Yes, it's especially true in this case of a relatively diffuse world wide problem that there has to be commitment by the people and confidence that others will be committed, too. And, the fact that the USA is the highest per capita producer of the primary greenhouse gas AND refuses to take action on that is certainly a major, major problem. It may be "too late" (where we can discuss what that means), but I'm hoping that efforts by individual cities and states will build and we'll get some leadership that recognizes that science has value. Right now, our federal leadership has been opposed to ever international agreement that exists. Surely we will recognize that Earth isn't big enough for that kind of lack of cooperation.
Unfortunately our planet has started the "Melting Cycle" and we already see a far more dangerous greenhouse gas being naturally released in quantity which cannot be stopped by anyone. It seems to indeed be too late, even IF we decided to act.
Yes - there is no doubt that our nation has, with FULL INTENT, ignored science for far too long. Our leadership, with our full consent, sold a massive hit on future quality of life for a fist full of petrodollars. In my view, that's a crime that outshines all crimes in human history. My only response is that I hope we can find ways to mitigate the damage by slowing the onset and taking the actions we can to mitigate problems of water, of shoreline, of agriculture and of providing for the massive movement of populations that are pretty much guaranteed to be required.
Any actions at this point must be individual based and will be quite limited. As an example I now live in a state far from shorelines and situated in Karst terrain, the middle latitude of my country, instated a pool and begun tree growth with drought resistance for shade. My kids are all north and aware of what is happening. I will fortunately be dead before this gets truly nasty but intend to be as comfortable as possible while I'm still here. I no longer even bother worrying about what I KNOW I cannot change and deniers are on their own while dwelling in ignorance....at least many are preppers so the transition should be pretty easy.
The massive movement of populations has already begun and it will bring with it the usual conflicts as well as droughts, famines and wide spread starvation and diseases which will result in an overall lower population but by how much remains to be seen. What I am curious about is how the planet itself is going to react to the changing weight distribution. Water is heavy and when entire glaciers melt and end up in the sea the weight decreases on the tectonic land plates and increases on the ocean tectonic plates. This will place strains along the plate seams which will probably result in greater seismic and volcanic activity in these regions. More tsunamis and volcanic eruptions will cause widespread problems.We already saw a glimpse of what can happen at Fukashima and the Iceland volcano that disrupted air travel in Europe. The old Chinese curse about living in interesting times is about to become our future reality.
Likely there will be some effect but my big worry is the effect on ocean currents in the Atlantic....if the conveyor slows of stops things will get bad for Europe and America especially.
That is a serious concern however I wonder how much of the ocean currents are driven by the Arctic ice cap versus the Coriolis effect of the earth's rotation? We know that Coriolis effect impacts the air and water is just another form of non solid matter that can be altered by heating and cooling so if the ocean currents are affected by the Arctic ice cap then it stands to reason that the Coriolis effect should also be playing a role.
Arctic and Greenland melting are already pumping massive fresh water into the Atlantic which is likely to effect the warm water circulation and sinking of cold...added to this will be elimination of the "Cap" holding back major volcanism in Greenland possible adding to the chill a slowed circulation will cause. With any luck atmospheric warming will offset some of it but, last time Europe had the little ice age.
This is something that most people just can not grasp. How drastically the climate has changed in the last 35,000 or so years. At about the time that humans were first entering into North America, there was no "San Francisco Bay". What you had was an inland valley that a river ran through, and the coastline was to the West of the Farallon Islands, now about 20 miles offshore. Even Santa Catalina Island off Los Angeles was connected to the mainland (which is why the mammoth became trapped there, and evolved into the pygmy mammoth). Even 20,000 years ago, this was still largely the same. And North Africa? Where now you have endless desert, that was a tropical wetland. I often wonder if prehistoric man in the middle Paleolithic was watching "Green Sahara" dry up, and tell each other that they had to stop burning wood as it was causing this to happen. Oh, and Death Valley was a vast inland marsh, with a thriving ecosystem. During that time, you could walk to Australia. You could also walk from Florida to Cuba. England and Ireland were connected to Europe. The Yucatan Peninsula stuck most of the way into what is the Gulf of Mexico today. The Falkland Islands were part of the land that would someday become Argentina. That is because "sea level" today is on average over 100 meters lower than it is today. And during most of the past 100 million years, sea levels were actually 50-100 meters higher than they are today. Technically, we are still in an "ice age", geologically speaking. That is one of the biggest problems with trying to find prehistoric sites. All of the coastal ones are now long gone, residing dozens of miles off-shore under the ocean. So all we can find are the scattered inland ones.
