Climate change is a weird thing to talk about. There's people adamant that's it's not happening, that humans aren't doing any of it at all and furthermore it's a natural thing that just happens with the Earth's axial tilt, but really, go look back in the 1960's-1970's and they actually thought the world was going to go into a cooling. So, admittedly, I think at this point on climate change your more or less average people are more worried about livelihoods and continuing businesses, like oil extraction and exploration, than say making the world a less hot world with more filth in the air, etc. That all said, I think we can certainly agree that when you look at the big picture, we need to do something. Iran literally had the hottest year ever, and whether it was just gross expansion wearing out the fresh water or just because it's scrubland forests and deserts, Southern California is becoming a sentiment of [well, also because the people by far there are often douchecanoes] 'fall off and float out to fucking sea, you horrid chunk of desert'. Also, there's a lot of weird shit that goes on with our idea of energy management. For example, in Kotzebue, Alaska there's huge energy windmills, and since this is the Arctic coastal tundra this really works well. Then you have the energy windmills, after the years in which the dams were more or less protested heavily in Vermont, that were installed there after they only ripped the whole damn mountain tops off, according to my friend. I can certainly say it is a weird ride to follow climate change. You got Group A people going "SAVE THE DAMN POLAR BEARS IN THE ARCTIC! THE PENGUINS NOW HAVE TO CLIMB IN CERTAIN AREAS IN ANTARCTICA TO NEST. CORAL REEFS ARE DYING!!!" and the other hand, Group B people shaking their heads, laughing, either in denial or in derision of this level of histrionics. I think it happens, but I'm not sure if it is as big a problem as its made out to be or an even bigger problem than it is made out to be. All I can say is, if we do the things everyone in Group A and the more moderates who still believe in man-made climate change, and it works, we'll be making the world a better place for our own species and others, so why is that a bad thing?
Most of the talk about climate change has very little to do about protecting the environment and much more to do about "things" losing value. You don't hear about floods destroying land, all you hear about is the cost if something happened. You don't hear about the increased frequency of super hurricanes having an affect on nature, you only hear about people who might have to pay more for insurance or their property values going down. You don't hear about increased snow falls in the Northeast having any bad repercussions outside of increased heating costs or snow removal costs. In this regard, climate change, in most of the discussed forms, is little more than people talking about money. The next thing I'm extremely skeptical about is climate modeling in all it's forms. We are taking temperature data and ocean temperature data from ~100 years worth of information, on a planet that has been around millions of years. To say we have even a beginners understanding of how the climate works on our planet is laughable at best. It's also a very ego filled thing to think that nature, in all of it's forms, is going to be changed by ants on an ant hill.
I'm with you on the modeling. We just don't have the data to claim it's going to be hotter in those cities since the dawn of existence. I do believe climate change is real and I think its been happening in a fairly cyclical pattern since far before recorded history and will continue to change and shift long after we're gone. What I don't know enough to guess is how much effect we as humans have on it. Remember the Golf oil spill? How that was going to wreck the golf forever? The planet is pretty damn resilient and while we probably have an effect on it I think most of us are too intelligent to believe the earth won't survive us. It's pretty impressive that we have been able to detect weather patterns and even changes in the patterns we found but to think with the data we have, how much of which is really accurate we don't know, is all encompassing and can generate accurate models is crazy.
Geochemist J. Lawrence Powell personally reviewed a total of 10855 studies on Global man-made climate change and a total of two came back denying it. I think coupled with things like ice millions of years old breaking off and melting into the sea, trees thousands of years old bursting into flame year round, superdroughts, Giant swirls of garbage in the ocean and much more says that we are fucking up this planet soon to be beyond repair. I don't care what anybody says except the climate scientists. They are the super-geniuses with the PHD's and not anyone else.
The climate scientists that are actually doing science are very smart. All the research and data and modeling has done some wonderful things, like helping predict hurricane paths, tornado warnings, etc. Those are real things that saved lives. But, the models used for predictions are still wrong on many occasions - have you ever watched your weather forecast? The sun can burp, something over which we humans have no control, and cause more change than we ever will. As a planet spinning along in our solar system and galaxy, Earth hardly knows we're even here. Local ecosystems? Yes. Globally over the Earth's life? Ha ha. This is cool: Side note: 5-hour Energy sells a million bottles a day? Wow.
