It’s just destruction of the habitat and it causes CO2 pollution, and kills off a vital CO2 sequestration process so IMV it belongs on the list. People know it’s not good but they carry on doing it. As gnobuddy points out, Gaia will extract its price no matter what. I think forest fires are a natural process. But wanton destruction is what we are seeing in Brazil right now (good to see that their current Minister for the Environment got booed and the middle finger when he tried to give a speech the other day. What the hell was he going to say to them? ‘Hope you’re all nice and toasty folks’)
Population is a huge issue, but everywhere is heading for the demographic transition (DT) and the global population will settle out at c 9 billion and projections are that after that it will slowly decline probably back down to 6 or 7 billion by 2150.
But, the adjacent issue here is that the per capita energy consumption in the developed world (and here I would include people living along the eastern seaboard of China and certain big cities in India) is just too much. I need to check it, but I think it’s about 5 kWh per person per day while in undeveloped regions like Africa it’s a fraction of that. This type of consumption is just not sustainable unless there is a radical shift to new technologies and we drop the reliance on all kinds of fossil fuels. So I am all for nuclear (hopefully in my lifetime fusion will become a reality as well), solar, wind and all electric transportation.
For the anti nuclear guys, just think about this: atmosphere overladen with CO2 that will be around for thousands of years; 50 000 premature deaths a year from coal pollution especially in China and India, countless industrial accidents every year in the coal industry and then the added pollution from the transportation of vast quantities of coal from suppliers to power stations. Nuclear by contrast is ultra clean.
Here is a list of per capita energy consumption highest to lowest
List of Countries Energy Use per Capita | Economics Help
“How about one in 4 years from now, then another one in 4 years from there on and then another in 3 years from there on which makes it 3 sessions in 11 years (due to the possible end of humanity as we know it in 12 years). Deal?”
I do not think humanity will be gone in 12 years. But I think life is going to getting more and more miserable. Just how miserable I really don’t know. But it will not be as fantastic as it was up until say the 1970’s. A lot of habitat gone, difficult times etc.
...and RFID tagging.
Disposable biodegradable single use plastic bags are no longer available in Aus so the deal is buy one and bring it next shopping trip......or forget and buy new bags every shopping trip.
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The human race can change its direction a lot easier than we think in times of fear, uncertainty and dread. Do not dismiss the effective anger of the young. It is they, not us, that will seed humanities future. A few days from now, I will be 64 years of age, and I have grown to despise my generation with its collective head firmly jammed in the feeding trough reaped from the riches of the last century. The exceptions are either being my friends or my people (known or unknown) - the rest can just sod off.
Don’t be surprised if one day the whole world wakes up and says “I have had enough of this”. Actually, it is happening now. Only some cannot, will not, or simply refuse to see it.
Ignore the trolls and hand wringers, now is the time to get a grip on reality and do something - anything - to make the world a better place to live in.
tapestryofsound
“A few days from now, I will be 64 years of age, and I have grown to despise my generation with its collective head firmly jammed in the feeding trough reaped from the riches of the last century. The exceptions are either being my friends or my people (known or unknown) - the rest can just sod off.”
Yup - 63 this year for me. You had the great generation, followed by the greatest generation and then the baby boomers who got everything on a plate and have ended up being the most selfish, self-centered small-minded bunch of hypocrites in centuries. And they have the cheek to point their finger at gen-x and the millennials Hopefully history will record them for what they are: the ‘deplorable’ generation.
Yup - 63 this year for me. You had the great generation, followed by the greatest generation and then the baby boomers who got everything on a plate and have ended up being the most selfish, self-centered small-minded bunch of hypocrites in centuries. And they have the cheek to point their finger at gen-x and the millennials Hopefully history will record them for what they are: the ‘deplorable’ generation.
Still no answer to my questions on post #208?
Maybe it wasn't the case at where you were but it (in bold) sure did happen around here a few years after Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was released.
