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lapse posted:I was going through my old poo poo and found a cool chart that shows the relative scale of different power sources and what we use the energy on. Those come from here. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
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# ? Jul 28, 2012 15:26 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 05:29 |
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Any reaction to the Watts paper? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/#more-68286 I know nothing about climate change but I have relatives who are crowing about this on Facebook.
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# ? Jul 30, 2012 22:55 |
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NinjaPete posted:Any reaction to the Watts paper? It was written by watts. He's a notorious fraud. There isn't a need to read it or respond to it because you can determine in advance that its wrong because its written by him. His job is to confuse people about science, just like con artists confuse people about money or phishers confuse people about identity. And he's good at it. But you dont have to fall for it if you dont wrong. Critical reasoning demands that known dishonest peoples truth claims be treated with the suspicion their malevolence deserves. At the point when the climate denialists are so drat out of answers they start releasing papers saying that meteorologists are lying about the current temperature, its really obvious that they are essentially acknowledging defeat and can only convince the very stupidest. Ignore that poo poo with prejudice. duck monster fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jul 31, 2012 |
# ? Jul 30, 2012 23:04 |
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lapse posted:I was going through my old poo poo and found a cool chart that shows the relative scale of different power sources and what we use the energy on. This is US only, it is Fake edit: that chart makes an appearance in the book anyways.
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# ? Jul 30, 2012 23:20 |
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Today I was out biking just beyond a construction area on the edge of the suburbs, and I got caught in a storm. The wind whipped up the dust and in effect caused a miniature dust storm. Had to take shelter in the woods of the ravine. Anyway, afterward I had a disturbing thought. If that could happen in a place where there has been heavy rain for the past month, and only one hot, rainless day to dry out the soil, what will happen in the US Midwest? Seems like the conditions are right for a new dust bowl.
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 03:07 |
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NYTimes op-ed posted:The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic link
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 03:09 |
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I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective.
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 03:25 |
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UP AND ADAM posted:I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective. Climate change and how we fix/cope with it is one of those issues that's so huge that its "somebody else's problem." Kind of like poverty, why people abuse drugs, world hunger, world water scarcity...etc. The problem is so big that the human mind would rather shut it out and/or rationalize it away than actually think about it. Mechanism to guard against panic.
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 04:11 |
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UP AND ADAM posted:I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective. Naomi Klein had a really interesting article in the Nation about the motivations of deniers - it's not like the Koch brothers or fossil-fuel lobbyists are too dumb to understand the science, but fighting it is basically the most rational business decision in the short term. quote:The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.” http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 05:11 |
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UP AND ADAM posted:I don't understand skepticism of climate change. There are a grip of alarming graphs that all center around the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel usage, emissions, and none of it requires much serious scientific inquiry. Where do they think these gasses go? Have they witnessed any out-of-control vegetation feeding on the excess CO2? Note, I can't stand reading anything put forth by any "serious" anti-climate change organizations or individuals. It's so wretched and lacking in perspective. Yeah its puzzling. Scientists where warning about the greenhouse effect in the 1870s. Thats how long we've known about CO2 and infrared absorbsion, and how long scientists have been worrying about it. Right back then, 140 years ago, scientists where actually demonstrating in laboratories poo poo heating up when pumped full of CO2. In fact its something gardeners have been exploiting ever since. Ask any dope grower, first thing you do is grab a CO2 canister and raise the CO2 in your hydro setup and you get lower heating costs and better yields. To effectively deny it requires some serious overhauls of physics to account for exactly why all this CO2 isn't causing climate change, as well as accounting for some other reason for things heating up. And since the solar flare poo poo has been more or less debunked we're back to a massive question for the denialists, (1) What is the mechanism thats stopping CO2 from heating poo poo up in the atmosphere and (2) What IS the mechanism thats heating poo poo up in the atmosphere. It involves some crazy leaps of faith to answer 1 and 2 and still sleep at night, in my view.
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 06:00 |
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Re the Watts-Muller hoohaa: Crikey reports that neither scientist had their studies peer-reviewed and went publicity-hunting before even publishing. Our own village idiot Andrew Bolt even claims Muller was never a sceptic. Hilarity ensues.
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 07:22 |
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eh4 posted:Re the Watts-Muller hoohaa: Crikey reports that neither scientist had their studies peer-reviewed and went publicity-hunting before even publishing. Our own village idiot Andrew Bolt even claims Muller was never a sceptic. Hilarity ensues. All that's left now is to dig up skeptic's public support for Muller when he first started.
