Climate Change is here and man made

It isn't climate change we need to worry about but rather energy. Right now we are reliant on fossil fuels and at some point they will run out and it will certainly happen before the world's ice caps decide to melt or the world warms up a degree or two. Any idiot can draw a graph of our exponentially rising demands for energy and our exponentially decreasing capacities to produce it.

Draw your cross in the middle of that and that is the biggest threat to humanity right there. Couple this with aggravating factors like the rapidly increasing population and it doesn't take much to work out that sooner or later we will be in a lot of trouble. Let us hope we didn't waste all the money, talent and effort trying to prove or solve climate change instead of solving the biggest problem facing mankind today.

What do we do then? Well we can't lower our usage or lower the population so we need to build more nuclear reactors for a start and to funnel more money for research into new forms of energy. Obviously this will never happen because the green agenda is against the cleanest form of fuel we have access to right now which is completely ridiculous!

Just think, only a couple of hours of the sunlight that hits the Earth every single day could power every household on the planet for a year if it was harnessed properly.

This is what we really need to do instead of pussyfooting around building wind turbines and arguing over whether some ice is going to melt or we might all have to go to work in shorts. The real problem is staring at us directly in the face and unfortunately it goes largely ignored because ignorance is bliss really.
 
Man-made climate change is real, of that I have no doubt.

The biggest problem, as alluded to by shenmel, is that this is an immensely complex science, and it is therefore easy to select any single piece of data or any single graph to illustrate ones own point-of-view without having to understand it or explain it.

Single points of data shown out of context can show anything, but a graph such as the one below is more useful (it shows 11-year averages of surface temperature from three different sources, with the 11-year average being critical to ironing out the peaks and troughs, as for each year's data-point, the average temperature is calculated for that year and all the years +/-5 years)

fawcett_11yr_avg.gif


Show me a graph of land-temperatures that appears flat, I'll show you a graph of deep-sea temperatures that shows a startling rise (such as the one below); show me a graph of ice-shelf surface area increasing, I'll show you a graph of a dramatic loss of global ice-volume (which takes into account thickness and surface area).

Total_Heat_Content_2011_med.jpg


Two simple truths:

- the greenhouse effect is a very simple physical phenomenon, and is supported by incontrovertible science
- CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and has been increasing since the start of the industrial revolution due to human activity

It's not logical to argue that climate has always changed and so we shouldn't be worried. Of course it has always changed, but never at the rates of change we see now (man-made CC is - at most - a 150 year phenomenon, whereas previous comparable changes in climate took place over much longer timescales). And this also rather misses the point that controlling CC is not about "saving the Earth"....our planet will survive whether we are on it or not; it is about saving our current place on Earth. Of course, we can keep emitting greenhouse gases, and the planet's climate will change, and as humans, we may even be able to adapt to this change; but we can't expect our own lives to remain the same, or the ecosystems we live in to survive intact.
 
One other reply to an earlier comment about a burning a tree being the same CO2 output as natural decay. Sorry to say, but this is nonsense! In simple terms, burning a tree releases as CO2 all the carbon that has been captured by that tree throughout its lifetime in one go; a decaying tree however keeps much of the carbon locked up for a far longer period. Some of the carbon is not released at all as it remains locked up in other organisms that feed off the decaying plant such as fungi or insects, keeping the carbon part of complex molecules that enter the foodchain.
 
Climate change and what to do about it represents a threat to the global establishment , that's why they have politicized it into the argument 'left wingers want to tax you more' ( witness the comments made by assorted RWNJs on this thread).
Unfortunately in their favour is the fact that the threat is not immediate and it is only human nature to pay more attention to more present dangers.
Our grandchildren and succeeding generations will be forced to live with the consequences of our inaction.
 
Climate change and what to do about it represents a threat to the global establishment , that's why they have politicized it into the argument 'left wingers want to tax you more' ( witness the comments made by assorted RWNJs on this thread).
Unfortunately in their favour is the fact that the threat is not immediate and it is only human nature to pay more attention to more present dangers.
Our grandchildren and succeeding generations will be forced to live with the consequences of our inaction.

That hits the nail on the head. There is a huge amount of political- and corporate weight behind the scepticism on climate change because the pay-offs from ignoring the issue are short-term, which benefits politicians (they get re-elected) and corporations (they make more money). Doing something about it only benefits the next generation.
 

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