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Originally Posted by Daradon
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To finish, we need to start changing now. No matter what the damage to the economy. Don't anyone fool themselves. There is nothing noble in prolonging this debate anymore. It's protectionism pure and simple.
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Well suffice it to say that this is where you and I disagree. I read the report posted by troutman (which I read but didn't dissect entirely). I think that some pieces of that are questionable in how they're presented, and I don't think that is just stalling for the sake of stalling.
I just have the opinion that to entirely turn the economy on its head with no debate or questioning along the way would be just plain irresponsible. I don't think that is an anti-science point of view either. In reality its the heart of science to question things and examine them.
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Originally Posted by Thor
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Emissions are going up, by a lot every year because of China, India's massive growth and the papers are coming out constantly about new and worrisome issues popping up.
The scariest things that have been a hot topic are the methane release happening in the Northern tundras of our planet, a greenhouse gas that is x10 worse than co2 and this has in the past been a signal that a speeding up of warming is coming as it acts as a multiplier to warming. They had predicted the tundra releasing methane wouldn't happen for another 50 years or more, but its starting now which is scary because of the possibility of what we call runaway warming which will happen at a tipping point as has happened in the past.
The point where we reach devastation is when the frozen methane in the bottom of the oceans starts to go is when we will start to see massive damage to our planet, and the eventual destruction of the ocean ecosystem and massive species die off; all while above land we will see massive droughts, extreme weather, more volcanic activity which is another huge kick in the nuts as the glaciers covering so many of the volcanoes in the northern tundra will no longer have the massive pressure on top of them to keep them in check.
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I think the generations 100 years from now will look back at this time with utter disgust at how we ignored all the signs, ignored those most trusted to warn us and did it out of greed, apathy, feelings of helplessness, and an unwillingness to change our ways because of how we are accustomed to low gas prices, and allowed the massive fossil fuel industry to obfuscate the issue like big tobacco did to delay us doing anything.
For the scientists that work with this stuff day to day, they are at a loss for what to do, all the consensus and honest analysis and prediction of what is to come is no small matter, its the survival of our species and nothing less.
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I have snipped away here to prevent this post from being two massive quotes, and apologize if I was too drastic.
I wanted to ask about this point regarding the methane release though. I don't think that I can do this without coming across as a denier, even though its not my intention, so I'm just going to ask it anyway. Part of my reason for asking this is the read I did of the report that troutman posted wherein they talk about this issue a little and point to it causing the sea levels to increase by about 12 meters in the coming years. My questions on this are pretty basic, probably because I'm not well enough versed on the topic (and I'm sure someone will be happy to tell me that!):
a) how much of that change is natural cycle that we have seen and verified over the millions of years of the earths existence, and how much is attributable to man? I think that both sides agree that the planet has warmed and cooled over the millennia, and we haven't always had the polar ice caps on earth.
b) if the changes we see today are as a result of the greater natural cycles of the planet, is there much we can do about this? Are we at the point of peeing on a forest fire?
c) this is one that I will just get flamed for, but I'm genuinely curious and not trying to be obtuse. So how do we know that the cause of the increase in temperatures is due to carbon emissions? Carbon dioxide only makes up a miniscule percentage of the atmosphere (0.04%?), and the graphs in all of these reports love to show how emissions have increased...but temperatures don't seem to have increased along with the emissions?
In general though when I see these dire projections and they're decades in the future it looks like a lot of extrapolation. Given how poor people are at forecasting and considering how many factors we have to model and predict here it seems almost impossible that someone is going to be accurate. We don't know as much as we think we do; we're basing these projections on a very small sample of roughly 100 years of observations. In general, the dire predictions that people seem to love to throw out there do as much damage to getting things done as anything else; we heard about how acid rain was going to kill all of our lakes, then the Amazon rainforest was going to be cut down completely. (Both deforestation an protection of water are absolutely critical in my personal opinion, but both have really fallen off the radar). Then we had the hole in the ozone layer and we were all going to be cancerous and a whole host of problems were going to happen. Interestingly though that problem is solved I guess, or at least it doesn't seem to be a concern, and in the report from troutman above it cites ozone as a GHG, so who knows what to do with that! I feel like we've been hearing about rising seas for years now, and same with the polar ice cap melting. I'm sure that if you were to go back you would see predictions that are dire and were supposed to happen by the year 2000, or 2010.
Anyway, I hope this comes across as intended, and that is genuinely curious and interested as opposed to argumentative. I guess I just think its an incredibly complex issue and taking a hardline position one way or the other seems very difficult to say the least.