Could Global Warming Make Life on Earth Better? 923
mikee805 writes "A lengthy article in Spiegel explores the possibility that global warming might make life on Earth better, not just for humans, but all species. The article argues that 'worst-case scenarios' are often the result of inaccurate simulations made in the 1980s. While climate change is a reality, as far as the article is concerned, some planning and forethought may mean that more benefits than drawbacks will result from higher temperatures. From the article:'The medical benefits of higher average temperatures have also been ignored. According to Richard Tol, an environmental economist, "warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu." Another widespread fear about global warming -- that it will cause super-storms that could devastate towns and villages with unprecedented fury -- also appears to be unfounded. Current long-term simulations, at any rate, do not suggest that such a trend will in fact materialize.'"
Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the math gets a lot more complicated once we start counting tropical type diseases which will increase in prevalence.
Not to say there aren't good things from global warming, but I would rather deal with what we do know (the climate we have now) rather than hoping that things will be better with whatever climate we get later.
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, preparataion would help us deal with global warming. However, the fact remains that humans are tightly bound to geography and environment by our infrastructure. While individuals may uproot and move without too much complication (although there certainly is an economic cost to do so), our infrastrucure doesn't. Furthermore, the simple cost of relocation makes it completely infeasible in many locations. Look at Bangladesh. Something like 60 million people there live within one meter of sea level. They expect a country as poor as Bangladesh to uproot and move a third of its population? And to where?
Just because global warming has the *potential* to, say, transform Siberia and Canada into a new breadbasket, doesn't mean that such a transition would go smoothly. Even in the best case in which the warming is a net positive to world climate (which is doubtful), this simple fact means hardship for humanity.
To add to that (Score:3, Informative)
Re:To add to that (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think the best description I could give for the weather is... weird. Winter comes a bit later, and while it had a certain period of being really cold it wasn't as bad as those I h
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure the other things you mentioned are true, but this part is partially untrue. It's not that these diseases won't follow the warmth, I'm sure they will, but that they won't be a problem when they get here. Granted, I'm talking about rich places like the USA, but here's the
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Informative)
Smile when you say that. Most flus over the past few decades have been fairly mild. But there is always the possibility that a new flu (such as the much bruited avian influenza A (H5N1)) could create a new pandemic as deadly as the 1918 out-break, which killed more than 600,000 here in the US.
Of course, flus are not caused by cold weather, they are caused by viruses, many of which originate in south-east Asia which is tropical or semi-tropical. That in turn is not a result of climate, but of the poverty and which in turn leads to close contact between humans and farm animals that serve as the reservoirs of infectious viruses.
The reason that flus spread in the winter in the northern hemisphere is that winter leads to close human contact in schools, offices, and shopping malls that allow the viruses to be transmitted between infected and uninfected human hosts. Flu pandemics are not caused by weather.
Similarly, the tropical diseases you mention are not truly tropical. They are transmitted by insects (mostly mosquitoes) that thrive in water. The reason that they are largely found in the tropics now is that the tropics are largely poor and dominated by bad governments. In Europe and North America public works of sanitation, drainage and insect extermination have largely eliminated these diseases, and they could in the tropics, if they were used.
These are not really climate issues.
Yeah not sure it's caused by 'cold'. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can imagine that if you were really cold, for a long time -- like, hypothermic -- that perhaps this would weaken your body's immune system to the point where you would become more susceptible to disease. However, I really don't think that there's much credence to the old adages about "putting your hat on so you don't catch cold!"
Re:Yeah not sure it's caused by 'cold'. (Score:5, Informative)
From the University of Cardiff's website:
Here's the media release. [cardiff.ac.uk]
Basically being cold allows any virus that you already have to take a stronger hold on your body and so symptoms that you wouldn't have had become expressed. You are close in thinking that the immune system is weakened but you certainly don't need to be hypothermic, you just have to have the virus present in your nose already.
See; your Mother was right!
I wonder what else she got right?...you do have clean underwear on don't you?
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, why would global warming stop at the optimum, for Germany, or for Sweden, or for the world?
Even if we recognized the optimum temperature when we reached it, overshoot seems very likely. Once we decide to stop warming the planet, it would take decades to change to non-carbon power sources. There would be more decades of warming already built into the increased CO2 levels, due to the thermal inertia of the oceans.
Very much warmer temperatures are very likely to less than optimum.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You assume we have anything to do with it. We humans LOVE taking credit for things much bigger than we are. The sun goes around the earth, you know.
The greenhouse gas emissions created by the human race are about 3-5% of the total. The rest comes from the planet itself.
I really wish you people would stop repeating the same lines over and over.
