Am I Imagining Things (Climate Change And Personal Observations)?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

It can always be difficult to differentiate between weather and climate.

My perception is that the extremes have been becoming moreso. Most recently, temps in the 60s and tornados in mid-December, and no measurable snow in Chicago until after xmas. But the challenge in Chicago is that we rarely get extended stretches of seasonally appropriate weather.

But there is no reason to doubt the statistics.

Meanwhile I just saw IL will see 3 new NG power plants - NOT because of any need for the power, and NOT b/c they are consistent with state emissions targets, but solely b/c investors see an opportunity to profit! :roll_eyes: And nice article the previous day on IL’s contribution to the Gulf deadline.

22

I’m strongly in favor of Global Warming. A warmer planet is a more productive planet.

We are in an Ice Age and have been for more than two million years. The real danger is when this interglacial period ends and the a hundred thousand plus year period of glaciation hits us again. When that happens, it is very likely that the two major causes of death will be starvation and from wars over the dwindling resources of the Earth. A cooler Earth cannot support the number of people we have now. Even in the relatively mild cooling of the period known as The Little Ice Age, hunger was serious as the cooler Earth caused serious disruptions to mankind.

For example, there are questions of what happened to the Anasazi people of the desert southwest. Guess what – they abandoned their civilization in the early days of The Little Ice Age as the area got more arid as the climate cooled down and could not support their population.

In a period known as the Holocene Climatic Optimum, when average temperatures were something like 2 or 3 C higher than today, mankind was finally able to settle down from their nomadic hunter gatherer life to one of farming, thus taking their first baby steps toward the civilization we have today. Imagine what our lives would be like if that didn’t happen and we still wandered from place to place in small groups hunting an area out and then moving to another just in order to survive. It was a warm climate that made those early steps possible, one warmer than what we have today.

The ability to grow wheat across large areas also helped. Initially, there were only diploid and tetraploid wheats. Farmers back then were unable to clean all impurities from their seeds and so it is thought that some farmer back then was planing a tetraploid wheat and had some seeds from a related grass mixed in. Through horizontal gene transfer (or lateral gene transfer, if you prefer), the wheat took up an addition set of pairs of chromosomes from the related grass to form a hexaploid wheat. That hexaploid wheat was able to be grown over a much wider range than the diploid and tetraploid wheats and thus aided our ancestors to spread out around the world. We still have diploid and tetraploid wheats today – diploid wheat is not grown much and is supposedly used to make a regional bread and as animal feed while hexaploid wheat is commonly used to make pastas. The wheat most of us consume on a daily basis is any of a number of hexaploid wheats that are now grown around the world.

It is hard to imagine how mankind could possibly have become what it is now without both a warmer Earth and the development of the hexaploid wheat.

By the way, someone mentioned growing grapes in England. Grapes were reportedly grown in England in the dark ages, but The Little Ice Age ended that.

As for the sea level changes that accompany climate changes, during the last glaciation the sea level was more than a hundred meters lower than today. In the warmer days of the Holocene Climatic Optimum and after, it was something like seven to ten feet higher than today.

Some twenty years ago I was concerned about Global Warming just like many others, but then I asked myself the question of whether it has ever been warmer and what happened. I was surprised to learn that the temperatures of today are cooler than what would be considered normal for this planet. We are, after all, in an Ice Age. What is unusual about this climate isn’t that it is warming, but that it is as cool as it is.

23

I haven’t time to deal with everything that’s wrong with that long post; but you might start by reading this out of today’s news:

24

A “white Christmas” doesn’t mean that there is snow falling on Christmas. It means that there’s snow on the ground on Christmas, which might have fallen that day, or it might have fallen a week or more before and just hasn’t melted yet.

@billy-jack , an “ice age” is when Boston is under mile-thick glaciers. We’re not in an ice age. We are, in fact, approaching temperatures as far above “normal” global temperatures as an ice age is below, and we’re already well above the Holocene temperatures. And that change has happened, not over the course of tens of thousands of years as is normal for ice ages, but mostly over less than a hundred.

