Climate Change - Is it too late to avert disaster?

[kyser_soze]

wire will be inshort supply after it has to be beaten out by hand with ahmmers. As will be the refined chemicals needed for your claymore and bullets. The good old spear will still have the last laugh.

I see your spear and raise you a punji trap (using localised materials)

PLUS - I'd use a natural substitute for wire...

 

[spacemonkey]

The problem i have with climate sceptics is that I don't hear them saying that looking after the planet in a better fashion is a good thing to do, regardless of the fact they believe the science is wrong. It's almost as if they WANT to carry on polluting and destroying....

In my experience 'climate sceptics' generally don't have a very good grasp of science. I've never met anyone with a BSc, MSc or PhD in Earth Science, Climatology, Biology, Chemistry etc... who denies it.

It's always fuelled by a distrust of the government, or some sort of conspiracy. Try bringing up any number of other associated environmental disasters such as biodiversity loss or ocean acidification and you get blank stares.

 

[david dissadent]

In my experience 'climate sceptics' generally don't have a very good grasp of science. I've never met anyone with a BSc, MSc or PhD in Earth Science, Climatology, Biology, Chemistry etc... who denies it.

Actualy geologists tend to have a large number of skeptics amoung them. I certainly know of one very experianced field petrolium geologist whos scepticism is founded on his knowledge of past climate, but he does tend to fall down when trying to explain away current trends and falls on the old gruesome twosome of Anthony Watts and McKitrick. Certainly the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been much higher in the past, especialy during periods such as the Devonian and carboniferous, but on the other hand the sun was weaker as well.

Also meteorologists have a bit of a streak of skepticism in them. They tend to be a bit on the disbelief models can work at those time frames. IIRC its a 66/33 split in favour of AGW (or their abouts) but still a siginficant body of doubters.

 

[Random]

I see your spear and raise you a punji trap (using localised materials)

PLUS - I'd use a natural substitute for wire...

Yeah, right, there's no natural version of wire! Punji trap sounds realistic, though, but it's not possible to really fence off a large area with that, only booby trap roads and so on.

 

[spacemonkey]

Actualy geologists tend to have a large number of skeptics amoung them. I certainly know of one very experianced field petrolium geologist whos scepticism is founded on his knowledge of past climate, but he does tend to fall down when trying to explain away current trends and falls on the old gruesome twosome of Anthony Watts and McKitrick. Certainly the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been much higher in the past, especialy during periods such as the Devonian and carboniferous, but on the other hand the sun was weaker as well.

I never met any when I studied Geology, I'm surprised to be honest.

I don't doubt the Earth can cope with much higher levels of CO2, but we've changed the composition in the blink of an eye. There are no precedents for what we're doing right now. You're right the sun was weaker, also the Earth was almost completely covered in dense vegetation in the carboniferous (I'm just taking a guess that current deforestation is going to play a huge role).

 

[kyser_soze]

there's no natural version of wire!

Cured pigs gut, or some kind of flora-based twine would be perfectly adequate. I would make a wire substitute from whatever was available to me.

Plus I could still make gunpowder, so I could still make bullets and claymores.

 

[Random]

Cured pigs gut, or some kind of flora-based twine would be perfectly adequate. I would make a wire substitute from whatever was available to me.

Plus I could still make gunpowder, so I could still make bullets and claymores.

cobblers, any pig gut or twine would sag, rot or otherwise perish after a few weeks of being laid as a trip wire across the damp english gorund.

And what are you making your gunpowder out of? Midden heap drived saltpeter? Say hello to mr missfire.

 

[david dissadent]

I never met any when I studied Geology, I'm surprised to be honest.

I don't doubt the Earth can cope with much higher levels of CO2, but we've changed the composition in the blink of an eye. There are no precedents for what we're doing right now.

Eocene thermal maximum? Permian Triassic? [/quote] also the Earth was almost completely covered in dense vegetation in the carboniferous (I'm just taking a guess that current deforestation is going to play a huge role).[/QUOTE]
The earth had significant glaciation and Im not sure there was more vegitation at the time. Just conditions condusive to coal formation.

 

[Dr Jon]

The Dark Side of Climate Change

 

[DotCommunist]

The Dark Side of Climate Change

good article. On a massively selfish note:

Lovelock guesses the rump human race will cluster around a few temperate islands in the far northern hemisphere, including his native U.K.