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Informative)
Get your numbers right (don't take them from obscure global warming sceptics' sites, for starters). You're confusing the oceans' (and land masses') total CO2 emissions (which are indeed much higher than ours) with the ocean's *net* CO2 emissions (which are *negative* -- the oceans currently absorb more than they emit, slowing the CO2 level increase in the atmosphere -- CO2 concentrations in the oceans are rising, all measurements show that). The CO2 concentration in the air is higher today than it was in the last 600,000 years or more, we also have direct evidence (carbon isotopes) that much of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from fossil fuel burning, and if you want, you can take the total amount of CO2 released into the air since 1800, divide it by the total number of molecules in the atmosphere and see for yourself that the current CO2 concentration is not a "thing much bigger than we are". About one in three CO2 molecules in the atmosphere originates from human activities, there is no scientific dispute about that.
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's proof that the levels were higher when the Dinosaurs were around, and hey, guess what, there's also evidence that the climate is in a cycle. Meaning you're ignoring that this could be happening normally.
Like I said originally, the human mind LOVES to think that it's the most important thing in the universe, and while it is kinda cute, it's going to be our downfall. The sun doesn't go around us, and to think that a species that is outweighed by certain insect species could change the global climate of a planet is just silly.
SLASHDOT, NOOOOOOO! (Score:4, Funny)
Not all good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not all good (Score:5, Funny)
Here, let me translate that into English for you:
"I live on the ocean floor. We call it a polder, but it's pretty much seabed. We've built earthen walls around this section and continuously pump out the water, and we have a lot of experience doing this and are quite good at it now, with triple-redundant pumping stations and seven nines of uptime, but nonetheless flooding is not so much a _potential_ disaster as it is our inevitable, inescapable, pre-ordained fate, i.e., it's really a question of when (not whether) we'll be flooded."
HTH.HAND.
But most Slashdot readers would enjoy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wait a minute... (Score:5, Interesting)
You! Shut up! It's HAPPY THOUGHT HOUR! (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't you see the pictures in the article of pretty young ladies enjoying the sun?
Eliminate the negative! Accentuate the positive!
Visualize palm trees in Germany, and put out of your mind the massive droughts and desertification in the torrid and equatorial zones.
Re:You! Shut up! It's HAPPY THOUGHT HOUR! (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, global warming, whether true or not, could not signifigantly affect trade winds which are governed by the spin of the Earth, and it is they that drive the major weather in many tropical and subtropical regions.
Global warming may or may not happen. If it does, it may or may not be a bad thing. Humans don't have any fundamental data on the subject, so human nature takes over: we fear change. The whole global warming scare across the world smacks of a very human fear of change. Most people don't even realize that the temperature on Earth now is, as far as we can tell, below the lifetime average for Earth, and below the lifetime median as well.
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In the event of a 3 degree average increase, which is almost three times the current estimate by 2100, Africa in all areas except the very southern portion of the continent is predicted to receive substantially more and more consistent percipitation.
Upon what science is that statement based?
See, for instance, Figure SPM.7 of the Summary for Policymakers [www.ipcc.ch] of the 2007 IPCC 4th Assessment Report.
That figure gives a >20% precipitation decrease for northern Africa in 2090-2099 (relative to 1980-1999 levels). It gives a similar decrease for southern Africa in the summers. For central-east Africa it gives a precipitation increase in the winters, and finds the predictions are unreliable for central Africa in the summers. Those precipitation decreases are
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The Earth's spin is responsible for the direction of the trade winds, not their existence or force. The winds are generated by the temperature (and hence pressure) difference between the equatorial zone and the temperate zones. If the Earth didn't spin, the winds would blow straight from
You're right, change isn't bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the melting glacial ice has volume that correlates directly to rising ocean levels. Rising ocean levels correlates directly to displaced populations.
Warmer earth includes warmer oceans. Warmer oceans mean stronger, more frequent tropical storms. I imagine you're also familiar with the meteorological phenomenon known as El Nino and La Nina. These terms describe the effects on weather caused by variatio
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Insightful)
So even assuming that Germans will be healthier when the weather is warmer, there could be other problems when the forests are destroyed by parasites and the top soil washes away.
40,000 fewer deaths in Germany (Score:3, Insightful)
Cold related deaths? (Score:5, Informative)
More heat related illnesses? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Life finds a way (Score:5, Insightful)
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How much war, pestilience, and famine would you cheerfully endure in this process? Oh, right, you'll be dead for most of it. I hope your kids enjoy themselves.
I hear this attitude a lot, but it just reflects nihilism and/or a lack of compassion for the rest of us, spatially and temporally. Or perhaps more likely, a lack of careful reflec
Needs to be said (Score:3, Funny)
Models (Score:5, Insightful)
this is where I lose karma. bring it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Milder winters are going to open up trade routes through the arctic.
I will potentially be able to grow stuff in my garden that won't grow there today. My tomatoes may become perennials as they are in their native habitat. And I could do with some citrus trees in my yard.
If the ocean levels rise, landmass on the North American continent will shrink as populations rise. The equity in my real estate investments will grow at an unprecedented rate.
Living in Raleigh, I will be much closer to the coast than I am today.
OK yes this does mean I will have less buffer from hurricanes, and the hurricanes may be more frequent and more violent than is typical.
