take a lot to destabilize our current human civilization. And that's where things get bad. Food and water shortages around the world will lead to famine and political upheaval, and likely periods of war. When you combine all of these factors, and the rate of change that will occur from say year 50 to year 75 or maybe year 80 to 100 - at some point there is going to be a 20 year period with significant change - that is going to have massive humanitarian, political, and economic effects. My point is that people need to start preparing for that future through investments in the right mitigating technologies, as well as figuring out how we can stabilize the carbon levels and even decrease it to slow down the trend and prevent the worst of the impact that may come 75 - 100 years down the road. People need to start taking this seriously.
What difference does it make if you call CO2 a pollutant or not? Too much of it causes our earth to heat up whether or not plants need it. Call it fresh air if you want but you still have to fix the problem.
no, scientists do not in fact "see the future." Seeing the future is impossible. That is one of the points of the Crichton Aliens essay: Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the model-makers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system—no one is sure—these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd. Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam? Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses? But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn’t know what an atom was. They didn’t know its structure. They also didn’t know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet, interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS. None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn’t know what you are talking about. Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it. I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines— hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn’t ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure. So I believe your confidence in scientists' ability to "see the future" is unwarranted. But people have always suffered, and in far worse ways than today. By virtually every objective standard of human well-being, most humans alive today are far better off than people who lived 500 or a thousand years ago. Lifespan, health care, food quality, overall quality of living, all of it. 500 years ago something like 80 or 90 percent of the entire human population lived in poverty; today that percentage is more on the order of 5 or 10 percent of the total human population. The bulk of humankind live in relatively comfortable conditions. I understand that climate change may be bad for some, perhaps many, people. But pessimists almost always fail to mention that there will be benefits to some, perhaps many, people as well. You don't often hear those scientists' predictions, because they don't fit the pessimism narrative. As the old saw goes, when it bleeds it ledes. I disagree that food and water shortages will necessarily result from climate change. If history tells us anything, we will continue to get progressively better at providing basic resources to people who historically have had trouble getting those resources. As a former grad student of mine remarked about his work doing PhD research in Africa, what African countries need is not more food or water or even medicine; they need the highways and political infrastructure to help distribute the resources that are already available but that perish or are stolen in corrupt political settings. perhaps. but perhaps not. What distinguishes humans is our ability to perceive the future, anticipate alternative futures, and engage in decision-making when weighing and choosing from alternative future possibilities. Humans have done this in the past, they have not been helpless. There is no reason to think that humans will all of a sudden be helpless in the future. I believe this is already happening and has been happening for quite a while I also believe that this is happening as well, although perhaps not as quickly as mitigation strategies and certainly not as quickly as we might like. I believe people are taking the topic very seriously. To think otherwise suggests the lack of critical reflection Crichton drew our attention to--and he was writing twenty years ago. I can assure you my students today (compared with twenty years ago) think of little else.
Ok but this guy is comparing climate models to the stock market. Climate models don't predict how much fresh water or food will be available, or how many people there will be. What the models do predict is how much CO2 is being released and how much heat energy that is adding to the atmosphere and the impact that will have on climate. Those models have passed incredible scientific rigor and their predictions have been incredibly accurate - including predicting unexpected effects. Scientists just don't sit around looking at data and make prediction about climate, they test these models and the models have to predict the future with extreme precision - and so far they have done it with flying colors. To me, the arrogance is this man, who without reviewing the science and trying to understand why these forecasts are so accurate and why they have so much confidence, he dismisses based on philosophical conjecture and comparison to things that are in fact unpredictable. We don't know a lot of things about what 2,100 will look like. We don't know how many people will be on this planet for instance. But we do know that at the current level of people, there is already a shortage of fresh water on this planet that is getting worse by the day. Not just in Africa but in large parts of the Western US for example. While a place like NY will likely never have to worry about fresh water, most people on this planet don't live near an aquifer upstream up them. And in places like Houston, the pumping of water out of the ground led to sinkage of the city! No you can't predict the future, and sure anything can happen, but right now the train is headed in a very bad direction...and you'd think the wise thing to do would be to course correct now versus later. Even if we are to entertain that your premise is correct, that there are other variables that may make climate change moot - maybe aliens come and give us new tech, or maybe a virus wipes out 90% of the population, or perhaps a meteor strike wipes out 2 billion people. Who knows right? But given the severe risks - doesn't it make sense to practice some risk management now?
you know who "this man" is, yes? a bit too late to respond to the rest, I'll get back to it tomorrow hopefully
