Climate Change: We're Doomed

[Alex123]

re: this post and this post

We are not doomed from global warming:




Varying fears: In 1977 we were warned of the 'next ice age', now we are warned that the planet is getting dangerously hot
So, which is it? Is the world cooling or getting warmer?




What I am concerned is radiation from nuclear power plants. This is really dangerous man made activity. http://enenews.com/

[Kim O'Hara]

Alex:
Posting stuff twice doesn't make it twice as true. I will debate you - and anyone else - as long as necessary but it is unfair to innocent bystanders to make them read it all twice.

Other members of DW:
If you want to know more about Alex's views on climate change (and mine, I guess), visit http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6963&start=280&hilit=climate (on the other DW) and read the 15 pages of that thread. By the time you get there, this new thread - http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=16568 - in which Alex has posted the same, ah, material, may have been merged with it.


Kim

[Alex123]

Alex:
Posting stuff twice doesn't make it twice as true. I will debate you - and anyone else - as long as necessary but it is unfair to innocent bystanders to make them read it all twice.

It is different forums, and my two posts are slightly different.

[Alex123]

Alex:
I will debate you - and anyone else

So what do you have to say about those pictures that I've posted?

[Dan74]

Alex:
I will debate you - and anyone else

So what do you have to say about those pictures that I've posted?

Alex, I took 20 seconds to check your first statement and it is completely bogus, out of context. Pierce Forster, far from being a Global Warming denier, is an author of one of the recent studies. Look here:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-15/national/36385685_1_black-carbon-impact-of-carbon-dioxide-soot

Piers Forster, one of the soot study’s authors and a professor at the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, said in a statement that reducing black carbon can help address rising temperatures.

“There are exciting opportunities to cool climate by reducing soot emissions but it is not straightforward,” Forster said, adding that cutting emissions from diesel engines and domestic wood and coal fires is “a no-
brainer” because it would improve public health and the climate. Fine particles cause heart and respiratory problems, leading to premature death, as well as asthma and other illnesses.

These emissions cuts would produce an immediate cooling effect, the authors estimated, which would avoid a nearly 1-degree Fahrenheit temperature rise in the near term.

I mean why would any sensible person waste time rebutting what you put forward when you don't even bother checking your sources?

(hey, I just called myself "not-sensible"! Ad hom?! )

[Alex123]

What do you have to say about the graphs that show that trend isn't toward warming?

Alex, I took 20 seconds to check your first statement and it is completely bogus, out of context. Pierce Forster, far from being a Global Warming denier, is an author of one of the recent studies

And what is the right context? It tells me something that even proponents of AGW sometimes admit that temperatures are not rising.

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
Stephen Schneider (leading advocate of the global warming theory) (in interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989)

Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are...
former Vice President Al Gore (now, chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management--a London-based business that sells carbon credits)
(in interview with Grist Magazine May 9, 2006, concerning his book, An Inconvenient Truth)

"Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are."

Petr Chylek (Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia) Commenting on reports by other researchers that Greenland's glaciers are melting.
(Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001) (8)

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.... Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."

Christine Stewart, former Minister of the Environment of Canada quote from the Calgary Herald, 1999
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_a ... hor2108263" target="_blank

[anjali]

What do you have to say about the graphs that show that trend isn't toward warming?

Decloaking for a moment to comment. See Volcanic Aerosols, Not Pollutants, Tamped Down Recent Earth Warming, from March 1 at sciencedaily.com. From the article,

"The biggest implication here is that scientists need to pay more attention to small and moderate volcanic eruptions when trying to understand changes in Earth's climate," said Toon of CU-Boulder's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. "But overall these eruptions are not going to counter the greenhouse effect. Emissions of volcanic gases go up and down, helping to cool or heat the planet, while greenhouse gas emissions from human activity just continue to go up."

Returning to cloaked mode.

[greentara]

By 2050 the world will most likely be occupied by 9.2 billion people. It will be hotter and harder to farm. We will need an area of additional agricultural land the size of South America.
Now they tell us we'll have rooftop gardens; like the hanging gardens of Babylon. Roofs must be strong and waterproof and water must be carried or pumped up. Of course this greenery is a boutique solution to a serious problem. If you used all the rooftops of a large city it would only feed approx 2 percent of the population.
Still this makes us happy and raises our spirits to see the green plants on the roof, colourful vegetables encouraging bees and birds into the area.
I guess we'll have to live in hope.

[Kim O'Hara]

Alex:
I will debate you - and anyone else

So what do you have to say about those pictures that I've posted?

(1) out of date and unsourced.
(2) Out of date and wrong, as you say, but that doesn't mean the recent science is also wrong.
(3) Forster appears to have some credibility but I would like to see the source and context before I said any more; Whiehouse works for a denialist think-tank which refuses to divulge its funding source (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation); and Curry is a well-known denialist with little expertise in climate and less credibility.
(4) Irrelevant and misleading. As I explained to you repeatedly in "The New Normal", what happened to climate over thousands of years when there were no people around did not affect people ( ) but what happens over decades - as compared to the last couple of thousand years - is important and will affect people.


