There is a large elephant in the room...

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May already be too late(Not to say that I've given up but there are legit reasons for despondency at this point)

The effort to tarnish the earth for profit's institutionalized.

It's only a matter of time for it to be too late.

If it's not too late to do something, just wait till it is.

Well, that's the thing about "paleoclimate"... of course there have been times when the earth has been warmer, but what do you think would happen if I sent you back in time to try and live through it? If you're talking geological timescales, you also have to accept that humans, indeed most mammals have been around for the blink of an eye, relatively speaking. We're not adapted to paleoclimatic conditions.

Yes, humans have survived a few warm periods in the last few thousand years, but the sort of run-away warming we're heading for now is a different matter entirely.

And please don't tell me it's not going to happen, unless you have data to refute what the scientists are telling us. I, for one, am getting fed up to the teeth with people claiming that climate change concerns are "alarmist", when they haven't even grasped the magnitude of the problem. I suggest you educate yourself.

Edited to add: Sorry if I seem to be picking on you, but uninformed people telling me that everything is fine and not to worry about it, as we watch the apocalypse unfolding and the man-made destruction of our planet SERIOUSLY BUGS ME OUT. I'm with the OP, it's way way past time to address the elephant in the room.

By that time it will be too late. By that time we will have already started a chain of events that will make life more difficult for us.

Even driving fuel efficient cars won't help at all if it means we end up using half as much petrol per year for twice as many years. Instead this just gives the oil companies a chance to charge twice as much per litre while still staying within the average families budget (because they're buying half as much litres). For this reason oil companies secretly love fuel efficient cars.

Yes, I agree, but we can't solve fossil fuel dependance overnight. The best we have right now are stop-gap measures, to try and slow things down while we develop better long-term solutions.

To be honest, I'm a pessismist, I think the change we need is too radical to be accepted, we're going to hit a climate tipping point soon and, well, life is going to get increasingly difficult for us, and especially for future generations.

But that's no excuse for not doing our best to make changes.

Presently, we add 83 million people to the planet every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

Any solution needs to figure out how those additional people will be provided with food, homes, electricity, transportation.

The solution is to lower their infant mortality rate and improve their standard of living. First world people don't have such a high birth rate but we used to. To put the brakes on population growth we must bring the third world into the first world.

Just because someone denies a problem doesn’t mean they haven’t grasped its magnitude. Remember what creationists usually say: it’s all about your worldview. In their worldview, the Bible trumps empirical evidence and even logic. Similarly, many people can have a worldview in which the ad consequentiam argument that anything that might justify a bigger government is automatically false is a valid inference rule.

Isn’t it real fun to be in a sinking ship with a few holes in its hull, which could still be plugged, but the few people who think maybe plugging them might be sort of a good idea are prevented from doing it and told to stop being such alarmists and that the ship’s sinking is a completely unfounded myth, while others enthusiastically keep making more and more holes? Oh, and there are not enough lifeboats for all, but many of the most avid punchers know they have some not very crowded ones reserved for them.



Isn’t that what we autistics get told every single time we try to get anyone’s help to solve any problem whatsoever?



It won’t be addressed. It’s not in human nature to do so.

In the US, the favored government solution appears to be to increase cost to discourage use.

Gas taxes, "Cap and Trade" (where a business may purchase pollution credits to further pollute), car emission test for car registration, proposed carbon taxes ...

However, people complain this hurts poor people mostly.

I think we're also passing through a technological wrinkle where solar and other fuels will become more cost effective on most fronts, especially if we're able to sort out fusion.

The main question then for those of us in the United States is - how do we deal with the sticky problem of the petrodollar, that so much of the national debt we've accrued was promised against a sort of 'good will' intangible that's either going to be transferred to another country or come to represent something that's obsolete in all cases. Any which way I do worry that we'd be seeing an economic disaster even with, and in part because of, such changes. Yes - not frying life on earth and losing all of the corals = critical. At the same time I do wonder if people are tooled to realize how much sacrifice is going to go around with this or whether our culture has any calibration to handle 'win/lose' or 'lose/lose' scenarios.

I know, that's why I called it one


It also doesn't help that most Americans favor great big, gas-guzzling vehicles over smaller, fuel-efficient cars.

Every time I see a Hummer in a parking lot...ugh...

The point isn't just that it "was warmer in the past." The point is that there is zero evidence in the temperature record that current temperatures are in any way abnormal, or even above a demonstrable baseline. In other words, there is no way to statistically separate any human impact from natural variation in the temperature record.

There is even a strong case to be made that some researchers deliberately skew temperature records in order to give the false impression that current temperatures are "rapidly incresing." A very good example of this is the Marcott 2013 data set. They added centuries-long smoothing windows to past proxy data, then appended a high resolution modern temperature data set to the end of it, which gave the impression that temperatures were "skyrocketing." However, when you compare the EPICA Dome C dataset to Marcott's, it's abundantly clear how much natural variation was omitted, and that the "spike" in Marcott's dataset is totally within the limits of natural variation. I mean, that is downright dishonest and there is no way that wasn't deliberate.



