Environmental Mega-disaster within 100 years

[smartcooky]

I would advice you to get your science news from scientists in the future, and not from Life Magazine.

Well, you see, those predictions were made by scientists. Here are a few more

Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald, April 19, 1970
“Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years”

Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich, April 1970
“100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years”
“Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make”

North Texas State U Professor Paul Gunter, 1970
”By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

Ecologist Kenneth Watt, April 22, 1970
“By The Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil”

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Why didn't the world end in a nuclear holocaust?
because nukes aren't as dangerous as we thought?

No.

It's because people and their governments made a tremendous effort to ban the use of these weapons in all but theoretical cases, and to slow down proliferation of the technology and materials for as long as possible. Doomsday would have happened (and still could) were it not for all the safety measures, legally and physically.

In the same vein, it is intellectually lazy to argue that Climate Change won't be as bad as all that: it's true that we will find ways to cope, and sometimes even profit from the changes; but this requires tremendous investments and planning and will not happen on its own: millions of people will lose everything because they don't have the means to adapt.

Doomsayers work under the assumption that "all things staying the way they are right now, X will happen. It is not that they naively think nothing will change, but that they want to highlight the need for course correction, sooner rather than later.
Doomsday scenarios can be very effective at directing political and technological efforts.

 

[Belz...]

Why didn't the world end in a nuclear holocaust?
because nukes aren't as dangerous as we thought?

No.

It's because people and their governments made a tremendous effort to ban the use of these weapons in all but theoretical cases, and to slow down proliferation of the technology and materials for as long as possible. Doomsday would have happened (and still could) were it not for all the safety measures, legally and physically.

I disagree. I think it's because people aren't normally self-destructive, and we know what nuclear war would entail.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

I disagree. I think it's because people aren't normally self-destructive, and we know what nuclear war would entail.

I agree about the "people" part; but individuals are a different matter.

As technology becomes more advanced, it put more power in the hands of individuals: portable weapons are an obvious example, but by no means the only one.
So while "people" will just be happy with better technology, some will try to abuse it, and stopping them will become more and more difficult.

 

[wobs]

I think you are missing my point. I'm not advocating for denialism here; I accept that scientists are right about climate change. I would argue about how accurately they can predict the future consequences of inaction. But more importantly, what I'm getting at is that a 100 year timescale is too far away to influence current behavior. One of the reasons for that (at least for me but I don't think I'm so different from most people) is that for my whole life I've heard, from scientists, about how ecological disaster is just around the corner. Consider this example from 1970.

Many of those predictions have come to be true. Some have been addressed before they came true.

While not all predictions are correct, a dire warning should not always be regarded as false, but we often find that action takes place to alleviate the problem.

But if you want an example of predictions that have come to be realised, how about the Club of Rome:

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ight-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse
But again, there are inaccuracies. However, it does track industrialisation and the increase in demand for goods quite accurately, along with ocean pollution, air pollution etc. Peak oil? currently anyone's guess.

The point is that these things have been predicted, but you may have picked up much of the over blown doom-saying from mainstream media, and not had access to the scientific opinion that created those stories.

With climate change, there are few positives, and what there are, are far outweighed by the negatives.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives.htm
Bad for agriculture, ecology, ocean acidification, sea level rise, the economy...
Even if you like your food to be less nutritious, not all of us do.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Isn't there any think tank that takes into consideration the plus side of global warming?

Warmer air plus warmer oceans = more rain, not less. The Siberian climate will only change for the better. Likewise that Great American Desert, the Great Plains. How much will wheat crops expand, clear up into Canada, and over the Tundra? Sure, the Equatorial deserts will get bigger, but how much more rain will fall on Sub Sahara Africa? Australia- ash pit or Garden of Eden? The west end is getting seasonal flooding theses days, I wonder what the fossil record shows archeo-climatically? Bye-Bye Polar Bear, but welcome tuna to the Arctic Ocean. Bye-Byre Galveston and NOLA, but California will add a couple hundred miles of ocean front property, and thousands of square miles of shrimp grounds. Arizona and the Sonoran desert- they get monsoons now, might go either way. Antarctica, a giant fresh water lake ringed by an atoll- ocean front property to one side, lake front in their back yards.

