Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[George Wallace]

I have to agree with Bruce.  We have become very different in the ways we deal with the environment.  All the panic that the Environmentalists are trying to raise today is really for show and line their "Environmental Project" pockets.  Gone are the days when anyone could bury 45 gal drums of PCBs and walk away.  Gone are the days where pesticides and herbicides are freely distributed and applied.  Hell!  My once beautiful city is a sea of yellow every year as dandelions bloom and spread their seed.  Gone are the days where kids played in the fog of the trucks spraying for mosquito control.  Gone are the days of cars without seatbelts.  Change is happening.  If not to the speed that you consider the optimal; well tough luck.  Get off your high horse and Chive on.

 

[Kilo_302]

I'm not sure how to respond these points. Are they arguments? Are you guys just listing off things that have happened in your lifetime? That's great that folks can catch fish in a river near your house. Really, it is. And yes, now we have seatbelts and it's true, in many ways environmental regulations have improved. But unfortunately your anecdotes don't change reality that catastrophic evironmental change will happen this century, and we are already seeing those effects.

 

[Jed]

Kilo302; As my wifes granddad used to say to the stressed out neighbour who came running across the field saying the world's gonna end:  Yah, Yah, Yah, but you still have time for a cup of coffee.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

I'm sure if I had a farm on Greenland 700 years ago catastrophic evironmental change came in a different form.

I guess it serves them right for not blowing tons upon tons of CO2 gases into the air................might have saved themselves.

 

[GR66]

I'm leery of peeking out over the battlements in this debate, but what the hell, I'm a glutton for punishment...

I agree with Bruce and George that we are much better than we were even in the recent past at dealing with many of the more obvious negative impacts we have on the environment.  Many beaches (Toronto), lakes (acid rain), streams (chemical dumping) and former industrial sites (PCB's, etc.) are in vastly greater condition than when I was my kids ages.  No major industrial project goes forward without extensive environmental impact statements and public/media scrutiny.  Clearly we are getting better at many of these obvious issues.

Where (in my opinion) we fare much worse is in addressing (and even acknowledging) the less obvious, systemic effects we have on our environment.  Good, productive agricultural land is still steadily plowed under to build homes and shopping centres.  Sprawling subdivisions continue to be built at the (current) end of already congested commuter routes with little or no thought given to the relationship between where people live and where they work.  We struggle to find additional sources of energy to use rather than working to reduce the amount we currently use (or waste).  Agro business is becoming more like a manufacturing process that consumes inputs like fuel, soil nutrients and water with little thought to long-term sustainability.  We demand faster and faster improvements to all of our "things" without coherent plans on how to reuse or dispose of all the items that have become obsolete.

All these failings do have serious impacts on both our environment and our own physical/economic well being.  However these are the issues that we tend not to address because none of them are as obvious as fish floating belly up down a stream, sludge and garbage washing up on the beach, or leafless trees dying from acid rain.  These problems are also in many ways more difficult to solve because solving them would require all of us, collectively as a society, taking a long hard look at how we organize ourselves and how we lead our daily lives.

Are we "f#&$%d" as Kilo suggests?  I'm hopeful that we're not.  While I don't doubt that things will likely get worse before they get much better, I do think that we are better poised now with our general literacy, education and ability to communicate and act together than at any other time in human history.  In other ages humanity has faced dire environmental issues like soil exhaustion, desertification, deforestation (loss of fuel), etc. and while devastating we have come through to bounce back stronger than before. 

The climate will change whether we like it or not.  Our actions may speed up and amplify these effects (or who knows....possibly even slow down or mitigate them if you believe reports about long-term global cooling trends) but overall I think that a single-minded focus on reducing CO2 emissions is simply distracting us from an even more important self-examination of what our relationship should be with our natural environment.

 

[George Wallace]

......... But unfortunately your anecdotes don't change reality that catastrophic evironmental change will happen this century, and we are already seeing those effects.

Now that is something that I don't believe that you, nor anyone else, can safely predict with 100% certainty of ever happening. 

As for the real issues on the environment:  Baby steps. 

We could always stop the world and let you off.

 

[Haletown]

I'm sure if I had a farm on Greenland 700 years ago catastrophic evironmental change came in a different form.

I guess it serves them right for not blowing tons upon tons of CO2 gases into the air................might have saved themselves.

Never happened according the IPCC.  The Medieval Warm period was disappeared in the IPCC TAR.  It was there in the first and second reports but went into the Climate Witness Protection Program for the third report.

By the fourth report the IPCC had to Mann up to hide the decline so they could  play hockey.

But then they disappeared the Hockey Stick.  It is still MIA, but it is really KIA.

The soon to be released Fifth Report should be interesting reading.  They have to deal with that whole global warming pause thingy and that is much, much more difficult to disappear than the entire Medieval Warm Period.

 

[Kilo_302]

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/future.html

Pleny of info here, and a few different projections based on emissions as well. You will notice that even if we stabilize at 450ppm, we are still looking at a significant rise in average temperature over the coming century. Tell a farmer in Kansas or Texas that the effects won't be catastrophic. They already were this past summer.

