Still confused about climate change...

Post Reply New Topic

I guess the next point that humanaut will make is that during the first years after the creation of the earth, the Earth was very hot. * It is much cooler now and so therefore global cooling is happening!
* “The very earliest Earth was some sort of magma ocean.”
FROM
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... InUFjHF8mM

Yes, this is correct on a geological time scale.

That would be nice, if true, but there is no indication at all that we are coming out of the present ice age.

This ice age has lasted for only a bit more than two and a half million years. If we are coming out of the ice age, then that would be the shortest known ice age by far. I think that the shortest known ice age is something like thirty to sixty million years. (I don't remember the number).

The longest ice ages are in the hundreds of millions of years. There is no reason, at present, to think that the ice age won't last for at least another one or two hundred million years.

We are currently in an interglacial warm period known as the Holocene between the last period of glaciation that lasted roughly a hundred thousand years and what will presumably be another period of glaciation that will last for many tens of thousands of years and very possibly more than a hundred thousand years.

The last interglacial warm period, the Eemian, lasted about as long as the Holocene has lasted. From what I understand, there is reason to think that the transition from the Eemian into our last glaciation was only on the order of three or four hundred years.

When the next period of glaciation begins, you can bet on two things:

1) Starvation is going to become very real for significant numbers of people on Earth as a cooler Earth is far less productive and can support far fewer people. People are going to be hungry throughout much of their lives and death by starvation is going to be common.

2) The worsening climate will make more and more land inhospitable. During the last period of glaciation, there were glaciers as much as a mile thick deep into what is now New York. Much of the UK was covered with glaciers. (For that much, Scotland is still rebounding as a result of the melting of those glaciers and "tilting" the Isles of Scily" into the ocean.) With less land to live on, there will be wars over the best land available. We may easily see world wars that dwarf anything we have encountered before.

Global Warming is nothing to be afraid of. The lack of Global Warming is something to be very afraid of.

I'm not afraid of a warming of a few degrees for the next millions of years, I'm afraid of a 10 degrees warming for the next few centuries. The rythm of change is important here.


Saying that globla warming is good because global cooling is bad is like saying a house in fire is good because ice formations in the house is bad. Global warming do bring bad things (Some which are bad for agriculture.) like desertification, drought, inondation from storms, sea rising and so on. And with the melting of Antartica glaciers accelerating the sea WILL rise.

Maybe that one day we will have to worry about glaciation, but right now the danger is warming and this is what we should worry about right now.

For some strange reason, the general population has the idea that when it warms up, it won't stop warming. The reality is that we would merely settle into another rough equilibrium.

You shouldn't forget that we have only so much carbon fuels available to release into the atmosphere.

Why do you think a warmer planet is a dryer planet? Are you aware that during the Holocene Climatic Optimum about 9,000 or so years ago when it was about 5 F warmer than today, the Sahara Desert was green, the Gobi Desert was a forest, and northern Mexico was not nearly as dry as today?

The reality is that some places will get more rain and some less. Global Warming isn't going to turn this into a desert planet.

I'm sure that research into the matters will continue. If we do find real reasons why Global Warming would be an actual disaster and we can show that the cause really is carbon emissions, then there will be opportunity to reduce our carbon emissions.

What amazes me is that so many who are in a panic about Global Warming are against the building of more nuclear power plants which would produce electricity without carbon emissions. Instead they go on and on about things like solar cells and windmills and electric cars which won't solve the problem at all. Supposedly, the carbon emissions involved in producing solar cells are as much or more than what would be released from a normal power plant to produce the same amount of power for the lifetime of the solar cell. The batteries for electric cars are pretty much equally bad.

The reality is that what we do know about a warmer Earth is that it is capable of supporting more life. There will be some problems, but we should be able to adapt to those problems. Worrying about a foot or two of sea level rise per century is ridiculous.

Bring on Global Warming.

I think you are either purposely taking me out of context or are confused.
My point is that it is a stupid argument to say that because the earth was a sea of molten magma soon after its creation, it is colder now ( compared to molten lava) therefore there is no current global warming.
Are you claiming that that is a valid argument???