Another good sanity check is sea level data. The claim is that sea levels are rapidly increasing, but this is demonstrably false. There is a very well-established trend in sea level rise that has existed for roughly the past 8,000 years, and there is absolutely no evidence in the data that this trend has changed at all. Some researchers will make this claim, but then show you a very truncated set of sea level data points that omit how well-established the trend is. Again, this is incredibly dishonest, but unless you have a background in statistics, it's very easy to be fooled by these kinds of tactics.



This is just the tip of the iceberg, as it were, regarding how many ridiculous and totally unfounded myths there are surrounding climate change. For example, there's a stupid scare around "melting ice caps." The earth's cryosphere has been steadily melting since the emergence from the last glacial period ~10kya, which happens every 100k-150k years (you can see these cycles very clearly in the paleoclimate record chart linked above). We are currently in a peaking period of one of these cycles, which historically are 1-2C *warmer* than we currently are now. In other words, current melt rates are not only totally normal, they're *expected* at this point in time. And, historically, the earth has spent about half of its existence (at least over the past 500my) without any crysophere at all--and life was hugely abundant during these periods.

The false predictions are another sanity check. ~98% of climate models have made predictions for the timeframe of the past 15 years or so that have been way, way too high. Temperatures for this timeframe have remained relatively flat instead of increasing at the predicted rate of several degrees C every few years. I mean, that is a tremendously significant deviation and no one in their right mind would ever consider that a successful set of predictions. It makes it abundantly clear that the hypothesis regarding CO2's impact on the global climate is fundamentally wrong; in other words, even though you can demonstrate in a lab that CO2 reflects heat, the way it behaves in the climate is not such that simply adding more CO2 necessarily results in measurably increased global temperatures.



There is actually more credence to the idea that cooling, rather than warming, poses a bigger danger to human life on earth in the foreseeable future. The 100k-150k year glacial cycles are extremely consistent--probably one of the most consistent signals we have in the climate record--and this means that in the next few hundred years or so, we're going right back to 2km thick glaciers as far south as New York City. These glacial cycles don't coincide with any extinction events, but I don't think it's a coincidence that human civilization only emerged after the end of the last glacial period. None of us will likely be around when this starts, which is too bad, because I freaking love cold weather.

Last edited by StickyVicky on 05 Aug 2018, 1:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.

People in first world have 8-10 kids too. How will you stop them?

So you want rolling black outs like North Korea? Sounds fun, I don’t want that. So until they can develop and produce the giant batteries able to store enouhnpowere to run the nation while the suns down, wind isn’t blowing etc, we won’t be using such power sources more then 20% of the power for the USA. You can’t just spin up coal plants at night to compensate. Or when wind stops blowing yell start the nuclear plant again. It takes a lot of time and money, and who’s paying for those employees to stand around on standby? It just won’t work.

That sort of misses my second paragraph completely.

I don't think there will be any pleasant way through or out of this, and I brought up the petrodollar as to how - even if this is all handled correctly and we make solar work or even get lucky and have widely available fusion there will be a big financial shakedown. The other big financial apocalypse will likely happen when we can 3D print or high-quality prefab houses much cheaper than they can be built and the revaluation of current homes makes 2008 look like a walk in the park.

Without the batteries solar isn't a viable solution, with the batteries it is. In the hypothetical, and likely, that I brought up it was in that scenario. Solar's still inferior to fusion because you've gotta print off these reams of panels that have rare earth, sometimes toxic materials, and it's a mess to deal with them as they go obsolete.

It is crucial IMHO that we claw back the CO2 problem and part of that is the amount of stuff that's trapped in the permafrost in places like Siberia. In my more Republican days I just hated that the left wanted to use these sorts of messages about climate change to 'stick it' to capitalism and they seemed to be abusing the issue, it made me quite open to the contrarian viewpoint for a while, but some things about this are open and shut. A leftist of that old cloth might say 'Well the only solution is to stop capitalism now - in my Marxist utopia we'll have zero emissions', I'm a lot more optimistic that some combination of free market and grants, in no small part aided by awareness and concern for these issues, is getting the job done without draconian anti-economic measures.

I'm also somewhat familiar with the studies that came back suggesting that the predictions made about global warming have come back on the low end of the register. I'm really glad of that because it means we can innovate our way out of it rather than putting an already complex social system under some type of strict central planning.

I increasingly as well think that divides between the sane members of the political spectrum are on policy nuance, less disagreement about the fundamental reality of whether there is or isn't a problem. I think we need solutions that utilize the free market as a vehicle (which I think would put me in more with the neoconservatives, libertarians, and classic liberals on this) and that's happening with solar and, thanks to many endeavors including those at Tesla, we're getting increased battery performance for electric cars and so energy storage is a technology that's getting pushed now for output in vehicles. It's in every auto manufacturer's interest who offers electric cars to get the cost and efficiency of their batteries as low as possible, both for outcompeting their competitors and also having more space for profit margin to make the shareholders happy. Needless to say that innovation helps drive us toward the sort of efficiency doubling we'd need to figure out storage for energy that comes in for only half the day.

The problem is that while the temperatures stayed low, CO2 emissions continued to increase. This necessarily means the entire hypothesis regarding CO2's impact on climate is wrong. Fundamentally, irredeemably, completely wrong.