In Canada, we may for the most part get off scot free. But of course that doesn't take into account the mass of climate refugees from Central American and the Southern US. Globally, we're looking at staples such as rice taking a massive hit in production all while demand is rising. Things will get ugly very quickly. I would argue that action is urgent given the fact that there is a delay between carbon levels in the atmosphere and effects on climate. We could already be past the tipping the point where positive feedback kicks in.

 

[Journeyman]

I wish you people would stop interrupting.   

I'm trying to get a complete page of "You are ignoring this user." 

 

[GAP]

I wish you people would stop interrupting.   

I'm trying to get a complete page of "You are ignoring this user." 

Just count the interuptions as .....as.....as.....damn, I'm being ignored again....

 

[Haletown]

Experts . . . What would we do without them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztz3ZdPbdKo

Missed it by that much!

Or about 6,000,000 km2.

 

[Haletown]

Kansas, where some people, believe the crops are suffering

"BALDWIN CITY, Kan. — In 70-plus years of working the earth, Max Moore can hardly remember a wheat crop this rich.

“We were so busy this last month” during the harvest, he said, “we couldn’t look sideways.”


Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2013/07/12/2885910/finally-kansas-wheat-is-a-cash.html#storylink=cpy"

 

[Haletown]

And of course the experts have told us that forest fires would be much worse because of global warming.

http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm


Missed it by that much.

 

[ModlrMike]

My  :2c: on the "scientific consensus"

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Attention is drawn to Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

 

[Haletown]

And more experts, basing their conclusions on consensus, agreed  global warming would cause more and bigger hurricanes.

Despite Al Gore  inventing a new Category 6 for hurricanes, their prediction missed it by that much.

 

[George Wallace]

Recent reports say that the Arctic is seeing a 60% increase in ice this year.  Also reports that 17 yachts attempting the NW Passage are now trapped in ice.

http://edmondsbeacon.villagesoup.com/p/arctic-summers-ice-free-by-2013/1051280

 

[Haletown]

And the experts told us, no doubt because they all agreed with each other and therefore had a consensus, that tornadoes would get bigger and more frequent.


Missed it by that much.

 

[Haletown]

And the experts told us, no doubt because they all agreed with each other and therefore had a consensus, that as CO2 increased, temperatures would skyrocket.



Missed it by that much.

 

[Kilo_302]

Kansas, where some people, believe the crops are suffering

"BALDWIN CITY, Kan. — In 70-plus years of working the earth, Max Moore can hardly remember a wheat crop this rich.

“We were so busy this last month” during the harvest, he said, “we couldn’t look sideways.”


Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2013/07/12/2885910/finally-kansas-wheat-is-a-cash.html#storylink=cpy"

You can't be serious. The last two summers saw record drought in Texas and Kansas. Just because some areas had bumper crops does not mean there is  not a problem. You clearly don't understand how climate change, or even the climate works. Changes will mean life has to adapt, and that is not an easy thing. Some areas will see more rain, and some will see less. Kansas and Texas have seen far less. I could post a thousand stories about the drought in the Mid West for every one that you could find about a bumper crop.

From that Commie-climate-change-cheering rag, The Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20130905-708229.html

Recent reports say that the Arctic is seeing a 60% increase in ice this year.  Also reports that 17 yachts attempting the NW Passage are now trapped in ice.

http://edmondsbeacon.villagesoup.com/p/arctic-summers-ice-free-by-2013/1051280

George we covered the ice issue a dozen posts ago. Yes there is more ice this year as we had a cooler summer. But the overall trend is clearly negative. I posted several graphs illustrating both facts.  Also, "Edmond's Beacon" as a source? Right...

And to you AND Haletown, I also posted a link that rebuts ALL of your above arguments. Here it is again:

http://grist.org/series/skeptics/

As you can see, pretty much every argument commonly made by climate change skeptics is thoroughly debunked with impeccable sources. All of the examples you both have just posted are either a) anecdotal, or b) data that does not go far back enough to illustrate the overall trend
c) or the data is just plain skewed out of all context

My  :2c: on the "scientific consensus"

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Attention is drawn to Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

Several points:

1. that paper is examining medical science, not climate science (there is a difference)

and it has been debunked itself. See below from the Wiki on the author (yes the original paper by Goodman and Greenland is cited):

"Statisticians Goodman and Greenland agreed that "many medical research findings are less definitive than readers suspect" but found major flaws in Ioannidis's methods, noting that Ioannidis (who did not collaborate with any statisticians on the article) appeared to have confused alpha level with p value and also built the assumption that most findings are likely to be false into his reasoning, thereby making his logic circular. Therefore Goodman and Greenland rejected Ioannidis' claim as unsupportable by the methods used."

2. Climate science is multidisciplinary. We are seeing data from geologists, biologists, atmospheric specialists, etc all lining up, and often independently from one another. I'll repeat.  These teams are NOT competing for the same breakthrough, which Corollary 6 is clearly referring to.

 

[Haletown]

Some people think if the New York Times or CBC says there wee record droughts across the USA recently then it must be true.

Other people realize journalists are for the most part clueless, challenged by numbers and prefer to re-print Greenpeace Fund Raising propaganda and pass it off as news.

Other people, who know what the PMDI is, actually go and check the data.