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Forums - Politics Discussion - Climate Change: What's your take?

OdinHades said:
About benefits from climate change: Could be, we don't know. But the science points to a different direction. A very real danger is the extinction of the gulf stream. If that sucker stops to work, europe will freeze to death. Imagine the whole european population fleeing to somewhere else in the world. For the climate to get warm enough there without the gulf stream, we would have to wait for global warming for some more centuries. By that time, living in other parts of the world would be impossible, because it's simply too hot.

Of course we don't know exactly what will happen. But we do know that our planet in its current state is a pretty damn good place for human creatures. So I say let's keep it that way for as long as possible and don't rely on things that could or could not happen. This is the only planet we have, we shouldn't fuck it up. We really really shouldn't.

Zero chance it happens. Europe is warmer than similar latitudes on the other side of the Atlantic and Siberia mainly because of the Westerlies, which depend on Earth's rotation. The Pacific coast is similarly warm, albeit restricted to a much smaller area because of the Rockies.

The last time the Gulf Stream was possibly disrupted was during the Younger Dryas event some 12,000 years ago, and it meant tundra spreading over the post-glacial, recolonizing mosaic of taiga on Scandinavia, not everything north of the Mediterranean "freezing to death".

Either way, our planet is colder than optimum. We have huge dead zones on tropical and polar deserts (after all ice caps are almost entirely devoid of life). The last time Earth was warmer, most deserts were gone, and so was the arctic ice cap on summer. Polar bears obviously survived, same as coral reefs, and just about everything else really. Of course the speed of increase might be an issue, though we just don't know yet how.

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html -> just check the historical records. Anytime Earth was colder, such as in glacial ages, it basically did a cosplay of Mars. Warmer periods were overall wetter and richer on biomass. Not defending that you should drive your SUVs and drown the planet, but hey, issues like these simply aren't clear cut. But it'simpossible to have a decent picture of net result of warming, or not, and accurately gauge the benefits and downsides... at least until we get there.

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

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http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/02/19/co2-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-seven-the-boring-numbers/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/C02-emissions-vs-Temperature-growth.html
CO2 has a logarithmicly decreasing warming effect and these three links give you different perspectives on this fact.

Authorities will lie to you for many reasons that is why you don't trust consensus and that consensus that is often trotted out is that CO2 does have a warming effect not that it is a problem.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/#2715e4857a0b5a28e28d7187

Now there is a very simple thing that you can do without having to take other peoples word for it. If someone thinks climate change is a big problem they should be for nuclear energy if they aren't they have ulterior motives.
Now I know there are downsides to nuclear energy but their are downsides to all forms of energy and nuclear energy is getting safer all the time and their is a new kind of reactor called a pebble bed reactor that makes it impossible for uranium to leak out literally from everything but sabotage.

Now if we were really serous about global warming we should be investing a lot of money into new safer nuclear reactors, recycling nuclear waste, better batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. France currently gets the majority of their energy from nuclear energy and if you are serious about global warming you need to get rid of almost all CO2 emissions and only nuclear can do that. Solar and wind are very unreliable and require a lot of land and that is problematic for wild life and you will never have enough space to meet our energy needs. Just keep in mind that we also need more energy not less so that more people can live longer and better lives.

Politicians love to lie to you the recent paris agreement does nothing http://blog.oup.com/2015/12/paris-agreement-climate-change/ http://www.cowichanvalleycitizen.com/opinion/362860251.html
Also none of the other proposed more extreme plans http://www.livescience.com/48097-climate-change-2-degrees-goal.html will do enough. Now using logic this makes me thing they are lying because we already have a technology that can drastically decrease CO2 emissions and if the problem is so great you think it would be worth the risk to put everything into new safer nuclear technology because not counting trunoble nuclear energy has caused the least deaths of any form of energy production and the fucashima power plant was an outdated design.

Just because someone has a higher education than you doesn't mean they are more trust worthy often it means they just have more to lose so always question with boldness everything and everyone because a constant in human nature is that people don't like to be told that they were wrong and many of these scientists probably had good reasons for believing what they did but latter found out reasons to doubt but continued on anyway and the longer it is that you aren't honest the harder it becomes to admit the truth latter on. Others could also have ulterior motives like wanting to be in the majority and there will always be more reasons that haven't considered.

Never blindly trust the experts an easy check on the experts is to use logic. If what they say is 100% true a great amount of risk would be acceptable to avoid the disaster and if they don't advise a realistic solution it is just hot air. That is why you should always be honest no matter if it cast doubt because the withholding of doubt causes more doubt and it just ends up hurting your cause.

