Greta Thunberg

[Nails]

You're not wrong, of course.

The difference between then and now is to do with scale. The changes that you are talking about happened over the period of many hundreds of thousands/millions of years until a runaway effect took place. What we're seeing today is many thousands of years of climate change happen within about 50 years or so, which is extremely concerning.

The Earth's climate seems to be a very finely balanced thing. The introduction of only a small bit more carbon dioxide molecules into the atmosphere has started the slant. Human's only actually produce a very small amount of the overall CO2 in the atmosphere but it's enough to start the instability. Naturally produced CO2 is absorbed by various things on the planet ("carbon sinks") so that the equilibrium remains. An analogy for this is a glass of water. Let's say you have a 1 pint glass of water. Every hour you drink half a pint and every hour the glass gains half a pint of water. You're in a perfect balance and the glass never runs dry or overflows. Now let's say that instead of giving you half a pint of water every hour, you now get half a pint + 1ml. 1 millilitre of water is nothing compared to the pints and pints that are been poured into the glass every single day but given enough time, that 1ml sends the whole system out of whack and the glass overflows.

That's what's happening on Earth. Climate change is a globally studied issue, across a ton of seperate fields. It's not just climatology where we get our evidence from. There's evidence from physics, from astrophysics, from geology, from biologists or conservationists, etc. It is possibly now the best studied and most well funded scientific model in the history of the world - mainly because it has the potential to be the most damaging, in part because it's an extremely complicated subject that requires linking together thousands of little sub-systems into a big picture, and also in part of course because of the politics of the issue.

But with that funding has come rigorous debate, skepticism and discussion. I'd argue that climate change is also one of the most challenged scientific models that are currently in wide circulation too - and that's a good thing. Science needs constant challenging of models set in place in order to prove the correctness of its ideas. And climate change, for all of the challenge that has come from legitimate skeptics inside the scientific world who have actually sensible objections to parts of it, has still passed all of these and seems to explain the world around us better than any other model.

With science that's all we can do. We look at the world; experiment, observe and predict. When we come up with an idea that fits observed data, and most importantly can predict future data accurately then we adopt this idea until something that fits better comes along. Despite many attempts by many different groups, nothing has fit observational, experimental and predictive data better than the idea of anthropogical climate change. I wish it would. I'm pretty sure everybody does. The idea that actually we're not heading for a global crisis which will destroy whole economies and create millions of refugees while taxing the world's food and water supplies above breaking point is comfortable and is certain preferable. But we can't ignore what we see in the data, no matter how uncomfortable it is, we have to be intellectually honest.

Well said. Intellectual honesty is at a premium right now.

 

[Nails]

LOL!
I think people are more worried about the eco based genocide young Greta is promoting. Of course if she gets her way there will be enough deaths in 3rd world and developing countries that the rest of us could probably scrape by.

The usual crazed mumbo jumbo from the weirdos.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Fuck me, are there STILL twats denying the science of climate warming?

The twats are the ones who believe EVERYTHING they read, without questioning it. For there lies idiotic behaviour like camping out on Oxford Street in a pink boat, and far, far, far worse, stupid knee-jerk reaction policies like lets cut all these trees down so we can make bio-diesel. Or let's build all these windfarms irrespective of whether they will actually save more CO2 than it cost to deploy them.

Fuck you all, from my six-year-old twin daughters whose future your conspiracy theory-atrophied brains are destroying. Assholes.

And fuck you all for being so aggressive and melodramatic. No-one is denying climate change is an issue, but the sensible people have sense of proportion about it. What do you expect to happen to your twin daughters, do you think their heads will explode? Or are you expecting them to drown under 900m of sea level rise?

 

[2sheikhs]

Fuck me, are there STILL twats denying the science of climate warming? Fuck you all, from my six-year-old twin daughters whose future your conspiracy theory-atrophied brains are destroying. Assholes.

I think everyone can agree that the air that we breathe has to be improved, particularly in largely populated cities. Smog covered city centres aren't a figment of imagination. You should be rightly concerned for your twins in that regard. A natural phenomenon like climate change, which has been occurring since the origins of the earth, are (or should be) less of a concern. I'd rather go by historical facts than hyperbolic hysteria driven by parties who's answer for everything seems to have one common denominator for every issue. Tax.

 

[1.618034]

It's an IMOCA 60. Carbon race boat designed for a once every 4 year round the world race for 1 person. Use it for what?

Good job she got some extra use out of it then and raised global awareness of what is a serious issue, to many.