Anthropogenic Global Climate Change, Terra-Forming at it's finest. Maybe.

This has already started burping methane big time. The absolute worst extinction, the Permian, was terrible, but it went apocalyptic when seafloor methane started melting. Methane is, depending on who I read, anywhere from 20x the warming effect of C02 to < drop pants and panic> levels.

 

[lomiller]

And the chart shows that most of Antarctic is cooling.

Sorry, no huge sea level rise coming from there.

Funny how you chose the one explicitly called outdated over the more up to date version right beside it. Could that be because the more current one refutes your claim? Too bad the older one refutes your claim as well since it shows plenty of warming in places with plenty of ice.

Permafrost not withstanding, You know, NONE of central Antarctica ice will even begin to melt until it warms to 0c.

Until what hits 0 deg?

My impression is that it is so cold there that another few degrees of AGW will melt NO icecap.

Correct. 2 more degrees is not quite enough to cause significant melting in central Antarctic, that would require about 4 degrees. Unfortunately, there is enough ice in West Antarctica to raise global sea levels by 20 feet and enough in Greenland to raise them another 20 feet and 2 more degrees is enough to melt half of this ice.

 

[lomiller]

But you still list ZERO positives.

I'm not a denier saying it isn't warming, I'm a realist saying there are pluses to warming.

Then shouldn’t you be the one telling us what those “plusses” are?

 

[Butter!]

It's a bit like saying having mono isn't all bad, because hey, look at all that time you get off work/school! You get to take naps, and people feel bad for you. You're unlikely to die from it in this day and age, as long as you take some cursory care and drink lots of fluids. And once you've had it, you're almost certainly never going to get it again. So you can kiss errbody without fear!

Sheesh, bunch of doomsayers.


Seriously, though - I do think there's exaggerated rhetoric attached to global warming, as there usually is with any charged, divisive topic. But saying crop yields would get better isn't realistic. There's no way new, unstable ecosystems in previously non-arable regions would produce enough to balance the loss of other established regions in any meaningful way. Let alone surpass. I don't have to be a *********** scientist OR on any kind of bandwagon to see that.

I believe casebro is joking. I think we're all getting our legs pulled here.

 

[lomiller]

I misunderstood, I *should* have realised that lomiller was being precise in (his?) teminology, as opposed to being slightly sloppy and conflating weight and gravity.

My reaction was the same as yours once I read your link...

Yup I was discussing gravity of the ice sheet itself not glacial rebound. The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are sufficiently massive to literally pull ocean water towards them and this piling up of ocean water raises local sea levels a surprisingly large amount.
From the article I linked previously

Jerry Mitrovica likes to illustrate the importance of the gravitational attraction of ice sheets with a thought experiment: what would happen if Greenland suddenly melted? Averaged around the world, sea level would go up by about 23 feet, as water poured into the ocean around Greenland and spread throughout the oceans. The local story, however, would be quite different. Ocean water near the melting ice sheet would experience two opposing effects. On the one hand, the addition of melt water would raise the ocean higher. On the other hand, the loss of the ice sheet’s mass, and thus its powerful gravitational attraction, would cause the ocean’s surface to relax away from the former position of the ice sheet, lowering local sea level. Mitrovica discovered that within about 1,000 miles of Greenland, the balance of forces would favor lower sea level, leading to the counter-intuitive conclusion that sea level falls even though water is being added to the ocean. At the distance of Scotland, the opposing effects would counter each other and no net change in sea level would be observed. Even very far away from Greenland we would observe this gravitational effect -- since sea level would go down near the melting ice sheet, to make up the difference it would have to go up even higher, than the 23-foot average, on distant shores.

 

[lomiller]

Well, you see, those predictions were made by scientists. Here are a few more

The skeptical approach would be to look at what the scientists in question got wrong and possibly point out which findings were never widely accepted to begin with. The pseudoscience approach is to say “look scientists were wrong before, lets just ignore everything they say and make up whatever we want”.

