Climate Change (fair discussion)

[Art Blade]

This was part of the quantum mechanics etc topic but focus shifted to climate change, so I split the topic and moved it.

And I too instantly reacted to him bringing up climate change. "Weather" is what I would have expected instead.

[PZ]

um... President Trump says that climate change is fake news

[Art Blade]

I don't know. There are people with scientific background who say it's virtually impossible that climate can change that quickly and there are people with scientific background who say it is happening. I think whatever is true, it cannot be wrong to be more careful with how we live and w0#k regarding our environment and nature. It can't be wrong to reduce pollution and to recycle and all that just as it can't be right to disafforest half a continent and not worry about what that does to ecosystems and all that. So.. I don't know about climate change but I think those who believe it's changing are doing all of us a favour by establishing rules that lead to a cleaner and less broken world.

[PZ]

I have a scientific background in education/research, and I believe climate change is a reality. There is no way that 7 billion people with all their pollution waste and "plunder the resources" behavior has no impact on the planet.

Sure, geologic changes has a huge impact on the climate, but it does not make sense that humans have no impact on the planet ecosystem.

I personally do not listen at all to individuals that claim with boisterous authority to know the real answer - those are usually fools that have a personal agenda or morons that cannot see beyond their own noses.  I like to look at data from as many sources as I can, and then apply "common sense" (which is evidently not that common any more) to the topic at hand.

Interestingly last week my wife and I attended a democratic town hall, and simply took it all in without comment. Although it was well managed, one could see that people were polarized - they did not want to hear about the "other side".

Yesterday we went to a republican town hall (presented by local Idaho legislators) and the same occurred.  It astounded me that the attendance (in the same venue) was only about 1/3 of the democratic town hall - why the difference in number one can only guess. Some of the comments by the crowd regarding education I have intimate knowledge of, and were blatantly wrong (in my professional history I have been the decision maker in our education policy).  I did not make comment during the town hall because I know it would have fallen on deaf ears - people were charged up by then.

I have never attended town hall meetings before this month, and found them fascinating - people making comments based on their biases, and refusing to look at the other side. The result is that chaos ensued with people on both sides becoming emotional, shouting, and unwilling to listen to others.

It was a sad observation for me and although I am glad that I went to see first hand what transpires at these meetings, I am disappointed that so much ignorance shapes the tone of the conversations (if you can call them that)

[Art Blade]

Interesting that you chose to say "I believe" which seems to be the opposite of science which should have been "I know." 

I suppose there aren't any hard facts? I know little about all that yet I heard interesting thoughts. For example, we only have been collecting weather data since, by comparison, "a few years," while we can deduce climate changes took place in the past by looking at samples taken by drilling into glacier ice, looking at soil in deep mines, that's where you can see and test how ice and soil changed their composition. During, by comparison, "ten thousands of years" (not to say millions) There are factors such as really big meteor impacts that left a mark. What they say is, too little time has passed, during which no significant changes took place, it could just be a natural spike, peak or fuzziness in the recent data we're looking at when assuming a climate change is taking place.

[PZ]

I use the phrase "I believe" because there are typically so many variables that a definitive answer is not reasonable. For instance, we were not on this planet 4 billion years ago, so traditional "proof" is not easily discovered 

[Art Blade]

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

The problem with climate change is we don't have a long enough set of records. A lot of the time you hear "Warmest month since record keeping began" which is what, 150 years? Wow, that's such a long time! Even taking into account ice core samples that go back 100,000 years or more, this is not the warmest the planet has been. Let's ignore extremely distant past times (over 70 or 80 million years ago) when the planet's actual land to water configuration was different enough that the climate would have been different anyway. Some information I saw suggests that even 2000 years ago during the height of the Roman Empire, the climate was warmer than it is now. Though we are approaching that point fairly quickly.

As for the climate changing "overnight" (in a few hundred or thousand years) there is some indication that something similar has happened before. Certain deposits of rock in some areas show what would be glacial deposits directly underneath tropical reef deposits. So at least in that area the climate when from arctic to tropical in the matter of a few centuries or less.

