There are studies pointing at the “Arab Spring” and the Syria unrest coming as a result of the food shortages brought by the extreme drought in the area and Russia, with climate change being a likely factor, most likely by making it worse that it could had been.
As many pointed before most of the shortages can be blamed on the inefficiency and lack of readiness and corruption of the regimes in the area; so yeah, if we had less people and less asshole rulers and we all allowed the flow of people affected around we would survive with much of a fuzz.
Unfortunately Russia will have to change a lot regarding their xenophobia and a lot of it also in the USA because we will have to deal with the flow of refugees caused first by the changes, and then by the warfare those changes are likely to bring.
While I’m an optimist in that we will survive, I’m a pessimist in the sense that a lot of the very bad things that could be avoided will happen, as there is not much preparation thanks to the idea by some powerful groups that nothing is happening.
That’s more or less my feeling as well. I’m sure global warming is a fact, but I also doubt that it’ll just go unchecked forevermore. At some point, there will be some weather patterns or clusters of natural disasters that can conclusively be pointed at as caused by global warming, and something will be done- geoengineering, and stricter pollution laws most likely.
Right now, the big problem is that despite the climatologists’ hockey stick graphs, the actual everyday impact has been negligible for your average person, and the science is abstract.
People don’t see it, so they don’t see a threat, and now they have people screaming the opposite, and saying that they need to change their lifestyles drastically to fix something that’s been going on more than 100 years, and hasn’t done anything that they can see. I can understand why less science-literate people might be skeptical.
Um, who says this? And who, other than Der, claim that civilization comes to an end? The worst case scenario that I’ve seen is that parts of the northeastern US become uninhabitable. But that won’t end civilization in and of itself.
To be clear: I do believe that the Earth is growing warmer. (I’d say I ‘know’, but I must trust the experts who actually do know since IANA scientist myself.) I was merely providing corroboration that there were people in the '70s saying that another ice age might be coming, and that a decade or so ago there was a hypothesis that an ice age may be brough about by global warming.
I wish people would understand the difference between weather and climate, and global warming and climate change. Just because you have a big snow storm doesn’t mean there’s no global warming, and just because there is global warming doesn’t mean you’re not going to have snow.
Yeah, well, the pieces I recall from that time period typically did not say “There is an Ice Age coming”, they were more like “Ice Age Coming*?***” I think there was a book or two, but they got CT-level circulation.
The biggest concern for global warming is the likely positive feedbacks, most notably in the permafrost. If the taiga and the tundra start to melt, a lot of CH[sub]4[/sub] will be released, and that is a major greenhouse gas. Global warming is likely to accelerate itself, and there is not a lot we can do, even now, to change that. Restoring the Amazon rainforest, if it it were possible, and expanding the boreal forests at breakneck speed would probably help a lot, but we have to do that starting right now, yesterday.
One faintly bright spot is the possibility that sea level rise will be less extreme than imagined because a lot more water will be in the air (not sure how much there is to that theory), but the likely changes to local climates will not be good. One major problem we would face is that if the arable zones move north (a questionable hypothesis), our crop-growing land will start to be competing with the forests we want for carbon-sequestration.
Gonna be 0-1 against the Pedant when TEOTWAWKI craps out for AGW Alarmists.
Kudos, though, to those who thought up the theme that being skeptical of AGW Alarmism is tantamount to being skeptical of science. It’s very effective in silencing critics, many of whom are in fact scientific boobs.
We have much larger, more impossible-to-correct crises that will eventually relegate AGW to the back burner way before it’s time to fry. Overpopulation. A little starvation. Some serious loss of natural habitat chewed up to feed the masses. Maybe a nice comet, or earthquake, or rogue virus, or nukes theft… Wars, maybe.
I’ll letcha know which one it was as soon as it becomes the Great Cause du Jour and displaces AGW from being the little pet of Chicken Little wannabes who just love being in the know and holders of Great Wisdom. Not to mention BFFs with “98 % of Experts.”
I had a ball mocking Y2K alarmists. It’s kind of nice to have a new Club to ridicule for their sincerity and holier-than-thouness.
I had a ball mocking them too as I investigated the issue when deploying new computer at the UC Berkeley library.
And as I investigated this issue, the reality is that the ones in the Y2K corner are the ones that use conspiracy and misleading information like them. They will continue to just fail.
They are called active scientists and they are not alarmists, they are not emeritus nor on the payroll of denier organizations or just plain McScientists.
Chief Pedant, do you actually have an argument (with scientific evidence) of why global warming won’t have a major impact? Any rebuttal beyond “it’s alarmist so I don’t want to believe it. And oh yeah, Y2K.”
In the 1970s, there was some speculation that we were due for another ice age and perhaps global warming would short circuit it. I don’t recall any firm ice age predictions, although I cannot certify there weren’t any.
Someone lumped global warming as another example of a BS prediction. So you think that it was a waste to ban CFCs and preserve the ozone layer? After that, nothing you say is worth looking at.