Kim

edit: fixed typo

[Kim O'Hara]

By 2050 the world will most likely be occupied by 9.2 billion people. It will be hotter and harder to farm. We will need an area of additional agricultural land the size of South America.
Now they tell us we'll have rooftop gardens; like the hanging gardens of Babylon. Roofs must be strong and waterproof and water must be carried or pumped up. Of course this greenery is a boutique solution to a serious problem. If you used all the rooftops of a large city it would only feed approx 2 percent of the population.
Still this makes us happy and raises our spirits to see the green plants on the roof, colourful vegetables encouraging bees and birds into the area.
I guess we'll have to live in hope.

Hi, greentara,
All valid ... but we can try to be a bit more positive, mainly by acknowledging that we must throw all our solutions at the problems. There is no silver bullet but if we have rooftop gardens, balcony gardens, streets turned over to gardening when the price of fossil fuel puts cars off the road for ever, etc ... and population control ... and lowering our environmental footprint in other ways ... most people will survive.
What we won't have - and could never have had, even without climate change - is 9 billion people living modern American lifestyles. We would need not just another South America for that, but another half-dozen Earths. We need to downsize our expectations: the future looks far more like the century-ago past than it used to. That's not all bad, of course - lots of people were happy a century ago, and lots of them were healthier than most of us.


Kim

[greentara]

Kim, Interesting, how will population control be implemented and by whom?

[Kim O'Hara]

Kim, Interesting, how will population control be implemented and by whom?

By governments, mostly, although I do see individuals' choices becoming more important.
China has been doing it for years - not well, admittedly, but fairly effectively. They have population problems now, but nothing like as bad as they would have had without the one-child policy. India has moved in the same direction, I believe, but I don't know the details.
Without being quite so draconian about it, governments can apply their usual range of fiscal incentives and disincentives e.g. tax breaks for larger families encouraging larger families. They are not new - we already have them, although they are weak and haphazard.
And there is a strong, clear pattern in the developing world: as girls are educated, and as child mortality drops, women consistently choose to have fewer children and have them later. That's the best improvement of the lot, a win-win-win scenario.


Kim

[Nemo]

We are not doomed from global warming:

We are not warming because of the trillions of gallons of ice melting into the ocean. Once that is gone you will see how you have been duped by the paid henchmen of industrialists and resource extractors. Since you obviously don't have a science background it works like the ice cubes in your Big Gulp.


Noam Chomsky: How Climate Change Became a 'Liberal Hoax'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... JUA4cm0Rck

[Alex123]

Dear Kim,

(4) Irrelevant and misleading. As I explained to you repeatedly in "The New Normal", what happened to climate over thousands of years when there were no people around did not affect people ( ) but what happens over decades - as compared to the last couple of thousand years - is important and will affect people.

Earth doesn't care about how its climate affects people. It is cause and effect. You think that people are somehow special in the grand scheme of things (all 1/100+th seconds). Climate changes regardless of how it will affect humans.

a) Climate was changing over billions of years. There was no humans to drive big spikes in warming or cooling back then. So why can't the SAME thing be occurring today? The only difference that I worry about is the nuclear waste. Here we have a man-made problem.

b) decades or even 1000 years compared to 4.5 billion years is nothing. We can't judge a dynamics of a football game by 1/100th of a second. We have been on earth for too short of a period to affect climate (even if we could). Nuclear waste is another topic. Here, unfortunately, mistakes were made...

Please be careful with the use of "denialist". I am offended by it. It sounds too much like "holocaust denial" which I am against. As far as I know, nobody denies that climate changes.

[Alex123]

Kim, Interesting, how will population control be implemented and by whom?

Pollution, radiation waste, etc. All these shorten life, and can cause infertility when accumulated enough. The way things are going, I hope humanity good luck to survive next 100 of years. I wouldn't be surprised if we will see 10s of millions of people starting to die in the next few years.

[Alex123]

We are not warming

I've seen many charts of longer term climate and I wonder if we are warming at all. Warming compared to most recent ice age? Perhaps. But it seems that the trend is overally down. We are in some of the coolest period of time, at least in the past 540 million years.

I worry more about ice age than hothouse. For 100s of millions of years the climate was much much hotter than today. Compared to that, we are in cooling phase.





As for, humans didn't exist back then so it is irrelevant: I think that human's "split second existence" is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Climate doesn't have to be for humans. It is effect of natural causes. Cyanobacteria was on earth for 2.8 billion years. Maybe they are more "important" than modern humans (Homo Sapiens) who were only for hundreds of thousands of years.

[greentara]

Kim, Lets be honest we don't know how this massive population will be controlled....any fuzzy answer is not the solution to the problem. In addition China's 300 million middle class has the money and the means to afford a second child and they'll keep trying till they get a male child.

[Kim O'Hara]

Kim, Lets be honest we don't know how this massive population will be controlled....any fuzzy answer is not the solution to the problem. In addition China's 300 million middle class has the money and the means to afford a second child and they'll keep trying till they get a male child.

Perhaps "controlled" is a misleading word. It implies one person, or a group, turning a knob like turning a thermostat up or down. We know that the reality here is messier.
"Limited" might be a better word. Population will be limited by the interplay of government control and social factors in China; it will be limited by starvation, sadly, in northern Africa for the forseeable future; it will be limited, as I said, by women in the developing world having fewer and later children as they get more education, equality and health care; and so on.
We can't know all the factors or influence many of them but we know that some people in positions of power and influence are astute enough to see the looming problems and do something about them. My glass, as always, is half full - I think we will get better at managing the population bomb, not worse.


Kim