Climate Change & Global Warming

[ArabiaTerra]

... However, I've never read any scientist make a statement like this:

 

We have had 0.5 degrees of temperature rise already. There is another 1 degree already coming as the carbon to cause it is already in the atmosphere. That gives us 1.5 degrees by around 2030-2040. This is guaranteed.

Actually, upon checking this I realise I got my figures slightly wrong. We've already had 0.8 of a degree and there is another 0.6 in the pipeline. It's still a total of around 1.5 degrees though.

 

More here.

 

And the original scientific paper here (pdf).

 

Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing humanmade greenhouse gases and aerosols among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85 ± 0.15 W/m2 more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years. Implications include: (i) expectation of additional global warming of about 0.6°C without further change of atmospheric composition; (ii) confirmation of the climate system’s lag in responding to forcings, implying the need for anticipatory actions to avoid any specified level of climate change; and (iii) likelihood of acceleration of ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise.

(my emphasis)

 

I don't think anything is guaranteed when you're speaking about the future, and science doesn't ever come with that kind of certainty. And I certainly don't believe that covering every hill with wind turbines is guaranteed to help us. The fact is that human beings will use up every scrap of fossil fuels they can get their hands on, whether windfarms are built or not; so all of that Co2 will get into the atmosphere anyway. If you think that's not going to happen, you are very much mistaken. I don't like it, you don't like it, but we don't make the rules. Windfarms won't delay that, and they certainly won't stop it. All they'll do is make some people rich, and destroy even more of the land that we haven't already destroyed.

That's a deeply pessimistic viewpoint. You may well be right, but I still have hope that sanity will prevail.

 

I would take issue with this though: "And I certainly don't believe that covering every hill with wind turbines is guaranteed to help us". Nobody is proposing to cover every hill. For one thing, the interconnector won't have the spare capacity for that. Also, nobody has managed to come up with any credible evidence that building windmills will destroy the hills. What does that even mean anyway? How do you destroy a hill? It might destroy your view if you think windmills are ugly, but is your view more important than human civilisation?

 

You can climb into your bunker and slam the door behind you if you want, I'm not ready to give up yet.

[Malachy]

You absolutely proved my point here:

 

Your quote:

That gives us 1.5 degrees by around 2030-2040. This is guaranteed.

 

The original scientific paper

Implications include: (i) expectation of additional global warming of about 0.6°C without further change of atmospheric composition

 

From a scientific perspective, there is a world of difference between Jim Hansen's 'expectation' and your 'guaranteed', and by pretending they mean the same thing you do a disservice to the science.

 

And although we are on the wrong thread for direct discussion of VE, this applies more generally to your approach to renewables, so I think it's valid here:

 

How do you destroy a hill? It might destroy your view if you think windmills are ugly, but is your view more important than human civilisation?

 

Again, you rather prove my point. What you are keen to save is not the environment, it's human civilisation, i.e. the status quo, i.e. your computer and your TV. This is where we differ. I think the hill itself is worth saving. The fact that you believe a natural landscape can only be judged in terms of a human 'view' is telling, as though subjective beauty were the sum worth of the environment. It is this type of thinking that has caused our problems in the first place, and again you show how similar your perspective is to those of the destructive, old-style capitalist ones that you purport to oppose. Your posts reek of the same old, dualistic idea that's been hanging around going stale for far too long: Nature can only be valued in human terms - as a resource, as food, as a 'view'.

 

What threatens this planet most is that attitude - that everything is expendable so long as it benefits human beings.

 

Some people feel an attachment to the place where they live which cannot be written off as just 'liking the view'. It's not NIMBYism (a stupid word that you are guilty of using) to care about a place or a landscape. The fact that some people still feel that kind of attachment - that they still feel a sense of loss when something unhuman is humanised - is one of the few hopeful signs that I can see at the moment. If enough people felt that way then maybe things really could change. Clearly, you do not.

[Gorgonzola Butt-cheese]

Very well put Malachy, I agree entirely.

Arabia Terra's unshakeable belief in the global warming science is similar to a devout christians belief in the 2nd coming of christ.

Whilst I dont hold his conviction, I actually think his heart is almost in the right place.

His inspiration is fundementally good, in that we strive to leave the planet in as good a condition for future generations as we possibly can, I fully agree with that.

But as you point out , there are flaws in what is being planned to achieve this.

The V.E. wind project is certainly one of those flaws, to erect giant turbines and all the associated infrastructure so far away from the end user's goes totally against this idea of saving the environment.

If renewable energy plans were sincere, all areas of the uk and the world would be busy fitting the most low impact forms of renewable energy equipment possible to provide energy for their immediate local area and only connected where the grid already exists, it would have to be managed without profit , purely run to cover maintenance and operating costs only, and in conjunction with the education of the communities to consider every watt they use.

Unlimited 24 hour electric would have to become a thing of the past.

At present renewable energy is being sold to the masses with tales of fabulous wealth to be generated, wealth to continue feeding our modern lifestyles of over consumption.

