drkohler said:
I always chuckle reading one those completely fallacious comparisons. Think about the following: a) The powerball lottery WAS WON, by apparently at least three people. So the lottery was won with 100% probability. b) Only a small fraction of the earth's population actually played the lottery. Compare that to the climate lottery, where the whole population plays.
If you are the (most likely republican party) American and think nothing about climate chance, go ask the people on all those islands (like Smith Island, for example) in the Chesapeake Bay. They have a different opinion. It's just a few steps away from Washington DC.. |
The power ball was won after the experiment was run simultaneously hundreds of millions of times. This event will only have one chance to occur(for each greenhouse level.) Please learn some basic probability before you make blanket statements. Most climatologists warn that runaway greenhouse scenarios are very, very, very unlikely to happen. They represent a very small subset of the solutions to the differential equations used in the models, and they rely on everything that can go wrong to go wrong. The last estimate I read was that we would have to burn something like ten times the fossil fuels found on Earth to have a certain chance of inducing a runaway greenhouse effect. And this was from a climatologist who was strongly concerned about the scenario. There have been periods in Earth's history with many times the greenhouse gas levels today and much higher temperatures and they never induced such a feedback loop. Often you will see the argument made that because it is a possibility we should prepare for the worst-case scenario, but imagine if we did that with every action we decide on, no matter how infinitely small the risk?
If you didn't castrate my post, you would realize that I said the places most affected will be coastal regions, with polar regions being the next (warming occurs faster at the poles.) But this could be a good thing for agriculture in places like Russia and Canada. Higher CO2 levels have also been shown to increase vegetation growth in tropical regions, stalling rainforest destruction and creating a feedback which slows CO2 in the atmosphere by encapturing it in the biosphere. The best thing people can do about CO2 levels besides reducing consumption is to plant more trees.
Side-note: Obviously I thought more about climate change than you have. It has become a great interest since I started working on statistical mechanics simulations my Junior year of undergraduate. You seem as if all your basic, surface knowledge on the topic comes from environmentalists and pundits who distort the reasoning and true concerns with regards to climate change by burying it in mistruths (the runaway greenhouse effect being a prime example.)
