Silly me.
U.S. and China Criticize Climate Report
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out hugging trees, but please.
It seems that unless it’s something that’s going to affect the next election, it’s going to get shived back.
Wait a minute… If we take measures to try to fix something and it’s going to cost our special interest groups several millions of dollars that will affect the next election.
I pit polititians taking the short view. My children pit them. And my childrens children pit them.
Just reading that article, this line just made me sit and blink:
I’m having a hard time understanding what politicians and policy-makers are not understanding about human-caused global warming. It’s virtually unanimous at this point that yes, we are doing it, and yes, it’s a Bad Thing.
Costly and time-consuming versus all human life extinguished on Planet Earth. Hmm, tough call.
(I keep looking at the time estimates, and figuring out if I’ll be dead by then - 2050 - I’ll be 84 - maybe dead by then, maybe just having a very uncomfortable old age.)
Why are you having a hard time understanding? There are people, right here on the SDMB, that are peddling the “I don’t like your proof and therefore I shall ignore it” shit. It started out as “We don’t know that the climate is changing”, followed by the “We can’t prove that humans are affecting the climate”. I assume the next argument will continue the battle of sense versus obstinancy.
I assume attrition will win.
-Joe
I’m having a hard time understanding that level of self-serving willful blindness. I keep thinking that at some point, the light will dawn and people will realize that this issue is bigger than some people in the U.S. and China making a little less money.
You’re assuming that the politicians want the same thing as you. They don’t. There could be polar bears floating past DC on ice floes and as long as the money was coming in you’d still hear them belting out the usual ‘Well it obviously needs more research, we’re unsure, could have some negative impact’ bullplop.
Puh-lease! You say that is if the human race will survive long enough on a desert planet for your children’s children to be around…
:: grabs water bottle and recycling bin, and waits for UFO rescue ship ::
Wait, lets see: More water, hotter temperatures, more moisture in the atmosphere = desert planet? Huh?
Now if it got COLDER it might be a desert planet, but I don’t see hotter and more humid as desert, more like jungle.
Say what?
I’m sure that was satire at the extreme environmentalist whackos. Right? Right?
Nope, the post was by featherlou.
Unfortunately, no. And I consider myself to be a moderate on the subject.
featherlou’s remark about “all human life extinguished on Planet Earth” was definitely not in the “moderate” category of predictions concerning anthropogenic global warming, though.
“Many human lives extinguished and boatloads of human money and resources required to cope with ecological catastrophes and major changes in global climate” would be nearer the “moderate” mark.
Mind you, I agree that the US and Chinese governments are being shortsighted in putting up so much resistance to emissions-reducing measures. But I can’t agree with featherlou that their shortsightedness has actually reached the point of putting our species at serious risk of literal extinction.
No one’s saying it will happen tomorrow, but in the long-term, I’ve heard that global warming might mean much more than just dramatic weather changes and rising sea levels.
IANAClimatologist, but just off the top of my heard I’ve heard about the possibility of rising temperatures causing the permafrost in Arctic areas to melt, outgassing large amounts of methane (a very potent greenhouse gas). Global warming could also cause outgasing of methane from ocean sediments. Sudden release of large amounts of methane has been associated with major extinction events in the past. From the first couple hits I found on Google:
This Accuweather links says:
What do you think the combined results of anthropogenic global warming, overpopulation, possible pandemics, pollution of critical resources, drinking water shortages, long-term drought and starvation, extreme disparity between rich and poor, and religious fundamentalism will be? This isn’t scare journalism; this is the reality of the world we’re making. It’s not bad; it’s incredibly bad compounding on incredibly bad. And that’s not even taking into account things like ongoing wars and nuclear weapons exchange, which we have sort of decided is never going to happen, but we all know what lengths desperate people will go to.
No, I don’t have a lot of hope for the long-term future of mankind, when the decision-makers look at issues like these and all they still think is, “If I vote for emissions controls, will that prevent me from getting re-elected?” “Extreme environmentalist whacko?” Me? Hmm…
A badly written dooms day movie? Why not throw in a super volcano, peak oil, the disolving of all the trapped methane in the oceans, the earths magnetic field going suddenly tits up and a really big rock hitting the earth too? And some space aliens…you can’t have a real disaster without some blood thirsty space aliens I always say!
IOW, get a grip.
-XT
The end of republican control?
There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture
out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain.
Life on the Mississippi
Hopefully, after that movie bombs, Michael Bay will have to find a new job.
Bad. Perhaps very bad. But extremely unlikely, as far as the scientists can tell at present, to result in the literal extinction of all human life on earth any time within the next several millennia, which is what you appeared to be predicting as pretty much a certainty.
I’m a fairly hardcore emissions-reduction advocate myself, as all who’ve followed the various GD threads on global warming are probably aware. But it’s important to remember that the specific mid-term and long-term predictions of current climate science cover a very wide spectrum in both severity and likelihood.
I don’t think we strengthen our case by talking about possible outcomes as though they were certain, or about worst-case scenarios as though they were most-likely ones. I think that even a quite conservative estimate of the most probable results of anthropogenic climate change (more fires, more floods, more droughts, more severe ecosystem disruption, more resource wars, more environmental refugees, more expensive adaptation strategies) is plenty scary enough to justify taking some serious steps toward carbon stabilization now.
Samuel L Clemens.
Baconesque facts are bogus.
Haiku scientist.