I watched Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and I have studied meteorology a little. I would like to hear your opinions on what will actually happen, climatologically, in the coming 50 years or so. How will the world respond to the changes (if you agree that there will be any)?
From what I’m aware of, it appears that a sizable measure of climate change is already imminent. That being true, the world we know now may be completely different by the time many of us are old. Is it not the most important issue of our time?
You’re asking for opinions, right? Because, just like saying “Bush is an idiot”, around here you’re preaching to the choir. Most everyone is convinced that Clinton is a demi-god, Bush is the anti-Christ, and global warming is coming because of the Republicans (I’m not saying any of the preceding are true or false, it’s just my general impression of the SDMB)
So, what’s going to happen in the next 50 years because of global warming?
The American West (Colorado, NM, Wyo, Arizona, Nevada) might get dryer (or might get wetter)
The East and South of the US will have increased rainfall.
The ice caps will thicken but recede.
Life for the industrialized world will be about the same.
There is a possibility that some of the poorer areas of the world will find improved conditions for agriculture, while others will find conditions worsen.
Ocean rise may not be counteracted by increased snowfall in Antarctica and Greenland, so some small islands may face serious crises, and soon!
Some species will face extinction
Some species will flourish
Tropical diseases will move into poor areas, but probably not into rich ones.
Is it the most important issue of our time? Maybe. No way to know for sure. I’m sure the people starving to death or dying of some disease that they can’t afford medication for would say “no”, while people who stand to gain political or financial capital from either side would say whatever it is would support their position.
Me? I doubt it, but it might be a subset of an “important issue” (our dependence on a polluting and dwindling resource).
The family gredunza will fix everything at the last minute.
My guess is that American prevailing political opinion will slowly switch from “we don’t really know what the cause is,” to “there’s a crisis! This is no time to play the blame game,” and the United States will force the rest of the world to follow its newly-found environmental leadership. It will take credit for stopping the CO2 increase that is causing the majority of the warming, and some unaccounted-for-in-computer-models natural mechanism will complement the reduction in CO2 emission to help the world temperatures level off at less than the most dire predictions.
Yeah, sorry. Unnecessary, impolite, and had no place in GD. Still annoyed from a totally unrelated thread and let it spill over.
Hmm… sad face or head smack? I deserve an eye-roll or a :dubious: at least.
The Deuce you say! Are you going to sit there with a straight face and claim Bush is NOT the anti-Christ? The forest for the trees, man. The forest for the trees!!
Trying to make exact predictions is a sucker’s game, because climatology is not an exact science. The atmosphere and the oceans are systems so massively complex that we can’t begin modelling the entire thing with any accuracy. The models we do have frequently prove insufficient, simply because they haven’t been adequately tested and refined. One example was cited by Gore in his movie. Back in 2000, scientists studying the antarctic ice sheets predicted that the sheets on the West Antarctic Peninsula would disintegrate in about twenty years. Instead, they disintegrated in about two years. Nobody in the scientific community had anticipated such a rapid breakdown.
Scientists have predictions for how much ice will melt from Greeneland and Antarctica, but those may prove to be off as well.
As far as how the various effects of global warming will effect social and political scenes all over the planet, I’d say small effects in rich countries and big effects in poor countries. In the United States, 45 percent of the country experienced moderate to extreme drought during the summer of 2005, and similar numbers in 2002 and 2004 (and probably in 2006 as well). That leads to increased wildfires, farmers going bankrupt, water restrictions for the public in some cities. But so far, it hasn’t been enough to cause massive public outcry.
In poor countries, there is far less buffer protecting the social and economic systems when conditions change. In Sudan, for instance, severe drought has compounded with a backwards economy to create food shortages, and those were the real cause of the outbreak of hostilities. In Ecuador, droughts plunged thousands of farmers into bankruptcy, and the end result was the downfall of the government in 2005.
Whether the economic consequences of climate change will grow big enough that they actually destabilize the wealthy countries is anybody’s guess.
Yeah, and I watched Michael Moore’s documentary F911. (just being cynical here)
Movies make great visual propaganda–but that doesn’t mean they are correct.
example:
Al Gore shows the famous snows of Kilimanjaro disappearing.
but this site is one of many that claim the snow melting has nothing to with global warming. (the melting is probably caused by local changes in the local forest cover. As if we didnt know that massive logging causes problems)
Our great-grandfathers (the cowboys) lived on a North American continent that was covered in dense forest. Look at the little strips of unused land between the corn fields of the Midwest. The trees are so thick you can’t walk between them. Today they are all gone, --corn and wheat stretch to the horizon.
My own guess is that climate change is occurring, but we humans will change along with it and adapt
How much of that would happen even if global warming wasn’t a factor? For years, I’ve read reports that much of the water usage in the Western U.S. is not sustainable, and that there are natural cycles of severe and prolonged drought.
I agree with your assessment regarding the potential to create propaganda using “documentaries”. That’s why I started this thread, actually. Altough the information presented in the doc sounded compelling at the time, counterarguments like the one you made about Kilimanjaro are left unpresented.