 

[Barking_Mad]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8138273.stm

 

[david dissadent]

I suppose you could summerise it thus.

If the denialist alarmists are right we are headed back into the Paleocene
If the more mundane denialists are right its back into the little ice age.
If the skeptics are right we are headed to a repeat of the Holocene thermal optimum
If the main stream is right then we are headed back to the Miocene.
If the main streams more alarmed projections are correct its back to the Eocene.
If the far end of the mainstream is correct then its the Eocene thermal optimum
And Lovelock, well then its the Permian Triassic extinction event........

 

[spacemonkey]

good article. On a massively selfish note:

I wonder what year we will close our borders to environmental refugees?

 

[sonny61]

Has this guy got it all wrong?

''It was hailed as a breathtaking scientific discovery: two ancient skulls of an apparently primitive hominid, an ancestor of man. Dubbed "Piltdown man," (Eoanthropus dawsoni) it was unearthed in Britain in 1912 by Charles Dawson.

Here, excited scientists declared, was the long sought "missing link" part human, part ape, a primitive Brit sporting the noble brow of Homo sapiens and an ape's primitive jaw.

Here at last was proof that we are Bongo's evolutionary descendants. Science was agog. Sounding like Al Gore, gullible scientists assured the world that the science was settled. Darwinian evolutionary theory was a proven fact.

It wasn't.
It took 41 years for the truth to emerge — Piltdown man was a scam. In 1953, the roof fell in: Piltdown man was not our ancestor; nor was it a case of mistaken identity. It was, as Richard Harter wrote in "The Bogus Bones Caper," a case of outright deliberate fraud.

We’d been had.

I thought of this old scam when I read this morning of a document being peddled by the Obama administration and touted by global warming alarmists. We are, this panic-ridden report produced by a bevy of 30 scientists on the payrolls of 13 Obama administration government agencies responsible for dealing with the effects of alleged climate change, facing unimaginable horrors as a result of global warming.

These climate hucksters pull no punches, providing what Suzanne Goldenberg of Britain's Guardian newspaper describes as " the most detailed picture to date of the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels and extreme weather events: floods in lower Manhattan; a quadrupling of heat waves deaths in Chicago; withering on the vineyards of California; the disappearance of wildflowers from the slopes of the Rockies; and the extinction of Alaska's wild polar bears in the next 75 years."

<editor: vast reams of cut and paste removed>

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Long, messy barely readable C&P that seems to be based on a logic fallacy.

Nice ...

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Oh wait ... 'the authoritative iceagenow.com' ... please excuse me while I laugh a bit. Authoritative to whom? Lyndon Larouche? David Bellamy? Oh dear oh dear.

 

[sonny61]

Is it correct the Earth's temperature has not risen for a decade?

''The year's average global temperature was the 9th or 10th warmest since reliable record-keeping began in 1850, and the coldest since the turn of the 21st century, according to separate surveys by the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization, NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and the U.S. National Climatic Data Center. Each used slightly different methods to rank 2008 based on world-wide land and sea-surface temperatures through November.''
(Source, The Wall Street Journal Jan 2009.)

So is this an indication that global warming, whatever it causes, is now over, or coming to an end?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Is it correct the Earth's temperature has not risen for a decade?

''The year's average global temperature was the 9th or 10th warmest since reliable record-keeping began in 1850, and the coldest since the turn of the 21st century, according to separate surveys by the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization, NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and the U.S. National Climatic Data Center. Each used slightly different methods to rank 2008 based on world-wide land and sea-surface temperatures through November.''
(Source, The Wall Street Journal Jan 2009.)

So is this an indication that global warming, whatever it causes, is now over, or coming to an end?

I'm a bit puzzled as to how someone could claim that the Earth's temperature 'hasn't risen for a decade' (well actually I'm not, some people are paid to say stuff like that knowing that it's not true and then other people repeat it)

It's been up and down year on year and last year was the coolest for a while, but the overall 5yr average is still clearly trending upwards. Even though 2008 was cool relative to the decade, it was hotter than all but one year of the 20th century. Or to put it another way, the last decade is the hottest since we started keeping proper records. Here's a graph of the three main global temperature studies showing the trend and (in fainter colours) various model predictions.

source

 

[Bernie Gunther]

As to the contention that surface temperature figures show that climate change is 'coming to an end' here are the longer-term figures showing the trend ...

source

... doesn't look like it to me.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Please do not post big unattributed C&Ps.

