Climate Change is here and man made

[andyhinch]

I agree, only those households earning $100k per year get to have babies.

I was thinking the Catholic Church coming out and actively encouraging contraception could be a good starting point

 

[Chippy_boy]

What is undeniable is that *something* must be done to curb population growth. It is a simple mathematical inexorable conclusion that if we carry on reproducing at the rate we are doing, eventually we will run out of resources. Old people will look back fondly on their distant past when they could remember eating a REAL fish, for example.

Sooner or later we are going to have to introduce limits on the numbers of children you are allowed. Controversial yes. But also inevitable. The only question really is when: is this something that we will need to do in the next 20 years, or 50 or 100 or 200. But it is inevitable.

 

[Chippy_boy]

I think what MAY happen in 100 years is rather less important than what IS happening now. Fifty years time might be a little too late for lots of countries.

Nothing IS happening now! The planet is just fine right now, unless there's some cataclysmic event you're aware of that I have missed?

And too late in 50 years? I'd say that was very unlikely, verging on impossible.

I am sure you realise that CO2 is effectively plant food. CO2 + water + sunlight = (via photosynthesis) plant growth. The more CO2 we put in the atmosphere, the more plants grow and absorb CO2. If CO2 levels ever got dangerously high, we could go on a global tree-planting program, possibly on an almost unimaginable scale. Maybe augmented with a global phytoplankton growth program. Or we could use other carbon sequestration methods to rapidly reduce CO2 levels. It could be a gargantuan task, but with global coordination, and facing our self-destruction as an alternative, it could and would be done.

Right now, we really do not know that we have a problem yet. All scientists can tell us is that the evidence suggests that man-made CO2 is the most likely cause of the apparent warming we may be witnessing, but no-one can rule out sun spots or other cyclical phenomena. And on the basis of "well it probably is anthropogenic", we are suppose to go off and ruin the world economy, constrain countless ten or hundreds millions in developing countries to decades of increased poverty and deny them access to western standards of living?

 

[MillionMilesAway]

Ice melting, seas rising, low lying lands in danger of flooding, yes, all lovely. What's a few million Bangladeshis really? And some Pacific islanders? don't care about them either. Oh, and the Somerset Levels.

I wonder if anyone's noticed the massive deforestation in the world, rather than tree planting.

Your science is a bit suspect. Providing more CO2 doesn't make plants grow faster or better. That would only be the case if we were near the lower end of CO2 concentration. As it is, if one tree can only use 1 bottle of CO2, the second bottle of CO2 is not going to get used no matter how hard the tree tries - it's a rarity that anything would need all the excess, and so it builds up.

Other carbon-binding tech? Such as? It'll be very expensive if not environmentally terrible. If CO2 levels would be a problem at that point, it's the same as the belief that there is a problem now. Maybe at this putative self-destruction point, people will think, "nah, someone will work out how to deal with it in the future."

Scientists and their pesky evidence, eh? awful people, let's ignore the data and throw up some unprovable options! I can't for the life of me see how sunspots would cause higher CO2 levels, and we know that higher CO2 levels leads to atmospheric temperature rise ('cos it's science). The rest is rhetoric with no more basis in fact than sunspots - there will be price to pay for fixing the problem, and it's a heck of a lot easier for richer nations to do that than poorer ones. Jack will be pleased that we're all right, though.

 

[Pokes28]

My biggest issue on this is the horrible manner in which data is changed. Science is only as good as the data and the nice folks at NASA and the IPCC move the needle by making constant changes to the data. When there was a lot of stories being written about the changes in the data, what did these two groups do? They made the old data inaccessible. I don't claim to be a climate scientist, however I am a logic driven person and I work in a scientific field. Data is what data is. There are sometimes valid reasons to make adjustments, but those adjustments must always be documented and be subject to review. Fortunately, there are several people and groups that collect all the data findings and have made a lot of it available and are showing these changes. The most recent issues is that they are changing current data and adding to the temperatures. They won't talk about why they are adjusting this data. Again, this isn't how science is supposed to work.

Man made global warming (which is what we are trying to discern as we have no ability to control the natural variations) may or may not kill the planet. It may or may not be as bad as these groups say it is. I have many problems with the whole situation, however there are two that really make me question the whole thing. First, the data, which I've already hit upon. Second is trying to pass off climate modelling as science. It is a tool to be used for forecasting, but there are so many unknown variables, that the results are at best a bad guess. I'd like to see what the results of the newest models would be if they just used the raw data versus the same model with the "enhanced" data.