 

[xjx388]

I would advice you to get your science news from scientists in the future, and not from Life Magazine. The failure here is entirely yours. You failed to be skeptical of your source. Now you are applying that failure to what scientists are saying today. That's not skepticism.

What is the OP article? A NY Magazine story quoting scientists exactly like LIFE mag did in 1970.

No. I cannot understand that, because I don't get my science news from Life Magazine.

But you do get it from NY Magazine, apparently.

You seem to be missing the point big time.

You haven't heard what you've heard from scientists. You are hearing it now tho.

Life magazine quoted scientists, just as NY mag did here. This is how the public gets their science news and is the subject we are discussing.

Again, I invite you to read the link in my sig.

Vote for people who accept the problem and who present a plan to start dealing with it. You can't deal with it on your own. Bicycling won't solve the issue.

You are wrong. We have a good idea.

Being scared by the scary is perfectly normal. Nobody is trying to scare you.[/QUOTE]
Yes. I understand the science. My specific gripe is with stories like the OP, their reporting on science and how they use large timescales because they are scarier and sell more papers.

 

[theprestige]

Humans are social animals. We're not entirely self-centered as we are group-centered.

Up to groups of about 150. Including pets. And probably including characters on Game of Thrones.

My suspicion is that caring about people beyond that circle isn't social instinct, it's religion.

This signature is intended to irradiate people.

 

[uke2se]

What is the OP article? A NY Magazine story quoting scientists exactly like LIFE mag did in 1970.

But you do get it from NY Magazine, apparently.

I tend to listen to the scientists.

Yes. I understand the science. My specific gripe is with stories like the OP, their reporting on science and how they use large timescales because they are scarier and sell more papers.

They report large timescales because they are reporting what the scientists find. Climate events take place over large timescales.

It is scary tho. Not because you are being manipulated, but because it's rational to be scared of what's about to happen to the planet we live on.

 

[wobs]

What is the OP article? A NY Magazine story quoting scientists exactly like LIFE mag did in 1970.

Which predicted that emitting too much CO2 into the atmosphere would cause climate change, leading to mass flooding.... (according to your link). This isn't far from what they are currently predicting. Increased flooding will become the norm with increased rainfall, and rising seas (caused by the sea heating up).

However, the bulk of scientists at that time were not predicting a new ice age, contrary to your link.

 

[uke2se]

I'm curious where all these old periodicals referencing "things alarmist scientists said would happen 40 years ago" come from. Is there a denialist site listing the examples to use in online discussion, or do they get passed around?

 

[Belz...]

Up to groups of about 150.

And yet we build large civilisations and decide to pay large amounts of taxes to give each other healthcare. I say we care more than you think.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

And yet we build large civilisations and decide to pay large amounts of taxes to give each other healthcare. I say we care more than you think.

And I imagine more than one soldier thought he/she was dying for his/her country.

 

[applecorped]

I'm curious where all these old periodicals referencing "things alarmist scientists said would happen 40 years ago" come from. Is there a denialist site listing the examples to use in online discussion, or do they get passed around?

It's called the internet, check it out

 

[Samson]

Very disturbing article here that argues that measures against climate change are too little too late and the repercussions of climate change have been severely understated.

It's a long article that goes into
-Die-off
-Food security
-War
-Air quality
-Water security
Etc

If this is only half right, our "decision" to build a fossil fuelled high-tech society may be the end of an inhabitable earth and the end of -well- us.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

It's too long to quote and do it justice. But I hope it sparks discussion.

Personally, I find it quite believable and see no real path to solutions as I don't see 7 billion people revert to a low-tech society.

Usually, I end apocalyptic subjects with a joking 'Invest in ammo and canned goods', but after reading this I'm quite bullish on heroin, hookers and VR-glasses to mentally escape the impending doom.

If the discussion moves to the scientific merits of the article, mods might want to move this to the Science sub-forum.

Eddie Dane:
I can say in simple terms without reading the thread, that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased at a rate more than 1000 times in the last 200 years.
Only really intelligent life can pull this stunt off, and elect Trump to deny it.
Disclosure of interest, I still quite like the Donald, he can't really achieve a cataclysm unaided.