Inuit may lose their traditional way of life, but they are sitting on vast chunks of currently frozen land that will become desirable temperate areas that the yankees will pay good money to move to once they start experiencing the kind of weather that is more typical of the southeastern US.
It's not all doom and gloom, folks. There will be extensive collateral damages, whole species will be lost, but life has a way of moving on. And Homo sapiens is one of the most adaptable vertebrates on this planet, so I'm sure we'll find a way to thrive through this.
Re:this is where I lose karma. bring it! (Score:4, Insightful)
i notice that the ones that are comfortable with "collateral damage" are the ones who won't be -- or at least believe they won't be -- "collateral damage".
note that i'm not necessarily talking about, just making an observation in the general.
mr c
Lengthy article, yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that I don't see it citing many sources, and when it does, it seems to selectively quote them, such as limiting it's considerations to "gradual thawing of the Greenland ice sheet" only when considering sea level changes. I'm not going to call this a whitewash, but it seems to be a sales job for a point of view, rather than a well-founded findings of a respectable research effort.
Ryan Fenton
But what is the author's point? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of my biggest annoyances with people who question global warming isn't that they think it's not happening or that it isn't us who are contributing to it, but rather the fact that they use these previous statements as an excuse to not do anything about it.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that carbon dioxide emissions really don't have any effect on global warming... does that mean that we should keep driving SUVs and not care about how much pollution we dump into the environment?
Although people who announce that the earth is doomed because of global warming and come across as being panicky appear to be crackpots to all them skeptics, it doesn't mean that we should ignore them. we should do what we can to conserve what we have. It's worth it.
I wish laymen would stfu about global warming (Score:5, Interesting)
Although arguing based on authority is something I don't usually do, but in the case of global warming most common people just display ignorance about the matter. That in itself is not a problem, but writing articles proclaiming truths which show signs that the guy didn't even bother to do basic research is bad. I wish people would try to inform themselves before trying to form the opinions of others.
Science is complex, deal with it. Naive, overly simplistic ideas set off my bullshit alarm, like in the case of "paranormal" stuff.
Know your source... (Score:3, Informative)
That's unpossible!
Catastrophic Migrations (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, it's not a bug (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like a politician caught in a lie trying to turn it to virtue.
Sigh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that this is akin to talking about the positive effects of smoking: weightloss, fewer old people to draw down retirement benefits, etc. It's disingenuous and generally only used to mask the drawbacks. Is it a necessary part of the discussion? Of course. Does it change the negative aspects of Global Warming? No. Do the negative aspects of Global Warming outweigh the positive aspects? Yes. The cost of Global Warming is still going to be in the trillions, because people generally already accounted for this.
Fewer deaths from flu spells will be offset by increasing deaths by malaria (which is already migrating north). Actually, reading through the article, it seems that the author has no idea about what has already happened, and is content with merely posting speculation about what could happen. I'm reminded of the troll piece recently posted on C|Net about intellectual property. Same lack of content, same latching onto vague promises that have not materialized, same complete lack of evidence for their position.
I'm off to tagging the article flamebait.
Re:Sigh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? It would be nice to live in such certainty, however, that certainly smells like something from the genus Factus Internetis Sphincterum to me. For every negative you can think of, I can probably think of an equal or greater net positive. That makes one of us either a Pollyanna or a Cassandra. Personally, I expect the reality will fall somewhere in the middle, as usual.
Here's a little quiz:
Take any point in history.
Now, what are the odds that the world's climate on that day will be exactly the same as it is 100 years later?
To put it another way...if you plop a city down somewhere, and then move forward through time, the odds that city will suffer some catastrophic event - from earthquake, to war, to flood, to famine, to plague - reaches near-unity. Put it on a coastline and you've probably DOUBLED your odds of 'something bad' over time.
Climate has never stood still. It was historically both warmer and colder than today. It will be both warmer and colder in the future. Accept that the world in which our society is built (and that includes infrastructure, national boundaries, etc.) is all just ephemera compared to the natural processes of a planet.
Suddenly, this hairless ape that infests almost every corner of the landmass of this planet thinks that it's his fault. Cute, but kinda pathetic.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll just point out that the problem at hand is not change, but man-made change that will hurt. A lot.
Bedevere Science (B.S.) (Score:3, Funny)
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
But, But, But ... (Score:3, Funny)
Huh? There was no bad hurricane season of 2006?
Nevermind.
Global Warming? Feh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just about every story is about how the world is ending, mostly because of man-made global warming. Yesterday, I heard that dams and hydro-electric power release more greenhouse gases than coal-fire electric plants. If they keep on like this, the only option for humanity will be mass suicide. Though, only if a decomposing corpse releases less methane than a living person, I guess.
Earlier this week there was a story about RFID devices in trash cans, to measure and control the amount of garbage thrown out by Britons. If this were in support of the George Bush's Global War on Terror, the masses would be out on the streets, but any invasive authoritarian measure can be justified in order to "Save the Earth" (tm).