As for the OP, we are already seeing effects. No, no particular weather event can be definitely traced to global warming, but there have been too many anomalous events recently. I just read about a town in Southern California that has not had running water in five months! Imagine not being able to turn your tap and get water. For five months. I think its bad but I won’t be around to see it.
Not your fault, but I have seen many examples of media getting wrong that bit about “we can not definitely trace an event to global warming”.
It is not a bad thing to say with the context, but it gets bad when the context is omitted, many times it is framed as being equal to “therefore no global warming”, they are wrong in the sense that they ignore how the issue is related to probability. But the main mistake they make is to not point out also the other problem of the warmth growing in the background.
Regardless of the cause of the event, natural or caused by AGW, the extreme weather events are getting worse thanks to the increase in energy and matter that the warming causes. It is more intense in the areas where hurricanes and tornadoes appear and in the Southwest the warming increase makes the droughts worse.
This is IMHO. And except for diehards who find significance stamping out anti-AGW sentiment wherever they find it, not the place for debate.
I am not very interested in AGW, pro or con. I am an observer of human nature, and am interested in why we think the way we think and why we become so vested in it.
I make a general observation that we are almost never right with our predictions and that there is a tendency to skew in a direction of TEOTWAWKI. AGW has become a contest of predicting the most dire outcome and producing papers in support of that.
Stuff comes out my nose laughing when I see GIGObuster embracing the idea that AGW has caused whatever political/religous strife he just posted above.
We get stuff wrong. We get it wrong en masse. In particular we get very forward looking predictions badly wrong. Statistically/historically we’ll be badly wrong about how bad AGW will be, and we are already wrong about where it ranks as far as Troubles Facing Humanity.
My main complaint is that more proximate problems that are less solvable are easily an order of magnitude greater than AGW. They just aren’t fun and they don’t have a solution. So, for example, our burgeoning third-world population as it comes online with development is going to push the earth to the brink of what it can support–and maybe beyond. Our proclivity for borrowing is going to bite us in the ass way before AGW does.
The ecological catastrophe of supporting the future population dwarfs AGW. But no one has a reasonable solution, so you don’t get the high-and-mighty haughtiness of Great Cause Superiority 'Cuz I Know What To Do To Fix It discussing it. On the other hand, you can be an AGW Crusader and preach the Message with total fervor even if you can’t understand a single parameterization in the AOGCMs.
That’s just too much Signficance to pass up, especially with religious faith fading.
And you get to be BFFs with smart people. Another goodie.
You get to say things like, “98% of Scientists agree with this science.” (And look at me; I am erudite enough to be with the Scientists!)
(When the market starts shorting Florida beachfront, that’s when you’ll know AGW has become a prediction worth listening to. )
A couple points: first, it sounds like you do believe some predictions, like the negative impacts of overpopulation, increased demand for resources by third-world countries, and unsustainable debt. So it’s specifically the predicted impacts of AGW that you don’t believe, not simply “we are almost never right with our predictions.” Is there something in the science that leads you to this opinion?
Second, I agree with you that AGW is certainly not the only threat facing us, and the ones you list are indeed very severe. But this is a complex system and it’s not easy to separate causes. If a million people starve in a famine, is it because of overpopulation or because the changed climate reduced food production? Probably both. If the U.S. goes deeper into debt paying for damage from massive wildfires and hurricanes, is that a debt problem or climate problem? Again, it’s both.
I said that it was a factor, not the cause, only that it is more likely that it was made worse thanks to AGW, TroutMan understood that perfectly, but if you want to insist on making caricatures of what others are saying and looking silly as a result, that is not my problem.
Look, I know I should had qualified some of those predicted eco-disasters as having some basis in fact. Yes CFCs caused the hole in the ozone layer. But there were doomsayers claiming that because of this almost the whole southern hemisphere of the Earth would be uninhabitable by now. And of course linking that to the fact that all the ‘first world’ govt powers are in the north so they didn’t care.
I’m a smart guy. I excelled at math & science in school. As I got older I also (slowly) began to understand politics. Science & politics didn’t used to be nearly as in bed with each other as they are now. So much so that I can spot science based on political views (i.e. junk science) instantly. A scientist gave this good example of the current situation:
Let’s say you’re a graduate student and you want to study the endangerment of, say, the Peruvian Tree Squirrel (not real). If you write a paper for a scientific journal and merely entitle it “The extinction rate of the Peruvian Tree Squirrel” you not likely to get much interest (read- funding!) But, if instead you merely change the title to “Global Warming and its effect on the endangered Peruvian Tree Squirrel” you’re literally 1000 times more likely to get funding.
And I don’t care how many references someone wants to give, the idea that ‘97% of all scientists’ agree that global warming is a fact is ridiculous. Its merely skewed by the fact that the ones that doubt it don’t mention it for fear of ostracization.
As a practicing scientist, this is nonsense. Scientists who go outside of dogma without data get ostracized. Scientists who go outside of dogma with data get Nobel prizes.
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