Pulsed migrations of differing DNA peoples into the Americas between 25-15MYA. There was the major migration resulting in the Clovis people and smaller ones like the Chilean migration.
But you undermine your own, implied point and underscore that of scientists alarmed by man-made climate change, as you illustrate the longer time periods required for natural change, in stride contrast tobthe rapid climate change being wrought by human actions.
I do? And please tell me, how I do that. Most of those environments collapsed in just over a hundred years. And many of them were quite recent. The wetland environment in what is now Death Valley? Jesus was walking when that still existed. I know I mentioned San Francisco Bay not existing 35kya. I mentioned that date simply because it is roughly the time that humans first entered the area. But in reality, San Francisco Bay is less than 5,000 years old. Are you aware that glaciers were advancing and destroying entire towns in Switzerland in the 17th century? In North America this actually lasted into the 19th century. Such changes have been happening for millions of years. Yet to the alarmists, every change currently must be because of humans. Guess what? We are not that important or powerful.
I just described how, in the post you quoted. Why, specifically, do you think you are undermining climate change theories?
Which you only know because you were taught this by precisely the same scientists who alatmed by man-made climate change. You imlly that they labor under the ignorance of their own discoveries and work, which, onbviusly, is absurd.
You are picking and choosing what science you want to believe and what science you want to ignore. There is NO CHANCE that will lead to an honest assessment or a valid argument.
Oh no, not at all. I am picking some very specific things here from the end of the last Ice Age. Of course, I can also go into the Medeval Warming Period, or even the Little Ice Age. But none of this denies that the climate is always changing, has always been changing, and will continue to change. Funny how you accuse me of "picking and choosing", meanwhile the "baseline" that climate change alarmists use is one that is set in the Little Ice Age. A period of unusual cold climate. Specifically, the coldest period in the last 20,000 years. No, I am not picking and choosing at all. But please, show me the more common trend to show I am incorrect, and was picking and choosing my data.
This is a completely inaccurate statement. Climate science generally uses comparison based on decade or at most century timelines. Ancient events are footnotes at best and usually not even that.
Once again, you pick specific results from science while ignoring others. Note where you used the word "picking" and "go into". Note that you choose to agree with climatologists that climate is always changing!! Then, you chose in your previous post (and I assume here) that climatologists who brought you THOSE results, somehow FORGOT those results. In fact, you suggest they forgot those results AND that those results are so important that their more recent results are ALL WRONG! Do you really thing that makes any sense?