I'm over it. Bother me no more with stories of global warming. At this stage, it's become a catchphrase to justify all sorts of bureaucratic intrusion and control, instigated by the watermelon left (green outside, red inside).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I found a nice spoof on an advertisment [flickr.com] for the Flemish socialist party (sp.a).
I don't think you need a translation, but you might not know that Spa [www.spa.be] is *the* best known mineral water in Belgium !
Why so much nonsense on /.? (Score:5, Informative)
Hello, Spiegel (Score:4, Informative)
Hello, Spiegel. Let me introduce my friend, the Larsen B ice shelf [nsidc.org], along with Journalistic Integrity. No, you haven't met.
Here we go again (Score:5, Informative)
I naively thought once the IPCC report came out these types of "debates" about climate change would end. I was wrong. If anything, the naysayers are louder than ever.
I have read the Summary for Policymakers (and actually used it as a teaching tool in my numerical weather prediction undergraduate class). Have you? It's written at a relatively non-scientific level (hey, it's for politicians after all) but is very, very clear.
The results of this international (intergovernmental) exhaustive literature review? Humans are very likely (90%) responsible for the bulk of observed global warming.
That's it. Plain and simple.
Yet, no other topic in the world brings out the armchair scientists more than global warming. It's a frustrating phenomenon for me as a scientist. It's sort of like being an oncologist dealing with a chronic smoker who blames his lung cancer on some genetic anomaly, or living 50 miles away from a nuclear power plant, rather than the bloody obvious fact that smoking two packs of cigarettes for 40 years just might have something to do with the cancer.
This is science, not faith. Just about every climate change doubter starts his sentence with "I don't believe humans cause global warming because..." or "I don't believe in global warming." This clearly demonstrates a huge misunderstanding of the scientific process. Belief has nothing to do with it. It's about physics, meteorology, climatology, astronomy, biology, oceanography, chemistry etc., all of which rely on the peer-reviewed scientific process to further our understanding of the physical world.
I challenge any of the naysayers to do a little research of their own, not simply rely on cherry picking viewpoints which align with their own. It's sort of like a game, holding up their "most credible scientist" as a shield, challenging me to do the same. Never mind the fact that my "army" of scientists is about three orders of magnitude greater than their own... but I digress...
The very least anyone should do before arguing against... or for... anthropogenic climate change is to pick up an undergraduate meteorology textbook and opening up to (usually) chapter 3, the chapter on heat transfer. The section on radiation is the most crucial one. Read about blackbody radiation. The solar spectrum and the terrestrial spectrum are a function of their temperatures. Because the Earth is much colder than than the sun, it emits in the infrared (longer wavelength than visible light etc. from the sun).
Then read about greenhouse gases, those by-and-large trace gases which exist in our atmosphere. Understand how they respond to longwave and shortwave radiation. A little light bulb should eventually go on over your head when you realize "oh, so *that's* why the Earth is habitable." You see, without these trace gases (CO2, H20, CH4) the earth would be in a deep freeze - estimated at about 50 degrees F colder global average temperature.
Once you make it that far, you're almost there. Realize that humans are responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 levels from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm to a modern day value of 380 ppm, an increase of over 30%. It takes very little stretch to realize that this would lead to a shift in the radiative equilibrium temperature of the earth (related to the global average temperature).
You see, this is really easy science. There is NO REASON TO ASSUME that CO2 values increasing the way they have would NOT lead to an increase in global average temperature!! This is exactly what we'd expect! And this doesn't even involve the scary discussion of feedbacks (water vapor feedback, snow/ice albedo feedback) which may accelerate the warming.
And that's just the back of the envelope part. Yes, there are still unknowns. Not, it's not the sun (we've checked into that if you can believe it). No, it's n
Reminds me of a conversation (Score:5, Funny)
I had with a friend who is a *very* fundamentalist Christian who believes in the Rapture. A time when all the "good" Christians (opposed to what?) get taken up to heaven for a thousand years. It went something like this:
Him: And then there will be plagues.
Me: What kind of plagues?
Him: The earth will get hot.
Me: Let me get this straight...all you right wing Christians will be gone and the rest of us can live our lives in peace without your religious dogma and misguided legislative agenda and it will be endless summer here? What's the bad part again?
NOT POSSIBLE (Score:3, Insightful)
The most simple definition of "weather" is water in the air. The weather is all about water in the air. The force and fury of storms comes from differences in temperature and water in the air. If you have even paid a LITTLE attention to the news during hurricane season, you would have learned that the forces that power a hurricane are differences in temperature and the temperature of the water. (That's why hurricane season is during the months that they are and not during the winter season.)
A global climate change will kill many species and cause others to flourish. This will create an unpredictable change in the global eco-system. We don't have the knowledge or computational power to take into account ALL known factors (let alone all unknown factors) to form a prediction. But one thing is pretty certain when it comes to global events like these. A lot of life is lost and it takes millions upon millions of years to bring the planet back to the level that we know it to be today. We won't see what happens. Our kids... our great great grandchildren will not see what happens. Humans may well be extinct when it happens and not necessarily for reasons we bring on ourselves. (In the grand scheme of things, very few species last THAT long, but given that we have effectively halted human evolution, it's quite possible we'll survive.)
