deGrasse Tyson & Nye on Climate Change

[Canuck-Hater]

Originally Posted by MillerTime GFG

Not sure if fata, but this is not going to be popular among Albertans, whom already dislike DiCaprio...

"Alberta oilsands prominently featured in DiCaprio climate change film"

http://globalnews.ca/news/3026914/al.../?sf39974229=1

Prominently? I watched the film and they spent maybe 5 minutes talking about the oilsands.

[Slava]

Thoughts on this article/research? http://business.financialpost.com/fp...-less-prepared

[Fuzz]

It's interesting because it is based on solar cycles, but lots of research has shown solar cycles alone don't account of the warming of the 20th century. Maybe anthropogenic warming and solar cooling will perfectly balance themselves out

I will say I agree that other than catastrophic Venus style runaway GW, an ice age scares me a lot more than a 5-10 degree rise in temperatures. Especially considering the record shows ice ages can begin very rapidly, and last a lot longer than the food I have in my basement.

[REDVAN]

I'll leave this here without comment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Solomon

[REDVAN]

And now for my comment:

Climate change is already killing us. It's not because climate change is some devil, it's that we're too stupid to do anything about it.

Instead of focusing on whether it's happening and why, we should focus on educating the masses on getting prepared. The biggest issues are rising sea level, ground instabilities (I wonder what happens when permafrost thaws? And other issues... droughts etc), and freak storms that seem to be happening more frequently.

Let's use some of the industrial and technological ingenuity that got us here and refocus it on life saving solutions, moving people to safer locations, and rotating our farmland/etc to more productive areas following this climate change. Carbon taxes and slowing our emissions won't save your grandchildren's life when the flood wipes out the food supplies or the tornadoes rip them to shreds.

Edit: tl;dr: the past is the past, gov't/media/nutbars should quit shaming us for the choices our grandparents made, and let's solve the issues that will affect our grandchildren.

[photon]

This appears to be from a book that's an English translation of some of Abdussamatov work:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...28045886000173

I haven't been able to find out what the translation is of though.. some new peer reviewed work by Abdussamatov or just something he wrote. Pulkovo Observatory's English page isn't kept up to date and I couldn't find anything using Google Translate.

Without a reference to or even the title of a paper it's difficult to find anything else about it. Everything I find is either websites repeating this prediction also with no more detailed info (all on climate change denying sites that I can see), or much older stuff about his predictions from a decade ago or his claims about Mars' global warming.

Abdussamatov though is a climate change denier and doesn't believe the atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect at all (not sure how he explains Venus' temperature, or if he believes Earth is somehow different). I remember reading that 2005 was supposed to be the peak of warming. Now 2014-2015 was supposed to be the beginning, but we're still setting temperature records.

The author Lawrence Solomon is also a climate change denier.

Given all that I won't be paying it much attention, if this chapter from this book is something new better to let the experts evaluate it.

[rubecube]

That article was written in classic climate-science denial prose.

[rubecube]

Also, according to this, Habibullo Abdussamatov has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/pee...tics.php?s=199

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by REDVAN

And now for my comment:

Climate change is already killing us. It's not because climate change is some devil, it's that we're too stupid to do anything about it.

Instead of focusing on whether it's happening and why, we should focus on educating the masses on getting prepared. The biggest issues are rising sea level, ground instabilities (I wonder what happens when permafrost thaws? And other issues... droughts etc), and freak storms that seem to be happening more frequently.

Let's use some of the industrial and technological ingenuity that got us here and refocus it on life saving solutions, moving people to safer locations, and rotating our farmland/etc to more productive areas following this climate change. Carbon taxes and slowing our emissions won't save your grandchildren's life when the flood wipes out the food supplies or the tornadoes rip them to shreds.

Edit: tl;dr: the past is the past, gov't/media/nutbars should quit shaming us for the choices our grandparents made, and let's solve the issues that will affect our grandchildren.

