These are the people who can't predict tomorrow's weather but are 100% certain of the weather in 100 years. In the 1970's, the climatologists were predicting a New Ice Age. The earth is not a static system. It is dynamic system with constant variations and fluctuations. Mr. McKibben's funding must be waning. He has to use tall tales to induce fear to secure grant funding.
@nancy_naive, I am not talk about Nuclear Winter which would not a true Ice Age. I am talking about the extremely cold, snowy winters that spurred the climatologists to believe a new Ice Age was coming. I remember living in Ohio in the 70's and there were snow drifts larger than my house. If I remember correctly one of the many article on the subject was called, "The Coming Ice Age." I think it was in Time magazine and it had nothing to do with fallout from a nuclear war. But believe what you want! You have the right!!!!
Where do they get this stuff? You can't turn on the TV without seeing massive ice melt everywhere. Sea temps are rising, coral beds are dying. Are these guys living on the same planet?
12 years ago, NASA built a unique satellite that could look at the entire sunlit face of the planet and actually measure absorption and reflection of energy.
This would have been ground breaking as for the first time, rather than try to stitch time-shifted snapshots of the earth from the narrow fields of view of existing satellite images, we could have measured the whole thing in all it's in your face, data busting glory.
Well what happened? NASA paid over 100 million of the US taxpayers dollars for it. Guess what happened? Politics.
It stands today as the only satellite NASA ever built that never got sent up.
We should be sitting here today with 10 years of data to look at- data that could have proved one way or another that things were trending the wrong way.
What we got was the same old political BS and a 100 million science project in a govt. warehouse somewhere.
These anti-change guys can be cocky because they kill off the science that could have proven it. If they want to impress us all, build a new DEEP SPACE CLIMATE OBSERVATORY with modern, state of the art sensors and get it the @#$@ up there before we lose another 10 years.
The wikipedia article is a bit flawed. It claims that Bush "canceled", this with no source for that comment. The reason for that, is that Bush did no such thing. Congress put it on hold once. Then the Space shuttle catastrophe, made prioritizing the launch capabilities of the remaining lift capacity more urgent. That is what pushed the launch of Al Gore's satelite to the back burner. Articles like that in Wikipedia are why high school students cannot use it a source for book reports.
CO2 comes from the environment in the first place, doesn't it? The plants need it to make oxygen for us, don't they?
Water vapor is the greatest greenhouse gas. Why is it never mentioned in these discussions?
Climate change is incontrovertibly real, of course, and there's nothing especially complex about the principle. I personally know climatologists who have conducted the studies.
I personally couldn't care less about the demise of mankind, I just hate listening to know-nothings insult scientists because they mistakenly think they have a right to an opinion on every subject, no matter how ignorant they may be on it.
Climate has been changing for millions of years and will continue to change no matter what we do. The rush to save the climate is reminiscent of tarp and the stimulous package. If we don't do it right away, the world will crumble. Rushing out to spend money on an unknown is foolhardy at best.
I subscribe to Dick Cheney's 2% rule (he said if there was a 2% chance of Iraq having WMD we should go in there). If there is a 2% chance that climate change is caused by humans then we need to do something abut it.
The point most seem to miss and the real issue at hand is not climate change, but rather long-term survival of our species. Overall, climate change poses as much a threat to us now as it did 10,000 years ago. Bad weather can be deadly, but it's hardly the only or even the greatest threat.
One poster here suggested that an asteroid might hit Earth in 2029 and kill us all. In the over all scheme of things, *that* threat is far more likely to end us than is global climate change. Plus, statistically speaking, an extinction level impact event is inevitable whereas global warming is not.
The good news is, the only viable solution to both such threats as well as a host of others, including overpopulation is simple. We begin working now toward migrating off world. Sooner or later this rock will no longer be capable of hosting life. Better we leave early than wait until it's too late.
Of course many will scoff at such an idea and call it science fiction. And today it would be. That's why we need to start working on it now. I suspect that from the time we began the effort in earnest, it would take us at least a century to establish a viable and hopefully self-sustaining human habitat on some place like Mars.
Others would ridicule such an idea as too costly; ignoring the impending danger while railing against problems no one can really solve. After all, the last time such an impactor struck Earth was 65 million years ago. And indeed, while inevitable, it may well not happen for another 65 million years. Or it could happen before I get this posted.
For all of our efforts to spot an approaching potential impactor, we still will not see one coming from the direction of the sun until it's too late to do much more than scream, "Oh shi..."
We are soooo screwed with the coming population explosion that we won't be around to worry about the climate.
I truly do not think that we can survive the next century without either strictly restricting populations, or moving off of earth. Sadly, I doubt either will happen.
In a calculus class I took, we based the data on the number of estimated habitable square miles on the earth, excluding extreme climates like the Antarctic and mountain tops, oceans, etc. Places people could reasonably live.
The idea was that the maximum density for EVERY ONE of those square miles could be 500 people. We're talking desert, every hill, every place you drive past, every single square mile. The rough calculation for that population density is 25 billion.
You really gotta love those right-wing Fox-news nut jobs.
One side of their mouth is screaming about the national debt we're going to leave for our grandchildren. The other is screaming about how there is no human-caused climate change.
