Ice on Fire

[PZ]

This is a fantastic HBO documentary on global climate change, importantly how regional areas have already been impacted. My wife wanted me to record this video, and I was hesitant to watch it. However, I enjoyed it very much as it showed video that makes it very difficult to deny that the world is changing, and not for the better.

[Art Blade]

I could tell Leonardo DiCaprio was talking but had to check the start again to see his name pop up. Yep, climate is changing.. I'm sitting here simmering at 34°C/93°F in JUNE.. and tomorrow supposedly 40°C/104°F. We used to get temperatures like 30+/86+ in August, mid-Summer, when we were "lucky" when I was a kid but never 40/104. Now we get it right after Spring's over.

[fragger]

We just had one of the warmest autumns (falls) on record. Well into winter now, nights are cold but not exactly freezing (and while we don't get snow or chilly sub-zero temperatures for weeks on end, it often does get down to around 0°C at night in the middle of winter). During the day though, I've mostly been getting around in T-shirts, only occasionally having to don a sweater or jumper.

I can't see how anyone can deny that the climate is warming up. Whether the cause is man-made or natural (and I think it's both), to deny it is like saying the boat isn't sinking while the water is sloshing around your ankles.

I think one problem is that some people aren't aware of the difference between weather and climate. I liken it to travelling somewhere by car, say from somewhere in the south to somewhere in the north. You don't go there in a straight line. The road may take you to the east or west as you follow it, and sometimes you may even head south again briefly, but despite all the twists, turns and detours, your overall progress is from south to north. Even though we're having a mild winter, it did actually snow not too far from where I live (about 100 kays away) a couple of weeks ago. That's a quirk of localized weather, not a symptom of planetary climate. While snow (relatively) nearby is uncommon, it is certainly not unheard of, and it doesn't prove climate change to be a myth.

[mandru]

I know it's been hotter for some of you guys and I'm sorry it's hitting you hard but it's been wetter and significantly cooler here where I am.  Last week (June 26th) was the first time I had to water the lawn as opposed to the typical need to start in late April or early May.  Our first 90° F (32.22 C) day was last week which is a month or so behind schedule.


No one is mentioning it but here's two things to consider:

#1 The roman warm period ~ 250 BC to AD 400 where citrus fruit orchards were being farmed as North as Hadrian's wall

#2 The Medieval Warm Period ~ c. 950 AD to c. 1250 AD that covered both Europe and Asia

Both can be Googled, both lasted a few hundred years, and were quite warmer than the current projected trends.

To avoid saying anything too political I'll shut up now. 

[Art Blade]

let's keep it simple: on a global scale, it's getting too warm too fast in a way that beats any old climate changes.
Also, let's differentiate between weather and climate.

[BinnZ]

My first google search on this topic came up with this: Medieval Warm Period

Check the diagram to the right, and look at the peak showing around the year 2000. Kind of contradicts your last phrase.

We're not getting political here matey

My next check on the Roman warm period shows indeed some evidence for a longer and warmer period than the times after that, might have been comparable to recent climate results on the Northern hemisphere, but for me it is way too little evidence to consider the current climate change a hoax.
I take the climate dead serious, and for me there's not much else to conclude than that we humans have finally passed the point of no return when it comes to destroying our environment.
Better don't get me started, I'm so pessimistic on that topic I should better not express what I think will be happening in the next 50 years. I can only predict, hunger, starvation, pain, world wars, destruction of nature and... probably a new iPhone 

[Art Blade]

Binn, nice signature, by the way

[BinnZ]

I just now found some additional info on the current warming and effects on the poles:The Guardian

[mandru]

Well then Binn grab a plot of land and start planting citrus and get the jump on becoming a tropical fruit Baron.  Ride the tide. 

The black line was from that graph was drawn from data provided by the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre who have repeatedly been caught out for fudging their numbers as in Climategate, Climate data scandal, NOAA climate change scandal etc... etc... when I searched Google* "UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre caught fudging data".

It is a little frustrating that any and every time atmospheric conditions related by the self appointed group (the cool kids) is proof of Climate Change but anyone else who's not in their circle has their observations shrugged off as merely weather. 

* (another untrustworthy info source since they skew and divert search findings)

[fragger]

I've always maintained that climate change will happen whether humans are present or not. It has been that way since this planet began to have a climate. The overall planetary climate has warmed and cooled repeatedly throughout its history and it is foolish to expect it to stay exactly the same forever. Why would it start doing that now when it has never done that, ever, throughout its entire history? We have to accept that no matter what we do, no matter what steps we take, the climate will change. That is inevitable. The only say we have in it is how much or how little we choose to help it along, because I'm afraid we can't stop it from happening at all. We do not have that kind of power.

I do believe that we are contributing to the process, but what is the ratio of man-made greenhouse-gas emission to natural? While we do pump a lot of CO2 into the air, that output is dwarfed by what rises naturally out of the sea from the exhalations and decomposition of the billions of tons of biomass in it, as well as from volcanism and other geothermal events.

I also think that it's not so much that we are producing more and more CO2 as it is that we are destroying more and more of the planetary foliage that normally absorbs that CO2 and recycles it back into oxygen. In the Amazon alone, one football field's worth of rainforest is now being cleared every minute. I'm willing to bet that if such runaway deforestation could be halted and reversed, if we could begin the painfully slow process of allowing the forests and rainforests of the world to rejuvenate themselves, atmospheric CO2 levels would eventually begin to drop. In other words, the emissions of civilizations is only a small part of the problem - an increasing lack of greenery is the larger part (also, less foliage means more sunlight reflected off the bare ground and heating the air above it).

