I blame Bush and Cheney.
Rub a Dub
'1600 years of Ice melting in 25 years is a bad omen'
by designs 165 Replies latest social current
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Berengaria
The Economist? Or http://theresilientearth.com/?
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steve2
Maybe catastrophic is to extreme a word but we need to radically alter how we live in these dry climates.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The Late Great Planet Earth! Famine 1975.....if man can panic over what lies ahead, he will - and so will woman. Little wonder there will always be room for apocalyptic religious groups. There is always something that can evoke panic.
Look, necessity is the mother of effective invention. Singapore, a postage-sized city-state with a bulging 5 to 6 million population at one time relied heavily on Malaysia for its water, invested billions of dollars on desalination plants that increas ingly meet its population's needs. No more being held ransom by a bigger neighbor.
Moreover, in other countries where drinkable water is at a premium, initiatives such as water-metering have seen domestic use plummet as people become more conservation conscious. The consumer wastage and ruination of earlier decades is over; responsible and sustainable use is increasingly the order of the day. Pinch the population's pockets and watch their habits improve overnight. New, meaner, leaner habits are acquired with haste.
Meanwhile, back at the coal face of an industry that thrives on panic, Chicken Little frets about where to focus his panic next....
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mP
betsy:
For fallacious argument to authority to exist you must either justify why climate scientists are inexpert in climate science, or prove that consensus amongst climate scientists does not exist, or both.
mP:
Temperature has been increasing before the industrial revolution. How can we blame everything on human leached carbon, if it was happening before the IR ?
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mP
Betsy
No I don't - I wholeheartedly agree with NOAA that climate change is manmade - thanks for highlighting their role in global awareness of this problem.
mP:
We have climate change every winter and summer and thats been happening before man even existed. Its been getting warmer for hundreds of years, many charts show this. Humans are destructive but we dont control the entire planet that much. Climate has never been constant, only a fool pretends that this is a new trend.
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kurtbethel
It is a pretty big problem, whether you accept the consensus or not.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
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besty
@tt2c
The two are not mutually exclusive, perhaps you would be well served by a course in logic.
OK - to summarise, you accept greenhouse gas theory, you accept that human origin CO2 warms the planet, you are open minded on the causes of climate change and you feel an Ice Age beginning in 2014 is inevitable. You are not convinced scientific consensus exists with regard to climate change.
Did I get that right?
What you need more clarification on is previous planetary warming going back 11,000 years and 125,000 years. Correct?
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besty
@mP
We have climate change every winter and summer and thats been happening before man even existed.
Climate is defined as weather over time, typically a 30 year period. So we don't have climate change twice a year as you describe - we have seasonal weather.
Its been getting warmer for hundreds of years, many charts show this.
Correct.
Humans are destructive but we dont control the entire planet that much.
Yes we are, and yes we do. Climate responds to whatever the dominant variable is. In this past the dominant variable may have been solar activity, volcanic activity, orbital variations, CO2 concentration etc. Today we are the dominant variable - changing the CO2 concentration by 40% in just the blink of an eye, changing land use on a massive scale, soot particulate emission all combine to affect the global climate. This is well established science beyond any reasonable doubt and has been for many decades. All the oil and gas companies accept the scientific reality.
Climate has never been constant, only a fool pretends that this is a new trend
I don't know anybody who promotes the idea of a constant climate.
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besty
@mP:
Temperature has been increasing before the industrial revolution. How can we blame everything on human leached carbon, if it was happening before the IR
Climate is a system responding to a variety of inputs. Now and in the past this includes planetary orbital cycles, solar variations, volcanoes, tectonic plate movement, oceanic currents, CO2 concentration etc.
More CO2 = a warming influence. More volcanoes = cooling influnce. Weak sun or low solar activity = cooling influnce. And so the climate varies. By studying evidence from the past we can discern which of these factors is dominant in changing the climate for hotter or cooler conditions.
The only variable that explains the current shift in global temperature is human introduced CO2.
Our hand is on the thermostat now.
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designs
steve2- first you animadvert on the idea of people and communites radically altering how they use natural resources then you describe how people and communites are radically altering how they are using natural resources, cute