Oh shit. Ferguson. Again. Witnesses Dispute Police Account Of Teen Shot Near Ferguson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...say_56313017e4b063179910b686?utm_hp_ref=crime EDIT: Here's a little less biased version of the story: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_966e36a0-aaef-545b-90cf-7e05a24fd5fd.html
This is the sort of the point I was trying to make. We definitely have influence over our own local ecosystem, but if you think we have influence over the jet stream or ocean currents or anything of that sort, that's just fools gold. Turning a forest into a barren wasteland is obviously going to have unforeseen effects on the environment just like paving over giant stretches of land has on surface temperatures, but these things have little effect on Earth as a whole. Yes, we may be eliminated from existence through our own stupidity of ruining the environment for us to live in, but the Earth will continue to orbit the sun until something way outside of our power stops that.
I don't think humans are ever going to be able to wipe out all the organisms on this planet. We imperil a very, very few. Look at the species that went extinct due to humans or are currently on the IUCN Red List. They're not things that can eat everything, live in multiple environments and thrive or even had large populations pre-human inference.
You'll be interested to know then that the early climate models from the mid-80s, when the first calls of global warming came out, were dead on. Please don't confuse weather with climate, they are two different things. I don't have time right now to get into a multipage discussion, so I'll use bullet points. I'm a scientist (full disclosure - not a climatologist) and I know a bit about this. Leaving aside the cause for a moment , here are the lines of evidence that global warming is actually occurring: Measurements of global average temperatures both surface temps and ocean temps, have risen significantly since we have first started recording them. There has been an observable decrease in polar ice, both arctic and Antarctic, in the last 100 years. Polar ice is melting, and new ice forms more slowly. Glaciers in mountainous regions all over the world are melting at unprecedented rates. The documenting of this is thorough, through written, photographic and measurement data. Sea levels are rising. For example, the US Army Corps of Engineers has measured 1 foot rise in mean sea level in New York Harbor over the last 100 years. That is enormous. Changes in bird migratory patterns and species occurrence related to global warming are well documented( i.e., reductions in species that need cooler temps in warming areas , and expansions of ranges of other species into warming areas. Shifts in vegetation occurrence showing similar trends to the above animal trends. There are others, but you get the picture. You can write off or explain away one or two of these , but to ignore multiple lines of evidence all painting the same picture is what is known as willful ignorance. Now to the likely cause - we know that our anthropogenic activities pump huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. In many countries, like the U.S., these emissions are directly measured from many sources. For example, at power plants (at which I have decades of experience) measurement of emissions, CO2 among them, is mandatory. Simple calculations can tell us the amount of CO2 emitted form smaller "non-point' sources like our lawn mowers. So the CO2 is being generated in amazing amounts., We know this. This is a fact. Numerous studies of ice cores form the polar regions have established a correlation between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and temperature. More importantly, we also know the effect of CO2 on sunlight and heat retention. This is fairly basic science. More specifically, basic chemistry and physics. To refute the notion that man does not contribute in any way to global warming means that the chemistry and physics that make your beer, run your car, fire your bullets, cook your bacon, and launch rockets suddenly and magically cease to exist when we move the discussion to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Here is a political bias test. http://programs.clearerthinking.org/political_bias_test.html#.VjJ010vO_nd Just thought you guy might find this interesting.
That study was horseshit. I would like to see what they believe the correct political answers are and from where they pull their stats. For instance: Bailout correlation to unemployment: Which U-figure are they using as a baseline for unemployment from the BLS? Anyone with a brain realizes that the calculation is completely wrong and the people leaving the workforce completely are not being calculated into the unemployment rate, in other words it is completely fucking wrong and nothing more than propoganda. Additionally, I'm sure you would see some interesting data if they divulged how they arrive at GDP per capita figures for countries like Sweden and Denmark and what counts as GDP. In any case, in terms of the environment, I am the first to admit that we should all do better at protecting the environment. We shouldn't need studies and huge fights over conservancy in order to be good stewards of the world we live in. What really bothers me is the approach we are taking to it, the answer is not MOAR TAXES!!!! and MOAR GOVERNMENT!!! to everything, that may be the easy answer but for people with similar philosophies as mine, that is a surefire way to get me to do the exact opposite and support the other side even if I don't agree with it. Beyond that, the AGW crowd really bother me, the ego of it, as discussed earlier, to believe that you understand a millions-of-years-old, all-encompassing ecosystem's climate based on 100 or so years of data is mind-boggling to me. I'm not saying that they may not be right but I sure as fuck don't think it is settled yet either. As late as the 70s the sky was falling because we were headed for an ice age.
