the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change.
Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.
Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte
https://www.gardenguides.com/97493-eucalyptus-trees-australi...
https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees
https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo...
https://www.quora.com/What-seeds-need-fire-to-germinate-like...
https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-n...
When the Iraqis set the Kuwait oil wells on fire as they left, it was predicted that they would burn for years and be a global environmental disaster. They were put out in six months. This was never celebrated. The news just moved on to something with more drama.
In the aftermath of the fires, the combination of ash and water used to put many of them out caused the desert to bloom like no one had seen in at least twenty years. This also was not widely promoted as some kind of good news.
When I was pursuing environmental studies, there was a cartoon in one of my textbooks depicting microbes giving off oxygen and some of the microbes protesting that they were destroying their environment and needed to stop. Microbes that off-gassed oxygen are how we got an oxygen atmosphere on earth.
One of my professors once said "We're like fleas on the butt of a dog trying to figure out which way the dog is going."
The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this.
Yes, that is called the Great Oxidation Event [1] and it was the Earth's first major extinction event.
The microbes were absolutely correct that their environment was being destroyed. The Earth then shifted to a new atmospheric makeup and new life blossomed but it was still a termination event for most life that existed prior to the event.
> The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do
Yes. Which means we shouldn't run a giant experiment with the atmosphere and the oceans. This is called the precautionary principle: if you're doing something that may result in systemic disaster then it's better to not do it. People who say that this giant global experiment won't do any harm (or go further and say it will be beneficial) are pretending knowledge that they don't actually have.
They are still cleaning up the oil from the sands on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia 30 years later though.
Still something to be celebrating I suppose, but less of an inconsistency.
At that time, it was not framed as "if nothing is done and we stand idly by and watch it burn." It was framed as "We simply don't have the manpower to resolve this and it's likely that many of these hundreds of oil well fires will end up simply burning themselves out while we try to get to them because the scale of this is just beyond what we have capacity to try to fix."
Then crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait and developed new techniques on the spot that were more efficient and effective.
This comment is essentially self-refuting, since it would mean that you don't know as much as you like to pretend you do, and you are presenting a story in a biased fashion. Considering that its evidence includes a second-hand account of what one of your professors saying we are fleas on the butt of a dog, I'm gonna put it squarely in the "stories" category.
When I want to know what is happening with the climate and fires, I'm gonna trust billions of CPU hours of simulations based on computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods, satellite observations, and the laws of thermodynamics, economic modeling, and the scientific peer review process just a little bit more than the model your professor presents. Yeah, Earth is complicated. Fleas? Not helping the discussion.
Red Adair was already a celebrated oil well firefighter in the 1960s, when 'Hellfighters' was filmed. His fame continued to grow. I remember a number of pieces praising Red Adair Company and others involved in putting out the Kuwait oil well fires. Putting out an oil well fire with a jet engine made for eye-grabbing news.
Obituaries about him include praise like this, from CBS, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hellfighter-red-adair-dies-at-8... :
"Thanks in part to his expertise, an operation expected to last three to five years was completed in nine months, saving millions of barrels of oil and stopping an intercontinental air pollution disaster."
I therefore think you exaggerate when you write "never celebrated."
Do you have a citation for the desert bloom? I looked, but couldn't find any mention of it. Since much of the water for putting out the fires was sea water, pumped in reverse through oil pipes, I'm curious about salt water could be beneficial to a desert bloom. Was it downwind moisture?
It was far easier to find publications like "Remediation of Oil Contaminated Sludge and Soil in Kuwait":
"The destruction of oil fields in Kuwait during the Gulf War resulted in unprecedented large environmental damage. More than 500 oil lakes were formed covering more than 49 km2 area. The volume of contaminated oily sludge’s and soil, which needs to be treated in Kuwait, is estimated to be more than 20 million m3 ... Within Burgan, all lake beds, particularly the ones near the city of Ahmadi and in the working areas such as gathering centers in the oil field, are considered to be a threat to human health and harmful to all types of life, including native flora and fauna."
an "Ecology of Arabian deserts" (doi:10.1007/1-4020-3970-0_5 )
"Lakes of oil deliberately released in Kuwait by the Iraqi Armyin the 1991 Gulf War were up to 2.5 m deep and contaminated the environment, as well as the north-eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. The movement of armies and their vehicles during the first Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq war in 2003–2005 has caused the fragile desert pavements laid down over thousands of years to be broken and destroyed over large areas of north-eastern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and many areas of Iraq. This caused a dramatic increase in the number of violent sandstorms and dust storms, new dunes blocked roads in northern Kuwait (El-Baz, 1992), and pilots reported a doubling of dust storms following the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s."
so I also would like to know how well benefits like the desert bloom balances the many better-known negative effects.
It was something I saw in a print magazine a long time ago. I can't cite it.
It's easy to pull out a single phrase, like "never celebrated," and nitpick it. In comparison to the handwringing in the news at the time about the imminent global catastrophe we were facing, the success of getting it out out and averting the level of global atmospheric catastrophe that was expected wasn't really celebrated.