I'm just going to leave this here;

University of Minnesota neuroscientist Shmuel Lissek, who studies the fear system, believes that at its heart, the concept of doomsday evokes an innate and ancient bias in most mammals. "The initial response to any hint of alarm is fear. This is the architecture with which we’re built," Lissek says. Over evolutionary history, organisms with a better-safe-than-sorry approach survive. This mechanism has had consequences for both the body and brain, where the fast-acting amygdala can activate a fearful stress response before "higher" cortical areas have a chance to assess the situation and respond more rationally.

But why would anyone enjoy kindling this fearful response? Lissek suspects that some apocalyptic believers find the idea that the end is nigh to be validating. Individuals with a history of traumatic experiences, for example, may be fatalistic. For these people, finding a group of like-minded fatalists is reassuring. There may also be comfort in being able to attribute doom to some larger cosmic order—such as an ancient Mayan prophecy. This kind of mythology removes any sense of individual responsibility.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...he-apocalypse/

[GGG]

Originally Posted by REDVAN

And now for my comment:

Climate change is already killing us. It's not because climate change is some devil, it's that we're too stupid to do anything about it.

Instead of focusing on whether it's happening and why, we should focus on educating the masses on getting prepared. The biggest issues are rising sea level, ground instabilities (I wonder what happens when permafrost thaws? And other issues... droughts etc), and freak storms that seem to be happening more frequently.

Let's use some of the industrial and technological ingenuity that got us here and refocus it on life saving solutions, moving people to safer locations, and rotating our farmland/etc to more productive areas following this climate change. Carbon taxes and slowing our emissions won't save your grandchildren's life when the flood wipes out the food supplies or the tornadoes rip them to shreds.

Edit: tl;dr: the past is the past, gov't/media/nutbars should quit shaming us for the choices our grandparents made, and let's solve the issues that will affect our grandchildren.

So the good news is that is first world people can do nothing and be fine. If you think saving the environment is tough try to get people interested in 3rd world development.

Some estimates show that preventing 2 C of global warming is cheaper than dealing with the consequences of 2C global warming so the solution might be reduce Carbon.

My preference is Geo-engineering solutions to delay global warming until tech gets us out of the problem.

[photon]

Originally Posted by GGG

My preference is Geo-engineering solutions to delay global warming until tech gets us out of the problem.

Hey I was just talking about nuclear winter in the Trump thread

[REDVAN]

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

I'm just going to leave this here;



https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...he-apocalypse/

I'm just trying to come up with solutions that we can use to focus the CC believers into putting some thought energy and action behind. They keep fighting the battle that we're warming and it'll be the end of civilization... when I personally think humanity is going to be done on earth eventually anyway, so we might as well use it up now. What will stimulate innovation and invention? When we actually run our of something (or it truly is too expensive to produce). Why do we have incentive to change before? It will not go anywhere until it's required.

People ARE scared, rightly or wrongly, so we should be steering them towards doing something about it (whether we need to or not isn't really part of the point I'm making).

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by GGG

My preference is Geo-engineering solutions to delay global warming until tech gets us out of the problem.

I hear the R&D costs on that are north of $300 billion. No way Canadians are willing to pay that. We can let the Americans lead the way on that. Oh wait...

[DiracSpike]

Are ou still considered a CC "denier" if you're skeptical that scientists can predict with any kind of accuracy the conditions on earth with 1 or 2 degrees of warming and when that will occur? Or do you have to accept wholesale that it's coming, all our fault, and will kill us all?

[GreenLantern]

So generally what happens is you have a model and you have a data set. This data set could be any amount of time but lets say that it runs from 2005-2015. You've got your meteorological inputs (things like air temperature, wind speed, relative humidity and precipitation) as well as your flux data, incoming solar radiation, etc.. in a hydrological sense, that is all I have experience with I can't speak to GCM's. But they model in 4-D so just imagine how complicated that gets.

You take these inputs and you set up your 'parameters' or site descriptions (what kind of soil is it? what is the slope? vegetation type? fetch? etc..) then you run your model. You use mathematical equations to represent natural processes such as interception rates, infiltration, runoff. You run it turning the knobs until you can simulate at the stand level what your actual observations are telling you. So I can make my data model from 2005-2015 the same snow depth I have recorded and the same streamflow that the Water Survey Canada has measured at the basin output.

