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So the Earth is obviously getting warmer, but most people ignore the question of whether humans are entirely to blame or if the larger factor is a natural clima

So the Earth is obviously getting warmer, but most people ignore the question of whether humans are entirely to blame or if the larger factor is a natural climate cycle. Certainly when the Bering Land Bridge melted (near the end of the Ice Age), no one was blaming that on carbon emissions. Is all the environmental hoopla really going to make a difference?

biohacker42 18y ago
Unfortunately I think it won't make any difference. High oil prices do make a difference. But I don't think anyone has a serious plan. For the greenies conservation is the answers to everything, but ultimately that is a ludyte pipe dream. I don't see any countries with a serious plan to ramp up nuclear power to a level that will replace hydro-carbons. And I think that is the only real alternative.
- dhbradshaw 18y ago
  People are acting. They just need time, support, and possibly imitation. 1. Cheap solar power: http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3 http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3. 2. Moving the entire nation of Israel from gas to electric: http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/ http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/. Efficient power storage seems like the only missing link. But what we have now is already enough to move forward.
ajross 18y ago
Stop. There is no meaningful argument: the current, epochally high rate of CO2 release is driving current climate change. Yes, the climate changes on its own. Sometimes it does this "rapidly". But there is no known mechanism in place to produce anything like what we are seeing. Conversely, CO2 greenhouse effects have been qualitatively understood (even it quantitatively modelling it is a bitch) for many decades. I'm not sure which "most people" you think are ignoring the argument, but I assure you it doesn't include climate scientists. It's just that it doesn't make any scientific sense. We know with certainty that fuel burning is producing a rapid spike in CO2 levels. We know with certainty that CO2 is an effective greenhouse gas. We know to within reasonable error bars that the climate is changing rapidly. Do the math. Occam's razor demands that we look at CO2 as the undeniably best hypothesis. No one has a better one. And the land bridge didn't melt, because it's made of land, and land doesn't melt. :) What happened is that the sea levels rose due to melting glaciers on the continents and flooded it. It's still there, it's just a shallow sea instead of a connecting lowland between asia and alaska.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  The most important question to me is this: what can we realistically do about it? Specifically, will major efforts on the part of the "first world" make a difference when we consider say China, which is rapidly ramping up to modern consumption levels without the commensurate environmental controls?
  - ajross 18y ago
    We can reduce consumption where we can, and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies. I'm less pessimistic than you are about China's ability to regulate itself, but even if you accept that China (or whoever) is going to continue burning coal as if there were no tomorrow, that's not an excuse for making things worse. And in the worst case where we simply can't stop burning, there are at least ideas out there about how to reduce atmospheric CO2 directly. Planting trees in the tropics is one, burying biomass is another. There are even some borderline-scary notions about seeding blooms in the ocean with iron. But it all starts with a recognition that action is required. Get off your butts, basically.
    - Prrometheus 18y ago
      >and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies What if the policies on the table are feel-good policies meant to show that they are "doing something", but the costs of those policies are higher than any likely benefit? That is a good description of what I feel about the current state of Global Warming "solutions".
  - wallflower 18y ago
    China is well on their way to becoming an American-like consumer and polluter. I'm not sure what we can realistically do about it since modern lifestyle is correlated with energy use (e.g. climate-controller rooms a.k.a. AC) "The best way to understand Beijing's size is to visualize what Manhattan might be like without the Hudson and East Rivers. Beijing just keeps going. Manhattan is almost 23 square miles. Beijing is more than 150!... Given the size, you can probably imagine the traffic. It's like Los Angeles without interstates, at rush hour, in the rain. It's impossible to get anywhere quickly. I was warned before my trip that traffic would be worse than anything I'd ever seen, and it was. One evening, it took our crew nearly two hours to go about eight miles... Had the Olympics been held last August, the air quality in Beijing would have been in violation of the World Health Organization standard every single day..." http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=3453777 http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=3453777
jsmcgd 18y ago
environmental hoopla. I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude.
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  150,000 people die every day. Check www.breathingearth.net and watch the counts of births/deaths, how quickly they move. Watch the deaths. Try to imagine each one as a real human being with a funeral, mourners, leaving a gap in other's lives. It's hard - impossible? 100,000 people is a _lot_ of people. That's not considering all the suffering that happens before many of those deaths from illness, disease, accident, war, muggings and assaults... I don't think people could stay sane if we couldn't be dismissive (or perhaps, accepting) of mass suffering.
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  >I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude. Environmentalists have been screaming "we're all going to die!" every 5 years for the last 40. Check out the first chapter of Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Many of the still well-respected names in environmental policy have been drastically, self-servingly disingenuous in the past in order to push a radical environmental agenda that frankly was not backed up by evidence. Anyone who does not carefully filter the hoopla from the fact is blind to history. Excuse me if I don't jump every time an environmentalist screams "dance!"
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    This is the first time yet that their screams were backed up by large scale consensus in the scientific community. You can't let previous ones that weren't (like global cooling, which was more of a sensation in the media than it ever was among environmentalists or scientists) ruin your outlook on real potential threats.
    - Prrometheus 18y ago
      Global Cooling is only one such dire prediction. "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring." Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: "It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence." Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically. Lomborg notes, "As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world." Lomborg's book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased." http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html
mdemare 18y ago
Regardless of what caused global warming, regardless of whether global warming is actually occurring, it is in our best interests to keep the climate stable, much more stable than it has been in the past. The big question is: can we do that (and at what cost)?
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  >The big question is: can we do that (and at what cost)? The problem is that the cost is likely to be very, very high especially since we as a species have only recently pulled ourselves out of mass-poverty. Even now, half the globe resides in poverty. Is it worth it to spend a significant portion of our newfound wealth on climate stabilization when half the world is still poor and the prospect for near-term economic growth is bright? I don't think so unless the climate problem is much, much more pressing than most scientists think it is.
geebee 18y ago
I don't dismiss science, and when the vast majority of climate scientists are deeply concerned, I'm deeply concerned. But I'm actually a bit confused about this as well. When I was in France, I visited a town called aigues-mortes, where walls that had once been used to keep the mediterranean at bay were now miles inland. England was once so warm that vineyards were common in the south. So please don't take this as a denial of disaster... I admit ignorance here. But hasn't the earth been much warmer while humans were around? Is humanity actually threatened, or is it that our modern civilization has gotten so hard-wired to our climate that we can't deal with change? For instance, suppose we were going through a period of warming that was natural, rather than human induced - would we still be looking for ways to reverse it? Or is it that the change is on such an epic and sudden scale that the temperatures of the past 20,000 years will all seem temperate after what the current round of global warming will induce?
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  >But hasn't the earth been much warmer while humans were around? Is humanity actually threatened, or is it that our modern civilization has gotten so hard-wired to our climate that we can't deal with change? I think the answer is that many greenies are ideologically opposed to any human alteration of the environment whatsoever. So, rather than calmly weigh the costs and benefits of current policy, they try to instill as much fear in the general populace as possible to get their way.
  - geebee 18y ago
    Sure, FUD campaigns are pretty common from every political movement. So are accusations of spreading FUD. You pretty much have to tune it all out and look at the science.
    - Prrometheus 18y ago
      I think those are some interesting questions you raised, and I also don't think they have been given the attention they deserve. I suspect this is because those who are capable of considering whether or not human society can adapt to Climate Change don't WANT to ask those questions. They don't want to find out that humanity can adapt to any likely changes, which is a possible outcome of their studies.

