Global Warming

[mushroomeater]

there should not be any debate on this as clearly as day, global warming is caused by us. if you have watched the inconvenient truth by al gore, it is really bothering.

[Pachyderm]

Actually, global warming is a cyclical process, and has been going on throughout time. What we have done is speed it up.

While I applaud Al Gore's commitment, the vast carbon footprint caused by the constant travelling to spread the word is generally disregarded. Also, the data he presents has been manipulated by some very clever people, and doesn't always portray the exact picture. (eg some of the graphs are extracted from much longer term data sets, and seem to show a large change, but the extracted data is displayed on a different,much smaller,scale. This is not indicated in his speech, and so gives the impession that both the graphs are based on the same scale.

It's a very impressive presentation, and does raise good pints, but as with everything else politically based, needs detailed examination.

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

There's a lot more than what most people think about--a lot of it is us, but the global temperatures swing back and forth between ice ages and hoter, wetter climes. We just left an ice age not that long ago, so that's part of it.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I was talking to a close friend the other day and he made a point on the subject with which I'm completely in agreement and it's that with the present rate of change and the amount of CO₂ already in the atmosphere, even if we stop producing CO₂ and methane today, we're screwed for the next 50 to 100 years. Add the current political will to do something about it and a looming economic depression and the changes needed will likely be too little too late.

Needless to say I'm very pessimistic on the subject.

[Griffin NoName]

Time for the Global WarNing Thread in Games?

[Swatopluk]

To my knowledge we are technically still in an Ice Age and it is not fully clear whether the next "natural" step would be a return to a true warming period or the next cold peak. Should nature be undecided, we are currently making the decision for her. Although the Gulfstream horror scenario seems to be less probable now, this does not preclude that parts of the world could get a good deal colder before nose-diving into Sahara global (and weather in general getting more extreme).
Apart from the temperature question: Too much CO₂ favors weeds over crops.

Long term goals: reduce mankind to 1 billion people and keep that (without the usual rude methods).
Don't even try to get everyone to US consumption (=waste) level, Europe light may be sustainable for the reduced number of people.
But the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. 

[Griffin NoName]

To my knowledge we are technically still in an Ice Age and it is not fully clear whether the next "natural" step would be a return to a true warming period or the next cold peak. ..................

Long term goals: reduce mankind to 1 billion people and keep that (without the usual rude methods).

May not be necessary. After watching David Attenborough's Cheeky Monkey it seems fairly clear intelligent life will progress and we are merely a divergence that has failed. It may be more important to bring in "Informed Consent" for apes and that would at least shut up the Animal Rights people as well.

[Swatopluk]

Video only available in UK 

[Opsa]

I don't care if it'll take several decades after I die for it all to begin to make a difference environment-wise, we still have to take measures NOW. The alternative is to let it get worse and that is not acceptable. I love the earth.

PS: Hi mushroom eater! Won't you introduce yourself here?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I wondered if creating a new thread in Human Concerns or just keep going on here in this one.
--
According to some scientists at NOAA global warming is irreversible.

People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years

To me it makes perfect sense (we have now several times the amount of CO₂ compared to the preindustrial age), the hit is on the potential time scale for damage.

[Opsa]

Irreversible, maybe- but if we continue on as we are we will only compound it. That's one of the reasons that the commercial that boasts that the U.S. has enough oil to last a whole 60 years (as if that's forever!) makes me so hopping mad. It is just irresponsible to think we can go on blithely running big fat SUVs like nothing is wrong. I'm glad there's a crisis. It's getting us off our complacency about pollution.

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

I really, really doubt it's irreversible. After we kill ourselves off, the earth will find equilibrium again.

It scares me how blase so many people are about global warming. As long it's NIMBY, doesn't matter. I think we're seeing some of it around here. The last couple winters, it's gotten warm (like upper 60s) in late December/early January and remains so until about March, when there's a couple weeks of frost. And then it doesn't get warm again until April.
There's already plants blooming right now--they didn't used to until the end of February at the earliest.

This isn't the El Nino/La Nina cycle. We haven't had a wet winter since 1997.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I believe the term 'irreversible' is used in relative terms, that is, regardless of what we do now it will not change much in our lifetimes nor in the lifetimes of our children, grandchildren, etc.

The whole thing got me thinking about carbon sequestration, the idea is to pump the CO₂ in the hollow basin where the oil/gas were, before we pumped it out. Eventually it will go out, so by doing so we are not so much solving a problem (supposedly) but delaying it.

The worst thing is that coal is still very abundant and despite the new effort to move to renewables it still will be used for the foreseeable future. I wonder (and may be the chemistry gods here can tell me) if you can convert coal into plastics instead of burning it, which at least would give some use to the stuff.

[Swatopluk]

Delaying it may be just the thing we need. There are some borderline ideas that once fusion power is available on a (really) large scale, the excess CO₂ could be filtered from the atmosphere and turned to carbon and oxygen again. Just getting it out of the air is energy intensive enough but there is enough hydrogen to fuse around. But efficient fusion power plants are still several decades in the future in even the most optimistic predictions.

[Opsa]

Speaking of climate change, the Washington Post had an article today about a Phenology Study that needs people from all over the US to report in with information about when plants in their area sprout, bloom, whatever. Check the linky if you want to help. They will be conducting another one on animals and other wildlife soon, as well.

I'll put another linky in our gardening and science areas.