Not everything everybody says about the horrors of climate change is always 100% accurate. Skepticism is a good thing.
Making people afraid to object to wild or unsubstantiated claims, lest they be labeled or ridiculed is not good scientific progress.
Every time someone points to some new hurricane or natural disaster as being a confirmation of global warming they are being just as stupid as the people who cite snowstorms or the occasional unusually cold spell as proof that it’s not.
So, global warming will drastically change the planet and our lives will not be like we have known them for the past couple of hundred years. But the only way to slow it down is to change the way we have lived for the past couple of hundred years. Think no more personal transportation, and no more steady, reliable supply of electricity. Back to early 1800’s in population and lifestyle.
As a Midwesterner, my main concern is that if global warming is going to raise the ocean levels, we have to make sure it happens fast enough that all the people that live on the coast don’t get a chance to move inland first. ( It will really screw up the property values and taxes ). Fewer people will also take care of a major part of the warming problem.
Things are changing, I’m just not convinced it isn’t more nature than man made.
What would it take to convince you? Because the evidence is enough to convince thousands of the most skeptical people in the world.
And while the most extreme changes to curtail emissions would indeed mean a drastic decrease to our standard of living and quality of life, there are still very big changes that could be made that would be very nearly painless. We can transition to smaller and otherwise more fuel-efficient cars, or even in many cases to pure electric or plug-in hybrid cars. We can shift more of our electrical generation over to non-fossil-fuel sources like wind and nuclear. We can make our homes and appliances more energy-efficient. We can come up with many other solutions, and institute something like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade to encourage industry to come up with other solutions. There’s no one big solution that’ll magically fix everything, but there are a lot of small solutions that, if we put them all together, can significantly mitigate the problem.
The best analogy I read is that you’ve got a pair of 6-sided dice, your hurricane dice. Whenever you roll ten or more, you get a hurricane. Whenever a double-six comes up, there’s a really bad hurricane.
Global warming takes one die and changes the 1 to a 6. That die now has two sixes on it.
Hurricanes are gonna happen a lot more now. Any individual hurricane you can’t say is proof of global warming, but the pattern definitely results from global warming.
That’s not the same thing as people who confuse weather events with climate change.
Electric cars produce lower carbon emissions than regular, even if you use a coal plant to get the electricity. Natural gas is lower than coal. Nuclear, hydro, wind and solar are all zero carbon, and we know that they could entirely replace fossil fuel. So there are lots of ways to make incremental progress with very little impact on daily life.
Furthermore, we know fossil fuels are limited resources so it’s inevitable that we must transition away from them. The question is whether we make that replacement over decades (by choice) or over centuries (by necessity).
The impact on lifestyle depends entirely on how fast and how completely you want to make the transition and only Pol Pot would try a transition that would send us back to the 1800s.
Well fie to that, this talking point is also a talking point from climate change deniers. And after 100 years of this the reality is that the wild and unsubstantiated claims are coming almost exclusively from the ones rejecting science.
As I said, things are changing. I don’t need to be convinced of that.
I just am not sure that because it is happening now, and human population is at an all time high (and getting higher) that it is cause and effect. I think that most people just “ass-u-me” that it is due entirely to people, and more specifically to power plants, cars, etc. Then I see footage of the latest volcano, or read about the last ice age and think about the changes the planet has gone through long before humans were so wide spread. The xkd chart seems to show that significant changes have happened, and long before people could have a serious effect.
No doubt we need to make drastic changes in our energy production and usage. I vote for nukes. Better to make a few small spots uninhabitable (for waste storage) than the whole planet. Unfortunately the movies have pretty much scared most people stupid about nuclear energy.
This is missing the point, what is happening now is that we are putting stuff in the atmosphere faster than nature can deal in the carbon cycle, as a result the CO2 content is increasing and then the temperature increases to levels not seen before humans started to keep count. the old natural changes were mostly gradual and humanity could cope and develop. This unnatural change is going too fast.
And also the best and largest use of nuclear power is in France, unfortunately the way they did it smells like socialism in the USA so it is unlikely that we will emulate that.
In any case there are still ways that we can change that do not need us to go back to the stone age. And you should be aware that that point of the proponents of change demanding that we get to the stone age era is also a climate change denier talking point.
The link between climate change and humans is actually quite simple. We know that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes the planet warmer. We see this in the historical (and pre-historical) record for both, and we understand the mechanism by which this occurs. The amount we see in the historical record matches what we would predict from our knowledge of the mechanism. We know that we humans are releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide, that previously lay undisturbed in the ground for millions of years. We know how exactly how much we’re releasing. The amount we’re releasing exactly matches the amount by which the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing, and the amount by which the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing corresponds to the amount of temperature increase we’re actually seeing.
If this is the chart that you had in mind, I can’t see the basis for a critique of the claims by XKCD. Each increment in your chart is 10,000 years. The point of the XKCD comic was to contrast the slope of the recent 100 year change to the experience over the past 20,000 years. My eyes can’t resolve slopes over 0.07 millimeters on my monitor. (7 mm divided by 100=10,000/100). Those so-called spikes occurred over thousands of years. Or tens of thousands.
I do, however, see a reasonably sharp spike within the last 20,000 years of the Vostok chart. Assuming is was stretched out correctly, it was fairly gradual by modern standards if we trust the accuracy of the XKCD presentation.
I’m not familiar with the science in wolfpup’s post, but I can read a graph. Chronos seems to think that there are no records of such rapid temperature changes in the geologic record outside of catastrophic asteroid/supervolcano events. If you have proof to the contrary, I’d like to see it.
