Florida and the Science Who Must Not Be Named
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Remember when we had that record hurricane season and it was blamed on ... something. And we were supposed to have a lot more in the future because of ... something.
These people have to stop blaming everything on something. It's warmer, it's colder, record hurricane season, no hurricane in 9 years, everything is always blamed on ... something. And then they wonder why there are people who don't believe them.
Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I hear so many deniers claiming that "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" and I just have to shake my head at their ability to dismiss something that's right in their faces. As the video we watched said, human industrialization pours 100 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the volcanoes on Earth, and the volcano emissions themselves do modify climate patterns in a measurable way. Basically, we're accelerating this planet's transition into something resembling Venus.
I don't know that I can actually agree with this. I see a lot of snow, and a lot of cold, and a winter that started really late. But I've only lived in this part of the states for a few years. Who am I to know whether these weather patterns are normal or not? This isn't the Little Ice Age[1] - our crops aren't dying.
I do believe that our climate is changing, but I believe that because there is a scientific consensus that this is so, not from any personal observations which wouldn't be rigorous anyway, and would (and should) hold about as much sway as an idiot in Congress bringing a snowball for his show-and-tell.
And this isn't mentioning the awful science that was sometimes brought out as evidence of global warming (mixed in with the good, it was hard to pick them apart). It took me two years after seeing Al Gore's TED talk to consider that global warming might be a real thing.
So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that.
Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals.
But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
My only point is that even the modest, "non-alarmist" positions are pretty alarming to any reasonable individual. That ain't hyperbole. It's just basic statistics.
Unfortunately it's the case that the extreme hyperbole on both ends drowns out the genuine alarm people should be experiencing at the very realistic effects of a warming climate.
Basically, by recalibrating everyone's expectations to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE", when you tell them "well, not everyone is gonna die, but a lot of people are gonna get screwed", the response is either "oh, you lied before, I don't believe anything you say now", or "well that doesn't so bad... I'm gonna go rollin' coal."
The projections for warming over the last 15 years have not panned out. There was no rise. So the earliest projections from the alarmists have proven to be wrong.
Are you saying that sea levels in general haven't risen? Or that Florida in particular is somehow immune?
If the former, this[¹] seems to contradict you, are you saying it's wrong, or am I reading it in a different way?
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/F...
Using that sort of reasoning, it's pretty trivial to show no "warming". But it's nothing more than statistical trickery. When you look at the overall trend, it's pretty clear that global warming has continued apace, right in line with predictions made decades ago. It's actually pretty impressive how closely reality has hewed to those predictions:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-c...
In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.
Thanks for playing. You lose: https://www.google.com/search?q=global+warming+prediction+fr...
Your argument was that my argument was a strawman. Those graphs all show projections that have not panned out. To be definitive, either of us would need to locate the original claims from a reliable source.
In case you don't grok the difference, the difference is that a relatively flat decade followed by a huge temperature jump will have the linear regression line for that decade be higher than the actual temperature, because the of the later jump. This is what is (likely) happening now (and what happened in 77-86, and 87-96). The most popular theory as to this seems to be that the heat is stored in the deep ocean, and then releases in a burst into the surface atmosphere.
Which takes me to my second point, that even with your interpretation (which is generally the interpretation of the graphs used to make the 'no warming in 15 years' argument), the graphs being used are surface temperature, and don't include ocean warming. As I mentioned above, including ocean temperatures shows a rise even in static decade temperature, without even involving linear regression.
If you'd like a source, the intended interpretation of the results are all in the IPCC reports, most of which have (reasonably) short summaries. http://www.ipcc.ch/
That said, I will take the word of a consensus of climatologists and meteorologists over that of politicians and religious leaders with a populist agenda, on principle alone.
Genesis 2:15 says "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it."
Note the KEEP it part.
Numbers 35:33 says "You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it."
Apparently, there's already a fundamental religious case for environmental protections.
Somehow, however, few ever seem to agree with me.
If you take atomic number, CO2 is 8-6-8. The word: תבוסת from the Torah means destruction and sums to 868.
Now all we need is a charismatic cult leader.
Both of them are true, the missing part is whether human is any part of either of those processes. I've been wondering for a while that whether the common slogan of "save the Earth" would have served better had it been "save the Human". Yes, it's just semantic, but it's the same as the change to calling "climate change" rather than "global warming" - human easily get caught up in language, most of the time probably just subconsciously. It also helped with not being on the extreme: it's also bad if the changes wipe out 50% of the human being on earth, which is probably magnitude more likely than wiping out 100% of us.
