What do you think about global warming?

Yes, it’s the worst crisis we’re facing right now, and it bugs the hell out of me that we can’t get our politicians to give a shit.

I don’t think people can make sense of it in either direction. There is a just massive component that is natural. We are smack dab in an interglacial and warming for that reason is natural. It’s actually one of the cooler of recent interglacials. Our CO2 contribution is smaller than many realize. That said it’s not trivial. Fear mongers and political agendas skew facts into extremes. People simply do not understand how complex climate really is.

I prefer to call it climate change. Parts will get warmer and then weather patterns shift and it snows in a place it hasn’t snowed before and then Jim Inhofe sticks his cock in a snowball on the floor of the Senate screaming that it is a hoax.

The science is kinda in on this. Particulates in the air trap heat. This is covered in most science books. It is a known.

I just wish people were honest about it. Just say that it would be expensive to do something about it but acknowledge that it is real. At least then we could start having a real debate about it. It is like alcoholism.. You can’t do a damn thing about it until you accept you have a problem.

And I would suggest visiting Florida soon and take lots of pictures. Your grand-kids might want to see what it looked like.

Yes, it bothers me, and the fact that the worst part will be when my kids are in the middle of their working lives.

And people in the U.S. are so parochial about it, not realizing we are already dealing with conflicts arising from climate change.

Want to know why ISIS is a problem? It is because of years of drought and crop failures in Syria linked to climate change.

The world’s climate is indeed a complex issue, but attempts to minimize human involvement with rising temperatures is beyond irresponsible, and the worse sort of criminal fraud. All the smoke and bullshit about “we don’t know enough“or “it’s too complicated” is dishonest at best. You just plain cannot spew billions of tons of carbon yearly into the atmosphere and oceans and pretend that it’s irrelevant to the world’s climate.

Welcome to Fluther.

The current mild warming of the planet and increasing levels of carbon dioxide are, in fact, necessary for the preservation of “life as we know it”.

It’s surprising how little understood this is, but there it is.

GWPF is to climate change what the Tobacco Research Institute was to cigarettes – a front group specifically set up to pump out the smoke and shine up the mirrors.

Florida flooding: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/11/miami-drowning-climate-change-deniers-sea-levels-rising
and
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/18/florida-wakes-climate-change

Sure, @stanleybmanly, ad hominems work just as well here as they do everywhere else, which explains why discussion is always so fruitful.~

Your knowledge of what a ad hominem attack is lines up nicely with your knowledge of climate science.

It is not a character attack to label the GWPF a front group for the denial and obfuscation of human involvement with climate change. That is it’s purpose, it SOLE purpose and you and I both know it.

It’s real, it’s scientifically proven, it can be seen everywhere and grows worse each day, it’s unstoppable… and not-distant future generations struggling to survive miserable living conditions as a result of it will damn past generations of naysayers and feet draggers.

Does this bother me? Yes, and though I won’t live to see the worst of it, it “bothers” me that so many of our “leaders” and wannabe leaders (like Donald Trump, who recently tweeted, with jaw-dropping stupidity, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”) very naysayers and foot-draggers.

Regardless of your opinion of the organization saying a thing, or the person saying a thing as a representative of the organization, it is incumbent upon listeners to listen to what is being said and respond to the thought… or you’re engaging in an ad hom fallacy. Which you are, @stanleybmanly and @johnpowell.

“Oh, them again” is not a valid response.

At least us Brits might get a natural tan in the summer

Whether the culprit is a natural occurrence or man (I think a bit of both,)it is real. In 100 years the Earth will be very different. Especially coastal cities with large populations. Miami for instance I’ve read is on limestone so when sea levels rise from melted ice ,even if they built a massive levy around the entire city the water would come up through the ground. Levies could work in some cities but the cost would be astronomical and they would still have water around them…
The real problem for people is that there is a growing population that is already probably too many for this planet and it’s resources. If/when sea levels rise it’ll put a greater strain on everyone. IMO this will turn into a rats fighting for dry areas on a sinking shit situation. War on large scales over remaining resources seems inevitable. Famine and disease will accompany or follow.
Life is good;)

I read every word of the article and watched the lecture. And such facts as carbon and carbon dooxide being necessary for life is the same argument coke throws up about sugar. My point on the organization isn’t about the truths sprinkled into arguments to deflect attention from the issue. It is about the role and mission of the outfit itself. It amounts to the Lupine anti defamation league lecturing sheep on the irrelevance of sharp teeth.

The quicker it leads to the destruction of the human race, and it most certainly can, the better. We had our chance. Give the earth a break. I’m actually getting happier and happier about it, even though climate change is turning L.A. into a wasteland. I wish I could be around to see the catastrophic events that will rid the earth of billions. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

I think any and all arguments made for or against climate change are disingenuous at best. Not only do you have endless trails of follow the money for or against GW, neither side AFAICT is completely transparent about their arguments, cherry picked stats and purported scientific facts. And neither side AFAICT puts forth accountability or a willingness to educate the public about what WE/THEY can do to make changes in their own lives that can and could help reduce not only ours but the worlds carbon footprint.

