Clamate Cange

[linwolf]

Ha, and here I was thinking someone would actually take a minute to let us discuss the evidence for and against it, but no. The first sentence is basically saying, 'OH HAI, THIS THREAD IS WHERE I TELL YOU I'M RIGHT AND YOUR WRONG.'
And no, it's not. Explain why half the world including areas like Spain and Portugal had SNOW that lasted MONTHS at the end of last year and the beginning of this year.

Global warming is a fact. The average temperature of the world have rising over the last century. Now whether it's man made or a natural process that is still up for debate, the same of whether it will continue or even out, but not if it's happening.

 

[bob1052]

Ha, and here I was thinking someone would actually take a minute to let us discuss the evidence for and against it, but no. The first sentence is basically saying, 'OH HAI, THIS THREAD IS WHERE I TELL YOU I'M RIGHT AND YOUR WRONG.'
And no, it's not. Explain why half the world including areas like Spain and Portugal had SNOW that lasted MONTHS at the end of last year and the beginning of this year.

Global warming is a fact. The average temperature of the world have rising over the last century. Now whether it's man made or a natural process that is still up for debate, the same of whether it will continue or even out, but not if it's happening.

A century.

Do you realize how immensely short a century is.

Do you realize how much hotter the world has been since before we had even set foot in rather than now (hint: more than a century ago).

Its people like you fanning the flames of these idiotic global warming discussions that are filling every outlet with so much misinformation that makes any real discussion of our effects on the environment impossible.

Also, the volcanoes in Iceland put out more CO2 than we (humans) will in a very, very long time. Worrying about cars on our roads is like worrying that if a child pours a glass of water on the sidewalk the earth will flood.

Do you know what a thought experiment is?

My mistake, I assumed you were trying to have an actual argument about a real world issue.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well, first of all, there's no magic cure. Any useful action will require alot of time and money, and is therefore unlikely.

People have known about climate change for ages, but nobody is going to do anything about it.

No politician is going to win votes on a platform of increasing taxes to pay for a greener nation. Alot of people are calling for their governments to do "something", but don't want their governments to do anything that will impact them.

Additionally, no nation is going to want to invest in reducing its impact when everyone else isn't doing the same. Lets assume that all the nations of the world got together and had a serious talk about the problem for once, and decided to all work together and fix it. But then one or two nations opted out. Who is going to enforce it? Unless it's enforced, the easy route of letting everyone shoulder the burden is going to be an irresistable temptation.

Add to that, the usual political problems associated with large scale reforms. When Kerry was running for president of USA, one of his ideas was to regulate for more efficient engines for motor vehicles. Great idea, less pollution, less costly vehicles to run, less dependant on oil etc. But the Republicans kicked up a shitstorm about how un-American it was to restrict people to having decent engines. Now, it'd take a massive effort for the US (or anyone else, for that matter) to make a difference...look at all the fighting over Obamacare.

In Australia, you have Labor (who are in power) trying various environmental schemes, which the opposition will immediately shout down because if it worked it'd make the government look good. On top of that, you've got the Greens complaining about anything that isn't a magic cure all, because an improvement in the situation is obviously much worse than doing nothing at all. Capturing CO2 from power stations and pumping it into unusuable coal seams to reduce the amount that ends up in the atmosphere? That's a terrible idea, if you have ways of lessening pollution, you are just encouraging people to create more.

 

[linwolf]

Ha, and here I was thinking someone would actually take a minute to let us discuss the evidence for and against it, but no. The first sentence is basically saying, 'OH HAI, THIS THREAD IS WHERE I TELL YOU I'M RIGHT AND YOUR WRONG.'
And no, it's not. Explain why half the world including areas like Spain and Portugal had SNOW that lasted MONTHS at the end of last year and the beginning of this year.

Global warming is a fact. The average temperature of the world have rising over the last century. Now whether it's man made or a natural process that is still up for debate, the same of whether it will continue or even out, but not if it's happening.

A century.

Do you realize how immensely short a century is.

Do you realize how much hotter the world has been since before we had even set foot in rather than now (hint: more than a century ago).

Its people like you fanning the flames of these idiotic global warming discussions that are filling every outlet with so much misinformation that makes any real discussion of our effects on the environment impossible.

Also, the volcanoes in Iceland put out more CO2 than we (humans) will in a very, very long time. Worrying about cars on our roads is like worrying that if a child pours a glass of water on the sidewalk the earth will flood.

