Climate Change and Global WarmingFollow

OMG DUDE do you mean that the Arctic will melt and the penguins will have no where to live !!!11!!!1

Will we be living in waterworld like that movie with Kevin Costner? He had gills man, GILLS. What are we doing to ourselves !!!11!!! Soon fish men will be saying that all our bases belong to them. Facking mer-men.

Bush is the Suuxxor and in league with the fish men.


But no really though, global warming will effect weather and such but i think if you were going to talk about issues that are really going to be important in the next 50 years you could bring up lack of fresh water and depeletion of oil reserves.

While the Bush administration hasnt been the most environmentally friendly by a long shot i dont think it would have been economically viable for the US to have abided by the Kyoto accord, especially when the Kyoto accord gives emerging economic super powers like China major concessions on amount of emissions.

Edited, Wed Sep 15 02:52:51 2004 by bhodisattva

How do we know the CO2 content of the atmosphere 160,000 years ago? I am seriously curious.

I talk about the US because most of you reading this are from the US, I could talk about Canada, Europe, China, all sorts of places are contributing. The problem is the most people who make decisions about these kind of things are the ones who won't do too much about it, always worring about their wallet. A huge source of methane, which is many times more potent that CO2 as a greenhouse gas comes from rice fields around the world. I'm not saying the US is the single cause of this, if I remember California has said most cars on the road by 2010, or something like that.

So, I'm only pointing things out in the US because most of you are from there, if most of you were from Spain, we could talk some about that. The thing is, this is a discussion about global warming, not a thread set up for flamers because they want to drive their big SUVs, and don't like winter. I've done my research, it looks like some of you have done yours, but most of you look like you dont know a thing.

Really?

But I thought you said...



It looks, to me, like the only opinions you're actually interested in are those that agree with you.

(PS; it's "Ignorant." Insults to intelligence work much better when spelled correctly.)

(PPS; if you're 'paraphrasing' Nat'l Geog., then it's not "their own words.")

<)B^P

And SF has a record HOT one....go figure.

But not you or I, we'll be dead. ;)

Doesn't the "ring of fire" refer to EARTHQUAKE and VOLCANO activity?

Are you asserting that global warming is causing earthquakes?

Or was it Johnny Cash music?

Uh, yeah... Doesn't sound like you did, though.

You're kidding, right?

You're not actually going to assert that any college geology professor anywhere on THIS planet teaches that petroleum lubricates plate tectonics, and that pumping that petroleum out causes earth quakes and volcanoes, are you?



Wouldn't it have been a lot smarter to say that before you 1) tried to ridicule my education, and 2) shoved your foot in your mouth to the kneecap line?



No! Really?

I thought for sure I detected a contemporary US public-school education.

A few points:

Tazok


We know what the "normal" amount of snow on Kilimanjaro is? We know what it was 500 years ago? 1000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 50,000 years ago?

If you had a huge snowstorm on monday, and started your first ever snow measurements on tuesday, and the snow started melting on wednesday, you might say that it's melting at "record rates". Doesn't at all mean that anything is wrong. We need about 1000 times more historical data before we can begin to do more then guess about whether what's going on is normal or not.

Are those the same Himalayan glaciers that the Arc of Noah is supposedly burried in? Gee. You think they were frozen then too?



That's great. Did he tell you definatively *why* it's changing? Did he determine if that's normal or not? The climate changes constantly. I'd be much more concerned if it *wasn't* changing.



Record rates according to what records? A glacier that "retreated" or melted in the past (before we were around to measure anything) clearly wont be around for us to take core samples from, right? So we can't know what the pattern of glacier movement and melting is, only the pattern of growth in those that are present today. Isn't that a pretty obvious flaw in concluding that because the ones that are present *now* are retreating that this is somehow unusual? We don't know that. You don't know that. No one knows that. Anyone who says they do has an agenda and is putting that agenda before the science.


Bluie


Sure. There are several flaws though.

First, we don't know for sure what the effect of "greenhouse" gasses are. You know where the term comes from, right? It's not set in stone. There is a theory of global warming and cooling cycles. This theory includes the possiblity that high levels of certain gasses in the atmosphere will cause the suns radiation to pass inward, but then reflect back to the earth instead of bouncing out into space again, causing a "greenhouse effect" which could result in global warming.

The problem is that no one knows for sure if this actually happens. No one's positive if there aren't other reactions to those gasses that mitigate the effect, or even if the effect occurs in the first place.

