Accidental double post – I was actually trying to correct a stupid typo – the last sentence above clearly meant to say " … the negative effects to humanity will greatly outweigh the good … "
Nuclear power, which people keep ignoring.
Canada’s best strategy is to try to attract investors in green energy, or other enviro-projects, from the USA. It is huge business and potential economic boon for Canada.
“Fuck the trees”? Without Canadian rain forests, CO[sub]2[/sub] accumulation will be worse. And global warming is one of many economically destructive ecological problems; it does not in any way exist in a vacuum.
(Not from BC, but a conservationist.)
Just to be accurate, rain forests are mainly a big deal in the tropics – less than 2% of Canada’s forests are rainforest, all on the southwest coast of BC. But yes, absolutely, Canadian forests are a huge factor, but we’re talking about boreal forests, of which Canada has more than 307 million hectares, and more than another 100 million in non-boreal regions.
Isn’t there anywhere on Earth that will have better weather and more productive farms and fields as a result of climate change? I find it hard to believe that we were once at THE perfect average global temperature, from which any departure is an unmitigated loss.
It’s not about the “perfect temperature”, and that perspective misses the point. The problem is the rate at which the temperature is changing, driven by the major perturbation in the earth’s energy balance caused by greenhouse gases and associated feedbacks. This perturbation is called a climate forcing, and the magnitude of the current greenhouse forcing and consequent temperature change is far greater than normally ever occurs in nature, even during the onset and termination of ice ages.
There are two primary consequences of this forcing. One is an unstable climate system, which will likely remain unstable for hundreds of years as it heads to a new temperature equilibrium, resulting in destructive extreme weather events and potentially significant regional climate changes such as major permanent precipitation changes and much higher or lower temperatures as global circulation systems change. Added to that are exacerbating feedbacks from loss of polar ice cover, rising sea levels, stronger coastal storm surges, and the acidification of the oceans.
The other major consequence is to regional ecosystems, which can’t adapt to sudden regional climate changes, resulting in potential impacts like loss of biodiversity, invasive species and diseases, and potential threats to local food crops – ironically, the threats are greatest in the poorest and most vulnerable regions like Africa, which in turn implies geopolitical instabilities.
Ah, I’d thought it was being claimed that increased storms/drought, etc. was the new equilibrium at the higher temperature. Ignorance fought.
Actually, both things could be true – I was mainly addressing climate destabilization due to strong climate forcings and rapid temperature change, but things could still be grim at equilibrium. For one thing, regional precipitation changes and temperature changes could be effectively permanent because of persistent long-term global circulation changes – droughts and floods are, after all, just the names we give to the effects of precipitation changes to which we are not historically accustomed nor acclimatized. Also, higher energy levels in the climate system can lead to more extreme weather; for example, warmer sea surface temperatures are theoretically associated with hurricanes that have higher energies. This is not to say that more hurricanes will necessarily form – there are disruptive factors that may actually create fewer of them with warmer SSTs – but when they do form, they may on average have higher energies, longer durations, and more destructive power.
You seem to use a lot of … caveats here. “theoretically” “This is not to say” “they may on average”. Is this one of those areas the IPCC has low confidence in?
I can’t find it now- I’d thought it was an Onion article but apparently not- that farcically presented global warming as a boon to mankind. Canada and Siberia become the most productive agricultural regions on the planet, floods turn former deserts into grassy plains, Cape Cod becomes a tropical paradise with parrots, palm trees and bikini-clad women, etc.
It depends on exactly what question you’re asking. I fear that your earlier reference to “climate change activists” and my recollection of prior conversations on this topic suggest an underlying agenda here to push the idea that there is uncertainty about rapid climate change causing extreme weather events, which is assuredly not the case. It’s been well established that there will continue to be record-breaking new high temperatures, more frequent extreme heat waves, more frequent and more intense precipitation in many areas with consequent side effects, and (with somewhat lesser certainty) droughts and stresses on water resources in some regions.
The picture on hurricanes is less clear not because of an absence of clear links to causative factors – no one doubts that the engine driving hurricanes is warm sea surface temperatures – but because there isn’t yet enough data globally to establish overall statistical trends and attributions. However one of the world’s most prominent hurricane researchers, Kerry Emanuel at MIT, invented a new metric for hurricane intensity called the Power Dissipation Index (PDI) and has amassed persuasive evidence that climate change has been driving increasing hurricane PDI over the North Atlantic region, where SSTs have been observably rising along with global average temperatures.