In other words:
.
Ocean acidification is going to suck so hardcore. 
I have no clue if reef-building corals will go extinct as a group and the world will go reefless for tens of millions of years, or we’ll merely lose all our coral reefs and have to wait hundreds of thousands of years for them to rebuild themselves, but even if we manage to halt global warming by doing something to reduce solar flux, the coral reefs are totally fucked.
All bets are off if we discover and implement some kind of terrestrial carbon sequestration technology, but that simply isn’t going to happen as long as the public discourse is “Global warming, problem or fake idea? Here’s both sides of the issue.”
They didn’t live in misery for the most part, or at least not misery by their estimation. Let’s not over-dramatize the suffering of all of those who came before us who were forced to eke out lives bereft of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
A month ago I was driving a day-laborer home. He expressed amazement as we passed a flock of wild turkeys that my country was so rich that free meat would be allowed to wander about unmolested. Where he came from no turkeys, no deer, no nutria, no anything was allowed to grow to maturity before being eaten.
My concern is not the human weal so much as the ecosystems. They no longer exist as they once were, except in remote locations. For better or worse, we broke it and we own it.
In 2014 Global Warming is pretty much settled science,
It was settled science in the 1970’s, pretty much, but it took decades to finally satisfy all the legions of dimbulbs that global warming was a thing substantially different from killer bees and the Y2K bug.
It turns out some college-educated people don’t have enough Science education to be able to distinguish good and bad arguments. This is a crying shame, and a condemnation of the standards that prevail in America’s institutes of higher learning. Even back in the seventies the most rudimentary science courses would have given Graduates sufficient presence of mind to be able to distinguish a good argument fom a bad one.
Well, the ones that told you so where the ones spewing the bull, as Jon Stewart said, you are listening to the positions of “Big Fecal”
I’m always interesting on the issue of sources so, can you mention who told you that item? (and the ICE age one) And why do you think is that people that are misled like that usually do not get angry with the sources that misled them but they get upset instead with the ones that show them that someone out there did give them trash as information?
As a teen in the late-'70s I heard about a possible ice age coming. I thought it was great, because I was into skiing at the time. 
About a decade ago there was talk about how melting of the ice caps might disrupt the ‘thermal-halide conveyor belt’ and cause an ice age.
*Note: I just skimmed the link, as I was just looking for a description of the current.
About the ice age coming in the 70’s: Most scientists then did report that warming was coming ( and they were correct), but the mainstream media did report only what the minority said, a lot was related to the clear pause and the cooling short trend then, but I do think that back then there was already pressure from fossil fuel companies to not inform the people properly.
Nowadays there should be no excuse of not reporting on the issue properly, but the so called liberal media is the pits on this issue and the right wing one is known for deceiving their viewers, it is a very old problem. As I pointed many times before it does not matter how liberal a mainstream paper or media group could be, if they would report about all the contamination they would lose many powerful advertisers so a lot is self-censored.
“Funny” ad of those past days:
Interestingly, the Pentagon is taking it seriously. Climate change to become immediate factor for all strategic, operational and planning decisions. I suppose that the danger of their forces ending up underwater focuses their attention.
As bad as who says it’ll be? There are some who say that Everest will be underwater, and those people are quite simply wrong. There are also some who say that it will be no big deal, and those people have already been proven wrong, since global warming has already killed many millions of people. The truth is somewhere in between. Precisely where in between? It’s impossible to say. Not only are there uncertainties in the scientific models (as there always are), but even if we knew the climate science perfectly, it also depends on just what we do. You think predicting the weather is hard? Try predicting people.
We cannot change quickly enough to prevent all harmful effects of global warming, since some of the harmful effects have already occurred. We can, however, still make a big difference. Will we?
I think the effects on the environment will be as bad as feared. But the effects on governments and world stability get less attention and could be worse.
I briefly studied atmospheric science in grad school in the early '90s. Even back then, global warming was established science among people who looked at it objectively. One of my professors was commenting on the impact, and said to imagine the disruption in the U.S. if the prime farm belt moved north a few hundred miles. States with an economy based on agriculture suddenly have no economy. It will be a massive undertaking to shift the farming industry - people, equipment, infrastructure. We’ll probably manage, although with severe negative impacts to many individuals.