We did the same with Y2K. The world expected a financial meltdown. People were stockpiling guns and give years of flour in their basements and then it became "Gosh, I can't program my VCR."
We take success for granted. We don't celebrate that we have 7 billion people with long life expectancy and high standard of living compared to 200 years ago. Instead, we complain about overpopulation and global warming and how we are hurtling towards our doom.
"How to lie with statistics" is a terrific book about how we can take the same data and say different things with it. We tend to frame it quite negatively.
In the end, none of us is getting out of here alive. We're all just dancing on this Earth for a short while.
There are people literally trying to find ways to solve death and wondering if we can be frozen and brought back and so forth. We're never satisfied and there's some evidence that it's partly because we choose to focus on the negative and with 7 billion people there no shortage of bad news, but not because things are necessarily actually worse in absolute terms.
Sure. And it's easy to exaggerate. Why not say "underappreciated"?
"People were stockpiling guns and give years of flour in their basements"
Sure. And yet no one I knew did that. If one points to extremes and ignore the average case, isn't that an exaggeration?
"Instead, we complain about overpopulation"
Perhaps because Norman Borlaug was right in saying "But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only."
"it's partly because we choose to focus on the negative"
Perhaps you are the one to see a desert flower bloom in the midst of great environmental damage. Does that mean the damage is not there and there's nothing to do?
Small consolation if you live in one of the former places, of course. But he's not wrong. Earth as a whole is a bit colder than it would be in the best of all possible universes.
Other effects like ocean acidification are harder to hand-wave away. I hate cold weather, myself, but it's not just about terrestrial climate.
Under no reasonable time frame for human existence is his claim even close to valid.
The fact is, we've been coming out of an ice age for the past several millennia, and life has generally gotten better as a result. The rate at which that process happens is very important, though. If Dyson did overlook any important counterpoints, that seems like a big one.
We know exactly what the Arctic is going to look like and its impacts. We have known and are observing the melting of glaciers in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas to catastrophic effects in downstream environments.
Anything is subject to debunking if you're unwilling to look at the most sophisticated evidence available. Unfortunately, there is no model that will tell you that a 4 degree increase in average temperature won't end most of human society as we know it.
Moreover, “Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world – possibly none – have a sufficiently thorough, 'big picture' understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.” (Roy Spencer)
I'm sorry but I'm not gonna take seriously people who want to criticize model sensitive as a reason to ignore climate change when the current glacial melt, the ongoing ocean acidification and all the phenomena that have already been unleashed by the existing levels of climate change continue unabated.
Ah yes, the same fires started by loony arsonists to promote climate change hysteria.
The sea level raise has been approximately 3 inches from the 1993 level. That is much less than the change due to the tides.
The location of certain geological features or bodies of water is a really poor indicator of environmental damage, because these things have changed constantly throughout time.
However the tons of plastic we dump into the oceans, the lakes of sludge outside of Chinese factory cities and the massive amounts of e-waste shipped every year to Africa where kids and adults extract metals and plastic in very unsafe conditions and smelters should be of great concern to everyone.
There is environmental disaster looming, and so much of it is much more radically evidence than CO2. We need to stop over-consumption. Consumerism and planned/negligent obsolescence is destroying this planet. Solving for the real problems will also reduce CO2, but focusing on CO2 is like trying to cure the sniffles when you're dying of the Flu.
It’s important environmentalists consider the whole and do cost benefit analyses of intervention.
I see much less of a cost to quality of life in reducing planned obsolescence and increasing the reusability of things than I do in decreasing carbon emissions wholesale. The transportation benefits of gasoline are enormous, and it makes less sense to restrict something so practical and beneficial than it does to try to reduce something as wasteful and pointless as intentionally making a product difficult to repair and maintain long term.
I’m very sympathetic to Dyson’s criticism of the status quo, although I don’t know enough to have an opinion on whether carbon emissions may be beneficial on net. He advocated for practicality rather than dogmatic belief, and was interested in simple interventions like changing land management and tilling practices if carbon emissions are actually as detrimental as are being touted, rather than dramatic energy reduction or conversion to expensive and currently less viable energy sources.
Regardless of whether or not people believe CO2 is on net beneficial for the planet, I think he was right in calling out the difficulty in having an apolitical, non-interested and practically minded perspective on climate change and environmental impact that goes against dogma. The science should speak for itself, and any candid and open good faith discussion to determine whether alternative perspectives are valid should be welcomed. Dyson’s argument that carbon emissions are probably good on net might be wrong, but his position was in good faith and well constructed. Any such position should be transparently engaged with rather than dismissed as uneducated.
But if the wind is blowing from the sea/river to the land, it can increase the level, specially during a storm, in some places a few meters. And the waves during a storm can be also a few meters high. [Hi from Buenos Aires! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudestada ] So a few inches was never enough to ensure that your city will not be flooded.