But back to the possibility that global warming might HELP the planet? No way... it will destroy anything close to the oceans, and areas identified as "tornado alley" such as an area close to where I live, will see expansion and intensification of those danger zones.
Again: more heat, more water in the air, more intensely violent weather.
I'm not a climate expert, but I stayed a weekend at some hotel that somehow makes you really smart.
an aside (Score:3, Insightful)
In related news... (Score:3, Funny)
Aguments about global warming (Score:3, Interesting)
Liberal talking points
* Because of over a century of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the average temperature in Earth is increasing.
* This has foreseeable negative impacts.
* The scariest impacts are from subtle effects that we can't even predict.
* Models say we are approaching a tipping point where the changes become self-sustaining and self-feeding.
* We can slow or stop this, but we're running out of time, and must act now.
Conservative talking points
* Global warming is not happening. It's a liberal myth.
* It's a normal cycle, not caused by man.
* It's pointless for us to try to slow global warming because India and China are putting much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than the United States is, and they won't stop.
* What's the big deal? It's only a few degrees change, and will make life better on Earth. Don't you like nicer weather?
* It's too late to stop the major effects of global warming. Better for the the government to encourage and subsidize business to adapt to and profit from the major changes that will inevitably occur.
Truthfully (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More paid-for "research" from special interests (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm, a German media outlet, Der Spiegel, a German author, Olaf Stampf, and a Swedish physicist, Svante Arrhenius. You really didn't read the article before you jumped on the Anti-Americanism bandwagon, did you?
As for your minority dissent argument (A few "scientists" must be heretics, because the majority disagrees), you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the article, because I don't think we have a clue one way or another what the future holds, but you've completely written off a possibility simply because it doesn't fit in with your political agenda -- kinda like the oil companies from the other direction.
Re:More paid-for "research" from special interests (Score:5, Insightful)
Galileo was considered a heretic (in a literal sense!) by the Church rather than his fellow scientists. This was because other scientists, after reading his arguments, were agreeing with him!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm, no. Galileo was referred to the Inquisistion by a scientist he had accused (baselessly) of plagiarism. Apparently, Galileo was a bit of a curmudgeon (a rude asshole might be a better description), with no social skills to speak of.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder if it would help if Snopes listed Global Warming as a hoax? I don't mean Climate Change -- that's the scientific observation that the climate is always changing. I mean Global Warming -- the idea that mankind is responsible for changing the weather -- as if that were possible!
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Informative)
It's still an interesting programme though.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Is that a joke? Sounds like a joke. I can't tell. (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand it might a real person who's just new to the subject and not very knowledgable yet.
If it's a joke then Internet Honor demands that I stay away and not get hooked. But if it's an honest post, Internet Honor demands that I respond with well-reasoned rational counters to everything that's wrong.
Maybe I should just go with a goatse link.
Whether we caused it seems a bit academic. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is completely false, and quite dangerous. Furthermore, I think that the debate over what has caused global warming, has really just become a distraction to the real issue, which is quite simply "what the hell are we going to do about it?"
It doesn't really matter whether the cause of the warming is anthropogenic or not; unless you're going to debate that the planet is not getting warmer -- and it doesn't seem like you are -- we still have a serious problem on our hands. It's a little academic to most people whether it's caused by power production, or automobiles, or cow farts, or energy fluctuations in the Sun, or a lack of pirates.
Telling people in Bangladesh who are up to their knees in seawater that "hey, we're just coming out of a geological cold phase!" isn't particularly useful. Or when the power grid and water supplies in the whole Eastern half of the U.S. fail because the average summer temperature is up in the mid-to-high 90s [nwsource.com] (or higher), saying "it was a lot worse a few million years ago" isn't getting us any closer to a solution.
The causes of the warming phenomenon are only interesting insofar as they give us possible solutions for dealing with the problem -- because it's not CO2 that's the problem, it's the warming that's the problem. If you don't think it's anthropogenic CO2 that's the cause of the warming, fine, but that doesn't mean that the actual problem just goes away because we didn't cause it, which seems to be the attitude taken by many of the anti-anthropogenic-global-warming side. We still have to deal with the same consequences even if the cause isn't anthropogenic. (And if it's not anthropogenic, then we're probably screwed even further, because it's probably a lot more difficult to reverse the process.)
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue isn't that I want us not to clean up our mess. The issue is that we are using the spectre of a problem which doesn't exist to prevent the development of the non-industrialized world, and the effects of our preventing that development on the environment alone are far worse than allowing the development would be (and that's before you look into the starvation, the disease, the horror, the menial labor and so on involved in living like it's the 1700s.)
Industrialization is important for a whole lot of reasons. Lots of those wars going on in Africa would never have happened if they had had the kind of reasonable food supplies that you get from electrified irrigation, refridgeration, and cooking without animal dung.