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 07:46 |
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eh4 posted:Re the Watts-Muller hoohaa: Crikey reports that neither scientist had their studies peer-reviewed and went publicity-hunting before even publishing. Our own village idiot Andrew Bolt even claims Muller was never a sceptic. Hilarity ensues. I'm happy to let this poo poo play out. Mullers loving network of amateur thermometer molesters have provided so much crank-grief to the climate sciences over the last decade that having the denialists tear them to shred provides so many own-goals for the denialists its sort of awesome to see it happen, because its that poo poo filled bedrock that so much of watt's horseshit is based on. This is shark on shark action here folks and even the sea shephards couldn't bail these motherfuckers out of this mess. Mr Muller, thankyou for your honesty in returning to science. I'm afraid however you have made a very nasty bed to lie in now that your knife wielding loons are out for you too. The one thing a gangster hates more than an opponent, its a turncoat.
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 07:52 |
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Yiggy posted:
For a guy who just ate a big ol loving crow, he's pretty sure of these claims. You'd figure after realising that he's been totally wrong for years he'd think that maybe the thousands of other scientists who've been telling him that actually know something about their field of study?
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# ? Jul 31, 2012 16:35 |
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Yeah, his bristling on that bothered me too. He seems to be a rigorous and honest scientist, but he only trusts his own data and that seems a touch arrogant to me. Also, when he was on Maddow last night right at the end he made a little pitch for needing to expand natural gas which was setting off all sorts of bells in my head. He was defending it as the cheap option to move away from coal which is way dirtier, but carbon is carbon man. I don't see how you can sit there telling me how astonished you are about the fit between CO2 levels and global warming and then start pushing for natural gas instead of nuclear. I'm glad he recanted on this hang up he had, but I think he's still missing the bigger picture. Yiggy fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jul 31, 2012 |
# ? Jul 31, 2012 16:42 |
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Hmm. A wholesale move away from coal to natural gas *WOULD* improve the situation, but its hard to know without doing the sum whether we are talking about a negligible or substantial improvement. We'd still be making GBS threads carbon into the atmosphere however and the problem would still exist. Its a band-aid over a gangrenous wound really. I'm sort of hoping muller is getting some insights over just how dishonest and vicious the campaign against climate science is , now that his old goons are now attacking him, causing him to rethink some of these positions. For now muller is in the "wait and see" category of reformed pseudoscience peddlers, in my view.
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# ? Aug 1, 2012 08:33 |
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duck monster posted:Hmm. A wholesale move away from coal to natural gas *WOULD* improve the situation, but its hard to know without doing the sum whether we are talking about a negligible or substantial improvement. We'd still be making GBS threads carbon into the atmosphere however and the problem would still exist. Its a band-aid over a gangrenous wound really. My take on it is that it's a big plot engineered by the gas lobby to make gas extraction (fracking) seem like a positive thing. What better place to start than a big name in the denialist sphere having a 'come to Jesus' moment and telling everyone within reach that yes AGW is real and the thing we need to do NOW NOW NOW is frack all the gas out of the ground.
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# ? Aug 1, 2012 09:18 |
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The Entire Universe posted:My take on it is that it's a big plot engineered by the gas lobby to make gas extraction (fracking) seem like a positive thing. What better place to start than a big name in the denialist sphere having a 'come to Jesus' moment and telling everyone within reach that yes AGW is real and the thing we need to do NOW NOW NOW is frack all the gas out of the ground. It's not difficult at all to believe his funding source switched from the coal industry to the natural gas racket. Lower CO2 emissions was just a minor bullet point for the natural gas folks until the past few years, and now they're on this big green push about it. Based on my personal experience with them, I wouldn't call the numerous folks I know from that industry environmentalists by any stretch of the imagination. But hell if they're not blabbering on about that bullet point now. I did get a kick out of warm winters tanking the natural gas market in '08, though.
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# ? Aug 1, 2012 15:24 |
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Sorry if I missed this in the past 15 pages, but what does everyone make of this? http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-climate-carbon-idUSBRE87014Z20120801 The headline seems like it will get spread around, with the bolded parts ignored. And the albedo changes and other feedback loops will probably counteract this quite a bit. quote:Oceans and land have more than doubled the amount of greenhouse gases they absorb since 1960 in new evidence that nature is helping to brake global warming, a study showed on Wednesday. Even though we have done very little to decrease our emissions, the Earth continues to lend us a helping hand," lead author Ashley Ballantyne of the University of Colorado told Reuters. zero alpha fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Aug 2, 2012 |
# ? Aug 2, 2012 00:36 |
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zero alpha posted:Sorry if I missed this in the past 15 pages, but what does everyone make of this? http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-climate-carbon-idUSBRE87014Z20120801 Deniers will cherry pick text as they always do. As long as there is either a ideological or financial incentive to deny reality, it doesn't matter how much evidence you present to them. The results of this study don't seem very surprising to me. As the ocean and atmosphere mix, the ocean absorbs basically a set percent of air. If that air has higher concentrations of CO2, then, yeah, ocean uptake of CO2 is going to increase. The big problem though is the second part you've bolded: at a certain point, the ocean gets saturated with CO2. Then, suddenly, this huge carbon sink disappears, and warming accelerates. Meanwhile, as CO2 gets absorbed into the ocean, ocean acidity rises accelerating the ecological crisis there. Nevermind the rest of it, that the ocean is absorbing more CO2 than previous studies thought should be cause for alarm all by itself. Fish stocks, coral reefs, etc are already in distress--this only will speed up extinctions in the ocean.