So are you up for reconvening on this subject in 4 years?
... and there are still surprises to be found:
For a long time, scientists had suspected that man-made climate change was likely causing this area of West Antarctica’s ice to thin, but they had not established a direct connection or mechanism. The issue is critical because this is where the majority of the continent’s ice loss is occurring. Now a new study new study published this week in Nature Geoscience appears to have solved the puzzle. A team of researchers in the U.S. and U.K. found that global warming has caused a shift in wind patterns that are ultimately bringing more warm ocean water into contact with the region’s ice.
Jan
For a long time, scientists had suspected that man-made climate change was likely causing this area of West Antarctica’s ice to thin, but they had not established a direct connection or mechanism. The issue is critical because this is where the majority of the continent’s ice loss is occurring. Now a new study new study published this week in Nature Geoscience appears to have solved the puzzle. A team of researchers in the U.S. and U.K. found that global warming has caused a shift in wind patterns that are ultimately bringing more warm ocean water into contact with the region’s ice.
Jan
What precisely do you want to discuss in 4 years that we are not aware of now?
I’ve given you my prediction. Take a copy and if I’m wrong in 4 years I’ll quite happily acknowledge it.
I don’t know why you are hung up on Global warming vs climate change. I moved to the UK in 1993. Winters were colder and there was frost many mornings during winter and it snowed regularly. Snow is now unusual (other than freak events like the ‘Beast from the east’ or the 2012 cold snap and winters are a whole lot balmier. Anecdotal, but it chimes in with measurements.
I’ve given you my prediction. Take a copy and if I’m wrong in 4 years I’ll quite happily acknowledge it.
I don’t know why you are hung up on Global warming vs climate change. I moved to the UK in 1993. Winters were colder and there was frost many mornings during winter and it snowed regularly. Snow is now unusual (other than freak events like the ‘Beast from the east’ or the 2012 cold snap and winters are a whole lot balmier. Anecdotal, but it chimes in with measurements.
It's exactly the same story with us - we used to re-use the shopping bags for the cat-litter we scoop out of the pan every night. Now we have to buy small plastic trash-bags for the same job.
Many other people I've talked to have been doing something similar - lining small waste-baskets with their "single use" grocery bags, or using them as pooper-scooper bags when walking their dogs.
I remember brown paper bags too, and small shops simply wrapped your goods in yesterday's newspaper and tied it with string. No plastics, no synthetic rubber-band.
Now the universal daily newspaper is a thing of the past, and the human population has doubled, and more people go shopping than ever before. We don't need to be cutting down enough trees to make brown paper bags for all of us. Perhaps enormous fields of bamboo, among the quickest-growing plants on earth?
But again, there's the scale of the problem. Even though newspapers are slowly dying, it's estimated that between 80 thousand and 160 thousand trees are cut down every single day. That's thirty to sixty million trees each year, a good fraction of which end up turned into paper.
Ironically, one of the reasons we are surrounded by plastic is because its typically made from byproducts of the petroleum refining process. Globally, we use nearly one hundred billion barrels of petroleum every single day - can you imagine the amount of waste left after we've extracted the fractions that make gasoline and kerosene and jet fuel and motor oil? Turning that into plastics was actually a way to reduce the amount of toxic petrochemical waste that we would otherwise generate.
-Gnobuddy
To nobody in particular,
In 4 years from now, I doubt if I will be thinking about this discussion. My concerns will be with my wife and I being able to eat, keep warm, find fuel, stop getting robbed. But I will be doing whatever I can about climate change.
tapestryofsound
Of course I do; but will you take them seriously, or simply divert the issue once again?
It's important to remember that nobody can instantly filter out all pseudoscience, and anyone can be fooled, at least for a short amount of time. Which is why it's important to stay vigilant, to find multiple sources of trustworthy information, and to belong to a community of people with scientific credentials who can help correct each others inevitable small mistakes.