biohacker42 18y ago

Unfortunately I think it won't make any difference. High oil prices do make a difference. But I don't think anyone has a serious plan. For the greenies conservation is the answers to everything, but ultimately that is a ludyte pipe dream. I don't see any countries with a serious plan to ramp up nuclear power to a level that will replace hydro-carbons. And I think that is the only real alternative.

dhbradshaw 18y ago
People are acting. They just need time, support, and possibly imitation. 1. Cheap solar power: http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3 http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3. 2. Moving the entire nation of Israel from gas to electric: http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/ http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/. Efficient power storage seems like the only missing link. But what we have now is already enough to move forward.

ajross 18y ago

Stop. There is no meaningful argument: the current, epochally high rate of CO2 release is driving current climate change. Yes, the climate changes on its own. Sometimes it does this "rapidly". But there is no known mechanism in place to produce anything like what we are seeing. Conversely, CO2 greenhouse effects have been qualitatively understood (even it quantitatively modelling it is a bitch) for many decades. I'm not sure which "most people" you think are ignoring the argument, but I assure you it doesn't include climate scientists. It's just that it doesn't make any scientific sense. We know with certainty that fuel burning is producing a rapid spike in CO2 levels. We know with certainty that CO2 is an effective greenhouse gas. We know to within reasonable error bars that the climate is changing rapidly. Do the math. Occam's razor demands that we look at CO2 as the undeniably best hypothesis. No one has a better one. And the land bridge didn't melt, because it's made of land, and land doesn't melt. :) What happened is that the sea levels rose due to melting glaciers on the continents and flooded it. It's still there, it's just a shallow sea instead of a connecting lowland between asia and alaska.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
The most important question to me is this: what can we realistically do about it? Specifically, will major efforts on the part of the "first world" make a difference when we consider say China, which is rapidly ramping up to modern consumption levels without the commensurate environmental controls?
- ajross 18y ago
  We can reduce consumption where we can, and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies. I'm less pessimistic than you are about China's ability to regulate itself, but even if you accept that China (or whoever) is going to continue burning coal as if there were no tomorrow, that's not an excuse for making things worse. And in the worst case where we simply can't stop burning, there are at least ideas out there about how to reduce atmospheric CO2 directly. Planting trees in the tropics is one, burying biomass is another. There are even some borderline-scary notions about seeding blooms in the ocean with iron. But it all starts with a recognition that action is required. Get off your butts, basically.
  - Prrometheus 18y ago
    >and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies What if the policies on the table are feel-good policies meant to show that they are "doing something", but the costs of those policies are higher than any likely benefit? That is a good description of what I feel about the current state of Global Warming "solutions".
- wallflower 18y ago
  China is well on their way to becoming an American-like consumer and polluter. I'm not sure what we can realistically do about it since modern lifestyle is correlated with energy use (e.g. climate-controller rooms a.k.a. AC) "The best way to understand Beijing's size is to visualize what Manhattan might be like without the Hudson and East Rivers. Beijing just keeps going. Manhattan is almost 23 square miles. Beijing is more than 150!... Given the size, you can probably imagine the traffic. It's like Los Angeles without interstates, at rush hour, in the rain. It's impossible to get anywhere quickly. I was warned before my trip that traffic would be worse than anything I'd ever seen, and it was. One evening, it took our crew nearly two hours to go about eight miles... Had the Olympics been held last August, the air quality in Beijing would have been in violation of the World Health Organization standard every single day..." http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=3453777 http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=3453777