Do you know what a thought experiment is?

My mistake, I assumed you were trying to have an actual argument about a real world issue.

I know a hell of a lot more than what you let out. The trouble with bringing up the past is that right now there are estimated to be 6.92 billion people alive. A lot of areas barely have enough food as it's right now. Climate change will lead do drought in some areas and flood in others. Areas where a lot of people live because the area right now support them. In the past these kind of event wasn't as bad because there either where no people or a lot less, plus people cared less what happen to people living on an other continent that is not the case to day. Climate change is a reality and there are to many people who depend on crops that might not be able grow where they live in the future.

 

[Jonluw]

Ha, and here I was thinking someone would actually take a minute to let us discuss the evidence for and against it, but no. The first sentence is basically saying, 'OH HAI, THIS THREAD IS WHERE I TELL YOU I'M RIGHT AND YOUR WRONG.'
And no, it's not. Explain why half the world including areas like Spain and Portugal had SNOW that lasted MONTHS at the end of last year and the beginning of this year.

Global warming is a fact. The average temperature of the world have rising over the last century. Now whether it's man made or a natural process that is still up for debate, the same of whether it will continue or even out, but not if it's happening.

A century.

Do you realize how immensely short a century is.

Do you realize how much hotter the world has been since before we had even set foot in rather than now (hint: more than a century ago).

Its people like you fanning the flames of these idiotic global warming discussions that are filling every outlet with so much misinformation that makes any real discussion of our effects on the environment impossible.

Also, the volcanoes in Iceland put out more CO2 than we (humans) will in a very, very long time. Worrying about cars on our roads is like worrying that if a child pours a glass of water on the sidewalk the earth will flood.

If you read the OP, he clearly states that he doesn't care whether it's caused by humans or not.

 

[Blue_vision]

There are some major things that need to happen to solve global warming (other environmental issues aside.)

-Dfine agricultural/development areas. Ideally, this would be based on a combination of soil productivity and local populations for export. Also ideally, this should see a pretty big reduction in current agricultural areas.

-Switch all power generation away from fossil fuels. The vast majority of this should be in the form of Solar, Hydro, and Wind power, but densely populated areas could see some nuclear power, at least for the time being.. This would be made much easier if overall energy consumption was decreased, which is very much possible by pumping up electricity prices (which also helps fund these projects.)

-Switch transportation to be environmentally friendly (generally.) This will inevitably have to mean far less cars, and big improvements in public transport infrastructure, especially in places like North America, in the form of city transport (lotsa busses, trams, metros,) and intercity transport (rural transportation, interurban train and bus service.) On top of this, any remaining automobiles need to be either electric, or some form of renewable combustion or fuel cell engine (hydrogen, biodiesel, etc.)
On top of this, long distance shipping should be discouraged, and any long distance shipping should be either achieved by electrified freight trains, or wind-based sea vessels.

-Improve waste disposal so it reuses as much material as is possible. Try to achieve 100% recycling, compost organics (food waste & sewage) into fertilizers and fuel. Basically make landfills obsolete.

-Reduce concrete use. Use alternatives, reduce the amount of concrete necessary in building construction, and increase the lifespan of buildings.

That's all I can think of now. Some pretty basic things that'd reduce GHG emissions hugely.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I know a hell of a lot more than what you let out. The trouble with bringing up the past is that right now there are estimated to be 6.92 billion people alive. A lot of areas barely have enough food as it's right now. Climate change will lead do drought in some areas and flood in others. Areas where a lot of people live because the area right now support them. In the past these kind of event wasn't as bad because there either where no people or a lot less, plus people cared less what happen to people living on an other continent that is not the case to day. Climate change is a reality and there are to many people who depend on crops that might not be able grow where they live in the future.

Although that is true, sadly it's almost unimportant.

People don't tend to care about calamities in far off places. It might get media coverage for a few weeks, but then people get bored and forget about it.

Nobody cares about the plight of people in more or less the entirety of Africa, nobody is going to care about people living in (possibly) new third world countries as long as it's not them.

 

[Biodeamon]

i say we listen to the enviromentalists but all the second world countries will doom us all!

