Global Warming and all that stuff.

[Dave1001]

If I'm not being presumptuous, how do you see the threat to yourself and yours?

Hard to gauge. I think I and a few members of my family have the brains to ensure our odds are about as good as the typical upper middle class 1st worlder family. We probably won't fare as well as the Gateses, but we're better situated than most of humanity.

 

[CapelDodger]

Hard to gauge. I think I and a few members of my family have the brains to ensure our odds are about as good as the typical upper middle class 1st worlder family. We probably won't fare as well as the Gateses, but we're better situated than most of humanity.

That's debatable. Your life is built on top of a complex structure, delivering you food and warmth and entertainment and infrastructure in exchange for whatever upper middle class contribution you make, which is probably a long way removed - alienated, some might say - from your consumption. The skeleton that holds this structure up is finance, which floats on faith. Faith in finance is a flimsy superstructure. Productive physical assets - land that feeds your family, for instance - require no faith.

Subsistence farmers are rather more likely to get through the coming disruptions than prosperous First Worlders. I'd like to think that some hunter-gatherer societies will not even notice that the modern world ever happened.

 

[varwoche]

Avoidance - dare I say denial? Of course I do! - is all your estimable List ever does evoke. That's the beauty of it .

If one must play interminable whack-a-mole, play it with a large paddle I say. (And thanks to you and Schneibster for your comments.)

 

[Dave1001]

That's debatable. Your life is built on top of a complex structure, delivering you food and warmth and entertainment and infrastructure in exchange for whatever upper middle class contribution you make, which is probably a long way removed - alienated, some might say - from your consumption. The skeleton that holds this structure up is finance, which floats on faith. Faith in finance is a flimsy superstructure. Productive physical assets - land that feeds your family, for instance - require no faith.

Subsistence farmers are rather more likely to get through the coming disruptions than prosperous First Worlders. I'd like to think that some hunter-gatherer societies will not even notice that the modern world ever happened.

I think that misreads what sustains the elite position of the more "meritocratic" elements of heirarchical elites. At it's core it's the ability to both network with and exploit other people. I think farmers, subsistence or otherwise, will maintain their vulnerability to the manipulative class. As such, even if the standard of living of self-made/self-persisting elites decline, I think they'll still remain among the best off of human populations. I think it's fantasy to imagine lawyers, journalists, and investment bankers starving to death while subsistence farmers make out pretty good. It may be the fantasy of end-of-the-world movies, but I don't think it's the likely reality.

 

[Schneibster]

I think that guessing that tens or hundreds of millions of people dying of starvation won't have much effect on life in the industrialized nations is a pipe dream. I keep wondering what damage those people will do while they are expiring. And some of them have nuclear weapons.

 

[Verde]

I have no doubt that we are in a warming trend,

Fine, that fits with the concensus of all who have looked at the evidence.

I have a serious doubt that man has anything to do with it.

I am also unsure as to the extent of mankind's involvement, but to doubt that man has anything to do with it
goes against a lot of well founded scientific data.

However,

Whether or not we caused global warming, we almost certainly want to do something to stop it if we can.

(Bolding mine)

There probably was a time when something could be done. That appears no longer to be the case.
http://www.physorg.com/news5769.html
Re: Siberian permafrost melting

There is still plenty we can do to improve our local environments, but let us not pretend we have any global ability.

 

[Dave1001]

I think that guessing that tens or hundreds of millions of people dying of starvation won't have much effect on life in the industrialized nations is a pipe dream. I keep wondering what damage those people will do while they are expiring. And some of them have nuclear weapons.

I never claimed "won't have much effect".

 

[a_unique_person]

That's debatable. Your life is built on top of a complex structure, delivering you food and warmth and entertainment and infrastructure in exchange for whatever upper middle class contribution you make, which is probably a long way removed - alienated, some might say - from your consumption. The skeleton that holds this structure up is finance, which floats on faith. Faith in finance is a flimsy superstructure. Productive physical assets - land that feeds your family, for instance - require no faith.

Subsistence farmers are rather more likely to get through the coming disruptions than prosperous First Worlders. I'd like to think that some hunter-gatherer societies will not even notice that the modern world ever happened.

According to Tim Flannery, the weather makers, than isn't going to happen either. The changes in weather patterns will affect these people as much as anyone. Crops and animals they now farm may not be viable in changed climatic conditions.

I do agree with the world of finance being based on faith, however. The Great Depression showed how fragile that faith can be.

 

[a_unique_person]

G-W may be a fact.

But I never, ever see a report that includes the role of Mr. Sun and his solar storms in the equation.

Everyone I've seen seems to forget that the earth's warmth comes from Mr. Sun!

That is factored into the study of climate. The idea that climate scientists don't take into consideration such obvious facts of science always puzzles me.

 

[a_unique_person]

Here are some southern hemisphere shipping references concerning icebergs.

