I didn’t get into all that when I posted earlier in this discussion. I just painted with a broad brush but have been closely following the science for many years. Those 90-degree water temps in the FL Keys are killing the coral reefs. That has been reported in the news. The collapsing of the permafrost in Siberia releasing vast amounts of methane gas is speeding up. The warming from the CO2 already in the atmosphere will continue going up even if the world became carbon neutral today. Yet CO2 is actually increasing more this year than last year. It would take 1,000 years for the excess CO2 in the atmosphere today to reduce back to where it was 150 years ago. I believe the evidence suggests the balance of nature isn’t just tipping but has tipped far enough that I doubt we can stop it.
There was a very informative 3-part series put on by PBS Nova tilted H2O: The Molecule That Made Us. The first episode was eye opening about the importance of the Amazon Forest’s annual effect on world rainfall. Satellite telemetry of atmospheric water content over annual cycles really showed how they act like the lungs of the planet breathing with the seasons. Something I learned that was newly discovery about the trees is they actually release small particles into the air that act to seed clouds and produce rain. The moisture then travels up into the Northern Hemisphere and that would not happen without them. Really worth watching.
No illusion that it will be a tough row to get the ruling parties in those parties to take action.
10-15 years ago, whenever “global warming”, aka climate change, was brought up here, we had significants numbers of PNet members pooh-poohing that this was the fiction of “tree-huggers”, anti-business luddites and, at worse, some conspiracy of global elites. The “signs of a warming climate” have come fast and furious across the globe. I don’t read as much the downplaying of the signs of an extremely fast warming globe and the existential threat being posed to humanity. We can look in the mirror and ask, “Have we acted as fast and as required of us in this country?” Personally, I think not. Again, if there is any chance of turning this around, we need to take action where we have impact rather than looking elsewhere and then shrugging.
I am going to get off this soapbox before I put myself in a comatose state of despair.
I almost jumped into this thread the other day after your first post on the subject and on and off thought about the messages and where the “truth” likely resides in all of this. I have two sisters that both have truths that are unbreakable that mankind and of course those with a conservative bias are to blame for all of this. They feel that free market capitalism is and was the cause of all of this. I point out that it was also the force that made their lives so much nicer than the lives of those that lived just 200 years ago and 200 years is just a tick on the timeline of man and even a smaller tick on life on earth. I ask them what creature comforts they would give up in an attempt to slow the impending end of mankind? They tell me our days are numbered and it is just a matter of years and we have already passed the tipping point so why turn down the heat in the winter or shut off the AC in the summer, as there is no hope. I tell them why would the Obama’s have something like $40M dollars worth of homes around the world that are just a couple feet above sea level if mankind is over in 10-15 years when the waters will rise. Why is John Kerry adding another home to his $30M worth of homes he has and buying it in Martha’s Vineyard. The list of things like this that cause me to play devils advocate in my head goes on and on.
I search topics like CO2 impact on the world on the big search engine and I get 100s of pages of hits on climate change and the end of mandkind as we know it. I change search engines to one with maybe a different bias and I read stuff telling me before man was ever here the CO2 levels were much higher and the world much more lush. I see experiments where by doubling the CO2 we have today grows corn 20’ high with ears that would feed a family of 4. I walk down to Lake Erie and think about that massive lake was dug out by glacial ice that was over 2 miles high above me. For sure climate changes and what was bad for the dinosaurs was likely good for us to immerge. Likely also producing all the fossil fuels that made our lives easy and the ability for the population to grow to where it is today and us to live to 80-90 or even 100 instead of 40-50-60 that was common only a flash in mankind’s timeline ago. There is half the people causing the problem but likely without the tech that fuel brought way more than half.
It is very odd to me how more people truly believing the end is near and thinking openly about it all are not at least playing devils advocate on the problem and deep diving into what is the true truth. I tell my sisters why don’t you just party it up if your truth is the end is that close. Why are the smart people building batteries and solar and wind and not just saying go full in for nuclear? We know how to do that and we know how to do it safely for the most part and so what if some of them have problems we will all be gone shortly anyway. Or we could all the true believers abandon all the modern ways and go back to the 1700 and forbid any progress past that point? We want our cake and eat it to because very few would even be able to make it a week.
In the 80’s I was told it would be over by 2000 if we didn’t change everything. In 2000 it was 2010 and now it is 2023 and the jet stream is going to stop between 2025 and 2050. I should make it to 2025 not sure about 2050 and if I do wonder if I will know much. Although by then capitalism might have a cure to reverse aging and that will be bad because it will cost more than I will have left because other problems like inflation will have taken it all. To be honest last winter reminded me of the winters when I was a little kid walking to grade school and this warm summer quite a bit like the summers I remember as a kid.
Around 2500BC the Sphinx of Giza was built and I saw a PBS show about it that they puzzled why the limestone had eroded up and down rather than side by side as wind driven sand would do. It was built by humans so mankind was around then. They concluded it was caused by centuries of rain running down the sides. Someplace in the history of climate change Giza was in a wet fertile location and something caused that to change. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t people needing electric stoves instead of gas or lack of enough electric cars.