Of course, they're too busy screaming to understand that if they don't get with the program in the next few years, their grandchildren are going to have MUCH bigger problems than the national debt.
You're amusing, lessor; not much, but some. You see, I never did believe that the sun revolved around Earth.
By the way,if *I'm* so backwards, tell me please, why is it that you still insist on referring to this planet as "The Earth"? Do you refer to Mars as "The Mars"?
If you're going to capitalize it, it's simply, Earth, not the Earth.
The fact is that we have radically increase the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to levels not seen in a hundred thousand years. So yes, we can measure that and we can see that the rate of increase has direct correlation with the industrial revolution and increases in population and burning of fossil fuels.
In fact, we are part of a giant experiment that appears will not go very well for the subjects (us) of the experiment. Like rats in a cage that are fed too much food, we are being fed too much fossil fuels to feed our consumption.
Human consumption of fossile fuels is far less a threat to civilization than is human consumption of food. Our rapidly expanding population is indeed problematic. But fankly, as long as sex remains more popular than dying, I don't see the problem reversed until it reaches some kind of tipping point.
Likewise, with climate change, let us assume for a moment that we are directly responsible for accelerating it to a dangerous rate. In order to stop that trend, pretty much by definition, humanity would have to collectively, voluntarily return to the Stone Age. Good luck convincing enough people to go along with that to do any good.
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12 years ago, NASA built a unique satellite that could look at the entire sunlit face of the planet and actually measure absorption and reflection of energy.
This would have been ground breaking as for the first time, rather than try to stitch time-shifted snapshots of the earth from the narrow fields of view of existing satellite images, we could have measured the whole thing in all it's in your face, data busting glory.
Well what happened? NASA paid over 100 million of the US taxpayers dollars for it. Guess what happened? Politics.
It stands today as the only satellite NASA ever built that never got sent up.
We should be sitting here today with 10 years of data to look at- data that could have proved one way or another that things were trending the wrong way.
What we got was the same old political BS and a 100 million science project in a govt. warehouse somewhere.
These anti-change guys can be cocky because they kill off the science that could have proven it. If they want to impress us all, build a new DEEP SPACE CLIMATE OBSERVATORY with modern, state of the art sensors and get it the @#$@ up there before we lose another 10 years.
Look it up for yourselves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-03/lost-satellite?cmpid=enews040711
Water vapor is the greatest greenhouse gas. Why is it never mentioned in these discussions?
I personally couldn't care less about the demise of mankind, I just hate listening to know-nothings insult scientists because they mistakenly think they have a right to an opinion on every subject, no matter how ignorant they may be on it.
One poster here suggested that an asteroid might hit Earth in 2029 and kill us all. In the over all scheme of things, *that* threat is far more likely to end us than is global climate change. Plus, statistically speaking, an extinction level impact event is inevitable whereas global warming is not.
The good news is, the only viable solution to both such threats as well as a host of others, including overpopulation is simple. We begin working now toward migrating off world. Sooner or later this rock will no longer be capable of hosting life. Better we leave early than wait until it's too late.
Of course many will scoff at such an idea and call it science fiction. And today it would be. That's why we need to start working on it now. I suspect that from the time we began the effort in earnest, it would take us at least a century to establish a viable and hopefully self-sustaining human habitat on some place like Mars.
Others would ridicule such an idea as too costly; ignoring the impending danger while railing against problems no one can really solve. After all, the last time such an impactor struck Earth was 65 million years ago. And indeed, while inevitable, it may well not happen for another 65 million years. Or it could happen before I get this posted.
For all of our efforts to spot an approaching potential impactor, we still will not see one coming from the direction of the sun until it's too late to do much more than scream, "Oh shi..."
I truly do not think that we can survive the next century without either strictly restricting populations, or moving off of earth.
Sadly, I doubt either will happen.
In a calculus class I took, we based the data on the number of estimated habitable square miles on the earth, excluding extreme climates like the Antarctic and mountain tops, oceans, etc. Places people could reasonably live.
The idea was that the maximum density for EVERY ONE of those square miles could be 500 people. We're talking desert, every hill, every place you drive past, every single square mile. The rough calculation for that population density is 25 billion.
Just about the time our grandchildren will come to realize that the debt we have left them is crushing them, the atmosphere will choke them.
Either way, we'll have been long dead with a smile on our faces.
Not with a bang...
One side of their mouth is screaming about the national debt we're going to leave for our grandchildren. The other is screaming about how there is no human-caused climate change.
Of course, they're too busy screaming to understand that if they don't get with the program in the next few years, their grandchildren are going to have MUCH bigger problems than the national debt.
By the way,if *I'm* so backwards, tell me please, why is it that you still insist on referring to this planet as "The Earth"? Do you refer to Mars as "The Mars"?
If you're going to capitalize it, it's simply, Earth, not the Earth.
In fact, we are part of a giant experiment that appears will not go very well for the subjects (us) of the experiment. Like rats in a cage that are fed too much food, we are being fed too much fossil fuels to feed our consumption.
Likewise, with climate change, let us assume for a moment that we are directly responsible for accelerating it to a dangerous rate. In order to stop that trend, pretty much by definition, humanity would have to collectively, voluntarily return to the Stone Age. Good luck convincing enough people to go along with that to do any good.