Temperature was colder then, so I don't think you can assume a temperature/iceberg correlation.

You keep on digging up amateur pundits, like this one. Why not spend as much time going through the published papers of professional scientists?

 

[politas]

I'm not sure if we want to stop global warming, because the cure could be worse than the disease (especially if we're minor contributors to a natural trend).

Then you're an idiot, or chronically uninformed about the issue, in which case, you should probably stop discussing it.

However, I do think we should at the very least be investing significant resources into adapting to global warming. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, air-conditioning, and mass transportation systems I think the 1st world is actually fairly well poised to survive global warming.

Chronically uninformed, indeed. Potable water resources will dwindle further. You may not be seeing this much where you live, but here in Australia (already fairly dry), we are already close to hitting our limits. A lot of major city space will be inundated, as well as much arable land. Remaining arable land will almost inevitably be claimed for urban development, because people are idiots that way. New areas may eventually convert into arable land, or they may not. Agriculture needs a stable climate, not wild fluctuations. Expect mass starvation where you live, not just in the third world.

The third world could be facing hundreds of millions of deaths and the wiping out of entire countries and cultures, though. Also, we could lose a huge amount of biodiversity. But the overall survival of the human species doesn't seem to be particularly threatened -if this is mostly a normal macrotrend and not human evironmental "externalities" coming back to bite us in the ass.

What makes you think a natural climate change is incapable of wiping out our species? Prehistory implies that the most specialised and complex creatures are the ones most likely to die in any major extinction event. Our chances are poor indeed if this is not something we have caused, and can therefore hope to reverse without development of major terraforming technologies.

 

[politas]

There probably was a time when something could be done. That appears no longer to be the case.
http://www.physorg.com/news5769.html
Re: Siberian permafrost melting

There is still plenty we can do to improve our local environments, but let us not pretend we have any global ability.

We should give up on global species survival and just concentrate on enjoying our last dying gasp? What a defeatist attitude.

 

[politas]

I think that misreads what sustains the elite position of the more "meritocratic" elements of heirarchical elites. At it's core it's the ability to both network with and exploit other people. I think farmers, subsistence or otherwise, will maintain their vulnerability to the manipulative class. As such, even if the standard of living of self-made/self-persisting elites decline, I think they'll still remain among the best off of human populations. I think it's fantasy to imagine lawyers, journalists, and investment bankers starving to death while subsistence farmers make out pretty good. It may be the fantasy of end-of-the-world movies, but I don't think it's the likely reality.

Do you understand the concept of Economies of Scale? Lawyers, journalists and investment bankers can only exist because first world economies include vast excesses beyond subsistence level. If we lose the ability to produce sufficient food, someone must still actually do the work of producing food. If resources drop sufficiently, then only the people producing food can be supported by those people. If you exploit them into death, you end up having to do it yourself. And you probably won't know how if you've spent your life learning how to exploit people.

 

[varwoche]

You [BobK] keep on digging up amateur pundits, like this one.

What's more, the pundit -- Hughes -- is rather stuck in the 90's:

The central contention of these pages is that for over a decade the IPCC has published global temperature trends distorted by purely local warmth from Urban Heat Islands (UHI's). link

However the evidence indicates that the UHI theory is bogus:

Global warming trend not due to urbanisation
Hadley Centre (pdf)

 

[rockoon]

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1978534,00.html
Climate change sceptics issued with challenge

Britain's leading climate scientist has challenged those who question the impact of the human population on global warming to defend their claims that car and factory emissions of carbon dioxide are not heating up the planet.

I think this story is worth following. If it does get going, here's an example of the rebuttal case :

Do I understand this correctly? Britains leading climate scientist is asking skeptics of AGW to prove a negative?

I think they need a new leader.

 

[Earthborn]

Is Global Warming BS or not? I don't feel like watching another propaganda film to try and gather information.

I suggest you watch the far less propagandistic (and more boring) European alternative:

"Climate Change" by ACCROTELM:
Part One (12 minutes)
Part Two (23 minutes).
Requires RealPlayer.

 

[Dave1001]

I'm not sure if we want to stop global warming, because the cure could be worse than the disease (especially if we're minor contributors to a natural trend).

Then you're an idiot, or chronically uninformed about the issue, in which case, you should probably stop discussing it.

No, I'm not, by you're own measure. Later in your own post you acknowledge (like many climate scientists) that we could be minor contributors to a natural trend. If so, the most draconian measures conceivable to reduce CO2 emissions and other man-made contributors to global warming may do little to halt the global warming trend and its impact on humans. However, it's hard to argue that they wouldn't have a significant impact on economic growth. I think most rational people can understand trading off the short-term benefits of economic growth for the long-term economic benefits of climate stability. But if the same order of magnitude of climate instability is going to happen whether or not short-term economic growth is sacrificed, then it would be a compounding harm to sacrifice short-term economic growth, especially since in theory maximal short-term economic productivity could be harnessed to to facilitate our adaption to the climate change that will come with global warming. That's not to say that I think man-made contributions are insignificant, nor that I think we shouldn't try to reduce manmade contributions to global warming. But I do think these various scenarios should be under consideration and studied, to facilitate coming up with the best global policy on how we react as a species to global warming.

