Very well written and very true. As for climate change, I do not know to what extent human activity has caused it or whether it will be permanent. A few onths ago, I saw a documentary on Nat Geo (I think) predicting a mini ice age where temperatures will be 10 degrees colder than normal to end global warming and cleanse the planet of the causes of global warming. I tend to think is is right if you look at the history of the planet. That seems to be the cycle. Since I do not know to what extent we have caused or exacerbated this, we should take all reasonable action to combat it. In any event, we are pretty crappy stewards of the planet.
Because it's unpredictable and there's past data that details scenarios of when the earth is 5-10 degrees hotter... no ice caps, stormier weather in the arctic and antarctic circles, clean water distribution, famine. It's not that the Texas heat gets hotter and you have to crank up the AC to cope with it. Your grand children could move to Canada because the southwest is a pathetic desert with small patches of LA-like cities that suck up all the water.
This is typical of your posts. You wax nostalgic for a long time, yet don't provide concrete examples. It's almost as if you just want to remind everybody how old you are. The only specific example you listed is that kids cannot play barefoot as much as before due to fire ants. Big whoop, kids probably should wear shoes anyways to protect their feet. Not a compelling post at all, Deckard, just you going on and on without specifics.
Climate change isn't bad in the general sense that the Earth's climate has always changed and the world has adjusted. But part of that adjustment is species going extinct or all sorts of random destruction. So, for the human race, climate change is bad because it causes famine and other problems. Accelerated climate change is worse because it creates unpredictability and more severe weather patterns, and it gives people and society less time to adapt. Our current society is built on the current climate - changing that means our society's situation is less optimal, and that has consequences, especially for the poor who have less options to adapt. So yeah, the planet will manage itself through a changing climate. But that doesn't necessarily include what is in the best interests of people.
Humans bringing those ants to an area where they did not previously exist is a concrete example of the activities of human beings having a direct impact on the ecology of an area. The point is that human activities matter ecologically. I am really surprised that you didn't pick up on that.
His post wasn't compelling because it lacked specific examples. The ants was the only one and it's not that huge of a deal for kids to wear shoes.
You have (intentionally) missed the point. Human shipping activity brought a species of ant to this area that previously was not here. It goes to show that human activity can have an impact on an area's ecology. The point was not whether it is a big deal to wear shoes.
From the purely scientific standpoint you are right but as you note no theory is every absolutely proven. Unlike things like special relativity which don't really have many policy implications though Global Warming does. The fact is is that the preponderance of research shows that it is happening and that human activities play a large role in it happening. That is where policy has to play a role. Now you we could just ignore the preponderance of data out there in support of it and not do anything or we could try to deal with it and prepare for the changes that it will bring. This would be like if the weather forecast says that in two days there is a 90% chance of rain it probably makes sense to plan on bringing an umbrella with you in two days. Also as I've said before even if human made global warming is completely bunk consider what steps are needed to combat it, developing renewable energy sources, moving away carbon based energy, greater energy efficiencies and etc.. Doing those have a lot of benefits besides reducing greenhouse gases. Even without the threat of global warming we should be doing those anyway.
This is a point that bears repeating. There are many affects of climate change with many of them likely to cause severe economic disruptions.
im glad people on here are smarter and can disagree with a large majority of top scientists around the world...
Fact is, people who choose to live in a bubble will not let anything burst that bubble until it's well past the tipping point. And we're past that point. We've dramatically changed the climate. You can talk about how more clouds will in fact cool the earth and thus debunk all these models but the reality is that the earth is warming and we've yet to see this effect - and it's an admission that the earth will have to warm further before the damping effect occurs. The evidence from the past points towards the CO2 levels we are experiencing being associated with a planet 5-10 degrees warmer - meaning even if we stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere the earth has a lot more warming to do. And in fact we are actually putting more and more at higher and higher rates. And you have some who think this isn't a bad thing. Sure, in the scheme of a million years it doesn't matter. But you are going to disrupt nearly every ecosystem on the planet. And that usually results in extinctions and a lessing of the food supply - not an increase. You have increasing population, decreasing food supply, decreasing effectiveness of medicine, deoxygenation of the oceans and shifts in ocean currents, wealth being moved to a smaller percentage of people, greater demand on resources that are limited such as rare earths, clean water, marine life, and land, and increasing energy prices. Historically these types of pressures have led to war. And with 10 billion people, and the weapons we have, the wars of the future won't be pretty. There's a very likely scenario where we are going to end up with a planet that isn't able to support 5 billion people, much less 10 billion people, and there's going to be some sort of rebalancing of the human population to a level that can be maintained. And since we aren't capable of managing things on our own, it's going to get ugly. And I don't think any part of the world will be spared hardship. People don't know what the Great Depression was like. People think this downturn was bad. It's nothing when you look at the long term forces and trends at play. Unless we come up with fusion power in the next few weeks we're in for a very rough ride.
bro you don't know? All the scientists in the world have annual meetings to generate lies for their own agenda The League of Fascist Scientists
If you go back to my original point, it was not that there is no human-driven climate change. I was just suspicious about the fact that in a ten-year window, there was not a single peer-reviewed abstract in a conference proceeding that questioned the human role in climate change. For a comparison, I pointed out that some people are still working on alternatives to other theories that are on a much firmer footing due to the fact that they have been tested experimentally (something that is not true, or even possible, with climate change).
man you can be dense. I got his point about human activity's impact. I also felt it was under supported by specific examples, and he also didn't support his other theme about how our grandchildren won't be able to live in the same conditions we grew up in.
And there is nothing wrong with raising that in a purely scientific discussion. I am talking about policy implications. If there were no policy implications I doubt this topic would even be in D & D.
That should tell you something about how overwhelmingly accepted anthropological global warming is. There is no credible voice against it. No legitimate scientist will take that position. The last one who was doing it - a hero of the right no less - just reversed his position and said he was wrong and that humans are infact changing the climate at an alarming rate.
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic By RICHARD A. MULLER Published: July 28, 2012 CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural. Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions. The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice. Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little. How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase. It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed. Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous. The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis. What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years. Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done. Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.”
If you need somebody on a BBS to show you that our ecology, water supply and atmospheric conditions are not static, it is you who are dense.