Now imagine the same scenario elsewhere in the world, where you aren’t talking about shifts within the same country, but into another country. How do the countries left with no water or agriculture or economy survive? My professor foresaw the collapse of governments within our lifetime. The timing might be overly pessimistic (depending on your age), but I don’t think the end result is wrong.
The effects will be different depending on whether you are a middle-class North American or a poor person living near the Equator. For the North American the effects would be similar to moving a few hundred miles to the South–you just use more air conditioning–(unless you live on the coast, where your house could go under water so you need to move). If you are a poor person living near the Equator you have a good chance of dying: the human body simply can’t stand high temperatures plus humidity. These brutal conditions (extreme weather conditions) are predicted to occur fairly often.
I hope it won’t be as bad as they say. But I kinda think it will be.
Both terms have been used by scientists for decades, and the recent heavy use of “climate change” in media and polical talking points has been advocated from the right as a way to make it sound less threatening and more manageable. Cite (admittedly biased source, but well-cited itself).
I find it amazing that people still truck out, “But they said something different in the 70s!” We’re talking about things based heavily on computer models. Computers have changed somewhat in the intervening forty years.
In a word, no.
Global warming has already morphed into ‘climate change’ as a direct result of a lack of credible, unbiased, scientific evidence and public disinterest & skepticism. In another decade or so (after absolutely nothing whatsoever happens) it will be on the scrapheap along with every other apocalyptic, civilization-ending, man-made, pop culture ecological disaster (a new ice age, nuclear winter, acid rain, the ozone hole, the Kuwaiti oil well fires, the shrinking rainforest etc.)
You could have at least waited a few posts after your point was refuted to bring it out again. There are so many other easy obfuscations you could have made at this point. How about blaming it on volcanoes? That’s easily refuted as well, but at least it hasn’t been refuted in this thread yet, much less in the previous post.
I can’t believe I’m taking the time to parse this. But what the hell.
Partly true - the wording change is due in some part to public skepticism. But lack of credible, unbiased, scientific evidence?? Good lord, man, what do you think people usually mean by credible? It’s not “what Fox News and Hail Ants choose to believe.” When 97% of scientists agree, that’s credible. Oh, but they are all biased, you say! Again, “bias” doesn’t mean “they don’t agree with me.” (And kindly explain why all these scientists are so eager to manufacture evidence showing there is global warming. Isn’t there a lot more money to be made off the rich petroleum companies than government research grants?)
Get your head out of the sand, it’s already happening.
See the posts above about the “ice age apocalypse” and come up some more pertinent examples.
Are you saying that a large-scale nuclear war wouldn’t have been an ecological disaster? Or are you commenting on the fact that we have avoided the disaster (so far) because we have avoided nuclear war itself through changes in our behavior?
Acid rain is less of a threat today in many countries because of our actions to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions. Countries such as China with less stringent controls still have a significant problem with it.
Also less of a problem today because of our actions to eliminate CFCs, the primary driver of ozone depletion. Sounds like you make a good argument for action on global warming, given our relative success with acid rain and ozone depletion.
There was little agreement on the predicted impact of the fires at the time. Some scientists predicted global effects and a nuclear-winter like scenario; others predicted the smoke would be rained out in a matter of days and the impact would be localized. There was no where near the 97% consensus as there is today around global warming (and the predictive science was poorer 23 years ago. But I’m feeling generous, so I’ll give you this one.
Besides the loss of species, a major impact of deforestation is global warming, which we are already seeing the impacts of.
It will probably be partly true and partly exaggerated.
I believe that humans are influencing the climate - namely increasing GHGs in the atmosphere. However, I believe that we will stop short of changing the climate considerably from today.
I believe in human ingenuity and I believe we will make changes and introduce new technologies that will help us deal with a changing climate and eventually reverse the effect. We did it for acid rain and the ozone and we will do it for climate change.
I wish I could share your optimism. What action do you see happening today that makes you think we will succeed? We did it in the past because people trusted the science and realized there was a need for action. Both those are sorely lacking today.
We have been in global warming for the past 10,000 years or so. Glaciers that were 5,000 to 10,000 feet high over the northern latitudes melted, the seas rose 600 feet or so. Our ancestors survived all of that, so why you think we not in the future ?
Personally, I feel we have more concerns of a turn to sever cold weather, than warming.