 

[Signal 11]

Is it correct the Earth's temperature has not risen for a decade?

No.

''The year's (i.e. 2008) average global temperature was the 9th or 10th warmest since reliable record-keeping began in 1850, and the coldest since the turn of the 21st century

So is this an indication that global warming, whatever it causes, is now over, or coming to an end?

No, it's an indication that the coldest year of this decade was warmer than all but 2 or 3 of the years of the 20th century.

It's also very well known why it was the coldest year of this decade. You could even find out why for yourself if you could be bothered to do some research instead of spamming this thread with bullshit you've found on some wingnut site.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Just to say sorry for being an absentee thread starter, but it is a damned informative discussion. Long may it continue

 

[sonny61]

It is not disputed that the Earth over the last 30 years or so did warm up.
But, the Earth has always had a changing climate, it was only 12,000 years ago this Island was covered in ice.

In the last thousand years the Earth has had cold periods and hot periods.
I won't bother putting another chart up, but if you go and Google your see the changing temperatures of the Earth over time.

If you look up in the sky your see a very bright orange object called the Sun, now something tells me that object could well be responsible for the Earth's never ending changing temperatures.

NASA says our sun is experiencing very mild solar activity, and to expect cooler temperatures.

 

[david dissadent]

If you look up in the sky your see a very bright orange object called the Sun,

If your seeing an orange sun, you may want to take off your rose tinted spectacles and see the yellow one the rest of us see.

 

[spacemonkey]

It is not disputed that the Earth over the last 30 years or so did warm up.
But, the Earth has always had a changing climate, it was only 12,000 years ago this Island was covered in ice.

In the last thousand years the Earth has had cold periods and hot periods.
I won't bother putting another chart up, but if you go and Google your see the changing temperatures of the Earth over time.

If you look up in the sky your see a very bright orange object called the Sun, now something tells me that object could well be responsible for the Earth's never ending changing temperatures.

NASA says our sun is experiencing very mild solar activity, and to expect cooler temperatures.

Stunning insight, have you ever thought about submitting a paper to the International Journal of Climatology?

 

[Signal 11]

If you look up in the sky your see a very bright orange object called the Sun, now something tells me that object could well be responsible for the Earth's never ending changing temperatures.

I wonder whether anyone thought to measure its output.
Oh yes, they do measure it. And it isn't responsible for the recent global warming.

NASA says our sun is experiencing very mild solar activity, and to expect cooler temperatures.

The solar cycle has a very small effect on global average temperature. And it's a cycle, so it cannot cause a long term trend. And we are just coming out of solar minimum. And NASA does not say to expect cooler temperatures.

Now, before posting any more ignorant shite, why don't you go and learn something about the subject.

This thread is for discussing what can be done about the problem, not for fuckwits like you to deny that the problem exists.

 

[Signal 11]

If your seeing an orange sun, you may want to take off your rose tinted spectacles and see the yellow one the rest of us see.

 

[david dissadent]

On a more serious note we do study the sun very very closely both with direct measurements and with proxies such as isotopes in ice cores. The sun has an 11 year cycle where it has minor fluxuations in luminosity. IIRC these fluxuations are in the order of less than 3wm^2 from peak to trough, out of c. 1388 wm^2 average insolation for the earth at the equater (figures of the top of my head so may be wrong). There is no real evidence of a consistant change in luminosity over the past 50 years to attribute the heating we have been experiancing over the past 150 years. In fact as has been mentioned before the amount of insolation at the 60N parallel has been steadily falling for many hundreds of years and this is almost always an indicator for a falling temperature (increasing the summer snow pack increases albedo). Something is overcoming this effect.

 

[sonny61]

Have NASA sicentists got it wrong with their prediction of a cooler Earth for about thirty years because of the Sun experiencing very mild solar activity?

Will the Global warming Taliban believers, have to use more fake photos such as the Polar bears stranded on a ice floe(used by Al Gore), to highlight Global warming?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Have NASA sicentists got it wrong with their prediction of a cooler Earth for about thirty years because of the Sun experiencing very mild solar activity? <snip>

Do you have a reference for this claim?