We also have *zero* provable relation between the increase of some of those "greenhouse gasses" and a trend of warming over time.

It's a self fullfilling argument. If you believe that greenhouse gasses are what cause global warming, then you can look at an increase in Carbon Dioxide in the air and look at signs of warming, and conclude that the CO2 is causing it.


Let me give you an analogy: You believe that people who are left handed are inherently biased towards evil. You find a town with a high rate of crime. In that town, you also find a higher then normal rate of left handed people. You then conclude that it's becuase of all the left handed people in the town that there is a high rate of crime.

The problem is that for all we know the left handed people have nothing to do with the crime rate. That's not to say that maybe they *aren't* more evil then other people (just as we can't say that the greenhouse effect doesn't happen). What we can't do is look at two phenomena and assume they must be causative.

The earth could be warming because we're at the part of it's natural cycle. The increase in CO2 may have absolutely nothing to do with it at all. More importantly, focusing huge amounts of effort on reducing those levels may have no impact on that warming trend either.


And that's what it's really all about. We can bandy about theories and ideas all day long. But at some point, we have to decide on a course of action. Whether you like it or not, we (that's humans as a species) gain a hell of a lot from industrialization. Is the cost we would incur from reducing that industrialization worth it? Can we guarantee that it'll prevent a long term warming trend? While many people argue that industrialization has damaged the ecology, we've also learned a hell of a lot about the earth and its climate as a result. We could duck our heads back in the sand and go back to a simple agrarian lifestyle and live comfortably in the knowledge that our actions aren't hurting the earth (not that growing crops and livestock doesn't also have an effect, but let's ignore that for the moment). Would that be "better"? Or is it possible, given the huge rate at which we are gaining knowledge today and the comparatively slow rate at which the kind of trends we're talking about occur, that we could learn enough to actually do something about it if we continue what we're doing?

Sure. There are some no-brainer kinds of things we can and should do in terms of pollution and ecological health. But there is a point at which you have to weight the costs of "damaging" the ecology to gain something. We make that choice all the time. From the first time a human chopped down a tree to make a fire, we've been doing it. It's not an either/or situation here, it's a matter of degrees. What we make and learn today from our equivalent to tree chopping, is a bit more impressive then simply warming ourselves on a cold night. It's one thing to blindly rail against modern society and what it's doing, but I think there has to be an idea of value applied to climate change.


And that's also why it's unfair to point the blame at larger industrialized nations like the US. We tend to do more "work" with less pollution and ecological damage then most of the rest of the world. It's also why the Kyoto Accords were a joke. They did not make any assessment of ecological harm in relation to value gained. It was purely about raw measurements. It didn't matter if you produced 100 times as much value per quantity of greenhouse gas emmitted. If you were above a value, you were in violation. It was poorly written and had very little long term goals and absolutely no purpose to set some kind of sane standard for how man should work with the earth. And that's why we didn't sign the stupid thing.

Well, that too. But it's also a silly accord. The US has a pretty low emissions rate in relation to production rate. It's not like we weren't one of the first nations in the world to pass environmental laws or anything. And it's not like not signing the Kyoto accords suddenly means that our industry has a free hand to pollute as they wish.

We just didn't agree with the method of measuring pollution effects that the Kyoto accords wanted to use. Since it made no comparison between production to pollution, it unfairly punished more industrious nations even though their industries were much more efficient at preventing pollution.

Global warming is kinda sexy, in a "Let's take off all our clothes because it's hot and get skin cancer because we don't have an ozone layer" way.

It would be wonderful if you'd provide a link. Their site is pretty hard to find a particular paragraph in...


Um. Nice of you to quote the one thing I already said. I know what the greenhouse effect is and how it works. That quote says exactly what I just said. The science of the process is not in question. What is in question is whether this *actually* increases temperatures worldwide, or whether there are other counterbalancing factors that we don't know about yet. The whole science is pretty new to make broad sweeping conclusions.


How about instead of quoting the bit about what the greenhouse effect is, you provide one where they say that they know that we are in a long term warming trend, and that this trend is not the result of a natural cycle, and is in fact the direct result of human actions, and is also the result of greenhouse gas emissions.


And provide a link so we can all see whether this is conclusion or opinion. Even scientists have opinions, and they rarely agree. I mention this because I have yet to see anything close to a real scientific conclusion on this issue. Lots of hypotheses abound, and those are often what's parroted about as "proof", but that's not the same as a tested and verified scientific proof of a theory. Not by a long shot.