jsmcgd 18y ago

environmental hoopla. I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude.

jodrellblank 18y ago
150,000 people die every day. Check www.breathingearth.net and watch the counts of births/deaths, how quickly they move. Watch the deaths. Try to imagine each one as a real human being with a funeral, mourners, leaving a gap in other's lives. It's hard - impossible? 100,000 people is a _lot_ of people. That's not considering all the suffering that happens before many of those deaths from illness, disease, accident, war, muggings and assaults... I don't think people could stay sane if we couldn't be dismissive (or perhaps, accepting) of mass suffering.
Prrometheus 18y ago
>I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude. Environmentalists have been screaming "we're all going to die!" every 5 years for the last 40. Check out the first chapter of Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Many of the still well-respected names in environmental policy have been drastically, self-servingly disingenuous in the past in order to push a radical environmental agenda that frankly was not backed up by evidence. Anyone who does not carefully filter the hoopla from the fact is blind to history. Excuse me if I don't jump every time an environmentalist screams "dance!"
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  This is the first time yet that their screams were backed up by large scale consensus in the scientific community. You can't let previous ones that weren't (like global cooling, which was more of a sensation in the media than it ever was among environmentalists or scientists) ruin your outlook on real potential threats.
  - Prrometheus 18y ago
    Global Cooling is only one such dire prediction. "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring." Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: "It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence." Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically. Lomborg notes, "As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world." Lomborg's book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased." http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html

mdemare 18y ago

Regardless of what caused global warming, regardless of whether global warming is actually occurring, it is in our best interests to keep the climate stable, much more stable than it has been in the past. The big question is: can we do that (and at what cost)?

Prrometheus 18y ago
>The big question is: can we do that (and at what cost)? The problem is that the cost is likely to be very, very high especially since we as a species have only recently pulled ourselves out of mass-poverty. Even now, half the globe resides in poverty. Is it worth it to spend a significant portion of our newfound wealth on climate stabilization when half the world is still poor and the prospect for near-term economic growth is bright? I don't think so unless the climate problem is much, much more pressing than most scientists think it is.

geebee 18y ago

I don't dismiss science, and when the vast majority of climate scientists are deeply concerned, I'm deeply concerned. But I'm actually a bit confused about this as well. When I was in France, I visited a town called aigues-mortes, where walls that had once been used to keep the mediterranean at bay were now miles inland. England was once so warm that vineyards were common in the south. So please don't take this as a denial of disaster... I admit ignorance here. But hasn't the earth been much warmer while humans were around? Is humanity actually threatened, or is it that our modern civilization has gotten so hard-wired to our climate that we can't deal with change? For instance, suppose we were going through a period of warming that was natural, rather than human induced - would we still be looking for ways to reverse it? Or is it that the change is on such an epic and sudden scale that the temperatures of the past 20,000 years will all seem temperate after what the current round of global warming will induce?

Prrometheus 18y ago
>But hasn't the earth been much warmer while humans were around? Is humanity actually threatened, or is it that our modern civilization has gotten so hard-wired to our climate that we can't deal with change? I think the answer is that many greenies are ideologically opposed to any human alteration of the environment whatsoever. So, rather than calmly weigh the costs and benefits of current policy, they try to instill as much fear in the general populace as possible to get their way.
- geebee 18y ago
  Sure, FUD campaigns are pretty common from every political movement. So are accusations of spreading FUD. You pretty much have to tune it all out and look at the science.
  - Prrometheus 18y ago
    I think those are some interesting questions you raised, and I also don't think they have been given the attention they deserve. I suspect this is because those who are capable of considering whether or not human society can adapt to Climate Change don't WANT to ask those questions. They don't want to find out that humanity can adapt to any likely changes, which is a possible outcome of their studies.