How many people know all that is supposedly involved in the production of green house gas? Are people aware that beef production accounts for 18% of our green house gases and methane from farm raised animals accounts for over 43% of the methane output in our greenhouse gases? Methane has a global warming potential recently estimated as 35 times that of an equivalent mass of carbon dioxide! How about we stop killing animals for food and guess what the whole global warming problem goes away overnight.

How truly impactful are these many sources of man made greenhouse gases?? What can we do to counter act and or balance our GHG output? All I see is finger pointing and handwaving that the other side is oh so wrong.

The question to ask is not what you think of global warming but what will YOU do to make a difference.

Climate change has been warned about for 30 or more years, before anyone thought to politicize it.

The motives of the companies, fake organizations created by corporations, and corrupt politicians who deny that the climate is changing and that human activities affect it, are very clear to see – they are trying to maximize their profits while they still are making so much on the fossil fuel industries.

The motives of overwhelming majority of scientists who have been warning us for decades, to lie? Yes, some politicians may have used the issue to try to get elected, as politicians do, but that doesn’t make the issue any less of a problem.

Every studied environmental science, or ecological science? Small changes in temperature often have huge effects on non-human life. The oceans are not only changing temperature, but changing their acid levels, and industrial over-fishing has been destroying fish populations, and on and on…

Ever hear of cascading effects? How about feedback loops? The world is a very complex system that no one can understand, but it’s clear that there are potential worse and worse consequences, potentially including catastrophic climate change and extinctions, up to and including our own.

What do we do when/if the temperature of pretty much all of India renders the country practically uninhabitable?

@Cruiser I’m with you on the polarization of this. It soo follows political ideology that it makes me laugh. Methane and water vapor are larger greenhouse contributors but they leave the atmosphere rather quickly. The CO2 will be around for a while. It may very well make things hotter but warm periods during an ice age are relatively short compared to cold periods and CO2 has been much higher without runaway catastrophic warming. Eventually, be it a 1000 years from now the doomsdayers and complete deniers will have to shut up. I think we’ll still be around and more adapted to deal with earth’s climate perturbations. We all know our rate of growth and expansion can’t last and we need to do something. We all don’t need to go live in grass huts and refuse to reproduce either. There must be a healthy compromise where humans can live happily, free, sustainably and not wreck the planet with more dire problems like straight up pollution and poor land management. Tell that to the folks who do their part on the surface without really understanding that their electric car runs on mostly coal and that the toxic materials for the batteries are strip mined from land that wars were fought over for. Until people learn to look at the big picture and look past the feel-good/doing my part ideology marketed at them then we can’t really do much here. People cling to their political ideology like a religious cult.

It would open the Canadian north for resource extraction and farming. It would turn the USA into mostly desert like waste land. More so then now. Mexico and South America would be wiped off the map.

In fact the effects of anthropogenic climate change that we are currently feeling are due to changes created in our environment generations ago. In other words, we haven’t even begun to feel the effects of this generation’s contributions to climate change.

Every book and report that I have read on this subject, and I have read several, indicate that we are in store for a shitstorm.

@trolltoll This “shitstorm” we are in for is all the 2nd and 3rd world countries catching up to the US and the west’s industrialized state and will need to burn copious amounts of fossil fuels to even come close to the damage our industrial revolution inflicted on this planet. We are just getting ‘warmed up’ pun intended

The evidence is that warming trends are cyclical, and more or less natural. I don’t think there is definitive proof that our current warming trend is anthropogenic. Nevertheless, it makes sense not to put more CO2 in the atmosphere than we really need to. A bigger problem in my opinion is the cutting of forests all across the planet. Trees scrub CO2 out of the air, and we’re cutting them down so that affluent people from industrialized nations can change their furniture when they get bored with the décor. I could say more, but I don’t want to rant.

@Setanta You bring up valid points, at the same time there needs to be greater recognition of the initiatives people, companies and countries are undertaking to address the egregious offenders in the global warming debate. Reforestation is a huge undertaking around the world but we can’t stop there. More needs to be done to stay ahead of the carbon footprint curve.

@Setanta
Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

Not one bit, bring it on with the quickness and speed of a cheetah cat.

@trolltoll you may want to look at the origin of that statistic.
@Setanta Generally agree except I do think there is a small man made component just nothing like the fear mongers have people convinced it is. Also a good portion of deforestation is the population in third world economies needing land for farming and fucking firewood so they can cook and eat.

@ARE_you_kidding_me what, NASA? Are we discrediting NASA now? Or is it Cook, the author of the cited study that you take issue with.

Cook

…Ok. May I ask why you have a problem with him?

Just the methods. He only used scientists that expressed an opinion of human caused or not. This left out like 60% or so of scientists among other issues. Not appropriate. I think it’s probably a more bell shaped distribution with the hump being on the “humans are contributing middle-ish side” with sparseness on “it’s all us” and “not us at all” sides

@Cruiser

There certainly has been great progress made recently. I heard on the CBC the other day (i was only half listening) that greater progess toward the reduction of CO2 emissions has been made recently than had been anticipated. As i said, i wasn’t listening closely, so i can’t say more than that. I hope it is true. I also know that great strides have been made at afforestation, i only hope it is being done faster than forests are being cut down.