 

[Falconsgyre]

Can we all just shut up and listen to the scientists when it comes to global warming/climate change/whatever? Seriously. If I see 10 doctors, and they all tell me I have cancer, I'm going to believe I have cancer. Even if they all disagree on whether it's metastasizing or not, or whether I have 6 months or 5 years to live, I almost certainly have cancer. I'm not going to argue that I can't have cancer because I drink orange juice and exercise, either, because I'm not in the least qualified to make such a judgment. If the doctors all say I have cancer, I have goddamn cancer.

Anyway, I assume we'll have a tragedy of the commons type result here, and world governments aren't going to get their acts together enough to actually stop it. Global warming isn't a world ending event (except in the crazy, snowball earth/hothouse earth kind of scenarios), so humanity will just keep chugging along. With a quarter of its population gone and a possibly collapsing ecosystem. I live in the middle of America, so I guess I don't have to worry about it.

 

[tweedpol]

So, as far as concrete proof, you've got nothing. You've got a bunch of supposedly intelligent people guessing at what might happen in a massively complex system that we barely understand...and you take their word as gospel? Yeah, you have fun with that.

Okay, but what do YOU have? apart from wishful thinking that our grotesquely irresponsible lifestyles aren't killing the planet and each other? At least my view is supported by, once again, almost all the people who study and understand these things. Whose word are you taking as Gospel? Fox News?

Also, millions of people die anyway. Dying from climate change isn't any different than dying from war or poverty or disease. At least those are problems that we somewhat understand and can do something about. But as far as climate change, we don't know enough to make changes without the very real possibility of making things worse rather than better. I'd say leave well enough alone. If that answer isn't acceptable to you, then that's too bad because "nothing" is a perfectly viable answer to your question.

You understand these are EXTRA people dying, right? It's not a choice between prevent disease or war OR reduce climate change because we've got to have deaths somewhere. Maybe if we nuke a large city that will get all of our deaths out of the way for a while and at least we'll know what killed them! Reducing the drive of climate change will cause less of the very well predicted adverse effects, and kill fewer people. It's just hard to get those in rich countries to care because it will affect them less, and it would require some passive agreement that it's their fault.

 

[Sylocat]

What proof do you have that Global Warming is happening? You can't make a rule like that without proof to back it up.

Okay then:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

 

[Sylocat]

Explain why half the world including areas like Spain and Portugal had SNOW that lasted MONTHS at the end of last year and the beginning of this year.

Okay. [http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm]

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Well this debate is getting us nowhere...

I had a university module on climate change, and I came out of that none the wiser, as far more intelligent men than I were putting up selective evidence and persuasive anecdotes on both sides of the argument. To choose one over the other would end up being a personal matter of taste, because for science to be rock solid and unarguable it has to be able to be recreated in a lab, removing all extrenal factors.

For obvious reasons we cannot test Climate change in a lab. All that can be done is tinkering with the very limited figures we have for the past couple of decades, and then relying on anecdotal evidence from historic reports (they grew grapes on Hadrians wall/ There were wild lions living in Italy) and physical reports (large carbon masses under the N/S poles:- what could that mean?)to give us vague ideas on how the world has changed. OK, it's slightly more scientific than that, but all that evidence is circumstantial. The exact impact of sun spots, volcanoes, cows farting, etc. cannot be known on the earths climate and ecosystem, because we cannot recreate it in a lab taking out all external factors.

If you look at the facts, there are still a few things that we must change for other reasons. A viable alternative must be found to deal with the running out of fossil fuels. Nuclear fission is a possibility, but it has a lot of bad press and radioactive waste (harmful for 100,000 years. yikes) Renewables are not the full answer (wind is a bit of a white elephant: collosal energy needed to produce the parts, transport them, only last for about 20 years, only produce power 1/3 of the time. Solar is better, but expensive and again can be unreliable. hydroelectric and geothermal are excellent, but not suitable for many areas and cause massive ecological upsets)

I would support research into nuclear fusion, there is a place in England that have built a machine to create fusion by passing a lazer through hydrogen atoms. If energy can be harnessed and converterd to electricity from this reaction, then our energy fears are over, and if we can incorporate into the grid a proper network for electric cars, to also run off the fusion, then we're laughing.

Sorry about the long post.

 

[Loop Stricken]

Space elevator.

Get one of those set up, you've replaced the continuous massive cost of getting shit out of our atmosphere with one enormous single payment.

Set up a geosynchronous ring around the planet for habitation, construct craft in orbit with far more ease than you'd do on terra firma.

Strike out across the solar system and wait for the inevitable terraforming technology to make anything more than farty little biodomes viable on alien soils.