I am not saying we shouldn't try to do the ecologically sound thing. All I'm saying is we have no idea what that is, and we're not doing things we should be doing out of a culture of fear spawned by 1960s science which has long since been disproven to a degree that would have scuttled any other movement in modern politics today.
It's time we started the science from scratch, and then looked a second time at the Kyoto treaty. The Kyoto treaty is well meaning, misguided, ecologically driven international scale murder.
Oy vey (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm always amazed by supposed scientists being so confident in predicting future states of chaotic systems so far in advance. I'm even more amazed by claims that certain changes to the present state will lead to a specific changes in future outcome. I believe this is called Hubris.
Now then, "Oy vey" is Yiddish for "Oh woe is me". This is a bit premature. Let's save it for when Nemesis gets his revenge.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, historically CO2 has been part of the feedback to solar forcing of climate change. But the increased CO2 has been a positive feedback, sustaining the climate change well past the solar forcing. What's different this time is that due to human activity we are pushing CO2 directly, so if our understanding of physics is correct (as established by Arrhenius himself), the result is heating. This is basic theory and the temperature record, though noisy, hardly contradicts this over the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Flunked statistics did you?
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you are a shill or dumb. But I reject the weather vs. climate argument, and the coin-flipping analogy is a pretty good one.
Predicting weather is about forecasting the dynamics of a system on time- and distance scales on which the system is chaotic. This is coin flipping. It's possible to predict the distribution of the results, but it's impossible to do much predicting the next flip.
Here's another analogy. Take a cup of coffee. Pour milk in it. Can you predict the precise way in which the milk swirls around? No, that's weather. Can you figure out what the average temperature and milk concentration of that cup will be in five minutes? Yes, depending on your ability to measure the thermal conductivity of the cup, the ambient temperature and humidity, etc.
Modeling climate sure isn't easy or particularly precise. But it is a false premise to reject such activities based on the fundamental constraints of weather prediction. Weather and climate are obviously governed by the same dynamics, but they differ fundamentally in terms of their time and distance scales.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh how wrong you are about volcanoes. Sucks when you have no data to back you up, doesn't it? For someone who harps on data and models, you are amazingly bad at picking your supporting graphs, your supporting models and your supporting papers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What does that teach you?
Well, for one, you might start reading the damn papers. There's a reason that the two claim an order of magnitude difference in the carbon deposition rate: one counts underwater volcanoes, and the other doesn't. Underwater volcanoes release a hell of a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere, because there are so da
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You've stated a number of unsubstantiated "facts", but other than one link to a chart, and your heavy and embarrassing reliance on the Swindle show, no independently verifiable references. A reference means providing a mechanism so I could evaluate your statements. Just throwing out "data" that I know to be wrong is not sufficient.
Or did I miss something?
BTW your chart showed more or less the same data that I had already cited here [globalwarmingart.com].
I've known about Arrhenius and CO2 for over a decade; my MS thesis at MIT
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well here is a newsweek article from 1975 which states that global cooling is(was) coming:http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cooling1.pdf [numberwatch.co.uk]
Does it matter what the scientific consensus was in 1975 if the public was made to believe a certain view based on "scientific evidence"? No, the only thing that matters is that global cooling was credited as legit in the mainstream press, albeit it's not the wide spread panic / money making machine that global warming is today.
So that's where the skepticism comes from. It's not baseless or a simple talking point, it's real history. Shocker, science has been wrong before and the public was made to believe the wrong thing. So that's where you get the skeptics from.
Honestly I don't understand why people so involved in science are outright angry at global warming skeptics. If anything they should embrace skepticism within their own work and prove with testable evidence that it actually is man made, instead of just calling someone a idiot in so many words because they don't believe.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Informative)
CO2 concentrations over the last 600000 years: http://www.realclimate.org/epica.jpg [realclimate.org]
Sadly, I can't find the graph that superposes the temperature record over the CO2 record. I'm sure another 30 minutes of googling for it will yield it.
The spike is over the last 150 years or so, and basic modeling techniques show you that it is abnormal. All your questions can be answered by looking through the two graphs I provided you.
Alright, I exaggerated when I said that our CO2 output dwarfs all natural emissions. You're right, that's probably wrong. However, our emissions are currently not being absorbed as fast as they are generated, and total concentrations are rising quite nicely. That's the key part - we are putting stuff into the regular cycle that doesn't get absorbed.
I know you don't think that it's affecting the earth. You still haven't given a reason why, despite the well known physics of infrared absorption, which are described quite nicely here: http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/hwb/chemistry/tutorials
The data about CO2 affecting infrared radiation from earth can be found here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=142 [realclimate.org], and at the Wikipedia article about greenhouse gases. If you object to the sources, you can always check the referenced literature.
I've got plenty of data. I can pull data for days. Where's yours? Where's your peer reviewed article? All you have is a few people who had to get a BBC documentary made, because people kept laughing at their theories and wouldn't bother publishing their papers. BTW, I've seen the BBC documentary - the data referenced in there, as well as the analysis thereof, has been widely discredited. For something real, read the IPCC reports: start here (http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/pub.htm), and don't stop until the end. Then come back.