UMMM, so you like Droughts and Fires?
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/sc ... IsnaDHF8mN
Blizzards, floods?
“The atmosphere's water-holding capacity increases by about 4 percent for every 1° Fahrenheit (0.6° Celsius) rise in temperature. This effect is similar to the difference between a warm bathroom and a cold bathroom: the mirror fogs up more when the air is warmer.
Extreme precipitation is likely when a storm passes through a warmer atmosphere holding more water. In warmer months, it takes the form of torrential rainstorms; in winter,blizzards are more likely.”

No.

Some places will be drier. Some will be wetter. That is going to happen with any change in climate.

All things considered, I'll take more precipitation any day.

While technically true, this ignores the fact that releasing all of the stored carbon on the planet into gas would make most of the planet virtually unlivable for humans.[/quote]

Unfortunately, more of that rain will come in monsoon-like downpours that destabilize soils and infrastructure.

The carbon cycle is decades long. Carbon that is produced now will take years and years to get out of the system; it's not like we can just stop producing carbon, and the effects of global warming will halt. There's a lot of warming that is already baked into the system even if we were to stop all emissions tomorrow.


Fukushima
If anyone could build safe nuclear reactors, one would think that it would have been the Japanese. Now a significant chunk of their country is going to be uninhabitable for a decade.
That said, I myself am cautiously in favor of more nuclear reactors, for this very reason, but I sure as hell don't want some out-of-state private power company cutting corners to earn a few extra bucks.

That hasn't been true for about a decade. Modern solar panels are increasingly efficient, increasingly long-lived, and increasingly cheap to make.

More life, possibly; more diverse life, no. Diversity = resilience in an ecological sense. As far as sea level rise, go talk to the people in Bangladesh, New Orleans, Cairo, San Francisco, New York, southern Florida, or a thousand other places in the world where people live (as most of the human population does) on the coastlines.

They'll tell you there has been no noticeable change whatsoever.

Fukushima just proves the need for regulation compliance being more strongly enforced. Let's just start giving corporate executives who cut corners on regulation harsher sentences, and it'll be fine.

Okay, I live near a coastal area (used to live ON the coast, specifically a marshy area) and what has been turning into a subtropical climate and I can tell you that we do notice. We notice a lot.

The hardiness zones are changing rapidly:

http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm

Louisiana's coastline is disappearing:

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/louisianas-disappearing-coastline-threatens-entire-us-economy

You see, a slow rise like the one that has been predicted doesn't sound like very much at one time, but one small increase can affect A LOT OF LAND:

http://maps.risingsea.net/North_Carolina.html

Besides that, swampy areas could very well end up getting swampier.

Don't believe everything you read in sci-fi magazines.

Fukushima proved that "no deaths followed short term radiation exposure," and that "very few cancers would be expected as a result of accumulated radiation exposures," while "15,884 died due to the earthquake and tsunami," according to Wikipedia.

There's no need to speak in hypotheticals.

Yes, Greens have stupid ideas about how to deal with climate change. Fortunately they're quite a small minority. Though on the up side, their policies would be better than those proposed by the denialists.

No, actually, they won't.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/world ... wanted=all
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/0 ... I47Q75j78s
http://www.irinnews.org/report/86472/eg ... lta-region
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ng-farming
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/us/south- ... new-state/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world ... .html?_r=0
http://www.corpsclimate.us/sandy/
http://www.newsweek.com/pentagon-report ... ter-277155
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/04/world/asi ... an-danger/

etc.

Fukushima proved no such thing. Cancers can take upwards of 10 years to show themselves, and Fukushima is hardly the only nuclear disaster we have to examine death rates from.

What Fukushima proved (again), was that it is difficult to engineer for every possible occurrence and that the danger of f*****g up with a nuclear reactor are quite high. As I noted before, a significant chunk of a country that does *not* have an excess of land to begin with, is now uninhabitable. In that sense, a disaster here in the US would be less traumatic.