I'm not denying the fact that climate in general is changing. The points I'm trying to make relating to climate change are: 1. We know very little about Earth's climate in general. At this point in time, many of the theories of why we are experiencing climate change are simply that, theories. It is a lot of very smart people trying to figure out what is going on with our climate, but no one really has found any solid evidence pointing to concrete information on what's happening. Yes, there are a lot of very simple correlations people are making, but just because they sound logical does not make them correct. We are dealing with a very very very insignificant amount of data and to think we are smart enough to make some very aggressive conclusions is short-sighted. 2. With that being said, if the Earth is experiencing climate change, the general discussion then falls to economic situations where this is an issue. If there is one thing that I've learned in my short time on this planet is, if there is money or power involved, people will do just about anything to acquire more. This is where the conversation starts to get murky. As you could imagine, there are numerous governments with numerous agendas that run counter to one another depending on which side of the coin you fall on and it's very easy to make "science based" arguments about why something has to be done to largely benefit one group, while completely castrating another. This is the biggest point of contention I have with dealing with climate change, making for profit decisions in matters that should be strictly scientific. 3. If we know what needs to be done for humans to stop affecting climate change, and those changes were made, what would that really do for our world? Yes, ice levels might begin to come back in the arctic. Some places on earth will start to cool down, while others will start to warm up again. Sea levels will start to recede in some places and increase in others. There still will be major storms and giant hurricanes and flooding and forest fires, nothing we do as humans, outside of learning to control the weather, is going to stop those things from affecting our lives. This is where I say, we are ants on an ant hill and have little control over how nature is going to affect our lives.
A Dallas area professor claims she was the victim of racial harassment by the police department. But wait....there's more! Apparently when she wrote her piece she was unaware that the officers dash cam with audio caught the entire incident. Here you can read her account, the police department's rebuttal and watch the entire dash cam video: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/l...thy-bland-i-was-caughtwalking-while-black.ece So what do you think? Is she the victim of racism or for some reason just trying to stir the pot of an already volatile issue?
You say this, then go on to post statements that look a lot like you are denying climate change. You have decided that your views on this issue will be governed by beliefs rather than facts. That is fine - it's a free country, and all that. You are entitled to your opinions, however you are not entitled to change the facts. We are not ants. Humans can and do alter the environment every day. That is a fact. As I previously stated, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, we release millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That is a fact. Along with nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides(SOx), and mercury (more facts). CO2 has specific physical properties, and interacts with other compounds and processes in a specific way. That is a fact. If you can demonstrate to me that these facts are incorrect, I will alter my view of humanity's impact on the environment.
I won't argue that humans aren't impacting the environment, that would be foolish. My question is and I don't want to put words in Popped Cherries mouth, but I think what he questions as well is: What is that impact? Is it statistically a significant impact? We live in a system that is millions of years old, we have collected about 100 years of data observing the climate of the system, we can't even determine a trend as to what the climate does and when yet, in my opinion, because if you look at the timescales, there isn't enough data; we can guess at it and hypothesize about it but can we honestly validate even on the most basic level what the global climate cycle is? Its bounds? Its timescale? If we had real data on a longer scale, we could do real modeling showing change related to CO2 levels. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a climatologist but as an Engineer (probably as you are), I study systems for a myriad of reasons and studies are only as good as the data you have to work with. To me, I can't see how we can clearly say that we are in a global warming cycle caused by man. I just don't see a definitive answer there.
About climate change: I have no doubt that increased carbon levels in the atmosphere will raise global temperatures. But I have a few questions: 1) Even if we stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow, wouldn't the human race still need to adapt over the next several hundred (or thousand?) years? 2) Who is going to enforce the carbon emissions? Isn't China the worlds biggest producer of CO2 these days? When, in the history of ever, has China NOT done whatever the fuck they wanted? They violate international copyright laws all the time, and that's something that's (supposed to be) punishable by international law! And they tell everyone to fuck off. The United States and most European nations enforce emission controls on motor vehicles, but MOST countries don't. (they sure as hell ain't doing it in Mexico!)