 

[blueish swede]

Climate Change is a political movement, not just a scientific one. There's all sorts of reasons why scientists are bigging up the issue - peer pressure; funding pressure; desire to see action; career opportunity... as well as genuine beliefs of course. I am not saying all scientists are bent. And then you have the issue of how does the very complex scientific data get translated into a format which the layman can understand? By jounalists and politicians, all with their own agendas, and many of whom who have no scientific background whatsoever.

Here's the Earth's temperature record, going back millions of years, courtesy of the British Geological Survey:

https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/climateChange/climateThroughTime/map.html

Note the Permian period, 298.9-252.2 million years ago, when temperatures were much higher than they are now. Note the Cretaceous, 145-66 million years ago, when sea levels were much higher. Much higher in fact than they are event predicted to rise under the current IPCC predictions.

And yet I read the other day that the IPCC is suggest all coral reefs will be destroyed unless we constrain temperature rises to 1.5C or less. (And 90% will be lost at 1.5C). Really? I wonder where the present day coral reefs have come from given they must have all been wiped out previously?

How may mammals were alive then?

 

[2sheikhs]

The latter.


There would be no harm if the preventative measures we might adopt were not in themselves harmful, but that's not the case. Apart from the enormous cost, and therefore comparative lack of funds to plow into other valuable activities such as healthcare, the slowing of industrialisation in countries like Africa will in itself result in countless millions of premature deaths over the coming decades. These are just two examples. And if we were to scale back on CO2 output to the extent the dungaree-wearers would have you believe are essential, the effects of doing that could be devastating in themselves.


Sensationalist nonsense. From their own headline grabbing article:

"Aggregating the responses revealed a one in twenty chance that seas could rise by more than 2 metres by 2100 if unchecked carbon emissions lead to average global warming of 5°C, about 2°C more than the temperature rises current government pledges would lead to."

i.e. We're not expecting rises of more than 2C (estimates range between 1.5C and 2C at the moment) but if it went as bad as 5C (i.e. completely off the scale) then there's a 95% chance that even then, sea levels would not rise by as much as 2m.

I think we should seriously consider building a wall around Manchester. It's effects would be two fold. One, to keep the water at bay to protect the newly formed resort of " Manchester by the sea" and two, to firmly keep the door shut for all the migrating scousers.

 

[Chippy_boy]

How may mammals were alive then?

So that warming period was not caused by mammals. Interesting

 

[mancity2012_eamo]

It can be used multiple times, as can a private jet.
What we do with the product is just one part of the process and our utility bills are horrific. I doubt that my employer would appreciate me taking copies of the bills and posting them on a public forum. In fact I'd probably be sacked as we have to sign confidentiality agreements ( assuming that you're not going to believe me unless I offer forensic details to the penny).
Think about the whole process. The carbon is mined by machinery. It's made into thread by machinery and put onto spools. It's then sent to the weavers who loom it into roll form. It's then sent to the impregnator who coats it in resin (which has also been through a mining and extraction process). It's then cooked in a gas fired tower, with electric fans to blow the heat and electric fans to extract the resulting fumes. It's then sent to the formers who use machinery to cut the product to shape and then it's put in a heated press for lamination. Between each process, the product is transported by land, sea or air.
It's not the raw material that makes carbonfibre/ kevlar products so expensive, it's the amount of labour and energy resources needed to reach the end product.

The wind that pushed the boat was free.

I think people attacking the messenger instead of tackling the message that is being highlighted is pretty much the corporate ploy that we see constantly.

And no I’m not one that believes the planet will die anytime soon, but we are overpopulated now and anyone who denies we are not in the midst of global warming whether it is cyclical or purely man made has their own motivation for putting that message out.

Making a villain out of a young girl with a message is not the way to tackle the message either.
There is s problem. Anything that focuses government minds for altruistic or non altruistic reasons, is not a bad thing IMO.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

The problem I have with the "we've got to put it in proportion" argument is that it's only emerged since the same people's previous position has become publicly untenable. Basically we've had 10-20 years of one side losing the argument and shifting the goal posts. First is was that the planet isn't warming. Then when it became widely accepted that it was, it was that humans weren't causing it and it was just a natural part of the cycles of warming and cooling. And then when it became widely accepted that humans are responsible, it was that yeah sure global warming is man made, but the negative effects are being exaggerated. It sounds like progress, I guess, but the implication of every one of these arguments, however, is that we have to be sceptical about people trying to work to protect the environment. Hence the fairly constant personal attacks on any individual trying to use their profile to raise awareness of particular issues too.