Oh, and just for the heck of it, because I like Woods Hole and a friend of mine worked there, here's a little summary they threw together about the CO2 data collected: http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications
Again - where's your data?
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the data is there. All I have is your word that what you say is accurate - and from the brief googling I've done on some of your claims (like the volcanoes - hah!) they're just patently wrong. You make pompous claims about your knowledge, about how science is supposed to work, about how everyone needs to support their claims with data, and then fail every last one of your own boastful demands and statements.
As for real scientists.... I sure hope you don't consider yourself one of them. I've worked with them, and you are so far out in crackpot land that you don't even qualify as an amateur scientist in the Scientic American sense, nor even as someone who has any idea how to interpret data. All you are is a complete waste of time whose only method of debate is intimidation. Shoo.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Insightful)
The total CO2 output of all the volcanoes in the world in any given year is still less than 2% of annual anthropogenic emissions.
You are probably getting CO2 confused with aerosol precursors.
As the previous poster pointed out, there are large non-anthropogenic sources of CO2, but until recently they have been essentially balanced by non-anthropogenic sinks of CO2, so that net CO2 concentrations remained pretty much constant on timescales of millennia. We are now sourcing CO2 at a much greater rate than it can be sunk, leading to a rapid rate of accumulation.
Out of curiosity, what do you believe is responsible for the current rapid increase in CO2 concentrations?
Not only is that not true, it's also not as relevant as you would have it appear: even if our CO2 output leveled off (which it most definitely has not), it would still continue accumulate in the atmosphere because we would still be sourcing it faster than it can be sunk. (Unless we go in for sequestration in a big way.)
Incidentally, you say:
Furthermore, the paleo T/CO2 record does not contradict anthropogenic global warming, nor does it explain the current temperature or CO2 trends.
Re:Give me a break... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've just managed to browse through the tedium of your entire body of posts in this thread, and I found only two relevant links: the documentary on google video, and the umich.edu page, which you summarily dismissed as supporting your points anyway.
I now officially think that you're batshit fucking crazy, and just forgot to take your meds. I've said it before, I'll say it again - it's nice to know that the opposition to global warming seems to to be comprised almost entirely of paid whores or nutbags off their meds.
Re:Give me a break... (Score:5, Interesting)
You do *not* get to have the last word. Everyone here is mostly trying to have a civil discussion with you. But so far, all you've done is insult and intimidate your critics. You say I don't provide any references or resources. I need to cite only one:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/57
Oreskes has sampled almost a thousand seperate scholastic studies across multiple disciplines. and there was *NO* direct dissent. This is a far cry from the "gobal warming hoax" you claim. These researchers are serious scientists. They only responsibility they have is to their own designated area of research.
What have you done? Aside from providing a link to that god-awful documentary and a reference to "the global carbon cycle" at the Umich website cited by one of your critics, you have produced absolutely squat. I have gone through all your comments and as of 2 PM PDT, everything you've expressed so far in reply to those in this discussion thread has been a whole bunch of hand waving, groundless assertions, or evasive facts. You're quick to dismiss the references provided by others but other than just those two citations, I can't find any other sources despite your repeated assertion that you have indeed provided references. In reply to my earier comment, you mention:
ice record
CO2 sedimentation
weather balloons
atmospheric temperature gradient
oceanic outgassing measurements
the CO2/temperature correlation
(basic common sense)
saying doesn't make it so. where is the reference to back up your position? Where are the figures and charts from studies that use these methods to disagree with the conclusions of our current understanding of global warming? I think your engaged in this exchange just for the sake of arguing without any genuine intention to enlighten or be enlightened. Some of what you say just makes absolutely no sense. "realistic data that predates animal life"????? "wholesale rape of baby seals."??????
In light of such bizarre comments, I am left with no alternative but to urge you to stop bothering the nice folks at slashdot and don't skip out on your medications.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:4, Insightful)
Flat-earthers can prove themselves wrong with 2 sextants and a friend, or by using "American Practical Navigator" by Bowditch, among many other possibilities. Things easily accessible to anybody with a calculator and a library or a marine hardware store. Flat-earthers are exceedingly rare and inexcusably stupid. Although maybe not rare enough.
Creationists . . . I don't even know where to start. Creationism is more reasonable than Flat-earth theory, but not much. The only real defense there is it is hard to make your own experiments to test evolution. You could see how you are a combination of your parents and extrapolate from there. I suppose you could take a weak antibiotic once a month until you develop some resistant bacteria or something, but that is a whole different variety of bad idea.
How is any individual supposed to measure global climate change? Assuming they don't have access to a world-wide network of observatories and whatnot. Last I checked, most people don't. Factor in things like urban heat island effect and local weather variations, and things become even more difficult for the amateur scientist. Add in that the sea level is changing both at a slow enough rate that people don't personally notice it (maybe in places with extremely small tide action?) and the fact that sea level charts matched against global temperature charts don't correlate the way you would expect (sea level has been rising at a pretty much constant rate over the last 120 years, while temperature has decreased for 10 years or more at least 4 times).