Once you can accurately model measured values, you start to take it a step further and twist the knobs some more to figure out what could happen down the road if say the temperature rose in this basin by 1 degree, or the number of snow cover days depleted by 30%, or if we took out 40% of the forest cover, or we changed our crop type, or we put up a dam to divert this streamflow and on and on and on.

All models are wrong, it's just that some are useful. We can't accurately depict what will happen 50 years down the road because we don't know, we just don't know. There are so many damn variables it becomes infinitely more complicated the larger your scope. However, these are the best tools we have and we are doing the best we can with them. So I can't tell you that you should absolutely believe what the models are telling you, because I don't believe that myself. But what I do believe is that we need a theory or a basis in which to work from and what these models are telling us is the best we are capable of right now. And in the case of a hydrological model, that basis is reality, the stand level modelling that occurs as a result of actual measurements or observations. Think of it as a diagnosis, in the educated opinion of scientists this is what is happening and we are working with the tools we have to figure it out.

[troutman]

The consequences of climate change

http://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner.

Effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come, largely due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes more than 1,300 scientists from the United States and other countries, forecasts a temperature rise of 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.

According to the IPCC, the extent of climate change effects on individual regions will vary over time and with the ability of different societal and environmental systems to mitigate or adapt to change.

The IPCC predicts that increases in global mean temperature of less than 1.8 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 3 degrees Celsius) above 1990 levels will produce beneficial impacts in some regions and harmful ones in others. Net annual costs will increase over time as global temperatures increase.

"Taken as a whole," the IPCC states, "the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time."



Future effects

Some of the long-term effects of global climate change in the United States are as follows, according to the Third National Climate Assessment Report:

[GGG]

Originally Posted by New Era

I hear the R&D costs on that are north of $300 billion. No way Canadians are willing to pay that. We can let the Americans lead the way on that. Oh wait...

The nice thing about this if you go with the leading candidates it's relatively cheap to start experimenting . The tech is all available. But becoming a world leader in geoengineering is certainly better spent money than chasing areospace dreams.

[photon]

Originally Posted by DiracSpike

Are ou still considered a CC "denier" if you're skeptical that scientists can predict with any kind of accuracy the conditions on earth with 1 or 2 degrees of warming and when that will occur? Or do you have to accept wholesale that it's coming, all our fault, and will kill us all?

Your or doesn't separate two sides of the same thing so the question doesn't make sense. Being able to predict outcomes isn't the other side of an OR of either accepting that it's coming or that it's caused by humans, and no one says it'll kill us all.

Being a denier means denying that AGW is a reality, the other side of the OR is accepting that AGW is a reality. Disagreeing on details of effects or if it's 78% or 75% due to human activities isn't denying the reality, it's working out the details of the reality.

EDIT: GL said it perfectly, "All models are wrong, it's just that some are useful."

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by GGG

The nice thing about this if you go with the leading candidates it's relatively cheap to start experimenting . The tech is all available. But becoming a world leader in geoengineering is certainly better spent money than chasing areospace dreams.

Please share these low cost ego-engineering ideas. I'm dying to hear about the low cost solutions to "buying time until tech can bail us out."

[GGG]

Originally Posted by New Era

Please share these low cost ego-engineering ideas. I'm dying to hear about the low cost solutions to "buying time until tech can bail us out."

The leading candidate is SO2 dispersion in the stratosphere but some models suggest that this could decrease rainfall in some areas. Though a lot of that appears to be pushing a geoengineering is evil agenda to its tough to determine the validity. So lots of work left to do. But deployment of SO2 dispersion would be a relatively inexpensive.

Other issues with it are that it doesn't stop Ocean acidification.

However we are too late to prevent 2C warming and the political will just doesn't exist especially with a Trump whitehouse adding at least 4 years to the US doing anything. We are out of options to cut CO2 in the timelines required so it's time for more drastic solutions.