The creators of documentaries which seem geared to leave the viewer with a particular opinion about an issue, often justify themselves by claiming that no one will listen to them otherwise; that propaganda is what their opponents use, and they must fight fire with fire. To me, however, the ends don’t justify the means. The only kind of supporters you may gain with this method are supporters with little objective belief in their own power of judgement. Such supporters are inevitably harmful to any just cause, because they will be manipulated by the trickiest of spinsters and not moved by any personal, rationally founded principles. So far, my feeling has been that An Inconvenient Truth is a minor offender of propagandizing, but I would like to hear more counterarguments, from anyone whom can present them.
Thanks all for your posts, and I hope to read more.
Go watch it again. Ten times in a row, with your cheeks and forehead glued to the TV screen. It will be a more beneficial use of your time than anything else you might have had planned for today.
Most of this area (CO, NM, WY) is semi-arid, so we’ve never really had enough water here in Denver. The late 80’s and early 90’s were the wettest decade in… a while (can’t find the cite, sorry), so the latest population explosion happened during a wet period and the reversion to normal would have been trouble enough, but a decade of warmer and dryer than normal followed making it even worse. As a point of interest, the 105 degree record we set last week broke a record set in 1880 sometime. LONG BEFORE our CO2 emissions could possibly have been to blame. NOAA keeps pretty good records, and this area cycles through ~ 10 year heat/drought periods every 30-40 years. The fact that the previous decade is breaking records set over the full 130 years of observation indicates that this period is probably worse (higher highs) than any other single period, even if it’s not dryer as far as actual yearly precipitation is concerned. We’re lucky that water gathering/storing technology has allowed up to keep our disgustingly green lawns (that and the draining of our aquifers)
Still, no way to tell in the short term what is happening. Could be natural warming causes increases in natural CO2 emissions by speeding up decomposition and etc. Every model I’ve seen comes up with an totally different result, although all of them are bad.
I have also seen papers detailing how global warming would be a good thing, increasing biodiversity and expanding agriculture… Probably done by the oil industry, but semi-convincing in areas.
The retreat of the Kilimanjaro glacier is indeed linked to a natural precipitation cycle, but there’s reason to think that it’s also linked to global warming:
And while we’re discussing the credibility of sources, it’s worth noting that chappachula’s link is to World Climate Report, the blog of well-known “climate change skeptic” Patrick J. Michaels, who is heavily funded by the fossil-fuel industry. As dublos pointed out, junkscience.com is not generally considered a scientifically reputable site, but rather a PR tool for its funding sources.
That doesn’t mean that Michaels or even junkscience.com can’t be right about anything, but they are generally regarded among scientists as strongly reflecting the biases of their industry funders. It’s important to give free play to scientific dispute and controversy, but it’s also important to be alert for attempts to misrepresent claims and issues as being more scientifically controversial than they are.
Unfortunately, if we do wait until we are completely certain it is human activity, the consequencies might, or might not be disastrous.
We can sit around, wait, do nothing, and hope for the best, and it may not amount to a great deal.
We could do something about energy consumption, try reforestation, clean power generation and it could all be a complete waste of time, things may revert to mormal, or they may be already out of control, or it may be that its part of the natural schem of things and there was never anything we could do.
All the same, wouldn’t it be one complete bitch if we did nothing, and the outcome was widespread drought that destroyed nations, populations, species and we found out that we could have made a differance ?
Moreover, as far as I can tell, there are two separate questions here:
What impact is human activity currently having on global climate?
What impact will human activity have on global climate in the future if we continue our current trends of fossil fuel use and emissions?
From everything I’ve been able to gather as a reasonably intelligent layperson on this topic, the answers seem to be
Most probably quite a bit, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty in working out the mechanisms and forecasting the results, so we don’t know many of the details.
Almost certainly (barring some very unlikely or unforeseen natural carbon-busting mechanism) lots and lots and LOTS.
AFAICT, there is almost no serious scientific disagreement that pushing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 up above 500 ppm (we have increased them in the past 150 years from about 280 to 380 ppm, btw) will put us into “scary global experiment” territory. The last time our atmosphere was that CO2-heavy was tens of millions of years ago, when sea levels were about 100 meters higher than at present. At present emissions rates, it’s predicted that we’ll hit 500 ppm within the next 50 years.
If our current patterns of consumption and pollution are unsustainable in the long run, and I’ve seen no convincing arguments that they aren’t, then ISTM that we might as well start changing them now.
A new study predicts that if current trends continue, the Arctic will be free of ice during summer by 2040. That’s 40 years sooner than previously projected.
The article says this could lead to the extinction of the polar bear and other species, and the demise of indigenous people’s (I guess they mean the Eskimos) way of life.
What it doesn’t say is how that will affect the sea level. When floating ice melts, that doesn’t raise the sea level by itself – but if that’s happening in the Arctic, what’s going to happen to the mile-thick ice shield covering Antarctica? And will the average temperature of the world ocean as a whole rise? If that happens, the sea levels will rise – warm water takes up more space than an equivalent mass of cold water – but by how many centimeters?
We will find out. There are enough people who can make short term profits by ignoring it. They are politically well placed. There are enough junk science, experts and scientists who can be bought to make those predisposed to not believing it satisfied. We are screwed. Like Bush says if they are right they only have to be right once. If you are willing to take the side thats it is a fabrication ,you better be right ,because we all die together.