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# ? Aug 2, 2012 01:29 |
Saying "oh look the oceans are absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere isn't that great" is equivalent to saying "oh look the rivers are carrying away all the benzene from that chemical plant, how great."
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# ? Aug 2, 2012 12:57 |
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ANIME AKBAR posted:Saying "oh look the oceans are absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere isn't that great" is equivalent to saying "oh look the rivers are carrying away all the benzene from that chemical plant, how great." This line of reasoning is more common than you would think with industrial interests. "The mine runoff will be carried away by rainfall and whisked out of Appalachia! " is something the coal industry tries to pull with strip and mountaintop removal mining. Nevermind that the same runoff is poisoning wells and the waterways everywhere downstream. I also recall this reasoning with the dispersant during the BP spill.
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# ? Aug 2, 2012 16:12 |
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Yiggy posted:Yeah, his bristling on that bothered me too. He seems to be a rigorous and honest scientist, but he only trusts his own data and that seems a touch arrogant to me. Also, when he was on Maddow last night right at the end he made a little pitch for needing to expand natural gas which was setting off all sorts of bells in my head. He was defending it as the cheap option to move away from coal which is way dirtier, but carbon is carbon man. I don't see how you can sit there telling me how astonished you are about the fit between CO2 levels and global warming and then start pushing for natural gas instead of nuclear. I have absolutely no problem converting every single coal power plant to natural gas and encouraging developing countries to be building natural gas over coal over the very short term. Eventually I would like to see every natural gas plant replaced with nuclear but we need to have a seriously multiyear adult talk with the American people to address the stupidity with NIMBY. As a reminder it took three years for SA to go from "Nuclear power is unsafe and unstable and ATOMZ" and "a single gram of plutonium could kill all life on earth" to "Nuclear power is the only way of actually reducing the atmospheric CO2 levels on earth." Also, it was Dr Muller's Physics for Future Presidents that made the Nuclear argument much easier for many people on SA. So lets give the man some credit here.
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# ? Aug 3, 2012 06:17 |
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Seems there is little concern for the impact of the oceans taking up all that carbon.
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# ? Aug 3, 2012 07:15 |
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zero alpha posted:Sorry if I missed this in the past 15 pages, but what does everyone make of this? http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-climate-carbon-idUSBRE87014Z20120801 Ehh, there is already pushback against this with all the ocean acidification stuff that is happening. We've known that the ocean has been sequestering large amounts of CO2 for a while now, same with land vegetation. This just means that when those finite sequestration banks are full it will get that much worse that much faster. Not actually seeing much new in that article though, besides maybe the specific numbers being moved around a bit.