To answer your question, I have three college degrees in science as well as research experience, which is a pretty good BS filter; that gives me enough background to instantly dismiss some pseudo-science (example: cars running on water. I discussed this one in an earlier post.)
Other pseudo-science cannot instantly be seen as nonsense, but a little research will turn up the facts. An example: "Volcanoes emit far more CO2 than humans, so how can we puny humans be causing human-created climate change?"
A little investigation shows that the USGS (United States Geological Survey) has hard data showing that the claim is entirely false. Note that the USGS is a scientific agency of the United States government itself - scientists working at the USGS study "the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it."
So what are the facts? According to the USGS, the world’s volcanoes generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually (that's 2x10^8 tons/year). Human industrial activities cause an estimated 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year - that's 2.4x10^9 tons. So the fact is that human CO2 emissions are more than ten times as much as all the earths volcanoes combined (including undersea volcanoes).
They do not appear legit at all if you apply even a little of the scientific method to these nonsensical claims. Where is the research paper or white-paper? Where is the description of the underlying science of physics, with a proper mathematical an analysis? Where is the experimental data? Where is the careful description of how the data was collected, to avoid false results? Where is the statistical analysis of said data? Where is the peer-review by other technically qualified people? Where is the bibliography of scientific sources and references used to generate the new ideas? Where are the scientific credentials of the person making the claims?
I guarantee you that if you look for these things, you'll find most or all of them missing. There is nonsense in audio precisely because customers are willing to accept nonsense without the desire, skills, or knowledge needed to ignore or dismiss it.
Some claims are so stupid that they can instantly be dismissed out of hand - such as "Placement (of Shakti Stones) on automotive CPUs has measurably increased engine horsepower". There is no scientific principle that would permit this, so we know it's BS to start with; there is no dyno data showing measured horsepower with and without the Shakti Stones in place, so we have no reason to dismiss our initial assessment as B.S.)
It's the same thing with magic-sounding capacitors, the sound of wire insulation, and other nonsense created and propagated by people with no scientific understanding. None of them stands up to even minimal scientific questioning or testing.
There are myths created by people who are not scientists (such as weather reporters, and the owner of the Accuweather business). But you won't find myths that survive for long among the general body of actual researchers and qualified scientific community.
This isn't because scientists are super-ethical and immune to the usual human weaknesses (errors, lies, et cetera.) It's because of the way science itself works - because a scientific claim has to provide enough hard evidence to convince other scientists who are looking for flaws and mistakes, and if they can find a flaw, they will.
A simple example: Imagine I'm a liar or a fool working in climate science, and I claim that glacier X has not shrunk, but actually doubled in ice volume during the last 50 years. Other scientists will doubt this claim because it goes contrary to observed facts about almost every glacier on earth; so some of them will immediately go look up satellite data and ground measurements of glacier X, which will immediately prove I'm either mistaken, lying, or a fool.
Not only will my false claim get rejected by the body of climate scientists, my scientific credibility will be destroyed, too; the next scientific claim I make will be scrutinized for my mistakes even more carefully.
Even if I had managed to fool ten researchers when I first published my false claim, that mistaken belief wouldn't last long. Once I'd been proven to be wrong, science would correct itself, and move on.
This is the incredible thing about science - not that it makes semiconductor chips and spacecraft possible, but that it is the only method we have ever discovered to get trustworthy results out of fallible human beings.
You're hinting at the "It's a natural cycle!" belief.
Think about this for a single second: any scientist who is not a complete imbecile, who hears about global climate change for the very first time, will immediately ask exactly this question: "How do we know this is not just normal change?"
The answer is complex; you look at previous climate change; you look for a mechanism causing the supposed change; you look for alternative forms of evidence. Scientists have done all these things now, for many, many decades, and the answer is this: This is NOT part of a normal cycle, because the speed and extent of the change is incredibly more rapid. There IS a scientific mechanism to explain the change, and that is anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
You wouldn't confuse a flea-bite with being mauled by an angry bear; why would you confuse natural cycles in climate which take 100,000 years or 10,000 years with our current climate crisis, which has developed in 200 years and accelerated dramatically in just the last 50 years?
