Gulf Stream Slowdown in Progress? 109
peacefinder writes "Researchers report that one process which drives the Gulf Stream is slowing down. As that current is part of the global oceanic heat conveyor which keeps parts of Europe and North America warmer than would be expected for their latitudes, such a slowdown might lead to abrupt climate change."
History (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, climate will change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes, climate will change... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, except for the 8,200y event, the climate has stood relatively still in the last 10 millenia. Coincidentally, the time were began to settle, started farming, mining. This whole idiotic civilisation tech-tree thing.
> if people go the way of the dinosaur, then so be it.
You may say, that I'm egoistical, but I find such a prospect in my life-time relatively disturbing.
Re:Yes, climate will change... (Score:3, Insightful)
At no point in earth's history has all life been wiped clean from it. The earth is fine; if people go the way of the dinosaur, then so be it.
You've stumbled upon the central lie of the "environmentalists movement". That is that it's all about "saving the planet". You're absolutely right, the planet is in no danger. Humanity of course, is in some danger.
As far as not caring about humanity, well you're entitled to your values. The vast majority of us don't want humanity to go away, people to suffer do to damage to our environment, etc. You'll excuse us if we get concerned about such things.
Re:Demise of the Maya (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yes, climate will change... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like a computer may randomly crash after running for a long time, but will go down far more often when a human is using it.
Problem isn't just that we may kill ourselves. The problems is we may take a large chunk of everything else with us. However, the former problem should be bad enough.
I'm guessing you don't have and/or don't want children. I don't, but I do want them. I would like to not go to my grave (and possibly theirs or their grandchildrens) knowing that it was my generation that should have seen the mess and still didn't do everything we could to fix it.
We spent full percentages of the U.S.'s GNP to get to the moon. Surely we could spend a percentage of -that- to see about trying to fix the damage we've done and are doing.
Besides, if you don't mind if we all die, why should you mind if we try to fix what we've done and clean up our mess?
Re:Yes, climate will change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kindly name them. I'd LOVE to see an official quote where PETA says that we should kill humans to make room for wolves.
Political Environmentalists hold the historically shocking assertion that preventing damage to the biosphere* is more important than human profit. If you take even the most outrageous environmentalist group large enough to be counted as a "vocal group", you can see what they're opposed to as the profit of some other humans.
Against fossil fuels? Because they damage the biosphere for human profit.
Against medical testing? Because they harm animals for human profit.
(About that word, "biosphere." While you can go ahead and look it up if you don't know what it means, it's probably fair to say that some "environmetnalists" have some odd ideas about what counts as "life" and what counts as "profit.")
Re:Yes, climate will change... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So what do we do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. The actual risk of nuclear power plants is quite small. Stack the lives lost by every single nuclear accident or byproduct storage, or even the theoretical lives lost (which is actually zero so feel free to not do that) due to working in the industry over the last 50 years against a decade or even a few years of coal.
Chernobyl was the classic case of the big nasty happening. Yet the lives lost due to it are suprisingly very small. Even factoring in the increased *risk* of developing a cancer from the fallout. Three Mile Island was, shall we say, a bit more contained. Again, perform a body count as with Chernobyl.
Now compare this to the direct and undisputed lives lost do to coal mining and use. I suspect if you took an "third party" (alien if you like) and gave them the data and an options, they'd consider the coal option insane by comparison. Most people I show the data to agree. It's usually a "WTF?!" moment. The rest simply refuse to believe we haven't had more accidents that we just don't know about, or decide to go research it on their own (yay!). They have all come back from their own research in agreeent.
Re:Anthropean eon (Score:2, Insightful)
But if we pump enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to overcome the counter-pressure built up in the poles... It could become a runaway greenhouse effect, which I believe were the words I used. In that scenario, our weather will head for a new equilibrium much like that of Venus.
By the way, a runaway greenhouse effect does not have to occur quickly. it could happen over thousands of years (or more). The telling sign will be if the earth is absorbing more energy than it is radiating back to space. If we have a sustained condition such as that, the earth is heating up and will continue to until it reaches a new balance (radiation in = radiation out).
FYI: There was recently an article on slashdot about this very condition being analyzed from space. It appears that we are there now, but we could have a few thousand years to fix the problem before our oceans are gone. If you think it is silly to talk about our oceans boiling away, please consider that water->steam is just another phase transition like ice->water, just a little further down the same road we are currently traveling.
Re:Yes, climate will change... (Score:3, Insightful)
You get a food pyramid that kills millions in an attempt to make them less fat (it actually makes them more fat!). Ask a heart surgeon - the FDA listening to early nutritional scientists directly led to the prevalence of heart attacks today.
If we make policy decisions based on early scientific projections, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot.
Personally, I believe that since our ability to effect planetwide change is currently growing exponentially, it is fairly likely that we can fix any messes we can make - any effect we can cause now will be dwarfed by the effects we could cause later. (For example if we really knew that carbon dioxide would kill us all, 50% of the world economy could be switched to fighting the "CO2 WAR," and we would remove the necessary CO2 very quickly. We have political/Financial processes in place to handle such large scale projects now.)