I may not 100% believe my alter reality, but IMO it as likely as the other reality and it makes life easier to enjoy.
Actually the entire North Atlantic system, Gulf Stream is just a part of it. Been a great week for bad news.
I arrive home on Saturday from the Maine coast, hoping the weather is breaking as they predict and l will be coming thru storms. Rather be wet than hot.
I was trained as a scientist. I was educated in the biological sciences and chemistry. I have an interest in and follow all the sciences. The understanding of science is often changed as more data is amassed. Much of what you point out is true.
Add CO2 in a controlled environment you do increase the yield of corn. Increase the temperature above or below a certain point or reduce the amount of water to a certain point at the same time and you reduce the yield of corn or kill it and the amount of CO2 available to the corn becomes irrelevant.
We are in an interglacial period and the climate was already heading for another ice age in another 10,000 years or so. We are currently changing that direction by pumping CO2, methane, and manmade chemicals into the atmosphere. It’s not that climate doesn’t happen to change the issue is the speed at which we are driving that change with our actions. There is a balance of nature that provides resiliency to change over time, but it can and does collapse if the change is too radical.
There was a time early on in the evolution of life on this planet that the atmosphere was a reducing one. That changed to an oxidative one when colonies of single cell algae (Stromatolites) started producing oxygen which was released into the oceans and atmosphere. That killed off most of the organisms that evolved to survive when the atmosphere was a reducing one. Here is an example of a single group of species radically changing the air to what we breath today.
There have been periods in the past were the temps and CO2 were higher and much of the world was lush and the world has gone from that into ice ages. Species died off, and new species evolved and adapted to the new conditions. Evolution is a slow process and take 10s and 100s of thousands of years. Any time in the past when the conditions changed rapidly it resulted in mass extinctions and it took time spans longer than humans have existed to evolve complex resilient biological ecosystems. A time span of 200 years is a millisecond in the time span of life on this planet. Missing the estimated mark or prediction by even another 200 years is still close to the mark on an evolutionary time scale. It is only significant to us because our lives are short even if we live to 100.
There are numerous examples of unrestrained human economies destroying the plants or animals they depended on. Take the case of humans settling the Western Hemisphere. During a time of climate changes that took much longer than what is happening now. This put pressure on those species adapted to the ice age, and the human economy of big game harvesting helped drive their extinction. Unrestrained fishing of the Oceans today has cause numerous fish populations to collapse. That is a current case of exploitive capitalism doing damage.
I don’t think we are going to see the end of the world anytime soon but do think the repercussions of climate change will make the world a harder place for the survival of many species including humanity. What a waste of life on this planet as we are driving another mass extinction by our greed and lack of action.
Human prosperity today happened because of the knowledge we have gained from using the scientific method to inform our discission making. It does not surprise me that when that knowledge points to the need to make inconvenient changes in our lives that it is rejected outright by many.
And that is the way science is supposed to work. However, an observational fact that has been seen is that the cold freshwater run off of the Greenland ice sheet has caused some changes to the AMOC off of Greenland. Another observation is as more has become known it seems to be melting faster than previously thought. What, when, and if a massive change will happen at this point is certainly up for debate.
One thing about the rate of climate change and sea level rise is it has been happening faster than the earlier predictions suggested. Those predictions are partly due to the conservative nature of science when making them. It is absolutely true that the processes are complex and not fully known, and the authors conclusions will have to be confirmed or disproven with further research. Their conclusion is rightly questioned. That is how progress in the pursuit of knowledge is made in science. It’s not what you believe to be true, but what you can prove to be true, and others can produce the same results.
Keep in mind that as countries develop economically they pollute less and have smaller families — below replacement values in much of the West.
Most of the air pollution disease burden is from indoors due to the burning of dung and wood for cooking by the worlds poorest.
Playing devil’s advocate is a thought process/experiment where you take the opposing viewpoint of your own truth and argue in good faith as if it were your own truth. It doesn’t mean you blindly switch sides rather is a tool that many times will show you things that our personal bias as well as group bias won’t allow us to see or understand.
Group bias is very high on this topic and many other topics right now as our country is polarized and both sides fear to admit that maybe the real truth falls someplace in the middle let alone you dare to switch sides. The group dynamic from both sides will quickly correct you and if that doesn’t work will add social pressure and lastly will cancel and expel you from the group.
The concept of playing devil’s advocate is becoming lost to society as both sides see it as disruptive and as the name implies both sides see the other side as the devil.
One thing that is hard for people to grasp in the process of thought is that many times there are more than one truth and that truth can even be a moving target.
Agree 100%. When ideological tribes would rather demonize each other than explore their different truths, playing devil’s advocate is ineffective at removing the blinders of group bias. That’s why I quit doing it.