Is human activity causing climate change? I don't think so, the climate has been warming for the last 10,000 years since the last ice age. More recent times there has been a dip in global temperature (the "little ice age") that essentially ended with the industrial revolution. Did the increased amount of pollution end the little ice age, or was it just coincidence? That's the question. Did humans cause climate change and a warmer Earth, or are we just accelerating it, a process that might have happened anyway?

I don't deny that the climate is warmer, the winters now are shorter and warmer with less snow than when I was a kid. There just isn't enough information to completely blame human activity for it, nor is there enough information to say that humans aren't the cause either. Either way, pollution is generally a bad thing and either way we should probably try to decrease it.

[mandru]

I believe (since that's a popular term) that the interference of world governments intent on driving a skewed discussion of the validity of climate change by silencing the opposing voices of qualified researchers by way of taking away grant funding and driving them out of academia is far too suspicious of manipulative intent.

How can a proper discussion be held without all the facts on the table?  I have to view the top down effort to hide facts from the citizens of the world can only be a concerted effort to create fear and assert control over people to herd them into a more manageable product.

There's a reason that restraint rings are put into the noses of bulls and the future development of civilization utterly depends on resisting the "go along to fit in" herd mentality and placidly waiting in line to have our nose ring attached by supposed high minded power hoarders who want to tighten their grip on us.  We have to demand all facts fully unfiltered be put on the table.

I don't know about you but I'm sick of putting money in Al Gore's pocket.

Here in the U.S. there has even been a few attempts to make speaking out against catastrophic climate change a criminal offense carrying prison sentences.  Fortunately more temperate minds have repeatedly blocked that initiative but have overlooked removing the financial muzzles of the opposing voices of the organized climate change gambit.

How much was the science of astronomy set back by the imprisonment and forced recanting of the works of Galileo Galilei over the concept that the Earth was not the center of the universe?  But then most people never fully grasp the full impact of the explicit warning "'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

[Art Blade]

D_B said a lot nicer and way more detailed what I had in mind when writing my rather short post. I liked reading it.

And I am glad that we can have a discussion here bare of attacks and flame wars, just keep speaking your minds, gents 

[PZ]

Indeed   

[LowPolyOWG]

I believe the climate changes in the latest decades are human made. The global temperature have increased to a higher level compared to 200 years ago. The nature can interfere with it through volcanic eruptions/solar activity. Well, we don't have volcanic eruptions spitting out huge quantities of dirt/ash blocking the sunlight every day and cooling down the earth.

NRK had an article discussing what would happen in Norway if we didn't managed to solve the climate change issues. Also had a different scenario where we did managed to prevent further rises in temperature.

Scenario 1: White sharks in the Oslo fjord/lethal heat waves over Europe and rising sea levels and increased chance of flooding. Even fish species commonly harvested would be reduced in 2050. Snow wouldn't even be common around here anymore...

50 years later (2100): Temperatures would be high as 35 celsius, but certain fruits like grapes, apricots and peaches would thrive in the gardens. The climate would be unstable and make farming difficult. Drought seasons or flooding would be prevalent. Millions of people would become climate refugees due to rising sea levels and flooding around the world. Nations would also try radical solutions to reduce effects, like building massive mirrors in space to reflect sunlight/salting the skies and fertilizing the oceans to grow algea.

But what if the world managed to prevent the temperature reaching disastrous levels in 2100? Well, technology improved so much that prices on solar energy went down and outclassed fossil fuels entirely. Local politicans rebuilt cities to become smarter. Urban harvesting have become widespread and houses are built with sutainable energy in mind. People also stopped wasting and resorted to re-use/recycle. There's still extreme rainstorms happening now and then.

I really hope the latter scenario will happen rather than the former.