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# ? Aug 3, 2012 07:45 |
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SirPablo posted:Seems there is little concern for the impact of the oceans taking up all that carbon. Ocean change scares me a lot more than climate change does. On some level, the quacks are right, we've had nasty climate change before, and we'll have it again. Truth is, we're almost certainly not going to venus the planet, though we could make it rather unpleasant. However I have no idea what the impact of destroying the ocean and making GBS threads up the Ph is, but drat it I dont like the idea of peak fish. Thats mass starvation armagedon styles and best I can tell going to be one of the earlier problems we face. As far as I'm concerned the ocean is the centerpiece of how the planet works, and if we gently caress that up, we're doomed
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# ? Aug 3, 2012 17:59 |
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duck monster posted:However I have no idea what the impact of destroying the ocean and making GBS threads up the Ph is, but drat it I dont like the idea of peak fish. That boat's gone and sailed, I think. A friend sent me this a little while ago:
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# ? Aug 3, 2012 20:49 |
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Don't worry, most of the fish we eat are well on their way to extinction. With any luck they won't have to suffer through ocean acidification. I've also seen a composite image of like 20-30 graphs with the fish we eat and they are already at fractions of what they used to be and are headed to zero. Don't remember where I saw it but that film gives you a pretty good overview of where we're at, which is pretty much hosed. a lovely poster fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Aug 3, 2012 |
# ? Aug 3, 2012 21:24 |
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I believe fish stocks show better than anything else how we've managed to gently caress up the biosphere good and proper. I mean, yeah, hunting the mammoth and many other ground species to extinction is an achievement of its own, but nearly depleting the ocean has been one of our largest accomplishments. Edit> Don't really mean to sound pompous, I realize fully that I'm part of the problem. It just saddens me immensely that my hypothetical grandchildren will probably never get to taste salmon, red snapper, etc. Freezer fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Aug 3, 2012 |
# ? Aug 3, 2012 21:43 |
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Freezer posted:I believe fish stocks show better than anything else how we've managed to gently caress up the biosphere good and proper. I mean, yeah, hunting the mammoth and many other ground species to extinction is an achievement of its own, but nearly depleting the ocean has been one of our largest accomplishments. Let's be honest, eradicating most of the megafauna off the face of the Earth is probably a bigger accomplishment than what we've done to fish stocks at this point. The difference is that all the mammoths are already gone and we're getting to personally experience the depletion of fish stocks. That being said, the fact that it took thousands of years to hunt megafauna to extinction and we're eradicating most fish stocks in under 100 years is kind of impressive. Then again, they're both really part of the same event
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# ? Aug 3, 2012 21:49 |
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a lovely poster posted:Don't worry, most of the fish we eat are well on their way to extinction. With any luck they won't have to suffer through ocean acidification.
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# ? Aug 4, 2012 01:48 |
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How have those areas been effected with a top predator taken out? Are they capable of sustaining fish farming? http://www.beluga.is/default.asp?Page=291 When done right it can easy curve the dependency of natural stocks. Maybe moved inland at some point with controlled water stocks and could become a closed system.
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# ? Aug 4, 2012 21:34 |
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...7350,b=facebook 46 square mile iceberg has broken off and is floating to sea. "When the iceberg finally does emerge into the Nares Strait, it could pose problems for ships trying to navigate the narrow ocean channel, Muenchow said. "Without a break-up, it is big enough to block the channel as another large ice island did for almost 6 months in 1962," he wrote on July 31."
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# ? Aug 5, 2012 06:55 |
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Decided to drop in on this thread to see if anyone has read this recent article from Rolling Stone: http://m.rollingstone.com/entry/view/id/29695/pn/all/p/0/?KSID=e00ec41471d2613b9b44f2a1a7392f8a&ints_viewed=1 It lays out, in incredibly clear (oversimplifying?) terms how close we are to completely screwing ourselves over. I'll quote some choice parts: quote:The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation. quote:Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.) quote:The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons It's an incredibly frightening article, and makes any other information about climate change I've read seem positively optimistic. Wondering what you guys think.
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# ? Aug 5, 2012 18:12 |
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There is also this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...504a_story.html It's a pretty scary article by a NASA guy. quote:This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
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# ? Aug 5, 2012 21:22 |
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Oy. It's all very overwhelming, but I hope these articles keep coming. People need to KNOW about climate change, and put it at the forefront of political issues. Otherwise I guess we can say goodbye to the Holocene and the world as we know it. Scary as hell.
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# ? Aug 6, 2012 02:27 |
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That Rolling Stone Article somehow made global warming even more frightening for me. To echo the thread title, we are so screwed.
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# ? Aug 6, 2012 04:46 |
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Ccs posted:It's an incredibly frightening article, and makes any other information about climate change I've read seem positively optimistic. Wondering what you guys think. That Rolling Stone article posted:You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do what you can to move to somewhere out of the way with a close-knit community and become collectively self-sufficent. I'm open to better ideas.
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# ? Aug 6, 2012 13:46 |
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Ccs posted:Decided to drop in on this thread to see if anyone has read this recent article from Rolling Stone: http://m.rollingstone.com/entry/view/id/29695/pn/all/p/0/?KSID=e00ec41471d2613b9b44f2a1a7392f8a&ints_viewed=1 My favorite part, about pricing carbon: "Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel – every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery store."
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# ? Aug 6, 2012 16:59 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 05:29 |
This last page has made me pour a few stiff drinks. What, if anything, can we do at this point? We've started something that can't possibly be stopped even if we magically make all our emissions vanish tomorrow. Our only hope at this point seems to be geoengineering. Using aerosols to block sunlight, or iron fertilization to stimulate phytoplankton which absorb CO2, or some sort of machinery that pulls CO2 directly out of the air. All of these things come with environmental and engineering challenges of their own though. I'm expecting that we'll attempt these things when the world finally realizes how hosed we are, but by that point it'll be too late, and/or we'll introduce new problems with any geoengineering attempts.
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# ? Aug 7, 2012 06:49 |