This is what I think.

That is assuming we do create a better world. Just so we don’t do this I don’t think anyone would object to making a better world. I think that some want to weigh the long-term consequences of making changes and not diving in head first blindly. I guess you could put me in that camp. I don’t think people are ready for the political, economic and lifestyle changes that are required for us to change course. I’m perfectly happy to live a more agrarian, sustainable lifestyle. Sign me up for that asap. I’m in as long as I still have personal autonomy. When politicians are involved with climate policy I’m going to be very pessimistic that good decisions are being made. There is a huge potential for a lot of bullshit to get passed right through in the name of “being part of the solution”

@ARE_you_kidding_me Nobody is trying to take away your personal autonomy except for those who think you should be a slave to the coal and oil industries.

I never said that would happen, I’m just advising caution. I don’t like being chained to oil and gas more than anyone else. I think the way we have built up infrastructure and the way we use resources is a dead, catastrophic end that will run its course long before we have to worry about climate change very much.

Wouldn’t you like to thumb your nose at the oil industry the next time they raise gas prices, instead of pay through the nose? Isn’t that why we send troops to the Middle East (to protect some oil kingdom)?

Super-warm seas wiped out an entire underwater forest in Australia, scientists report
By Chris Mooney Washington Post
Jul 8, 2016

This year, the tragic die-off of large volumes of coral at the treasured Great Barrier Reef has provided a climate change shock like few others. The cause was too much warm water — which seems to have pushed the corals past a thermal survival threshold. And that warm water, in turn, is tied to climate change.

Now, however, a team of researchers has revealed that another Australian coastal ecosystem that gets less attention — Australia’s kelp-dominated Great Southern Reef, which covers a huge expanse along its more temperate southern and southwestern coast — saw an equally dramatic ecosystem upheaval five years ago. And the cause was the same — what the scientists call an “extreme marine heat wave.”

“Some of the same types of drivers are behind all of this, and I think this really emphasizes the manifestation of these climate-driven events. It’s more than just the coral reefs that are being affected by this,” says Thomas Wernberg, a marine biologist at the University of Southern Australia who led the new research, which appeared Thursday in the journal Science. Wernberg conducted the research with 21 other authors from a variety of institutions in Australia and abroad.

Many Americans will be familiar with the towering kelp forests off the coast of California, where these enormous organisms can grow to be more than 100 feet tall. The kelp off Australia’s southern and southwestern coasts aren’t nearly as tall, but they are still the backbone of a rich ecosystem, and the researchers still refer to the organisms as creating a “kelp forest.” Wernberg and his colleagues estimate the Southern Reef as a whole to be worth $10 billion each year in economic terms because of tourism, fisheries and other benefits.

But in 2011, a surge of ocean temperatures between 37 and 41 degrees above normal — conditions that for the kelp represented “the hottest in recorded history, and that’s going back 215 years,” Wernberg says — took a devastating toll on a major part of this ecosystem.

In the most northern (in the southern hemisphere, the warmest) latitudes, along the southwest coast of Australia south of Kalbarri, kelp forests died off in dramatic numbers, suggesting the temperatures had “exceeded a physiological tipping point for kelp forests,” the study reports.

“When the heat wave happened, all of those northern kelp forests were basically wiped out in a couple of months,” Wernberg says. “And southwards, at least a couple hundred kilometers, there were quite substantial impacts, but you gradually got more and more kelps as you went further south.”

The study, based on years of underwater surveys, finds that before the marine heat wave, in late 2010, kelp covered around 70 percent of reefs in the midwestern Australia coastal area — but afterwards, in 2013, their area had declined by 43 percent, or 371 square miles.

Moreover, north of 29 degrees North latitude, kelp forests were either gone entirely, or 90 percent decimated. This represented “a 100-kilometer range contraction” as well as “functional extinction from 370 square kilometers of reef,” the scientists report.

Source

(emphasis added)

Global warming? Global Climate Variation? Climate Change? Anything that changes its name so often similar to Creationism-Creation Science-Intelligent Design is suspicious to say the very least. It is a dogma not to be questioned. It is more religion and politics than science.

What do you want to call it? The glaciers and ice caps are melting, but some areas get never-before-seen cold and other areas get way too much or way too little rain.

The dire predictions Al Gore made have not materialized. Climate varies naturally. Humans have no part in it.

Max and Min temps and rainfall are getting worse than recent recorded history.

Look at the big picture We are living in one of the most stable, quiet periods in earths history. Recorded history frankly has not been that long. Say what you want about our CO2 contribution, we all know that’s bad but as far as our climate it’s still quite stable. That’s where we want to keep it. The big picture looking back is what could happen in the future. Caution it what we want in both regulating human activity and messing with our climate.

@ARE_you_kidding_me – basically, don’t rock the boat, since high CO2 coincided with wacko climate swings.