I remember about 35 years ago seeing a documentary about the (then) imminent computer age, and there were eggheads going on about how it would be a good thing for the forests of the world because paper would largely become a thing of the past as more and more business information would be in digital format, not ink on paper. There was talk of the "paperless office" of the future, where everything would be electronic and all documentation would exist in data storage and would only ever be displayed on CRTs - no paper reports, memos or letters.

Well, that turned out to be a massive pipe dream...

15 years later, I was working in IT as a desktop support technician in-house for a company called Corporate Express (who supply everything office-related directly to businesses, no retailing to the public). I worked in their main HQ building in Sydney, and their two giant warehouses were part of the same complex and I would often have occasion to go out there for one reason or another. You wouldn't believe the amount of printer paper that went through that place each day.

Bulk reams of A4 paper are shipped in boxes, with 5 reams in a box. You can fit 40 boxes on a standard pallet, arranged in five rows of eight boxes, so that the result is like a pallet cubed, so to speak. That one full pallet holds 200 reams of A4 paper in total. Now imagine 16 full pallets arranged in a 4 x 4 horizontal square. Now imagine three more of levels of 16 pallets stacked on top of that first level. We now have 64 full pallets of A4 paper arranged in a huge cube, totalling 12,800 reams of paper. Now imagine 8 of these huge cubes - 102,400 reams in total. Now imagine that amount of paper coming into, and being dispatched out of, that warehouse twice per day, every day (on average - sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on demand.

This was the national distribution centre, so the paper would arrive here from the docks or wherever and then go out to points all over the country. And remember, that was just one national office supply company - there were others and now there are even more, like Staples, Officeworks, COS, Office Depot, and a number of others moving hundreds of thousands of reams of paper every day.

And that's just A4 office paper...

We're blowing through paper, and the trees that it comes from, like never before in history. Forests are the planets lungs and we're the cancer.

[Art Blade]

"paperless office" is something I grew very fond of as soon as it was possible. I suppose I have saved half a forest.

Just a few anecdotes.

When I got a new boss and along with him, a new office, I asked him whether or not I had to maintain those big folders each employee's desk was outfitted with. I told him that all those pages in them contained information that was also available on the company's intranet and that they were being kept up to date without me having to do anything while those folders quickly outdated and had to be updated manually and frequently. With paper. And maintaining those folders including ripping out old pages and replacing them with new ones took time. Also, those pages were nothing more than printouts of computer files from the intranet. He looked at me and said, "how you maintain your workplace is up to you." And I grinned, grabbed the folders and tossed them into the rubbish bin. He grinned back at me and left. Until today I'm most likely the only one to have done that.

My office desk is so clean (bar of paper, files and sticky notes) that someone once said, "oh, I didn't know it was actually occupied, empty as it looks." Made me laugh. I don't use sticky notes and notes in general because I found out that you rely on those notes and keep looking up what's written on it countless times for long periods of time. When it's gone, you're helpless. I much rather memorised the stuff so I didn't have to look it up every time and that made my desk look much neater than most.

We once had a meeting and we were to learn about certain changes and news. While everyone was settling down, someone trying to be both helpful and patronising asked me, "don't you want to get your note pad and a pen?" To which I replied that I didn't need that and that I'd be able to memorise stuff without having to write it down first. Of course, everyone heard that. By the end of that meeting the coach asked questions about the stuff he just taught us and turned to me, as did everyone else, in anticipation of me failing. I didn't fail. While others were busy finding their notes on the stuff being asked, I could answer right away and I got it right. Funny thing, people keep coming to me asking stuff because they can't find their notes.

Of course I use files, digital ones. I keep stuff on my PC that I know I won't remember forever, stuff you don't use frequently, so I can look it up when needed. It's so easy to find stuff on a PC as opposed to finding stuff within thousands of pages in dozens of paper files.

I don't get why people STILL prefer paper over either brains or computer files. "I've much rather got it on paper. See, if there's a power outage, you won't be able to w0#k," is what I sometimes hear. My reply is, "neither will you."

But I am not responsible of deforestation. The amount of paper I have used could have been grown in the backyard.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I haven't checked the numbers, but I would think a lot of the paper used today is made from trees that are farmed, not old growth. Sure, there are probably a number of trees that aren't farmed being used for paper, but I bet it pales in comparison to the amount of trees that are cut down to make way for farm or grazing land. Those trees are then probably burned for fuel or made into charcoal for fuel, both of which release CO2.

One anecdote I recall hearing was when here in the USA there was a big push to reduce oil usage and convert over to biofuels like corn. So any excess corn we had was sent to make biofuel, mostly in the form of ethanol that's added to gasoline to reduce gasoline use and therefore emissions from vehicles that contribute to global warming. That was all well and good until because of that, the USA had less corn to export and the price went up accordingly. Brazil, a large importer of USA corn then decided that the price was too high and proceeded to grow their own corn, which of course resulted in the grand scale deforestation of the Amazon basin. That of course, lead to probably more greenhouse gas emissions, plus the loss of the forests that filter the air and trap CO2. The net result was a small reduction in emissions in the USA but a huge increase in emissions in Brazil.

[PZ]

Just so happens we have a very large paper plant about 90 miles from here. They use scrap wood, sawdust from lumber mills, and a variety of other waste products as part of their wood sources. D_B is correct about farmed trees - large plots of farmed wood that in addition to providing a sustainable wood source for paper, help remove CO2 as they are growing.

I've gone paperless mostly because it is way easier to maintain electronic documents (I usually lose my paper documents  )

[Art Blade]

plus, you can't leave marks on them as you could with a wet cup of coffee planted on a (until then) clean white document or grabbing said document after having eaten a salami sandwich, leaving greasy fingerprints on it

[PZ]