25

Among the numerous thigs in your post that I disagree with, this one seems more egregiously wrong than the others. The Earth as it is now cannot support the number of people we have now. A warmer world couldn’t either, nor could a colder one. We are too many and living on borrowed ressources. People who are in favour of GW (Putin comes to mind, he thinks Siberia will become fertile and nice) are a problem.

26

The problem here is that the constant dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere creates a moving target. 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the start of the industrial era would be manageable; while expensive, that 2 to 3 degrees you talk about could have been the case if we had done corrective moves years ago, now we have to do more expensive corrections and adaptations as we can expect more warming than that. And yes, not doing those changes would mean even more disastrous warming.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/what-is-a-4c-world

https://www.greenfacts.org/en/impacts-global-warming/l-2/index.htm#0

27

Another point that often gets overlooked: The problem is global warming, not global warmth. If the Earth’s temperature rose by 2-3 degrees and then stayed there, within a few lifetimes we’d adapt to that, and might, indeed, be better off in that warmer world than we are now. But it does take that time to adapt to the changes, and we don’t have a few lifetimes to adapt to it: That’s how much temperatures are increasing in one lifetime. We can’t adapt fast enough. Whatever adaptation we do, by the time we do it, we’re already too late for the next adaptation. And most of nature is much slower to adapt than we are: It takes multiple lifetimes for trees to adapt to a new climate, too, except their lifetimes can be thousands of years.

28

You don’t have to rely on your personal observations.
The USDA has changed their climate zone map.
Western North America is experiencing the worst drought in 1000 years. No end in sight.

If you somehow imagine this as not catastrophic, even a net positive, you are under so deep a delusion that it defies human speech to describe it.

29

I will say, however, that hearing the voices of doom and despair all around me doesn’t upset me the way it might a person who did not decide that we were absolutely going to kill our planet as fast as we could and nothing would stand in the way of that destruction – in 1972. I’ve never changed my belief at all. It took others a while to catch up to the truth.

30

You are confusing ice ages with periods of glaciation within an ice age. Years ago, the last period of glaciation was the only known such period and was termed an ice age. Today, we know better. There are five known major ice ages and this is one of them.

This ice age began about 2.6 million years ago and there is no reason at all to think that we don’t have millions of years to go The shortest known ice age was, I think, about 30 to 40 million years and the longest about 400 million years. They are generally believed to be the result of very long term geological conditions, many times longer any glacial period within an ice age.

This is considered warm for the Earth only if you ignore the last billion years and only look at the time since the end of the Eemian about 115,000 years ago. The Eemian is the previous interglacial period and is thought to have been warmer than this interglacial period.

31

It’ll end when the ice has gone.

32

You are just repeating classic contrarian points, that were debunked ages ago. What you say is correct, paleolitically speaking, the problem is that contrarians that made that argument mislead many by ignoring that the change back then was natural and very gradual.

33

The fastest warming period in the last 15,000 years was at the end of the Younger Dryas – a warming of around 10 F in a few years, possibly as few as 15 to 25 years.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t arrive at my view of this from listening to some contrarian arguments. To the contrary, I started looking at it out of concern but found that the facts do not support the alarmists at all. This is hardly a warm period.

By the way, warmer air is capable of carrying more moisture. Do you know where the driest places on Earth are? Where it is cold. One is the Atacama. There are some earthern buildings there built hundreds of years ago that never experience rain until the 20th century when they had two rains.

Another is Antarctica – the snow and ice is not because of large snowfalls but because the tiny amount of snow that does fall doesn’t melt. They even have at least one place where the amount of precipitation is so tiny that the ground is bare of snow.

It might surprise you to learn that the Sahara Desert is reportedly greening. That shouldn’t be very surprising because during the Holocene Climatic Optimum when it was significantly warmer than today, the Sahara had lakes, grasslands, and forests.

Sure, there are going to be winners and losers. As the weather patterns change, some places will indeed get less rain, but many will get more rain.