I like science. I want this treated like a true scientific project. I want a voice for decent. Today, if you raise objections, you are shouted down as an ignorant fool and are attacked personally.

 

[Metalartin]

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/ozone-layer-asia-threatened-weird-pumping-effect-atmosphere/

A weird phenomenon is happening high above the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas that could prove to be an atmospheric nightmare. Pollutants that gather from India and China in the lowlands around the mountains can be boosted as high as 18 kilometers, reaching the stratosphere—the atmospheric layer directly above the troposphere that contains most of Earth’s ozone.

Not sure what I believe, I don't like the excuses that being wasteful and power hungry doesn't matter clearly it contributes, pollution(not just air pollution) there is no excuse for and is normally linked to our need for power... but the idea that it's used as a tool to push socialist agendas(left wing politics) is not that far fetched either. In fact there's truth to both sides we should make the effort to be greener when we can and work towards greener power but we also need to watch out for those hiding their own interests behind a "good cause"(for money or power etc).

 

[RandomJ]

Humans ability to bury their heads in the sand never ceases to amaze me. We have completley changed the surface of the planet yet some don't want to admit that doing so has consequences.

 

[Ban-jani]

I agree, only those households earning $100k per year get to have babies.

That's me out then haha.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Ice melting, seas rising, low lying lands in danger of flooding, yes, all lovely. What's a few million Bangladeshis really? And some Pacific islanders? don't care about them either. Oh, and the Somerset Levels.

And how much damage has that done so far? Nil, none, nada. The comment made above was about all the problems happening NOW and there are none.

I wonder if anyone's noticed the massive deforestation in the world, rather than tree planting.

Yes, and that's a problem. But it's not caused by CO2 is it. It's caused by idiotic behaviour.

Your science is a bit suspect. Providing more CO2 doesn't make plants grow faster or better.

Yes, it does. Do some googling about it.

That would only be the case if we were near the lower end of CO2 concentration. As it is, if one tree can only use 1 bottle of CO2, the second bottle of CO2 is not going to get used no matter how hard the tree tries - it's a rarity that anything would need all the excess, and so it builds up.

Wrong. We aren't dealing with "a tree" are we. We are dealing with ALL plant life - algae, grass, trees, moss, etc. More CO2 is good for plants. Again, do a bit of googling.

Other carbon-binding tech? Such as? It'll be very expensive if not environmentally terrible. If CO2 levels would be a problem at that point, it's the same as the belief that there is a problem now. Maybe at this putative self-destruction point, people will think, "nah, someone will work out how to deal with it in the future."

Who knows, I don't live in future. What I do know is that 2116 tech will be hugely better than 2016 tech. Take a look at what life was like in 1916 if you want to challenge that.

Scientists and their pesky evidence, eh? awful people, let's ignore the data and throw up some unprovable options! I can't for the life of me see how sunspots would cause higher CO2 levels, and we know that higher CO2 levels leads to atmospheric temperature rise ('cos it's science). The rest is rhetoric with no more basis in fact than sunspots - there will be price to pay for fixing the problem, and it's a heck of a lot easier for richer nations to do that than poorer ones. Jack will be pleased that we're all right, though.

You're not getting it are you. Solar activity has a direct impact on the temperature of our planet. It has fuck all to do with CO2 levels, but it heats the planet more or less depending on the solar activity. Not surprising really when you think that Earth would have become an cold, dead planet eons ago were it not constantly warmed by the sun.

You've obviously bought the scaremongering party line, hook line and sinker. But if you sit back and have a think for yourself, you might find the process rather enlightening. How bad would it actually be if sea levels were 30 cm higher in 100 years? And what if the world was 2C warmer? What if CO2 levels are an indicator of global temperature and not a driver of it? What if the sun is actually behind our periodic swings in climate that happen all the time? What if the earth is actually a balanced and stable system that self-regulates, as evidenced by the fact that we have a habitable environment some 10,000,000,000 years after the planet was formed, and were it unstable it would have gone the way of the moon, or Mars or Venus 9.000.000.000 years ago. Take a pause for thought rather than just believing whatever the media pump out at you.

 

[Jim Tolmie's Underpants]

Scientists and their pesky evidence, eh? awful people, let's ignore the data and throw up some unprovable options!