I believe that there is indeed global warming, and I suspect that people are at the very least part of the cause, but I can't personally convince myself to care about it, one way or the other.
Stop it? Meh.
Slow it down? Meh.
Reverse it? Well, that seems like a bad idea, but still; meh.
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Re:Head in the sand (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no doubts that life will adapt to global climate change, fewer corals but lots of algae and red tide in the new warm oceans.
I think maintaining the status quo of historical climates seems to have many economic benefits that should not be ignored. And major global climate change would likely shift most markets fast towards the red. The markets would be forced to adapt quickly, which they are not very good at doing without a lot of suffering by the people at the bottom. Perhaps this is the conservative in me talking. (not neo-conservative!)
Re:Head in the sand (Score:5, Insightful)
And which historical climate do you propose maintaining? The Little Ice Age [wikipedia.org]? The Medieval Warm Period [wikipedia.org]? With or without human intervention, climate is constantly changing. We need to learn to deal with it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it's not just you. Many people believe that all change must be bad because change, by definition, means things will be different. Some things will be better and some things worse, but all things will be different.
Different != Bad
That said, if I had to chose between between global warming vs
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Way to dismiss all thoughts and opinions that don't agree with you.
I think it is pretty much an agreed-upon fact that earth temperatures are rising, and I think that it is naive to think that human activity can't have an effect on climate. However, this does not mean we all have to have are eyelids glued open and be forced to watch An Inconvenient Truth until we believe the polar ice caps will melt away,
Re:Head in the sand (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm...maybe it will be better.
Michigan? Uhm, no. (Score:3, Informative)
...and Lake Michigan is 579 feet above sea level (this means that the majority of the state of Michigan is even higher in altitude). No predictions, regardless of how absurd, ever mentioned the oceans rising by that much.
And no, melting ice caps will not make the Great Lakes flood. If anything, global warming is more likely to make them continue shrinking in size.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:5, Insightful)
And, speaking of Katrina, some scientists studying global warming believe that it is responsible for the more-active-than-usual hurricane seasons of the past few years. Which makes sense since the main cause of hurricanes is -- wait for it -- heat. Who paid these shills?
Is it also responsible for last year's dead hurricane season? Really, these things are far too complicated to generalize in that manner. While I do believe global warming is anthropogenic, I don't think it serves any purpose to use half-baked, unreasearched theories to blame everything short of a supernova on global warming.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:4, Funny)
Dynamics (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, with respect to the warming is good for life argument, the Earth has most certainly been warmer, and likely more violent weather-wise. Our distinct problem is that we have virtually eliminated the possibility of more life spawning by killing its potential habitat and introducing toxic waste of various forms.
I wrote an article 15 years or so ago arguing that global warming wasn't the biggest issue, but rather that desertification and the elimination of biodiversity was. Whether we can live in a world without a functional ecology is going to be something we quickly find out. If it's warmer doesn't really matter, unless you are in a stressed area. My opinion is that a lot of people are going to perish, but as usual YMMV. As if they already are not perishing! It may simply be more permanent for many regions.
Predicting those regions is like predicting the weather!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Head in the sand (Score:4, Informative)
It was a dead hurricane season in 2006? Typhoons in Asia [wikipedia.org]
Sounds to me like you're forgetting the world is a big place, every year one part of the world has a worse season than another part. Weather is crazy, when Katrina hit during a bad year the rest of the world saw less storms. It's been happening for as long as we've been keeping records.
Despite what you seem to think the relationship between heat and the intensity of hurricanes is very well researched and documented. Just because its hot in one place one year doesn't mean that same place is going to be the hot spot the next year. Ocean currents and trade winds take quite a while to round trip the earth.
So yes, global warming contributed to the weather that we are currently enjoying, except for the fact that Florida is in drought and experiencing some mighty bad forest fires along with Georgia. Yep, no affect at all. Oh yeah, all those extremely powerful tornadoes, also not affected by increased temperatures. Climate change is violent, it always has been in the past, I have no idea why people seem to think it would be easy to deal with now.
Do we need to outlaw oil and stop all emissions? Of course not, but we need to do something about the problem at hand, the problem we can see now, projections of the future don't mean jack as we know now that the climate is changing and we're in a position to do something about it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
These guys think global warming will *drain* the lakes:
http://www.ecocenter.org/releases/20030414climate. shtml [ecocenter.org]
http://www.greatlakesdirectory.org/oh/111803_great _lakes.htm [greatlakesdirectory.org]
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2007 0407/METRO/704070370 [detnews.com]
So before you say 'shill' make sure you are dealing
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Actually Michigan and the Great Lakes will see a large increase in waterfront property because global warming makes the Great Lakes water levels decrease. When the lakes don't freeze in the winter they lose water all winter to evaporation that was normally protected by ice. There are some people suggesting this is why New Jersey and New Yor
Re:Head in the sand (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)