34

You need a quote for that, and in any case it does not deny at all that there were natural reasons for that change, not like today.

Incidentally, most of what you typed there is once again correct in localities, wrong in the overall picture. It has to be noted to that you just ignored what the evidence showed about how it is very irresponsible to think that there will be very little bad effects to come.

35

And many of the ones that get more rain will be flooded. Including large amounts of the currently most heavily populated areas in the world.

The last time most human coastal settlements went underwater, there were a whole lot fewer of us.

Plus which, agricultural areas being subjected to alternating deluges and droughts will be less productive, not more; even if the average amount of rainfall in their area looks like an improvement to the unskilled eye.

36

Getting back to the OP: Michigan has had a large amount of suburban “infill” over the past few decades. Ann Arbor to Detroit is fast becoming one large suburb. And suburbs have extended up to 23 Mile Road. (For outlanders, main east-west roads in and north of Detroit are spaced 1 mile apart and are numbered sequentially along with being named. For example 16 Mile Road is also called - wait for it - Big Beaver Road.)

Probably observational bias – I’ve noticed that weaker weather patterns seem to fall apart once they hit the “heat bubble” of Detroit and suburbs. Or they squirm around and push south or north. It is common for Monroe (between Detroit and Toledo) to get heavy snow or rainfall while Detroit stays relatively dry.

Of course, there was that year in 1999 or 2000 when we got so much snow that airplanes were parked on the runways at Detroit Metro airport - they couldn’t get to the terminals! The poor passengers were stuck on the planes.

And don’t get me started on the summer rains that always seem to fall on the weekends!

37

We would really love the greater rain around here. Without it, we are dependent on groundwater and that is rapidly going down. We have a section of wheat that will probably have to be plowed up because it hasn’t got enough rain to grow. And this is far from the worst I’ve seen myself. There was a period in the 1950s that people who remember it say was far worse. And then there was the dust bowl.

There will always be droughts now and then. It is a big error to jump to the conclusion that this drought is caused by global warming. Like I said, warmer air can carry far more moisture than cold air.

Don’t be scared of change. Things change. If too much water becomes a problem, we can adapt to it.

38

This is a huge misrepresentation of the issue, as are many of your other points. The increased moisture content of warmer air, at the simplest level, is irrelevant because condensation is a function of relative and not absolute humidity. Secondly, and much more significantly, increased water vapour acts as a powerful feedback that greatly amplifies the forcing of greenhouse gases, accelerating global warming. Thirdly, these effects change global circulation systems, leading to regional climate changes that include both flooding and droughts, as well as long-term regional temperature changes, all of which are much faster than the capability of natural systems to adapt. And fourthly, this destabilization of the climate system also leads to more energetic and destructive storms.

This chart from the IPCC AR4 provides some insight into some of these threats:

I would also add that, although I’m not a moderator and this is not a Politics & Elections forum, nevertheless the denial of climate change or its impacts is generally regarded as typifying the kind of nonsense that is generally discouraged on this board:

Climate Change Denialism. We believe the science. While there is room to debate ways to deal with climate change, the existence of such is an observed fact.
New Rules for Politics and Elections – January 2020

39

Fearlessness and ignorant complacency are not the same thing. Although ignorant complacency can often produce misguided feelings of fearlessness, based on simply not understanding the problem.

The trouble is that adapting to severe disruptions in climate patterns tends to be difficult and expensive, and in some cases devastating for the individuals involved. Saying that climate change isn’t a problem because “we can adapt to it” is kind of like saying that people shouldn’t be worried about speeding on icy roads because if they crash and end up in a wheelchair “they can adapt to it”.

Yes, human beings as a species can adapt to almost anything in the long run. However, the smarter ones among them try to avoid knowingly causing catastrophic problems that will be difficult and expensive to adapt to.

40

I’m not denying climate change. I welcome it.

What I deny is that the sky is fallilng. I think it will likely have considerably more benefits than drawbacks.