Never use the argument they were paid to say that because anyone can be paid to do anything and if they are doing the right thing they should be paid it is an explanation but it means nothing by itself. There is never a good reason to silence debate if you are afraid of debate than you are afraid of logic and the truth or that they won't win out and if that is the case everyone might as well give up now,



TheLight said:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/02/19/co2-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-seven-the-boring-numbers/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/C02-emissions-vs-Temperature-growth.html
CO2 has a logarithmicly decreasing warming effect and these three links give you different perspectives on this fact.

Authorities will lie to you for many reasons that is why you don't trust consensus and that consensus that is often trotted out is that CO2 does have a warming effect not that it is a problem.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/#2715e4857a0b5a28e28d7187

Now there is a very simple thing that you can do without having to take other peoples word for it. If someone thinks climate change is a big problem they should be for nuclear energy if they aren't they have ulterior motives.
Now I know there are downsides to nuclear energy but their are downsides to all forms of energy and nuclear energy is getting safer all the time and their is a new kind of reactor called a pebble bed reactor that makes it impossible for uranium to leak out literally from everything but sabotage.

Now if we were really serous about global warming we should be investing a lot of money into new safer nuclear reactors, recycling nuclear waste, better batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. France currently gets the majority of their energy from nuclear energy and if you are serious about global warming you need to get rid of almost all CO2 emissions and only nuclear can do that. Solar and wind are very unreliable and require a lot of land and that is problematic for wild life and you will never have enough space to meet our energy needs. Just keep in mind that we also need more energy not less so that more people can live longer and better lives.

Politicians love to lie to you the recent paris agreement does nothing http://blog.oup.com/2015/12/paris-agreement-climate-change/ http://www.cowichanvalleycitizen.com/opinion/362860251.html
Also none of the other proposed more extreme plans http://www.livescience.com/48097-climate-change-2-degrees-goal.html will do enough. Now using logic this makes me thing they are lying because we already have a technology that can drastically decrease CO2 emissions and if the problem is so great you think it would be worth the risk to put everything into new safer nuclear technology because not counting trunoble nuclear energy has caused the least deaths of any form of energy production and the fucashima power plant was an outdated design.

Just because someone has a higher education than you doesn't mean they are more trust worthy often it means they just have more to lose so always question with boldness everything and everyone because a constant in human nature is that people don't like to be told that they were wrong and many of these scientists probably had good reasons for believing what they did but latter found out reasons to doubt but continued on anyway and the longer it is that you aren't honest the harder it becomes to admit the truth latter on. Others could also have ulterior motives like wanting to be in the majority and there will always be more reasons that haven't considered.

Never blindly trust the experts an easy check on the experts is to use logic. If what they say is 100% true a great amount of risk would be acceptable to avoid the disaster and if they don't advise a realistic solution it is just hot air. That is why you should always be honest no matter if it cast doubt because the withholding of doubt causes more doubt and it just ends up hurting your cause.

Never use the argument they were paid to say that because anyone can be paid to do anything and if they are doing the right thing they should be paid it is an explanation but it means nothing by itself. There is never a good reason to silence debate if you are afraid of debate than you are afraid of logic and the truth or that they won't win out and if that is the case everyone might as well give up now,

None of these links are from published science. These are blogs.

#EMBARRASSING





drkohler said:
sc94597 said:
Runaway greenhouse effect (and it ilk) are scare tactics. The probability for such models to come fruition are similar to winning the recent power-ball that was in the news for a week or so, very little.

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.)



We know the temperature for 150 years for less than 50% of the planets places.{Nobody can tell you the temp in DC when Lincoln was killed, OR the average temp of Arctic in 1952] The earth is millions of years old, and man is minimum 6000. WE or No person has any idea what 'normal, average, median, usual temp is except for a blink of an eye of the earths life. We didn't even have digital[ 76.5 degrees] thermometers 50 years ago. Heck, all the continents used to be one big land mass. They can't prove we caused any change OR that doing anything will reverse or stop or slow or defer back to 'normal'. What if the reason we got 2 degrees warmer last 25 years is that the earth orbit moved 200 yards closer to the sun, too little to measure? Or the Sun expanded by 1% and is now hotter? Or the sunburst in 18whatever year damaged the ozone that we didn't even know we had until 1965? In other words there are sooo many variables and sooo little data compared to the age of the earth that ego and Gov paying for data are the real climate that needs changing. God killed the dinosaurs so we can drive Grand Cherokees and that is the real story...



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GribbleGrunger said:
SamuelRSmith said:

 

The issue with these points is that it assumes that fighting global warming is costless. You present it as if fighting climate change and being wrong will be without cost.

The truth is that in order to switch to green energy/manufacturing, billions will suffer reduced standards of living, and millions will die. That is the reality of these proposals.