And this is where the whole thing falls down .At present there is no movement to change the way we live our lives.

The entire developed world must change with regard to energy use, food production, transportation and commerce.

And this is rarely considered by the masses .

And this entire change in our modern way of living is a must if we are to achieve this sustainable existance in harmony with the natural world around us.

And I cant see this happening without some kind of massive shock , social and political upheaval, total war and famine.

This might come about once fossil fuel production begins to dwindle, specifically oil and gas,

It is widely believed this will occur within the next 15 years.

[Gibber]

What threatens this planet most is that attitude - that everything is expendable so long as it benefits human beings.

 

But isn't AT at the point of realisation that everything isn't expendable for the benefit of humans? It may be a human centric position but its at the point where its now known the environment now has to be managed. Whether this is primarily for people rather than an intrinsic value that the environment has, isn't really a point of discussion because for the sake of getting things done to manage the environment the benefits to people will need to take centre stage because if people can't run their TVs or heat their homes or make a living from providing the means to do so it won't get done and the environment will be used as it always has been.

 

The operative word here is managed.

[Malachy]

the environment now has to be managed.

 

There is so much wrong with this particular statement that I don't know where to start. In fact, I won't start. I'll maybe just put my head in my hands instead, and rock backwards and forwards, weeping quietly, muttering about mankind's eternal foolishness and hubris until someone comes to take me away.

[EM]

There is so much wrong with this particular statement that I don't know where to start. In fact, I won't start.

Intriguing. Looking at Mr Gibber's statement I can't see anything wrong with it at all, let alone multiple issues. Please elaborate further.

[Malachy]

And therein lies the problem. The idea that the environment is there to be 'managed' by man - indeed, that it cannot cope without human management - is so deeply instilled within out society, our culture and in most people's way of thinking, that it seems almost instinctive. You hear it in the biblical notion of man's 'dominion' over the birds and the beasts, and I'm sure it goes back much further, to the early days of agriculture, most likely.

 

Humans make the rules, and nature must bend (or be bent) to fit them. So the thinking goes. Nature is imagined as something helpless. Or at least nature in its preferable state is helpless. In places where we cannot pretend to 'manage' (such as the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, for example) nature becomes threatening to us - a thing to be fearful of - and therefore we have done our best to destroy such places, and to make them manageable.

 

Unfortunately, I don't think the climate can be controlled and managed like a zoo or a safari park.

 

Someday, if we're lucky, there will be a change in the way we imagine the world around us. Other cultures in the world have seen things differently, and some continue to do so. For them, nature is not something to be managed, it is a 'fact', a way of being, of which we are a part and to which we must adhere. This makes me sound like some new age wanna-be Buddhist or something, but it's not like that at all. I believe the countless environmental disasters we see happening around the world - oil spills, toxic sludge in Hungary, mass crop failures, extinctions, habitat loss and climate change - should not be seen as individual events exactly, but as natural, inevitable results of our own attitude: a kind of mass, societal hubris that leads to repeating, accumulating disasters.

 

This doesn't even begin to express my problem with Gibber's statement really, and I don't expect to elicit agreement from you, him or anyone else. It's just an attempt to express the difficulty I have with the way that many issues and arguments are framed within mainstream debate.

[Gibber]

There is so much wrong with this particular statement that I don't know where to start.

 

I had a feeling that might be the trigger word. Try to read it in terms of managing the environment in a way that allows us to keep our way of life without threatening the end of all our lives while being still being able to tramp around the hills.

[Gibber]

The idea that the environment is there to be 'managed' by man - indeed, that it cannot cope without human management -

 

Its more we cannot cope without managing the environment. Without burning hydrocarbons the sabre toothed tiger would have eaten us a long time ago.

[MuckleJoannie]

When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/

 

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

 

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it.

 

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question

[crofter]

Brilliant. It will be even better when twitter becomes nothing but a collection of bots arguing with each other.

[Guest Anonymous]

wonder how much co2 his server is releasing into the atmosphere every time it goes to work debunking the rational minded folks that it was set up to argue with.

 

But I guess he will have thought of that and installed a wind turbine and only switches on his computer when the wind is blowing, or maybe he has it linked up to ATs bedroom there is a lot of hot air emenating from there

[ArabiaTerra]

A summary of climate science over the last year.

[crofter]

A summary of climate science over the last year.

 

Hmm. How long has human civilisation been "on the precipice" for now?

 

Interesting use of language here...

 

1 "If confirmed"

 

2 "could trigger"

 

3 "may be the impact"

 

4 "we risk"

 

5 "may rise" "could hit"

 

6 "very strong indications"

 

7 "the authors should have put in more of a disclaimer about statistical uncertainty"

 

8 "perhaps [the] most likely explanation"

 

9 "could"

 

10 "could"

[ArabiaTerra]

Antarctica warms and the ice sheets melt:

 

http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/23/antarctica-warming-ice-sheet-melts/

 

Meanwhile the Arctic ice sees the lowest area ever recorded for this time of year:

 

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stdev_timeseries_webtmb.png

(click to enlarge)