However, I do think we should at the very least be investing significant resources into adapting to global warming. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, air-conditioning, and mass transportation systems I think the 1st world is actually fairly well poised to survive global warming.

Chronically uninformed, indeed. Potable water resources will dwindle further. You may not be seeing this much where you live, but here in Australia (already fairly dry), we are already close to hitting our limits. A lot of major city space will be inundated, as well as much arable land. Remaining arable land will almost inevitably be claimed for urban development, because people are idiots that way. New areas may eventually convert into arable land, or they may not. Agriculture needs a stable climate, not wild fluctuations. Expect mass starvation where you live, not just in the third world.

Right. Nothing I posted denied that potable water, lack of arable land, and mass starvation, including in the 1st world, will all be serious problems. Although I do think 1st world mass starvation is the least plausible of the three (not to say that it's completely implausible). I don't see any of this as threatening the survival of the species. Even if in a social extreme there is a reversion to draconian, heavily armed city states -and I doubt it will come to that- cognitive and ecomic elites have too much at their disposal in the 21st century in the war for their own survival (against both the elements and other humans) to perish from even worst case global warming.

The third world could be facing hundreds of millions of deaths and the wiping out of entire countries and cultures, though. Also, we could lose a huge amount of biodiversity. But the overall survival of the human species doesn't seem to be particularly threatened -if this is mostly a normal macrotrend and not human evironmental "externalities" coming back to bite us in the ass.

What makes you think a natural climate change is incapable of wiping out our species? Prehistory implies that the most specialised and complex creatures are the ones most likely to die in any major extinction event. Our chances are poor indeed if this is not something we have caused, and can therefore hope to reverse without development of major terraforming technologies.

Because nothing in the known history of the Earth's climate changes seems to present even a strong threat to the survival of the human species as it exists in the year 2006. As a species (as opposed to many individuals) we are about as opposite from being a specialized creature as one can get. The reason I think the chances are worse if climate change is significantly manmade, is that it may be an artifact of our social evolution and interspecies competition. Like with mutually assured destruction, I think the greatest threats to our survival (at least until the sun supernovas or a "when world's collide" magnitude of planetary collision) is something that emerges from intraspecies competition. Grey goo, intelligent robots, the singularity, good old nuclear war, that type thing. An accellerating global warming due to industrial competition (between countries or between yuppies) would also fall into that category in my opinion. Which is why I think we're in a better spot if the current global warming is part of normal planetary warming and cooling trends, rather than significantly the result of human activity.

 

[skoob]

Do I understand this correctly? Britains leading climate scientist is asking skeptics of AGW to prove a negative?

The Holocaust never happened. 9/11 was not carried out by Al-Qaeda. Hummingbirds do not exist. 2 + 2 does not equal 4.

What? You expect me to back up those statements with evidence? But they're negatives! You can't prove a negative! (But you can easily disprove them, by using evidence.)

 

[rockoon]

The Holocaust never happened. 9/11 was not carried out by Al-Qaeda. Hummingbirds do not exist. 2 + 2 does not equal 4.

What? You expect me to back up those statements with evidence? But they're negatives! You can't prove a negative! (But you can easily disprove them, by using evidence.)

I was expecting that link to disprove the negative .. but it didn't...

Instead it proved that environmental activists like to use alarmist quotes in order to sway people with emotion rather than reason

 

[a_unique_person]

I was expecting that link to disprove the negative .. but it didn't...

Instead it proved that environmental activists like to use alarmist quotes in order to sway people with emotion rather than reason

Varwoche has highlighted reports from scientific studies by scientific bodies as presented in various sources of information.

If you look up the first one, it refers to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. This is a link to their study of changes in the Antarctic.

http://nsidc.org/sotc/iceshelves.html

Because they are exposed to both warming air above and warming ocean below, ice shelves respond more quickly than ice sheets or glaciers to rising temperatures. Antarctica has 15 major ice shelf areas, and 10 of the largest appear in this map: Ross, Ronne-Filchner, Amery, Larsen C, Riiser-Larsen, Fimbul, Shackleton, George VI, West, and Wilkins. The three largest are the Ross, the Ronne-Filchner, and the Amery.
Two kinds of events on ice shelves have attracted the attention of scientists. One kind is iceberg calving, a natural event. The other kind is disintegration, a new phenomenon suggestive of climate change.

Hardly environmental activists, and based on scientific observation and study.

That's the first link. Do you want me to do more work for you?