Even if we literally nuke ourselves out of existence, chance are something will still be leftover on the Earth (unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet).
Cockroaches are damn resilient.
> The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doin’ great! It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, and meteors, world-wide floods, tidal waves, world-wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
> The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, Folks, we’re goin’ away. We won’t leave much of a trace either, thank god for that. Maybe a little styrofoam, maybe, little styrofoam. Planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul de sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doin’? Ask those people at Pompeii, who were frozen into position from volcanic ash. How the planet’s doin’. Wanna know if the planet’s alright, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia, or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who built their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room. The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cuz that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us.
> unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet
We are very, very, very, very much unable to do that. We can fuck up the surface a bit but that's about it. Consider: the Chicxulub impactor delivered an estimated 100 teratons of equivalent TNT. And it didn't come close to blowing up the planet. How To Destroy The Earth[0] estimates that we'd need 25,000 gigatonnes of antimatter to blast the planet to pieces.
This is why science is so important. Science is about questioning everything. While we used to think animal fat was bad we've since learned otherwise.
Even if we are pretty sure about something it is dangerous to shut out debate. Except that which must not be named. Any questioning of this basic fact of reality is a sure sign you are not a man of science.
Only an idiot would be stupid enough to inquiry and debate. True science lovers accept the messages they heard on a video without question.
Guess it was too innocent.
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html [2] http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...
Because the vast majority of it (just about all of it outside of actual climate scientists, really) is but one more round of professional doubt-sowing, in the long line of tobacco, leaded gas, CFCs or SO2 (and with very similar people in the roles of professional doubters).
> They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change.
They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity.
Whoa there. If their models don't do a good job of predicting climate change, then that has a direct impact on the predicted consequences and the impact on humanity, no?
At a global level though, we can see the energy being dumped into the system (making it more chaotic and more violent) and we can see ice covers literally melting before our eyes, both reducing global albedo and ultimately ending up swelling the seas. The global ice melt on its own is sufficient for pants-shitting terror.
Also, we built our civilisation in a specific (climatological and ecological) set of environments, climate change means these are likely to change fast, and regardless of an eventual steady state at the end there's absolutely no guarantee we'll come out ahead (or even at all) at the end of the ride.
That's one of the things which gets my goat about modern conservatives, they hate conservation.
How do we measure that? From the article I posted above, climate scientists readily admit that the temperature increase they expected with their models has not come to fruition (as a global, non-local measure).
And thus, if the temperature models haven't been that accurate, how accurate are the sea-level models? Even those estimate a very wide range of potential outcomes (I'll readily admit the minimum is still a significant sea level rise).
For all we know we are helping to perpetuate this thaw rather than slip back into another ice age. Maybe human generated global warming would have had to be implemented anyway to save the species. There's just so much we don't know.
Just consider how embarrassed Benedict Cumberbatch was when he accidentally used two words in wrong order ("colored people" is insulting, "people of color" is okay).
The more immediate threat is the environment effects of overpopulation and pollution in the waterways. I remember fishing in the lagoon by my house when I was a kid and the water being super clear and full of fish. Now, it's been overfished; you can only catch undesirable bottom feeder type fish. It's also a constant brown caused by runoff from residential areas.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.s...
On the one hand it worked. The Senate, this year, happily passed a resolution that "climate change is real and not a hoax", but of course Republican reps gleefully pointed out that, of course the climate changes, no one is disputing that...
But now that "Climate Change" is, to the public, basically just "Global Warming", Florida is now working to ban the very term their political wing invented.
The schadenfreude is strong in this one.
I doubt the American right wing influenced Mr Charney in his naming conventions.
http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-war...
The use of the term "climate change" as part of the public discourse (as opposed to scientific discourse) is as a result of a right wing PR campaign in the 1980s.
water vapor?
Carbon cycles through the atmosphere on the order of centuries. So if we put too much CO2 in the atmosphere we have to live with the consequences for what will seem to us like a long time. That's why people focus on CO2 as the "climate change gas."
...But I wasn't referring to that list, I was referring to the people commenting on here. Also, a representative list of scientists who do not oppose the mainstream view of climate change would be far longer (note the chart on the side), and also include far more people who actually study climate change.
"These scientists have said that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling."
So we don't know that they disagree with global warming, just that they think the projections are too inaccurate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98
Anyway right now it is global warming or Cthulhu ... the article describes well both of them