[fragger]

I'm enjoying reading all the comments here, good w0#k chaps This is a subject I find difficult to avoid giving my two-bob's worth on, so I will

Agreed, reducing humanity's pollution output can only be a good thing, but I don't think it's a be-and-end-all. I'm sure that our civilisation is not helping things any regarding the planet's health, but I'm far from convinced that that alone is responsible for changes in climate. There are just so many variables involved, and still so much that we don't fully grasp that I think any kind of outright declarative statement on the issue one way or the other is pointless. We can theorize, but we can't declare. There may even be factors driving the climate of which we are unaware - geo-electromagnetic fluctuations (possibly over greatly varying spans of time), long-term lunar tidal effects, galactic radiations, gravitational interactions between Earth and the other solar planets, or even things we can't even begin to be unaware of Continents are still drifting, mountains are rising and falling, and the Earth's surface is continually renewing itself via subduction and eruption. These things take place over awesome spans of time, but take place they do and they all play their part in Earth's ongoing climactic evolution.

Nobody can claim to be an expert on this. We're up against the very fractal face of chaos theory and we're relative newcomers to the field (although it's not literally "chaos" of course, it's the fact that there is an interplay of so many variables that as far as we mere humans are concerned, it might as well be chaos). We can't predict the weather for the next week, let alone for centuries to come.

Here in Oz we've been going through one of the worst heat waves on record, and of course all the global warming alarmists have been having a field day with it. The thing is, it is one of the worst heat waves ever - it is not THE worst. That was recorded 78 years ago, in 1939 (my parents in fact remember it). Had there been any kind of public climate debate taking place back then, that spike surely would have been touted as "proof" by the dramatists of imminent climactic disaster.

Reducing our pollutant levels is a positive thing to be sure, but I don't see that it will necessarily have much effect on reducing climate change. There are climate-driving factors and processes that are beyond our means to control. As some of you guys pointed out, the planet's climate has been changing dramatically throughout its lifetime, evidently long before humans appeared. I don't believe we have the power to stop the climate from changing altogether (and thank heavens we don't have that sort of power) and it would still happen even if we weren't here. I think only a hopeless dreamer could imagine that the planet's climate will stay exactly the same forever, even with our best efforts. It has never stayed the same in the past - why would it start now? Just because we want it to?

One thing that strikes me during all of the debate about climate change is that one of the highest contributing factors to driving the Earth's climate, if not the highest overall, never seems to get a mention - the Sun. Not just the fact that the Sun's energy output fluctuates over time, as all stars' do, but the profound effect that sunspot activity - or in recent years, relative lack of it - has on our planet's climate. Sunspots and their associated emissions of charged particle clouds have a considerable moderating effect on Earth's overall temperature. Little or no sunspot activity means less UV absorption by charged particles between the Sun and Earth, which in turn means higher rates of UV radiation impacting Earth's atmosphere. Atmospheric gases are excited by that radiation, and when any gas is excited by radiation, it gives off heat (and light, hence aurorae). To nutshell it, no sunspots means a hotter Earth, and sunspot activity has been very low for quite a number of recent years. There is not much we can do to address that - like, nothing whatsoever.

It will take more than a carbon-footprint reduction to slow climactic change, and I don't believe we can stop it from happening altogether. That is a futile and naive belief, arrogant even. We can't compete with nature. Earth is a planet in space, composed mostly of turbulent superheated liquid beneath its paper-thin crust and covered by a wisp of transparent gas, spinning, wobbling and nodding its way around a variable star along with a clutch of other greatly diverse planets while the whole system drifts and weaves its way around a galactic core, gravitationally jostled by a couple of hundred thousand other star systems doing the same thing and passing through great clouds of gas and dust along the way. And this galaxy is being flung about the universe like a celestial frisbee, directed by the clusterings and gravitational influences of billions of other galaxies. About the only thing you can definitely predict with 100% accuracy is that in such an unimaginably vast and infinitely intricate system, there WILL be change. Lots of change, all the time.

[Art Blade]

wow, that was a nice post, fragger -- and I had to crack a smile once and then reading it

[fragger]

Thanks Art