That's a fair point but I don't think it's one we can 'afford' to take into consideration. I'm coming from an objective perspective but I believe global warming is real so I can't escape the idea it could be persuading me subconsciously to view it in a particular way. It boils down to one simple fact: If we are right and nothing is done then Earth dies and human kind ends. If we are wrong then human kind continues but with less wealth and millions of people dead. When taking your point and my point into consideration it essentially boils down to 'kulling' vesus 'killing'. Given a choice between those two things I would still go with scenario one.



 

It isn't the false dichotomy you created. The likely result, even if we didn't use government action to affect change before it would occur naturally via markets, is likely much shorter than the total or great destruction of the Earth and humans (which from what I can tell is much less likely than development in undeveloped countries being slowed greatly by fossil fuel  reduction initiatives.) 



Aeolus451 said:

I'm not trying to convince you. You are simply mistaken and trying to correct you. 

My whole point is proven just with mosquitoes. They can carry West Nile Virus, Malaria, Dengue Fever, Chikungunya, Yellow Fever, and Dog Heartworm (my pets have gotten this). They thrive in warm and hot climates. They are almost impossible to avoid in tropical weather. They will spread further as the world gets warmer and be around for longer periods of time. They will spread the diseases they carry to new countries. 

No it really isn't ... 

You have yet to prove that there will be a net gain in terms of ideal regions for mosquitoes to breed and even if there are more grounds for mosquitoes to flourish however it won't amount to much if most of them are in remote locations ... 

And what's more is that you forget to factor in the human side of the equation such as pest control, vaccines, and what medical science in general has to offer ... 

It is because of our industrial complex that we're all able to get this far to explore the new golden age in terms of life quality ... 

You can't really put a price on what current technology or research funding has to offer now even if it isn't environmentally friendly, can you now ? 

Before you go writing off a negative outcome you should at least consider what that trade-off had to offer to the future ... 



I am skeptical about Climate Change mainly because of the thought-control left-wing elites who are promoting it. When I see climate scientists or scientists who work for NASA being dismissed from their jobs for questioning the science behind climate change I really start to smell a rat. Climate change is used so often to promote global socialism and the reduction of population and this just too easily fits the agenda of the elite left. I don't pretend to understand the science behind climate change, but I am highly skeptical when I see how it's being forced on people.



Luke888 said:
fatslob-:O said:
I don't deny that we have a role as far as climate change is concerned but what alarmists fail to realize are the benefits of a warmer environment like less deaths from freezing or more natural produce growing ...

 

Your argument doesn't make sense: warmer weather in colder countries is certainly apreciated but the warming happens all around the world, every year in Africa thousands of square km go under desertification, which takes the place of most of the forests that contribute to make us breath. Plus, in a world where not everyone has access to water  I'm shure that there's already more people dying because of heat than because of freezing. In the summer newspapers always report about people dying because of heat even in the most advanced countries while people dying because of freezing don't appear that often...

In first world countries it is actually winter which kills more. People have had a good job of avoiding deserts, while harsh winters happen in most first world countries (in the temperate zone.)

 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/07/30/weather-death-statistics-cold-heat/13323173/

Also the IPCC has found rising CO2 levels to have a net increase in vegetation growth, especially in the tropics. Other climatologists have also found it to be responsible for something like 14% greater agricultural output in the world's breadbaskets than if CO2 we're to remain constant. I can source these claims if you want. On my phone right now though. They are also easy to look up.



Here's the problem that many of us so-called climate change "deniers" have with those who insist that the science is "settled" and that we must do something NOW!!!(TM)... climate change is indeed real, nobody is denying that except for the most extreme of religious nuts who take the Bible and other scripture literally. Climate change has been occurring since time immemorial, during which the planet has gone through tremendous changes from the makeup of its land mass to the type of life that populates it, which by the way has also gone through several periods of mass extinction already over the last 500 million years or so without any assistance from humans.

Now, fast forward to the present day, and (some) scientists and world leaders have concluded that this nasty climate change that has been naturally occurring for billions of years now and only within the last few centuries has been affected by human activity needs to be STOPPED dead in its tracks. And being the benevolent all-knowing leaders that they are, they've also decided that the best way to accomplish this task is wealth redistribution on a global scale via mass taxation and energy regulations designed to cripple traditional sources of energy in favor of "green" ones, which of course conveniently benefits those in power while leaving the rest of us poor schlubs who make up 99.999% of the Earth's population to pick up the tab.

It's the political equivalent of driving a Tesla... it makes you feel really good and smug about yourself believing that you're doing your part to save the world and doing it in style, but in reality you're not changing all that much when it comes to climate change / global warming.



On 2/24/13, MB1025 said:
You know I was always wondering why no one ever used the dollar sign for $ony, but then I realized they have no money so it would be pointless.