Global Warming

[Meadmaker]

So I'm going to talk global warming.

Let's get a couple of things out of the way. Global warming is real. Global warming is bad. Global warming is caused by man. We should do something about it.


So, why bother with a thread?

One of the things that bugs me about the "debate" on global warming is they hype. The fearmongering. The absolute panic that leads 20 year old morons to believe that unless they throw soup on famous paintings, we're all going to die.

Global warming is, indeed, bad, but it is not an extinction level threat. It really isn't.

At least, that was my conclusion when I first looked at it seriously some years ago after watching "An Incovenient Truth". Above all, in my quest to understand, I decided that most of what I read about "tipping points" in the popular press was nonsense. In the mass media, tipping points were presented as some sort of "point of no return". Greta Thurnberg said that we had 12 years and it was all over. That really made no sense to me. What would happen that couldn't be undone? And why is it that somehow 3 degrees warmer was going to kill us?

So I looked into it, and concluded that things were bad, but not absolutely horrible. From my perspective, it was bad enough to say that people ought to vote for politicians who say they want to do something about it, but not bad enough to actually lose sleep about or change the way you approach life. i.e. I've read of people who choose not to have children because they will be born into a hellish existence as climate change destroys civilzation and possibly kills everyone.

It's a small crowd here, and I don't know where this is going to go on a deep subject like this, so I'm just going to start with something kind of random. When the subject came up in another thread, I decided to go over to scholar.google.com, put in "climate tipping points" and see what came up.

Here;s one:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2103081118d

It examines the economic impacts of climate change tipping points and notes that the impact may be greater than anticipated.

I wouldn't expect anyone to read the paper and do an in depth analysis. I skimmed it myself. However, here are two takeaways from it that are relevant to this discussion.

1. The impact of the tipping points is not "We're all going to die."
2. The nature of the tipping points is not "We can never recover", or "The world goes to Hell". The real tipping points that real scientists really talk about are situations where global warming starts a process in motion, and creates conditions that cause the process to accelerate. It is not "There's no turning back"

To reiterate, I don't want to deny or even minimize the impact of global warming. It's real. It's bad. It just isn't so bad that you need to throw soup on anything. We'll manage. Maybe beachfront property in Miami might be a bad investment in the long term, but the United States is not going to turn into a dessert, and if it does, Canada will become nicer. And all of this takes time. We won't wake up one day to see that the streets of San Diego are flooded.

So, I'm just going to drop that and see where it takes us If you think I'm missing the boat on this problem, I would welcome some education on the subject. All I ask is that if you're going to engage, bring some information with you.

[sparks]

No further comment or facts needed. You've made up your mind.

Have fun with that!

[stanky]

You paint it rosier than i would. Perhaps because i'm looking at impacts on our food sources. Not the outliers, the billions...and it looks bad. For a variety of reasons, i could go into. An easy example is the ocean. That food. Then floods from rising water and salt, in coastal flat land; pollution build up; erosion on higher ground; degradation of seed species; temperature and rainfall disruptions, and so on. Food shortages can put people on edge. Water, too. The U.S. is stunningly dependent on a few irrigated deserts in California for food. Wars can disrupt grain shipments....we're out on a fragile limb.

[arthwollipot]

Let's face it - it's bad. It's bad, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. But it will get better. Progress on this matter has been glacially slow, but it has accelerated. I don't think we're going to be facing global catastrophe and the collapse of civilisation.

But that's just my opinion.

[Meadmaker]

You paint it rosier than i would. Perhaps because i'm looking at impacts on our food sources. Not the outliers, the billions...and it looks bad. For a variety of reasons, i could go into. An easy example is the ocean. That food. Then floods from rising water and salt, in coastal flat land; pollution build up; erosion on higher ground; degradation of seed species; temperature and rainfall disruptions, and so on. Food shortages can put people on edge. Water, too. The U.S. is stunningly dependent on a few irrigated deserts in California for food. Wars can disrupt grain shipments....we're out on a fragile limb.

Well, one possibility is that I have looked into those same things as well, and concluded that it's really not that bad.

With global warming, there definitely will be negatives. Some places that are fertile and food producing today will not be as productive in the future. That's bad. However, there won't be vast stretches of desert in "breadbasket" places like Nebraska and Ukraine. Also, the transition from now to warmer than now is one that will take place over 70 years. (A lot of articles talk about temperature rises by the end of the century.) We have time to adapt.

It's a bad thing, but it's not going to kill us and our children.

Maybe wars will do that, but someone finds reasons for wars with or without global warming.

[stanky]

whether we're toast or not, i see room for a last gesture, something with guts and heart, for people that feel the doom.
It could be used as a license to have courage, that sense of doom. I give up! he hollers. and the new orders come.

i think we need to cut back pretty hard on reproducing for a while. With half the people, we'd have twice the chance. Could be done without violence.
Until our blundering impact is healed, there should probably be way less of us.

no?

[sparks]

Agreed.

But how do you convince and/or enable the propagators to bloody shut it down?

Education, and the increase in the standard of living takes time.

[Admin]

The real tipping points that real scientists really talk about are situations where global warming starts a process in motion, and creates conditions that cause the process to accelerate. It is not "There's no turning back"

Until there might be.

There are too many unknowns to say for sure what's going to happen, but the signs are incredibly bad. The difference in the ocean temperature is the real problem - I'm sure we can cope with several degrees hotter on land, albeit with a few hundred million deaths - but if the sea reaches +6 degrees C, it's highly likely oxygen production will cease, leading to planetary extinction.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 094120.htm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7919304837

Is 6 degrees a realistic scenario? I don't know, but given we're 1/3 of the way there and the rate of increase is speeding up, I wouldn't say it's impossible.

[stanky]

The death of the coral is pretty stunning in its suddenness. Its role as nursery implies a big impact. Is there any stopping that in time?
The insect collapse is a surprise. Huge terrestrial reverberations; cause poorly understood, at best. Might not be visually apparent from a hiway, but trees are having some real problems. Birds, bats, amphibians; plunging. River of plastic flows more; CO2 up, red tide and other toxic algae still feeding on our affluence or effluence.

Despite good efforts, the momentum of the dumb choices claims species daily. Extinction rates might be a decent metric in analyzing our chances. Or, maybe we are that independent of the rest of nature, that its slow demise, at our hand, won't much matter? I'll be happily dead, regardless.
I don't envy the grandkids.

[Meadmaker]

The real tipping points that real scientists really talk about are situations where global warming starts a process in motion, and creates conditions that cause the process to accelerate. It is not "There's no turning back"

Until there might be.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 094120.htm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7919304837

Is 6 degrees a realistic scenario? I don't know, but given we're 1/3 of the way there and the rate of increase is speeding up, I wouldn't say it's impossible.

This is the sort of thing I was looking for. It will take a bit to digest.

My immediate reaction was that 6 degrees is higher than I usually see, so that is suspicious. The other thing, at a very quick glance, is that I don't understand why it is that six degrees kills all the plankton, especially since they're talking about surface temperature. Surely the equatorial plankton just move north, don't they? And there's nothing that could live six degrees higher than the current temps in the equatorial regions? There's things that live in hot springs.

One of the things I will do is see if I can find other papers to cite this one, or on related topics. If no one is quoting this one, then it's not taken seriously. If no one else is publishing the same thing, then the idea isn't taken seriously. I'm not sure I can get that information on google on a home computer. I might have to head to a university library, which at this time of year is hard. (I'm starting my busy season.)

I'm not dismissing it by any means. I'm just saying that actual science papers aren't usually easy reads, and it will take time.