As long as we are reconsidering - Is current desalination a good, environmentally friendly means of obtaining drinking water? Currently, salt water is run through fresh water factories and hyper salty water returned to the sea. Seems like one of those, "the oceans are so massive our dumping garbage can't effect them" type thinking. So sure they can manage a little garbage from small, scattered populations until they grow. What of the growth of desalination factories? It is suggested hyper salty water not be recirculated back into the oceans. If left unchecked, how will they finally effect the biome. Or water currents? Or other effects? Just because "they" say it's GREEN. doesn't mean it is. http://politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/can-they-be-trusted.513616/ There is nothing GREEN about bird killing wind mills that are placed in "wind rivers". There is nothing GREEN about plating the desert with mirrors. Neither to the desert floor nor the atmosphere super heated fries birds that happen to fly through it. Desalination via recirculating hyper salty water back into the seas is not GREEN. Moi A Pondering Mind Is A Terrible Burden. Especially trying to share with troglodytes
No because it requires a lot of energy to desalinate water. But it is the only option left in many cases. It gets back to the fact that environmentally friendly energy is the key to many problems. They don't do this because it is environmentally friendly. They do it because we are running out of potable water sources. Already we are seeing countdowns until entire cities and even regions run out of drinking water. Where does the clean water go once used? Back into the ocean. But if you're really worried, don't fret, coming soon you'll be able to drink recycled sewage water. Mmmmmm! The drink astronauts like better than Tang. Wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds annually — a small fraction compared with the estimated 6.8 million fatalities from collisions with cell and radio towers and the 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion deaths from cats, according to the peer-reviewed study by two federal scientists and the environmental consulting firm West Inc. https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...l-fewer-birds-than-cell-towers-cats/15683843/ As for solar concentration farms, the bird problem is significant but they are working to correct that by identifying what attracts the birds in the first place. Apparently the mirrors make it look like a body of water. So they are introducing optics to break that up. They are also working to reduce the attraction to insects, which attract birds. Currently the Audubon Society opposes these installations. And it may be a non issue because they are proving to be costly. Standard solar panels may make more sense - esp given the drastic reduction in costs that has occurred over the last two decades. BTW, the same is true of nuclear power. It has NEVER achieved the cost levels predicted way back - the promise of "too cheap to meter". Far from that, coal plants are cheaper to build and operate. And you can't build a nuclear plant without government money. Banks won't finance them because the ROI takes too long and the cost is too high. The cost of decommissioning was never factored in either. That is the worst of it. In short, nuclear power is socialized power. So if you support socialism, nuclear power is your baby! It costs and costs and costs and never pays back.
Great chart. Once again it shows that improved energy efficiency is by far the cheapest source of electrical power in the US.
Now some reality, not slanted by "spin". The country that is the highest producer of "greenhouse gas" is China. It produces over 1/4 of such emissions in the entire world. The "per capita" is only lower, because of their population. China produces 25.6% of all greenhouse gasses. The US, only 14%. As for doing nothing, do you even know what nation reduced it's greenhouse gas emissions the most on the entire planet? http://www.eesi.org/articles/view/u...reductions-but-some-states-are-falling-behind In fact, the reduction in the US alone since 2005 is more than the reductions of all of Europe combined. How do you explain that, with the claim that the US is "doing nothing"? Which is why it is largely a failure as a science. "Hey, we are going to look at only the last 100 years, and completely ignore everything that ever happened before that!" Now what kind of science is that? Science that purposefully ignores literally billions of years of geologic records is not science at all. Imagine astronomers only considering what happened since the birth of the Sol System, and ignoring everything from the Big Bang until then. Or physicists ignoring everything prior to the discovery of sub-atomic particles, saying it does not matter. Myself, my background is primarily as a geologist. Hence, my view of this does not go merely a century, but millions of years.
While returning the salts to the ocean does increase the salinity, it is insignificant over the course of the history of the planet. Salinity largely increases on average over millions of years. But there are a lot of other things that effect that. First, you have the ice caps. When ice caps form, they are all fresh water, so the salinity of the oceans increases. Today, salinity is roughly 34 psu. But during the last ice age, it was as high as 38 psu. And as ice caps continue to melt, it will be reduced even further. Then you have where salt is captured and removed form the ocean. The last larg event of this magnitude was the Messinian salinity crisis, roughly 6 million years ago. In this event, the Straight of Gibraltar closed off, turning the Mediterranean into a vast inland sea. This lasted for around 600,000 years, and the evaporation captured millions of tons of salt and sequestered it into the rock. This is why there are many salt mines in that area of the world. They are mining the salt that was deposited during this (and earlier) events. And it continues today in places like the Dead Sea and Salt Lake Basin. These Salinity Sinks have formed over and over again over the course of the history of the planet. That is why the oceans are not dead bodies of water devoid of life today. So do not worry about the increase in salinity, it is not even microscopic when the oceans are over 1.3 billion square kilometers (over 352 quintillion gallons). That is 352,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons in normal numbers. Might as well try to claim a drop of ink in Lake Tahoe will affect the color of the water.