You know the fellow who works as a waiter at minimum wage, for years and years, convinced that tomorrow he's going to be discovered and become a famous actor / musician? Eventually he's old and worn out and sick, but still he waits for the day when the world will finally realize how special he is?
That's fusion. The idea is appealing; but the reality is fifty years of continuous failure by scientists. Every approach that's been tried has gone nowhere. I've studied a little plasma physics, and the reason for the failures becomes very clear: plasma is incredibly difficult to handle. We just can't do it, though the gravity of a large star can.
I would not hold my breath waiting for successful controlled, sustained, energy-producing fusion on planet earth. My prediction is that it will not happen in the next fifty years, either. (And that is my personal opinion, not a provable scientific fact.
)It started with an article about psychopaths in one of the popular science journals, Scientific American or Discover or something like that.
That opened my eyes to the fact that most psychopaths don't go around chopping up children in basements; instead, they are usually successful lawyers and businessmen and women, where their lack of empathy, compassion, and fear allows them to crush the opposition, take advantage of legal loopholes, make more money, and accrue more power than a person with a normal psychological profile would.
Think about it for a moment. Most of us are happy to earn money, but if there was a natural disaster, and you had a larder full of canned food, and a starving grandmother showed up begging for food, would you charge her $100 for a can, or would you just give her some food?
Which course of action would leave you richer?
Which course of action is unthinkable unless you're a narcissist / psychopath / sadist / Machiavillian personality?
The majority of people who've made vast fortunes have done it through a series of actions that ordinary humans with normal personalities would not take. They did it because they placed profit and earnings above other things that normal people value more than money.
There are exceptions to the rule - people who became rich through their writing, or their invention, or by inheriting their wealth.
Fun fact: some decades ago it was discovered that a surprisingly large percentage of CEOs of big-money corporations were former bomber pilots. It turns out that the psychological profile needed to drop an atomic bomb that slaughters a 100,000 people is very well suited to doing things like putting thousands of people out of work to make 1% more profit, or forcing people to work all day without bathroom breaks in US states where there is no law forbidding this practice.
Read Barbara Ehrenreichs "Nickel And Dimed" for a heartbreaking look at this and other business atrocities committed in the name of making even more profits.
-Gnobuddy
Did you treat the global warming info with the same skepticism?
Then why did you make such a simplified statement quoted below?
"The belief that there is no such thing as climate change is merely an unsupported opinion, and therefore, worthless."
My "Fusion (not fission)." wasn't a question by the way.
Something like that? Was it peer-review by other technically qualified people?
The only problem to solve, (beyond so many data that although they are real, the rulers do not care) is the social-political system in which the world is today. Neoliberalism (anti social by nature) has triumphed over more human systems such as social democracies.
The nordic countries had advanced social democracies and are slowly losing them.
But to discuss this, which is the true quid of the question, it is not possible here because it violates the rules of the forum ... what is not? What would be the problem? As long as no one utters insults and respects himself, in The Lounge he would have to allow himself.
The nordic countries had advanced social democracies and are slowly losing them.
But to discuss this, which is the true quid of the question, it is not possible here because it violates the rules of the forum ... what is not? What would be the problem? As long as no one utters insults and respects himself, in The Lounge he would have to allow himself.
Good for congratulations ! And how is the planet and i s temperatures affected by the loss of biomass?
Biome - Wikipedia
Cal, I’ve done that myself in the past by typing in a WP, then cutting and pasting the carefully parsed text into the reply box - giving time to add any flourishes and emoticons deemed necessary.
But regardless of how achieved, more impressive to me than Gnobuddy’s composing skills is the patience demonstrated.
But regardless of how achieved, more impressive to me than Gnobuddy’s composing skills is the patience demonstrated.
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