Agreed, no political debate, please!
Why the question, hmm, I dunno, I guess because there has been all this discussion which seems geared toward skepticism regarding the fact of the world getting warmer, and I think a lot of that skepticism has been backed by and spread by those who stand to benefit from denying human-caused warming. Not to say there aren’t people on both sides of the political spectrum cherry-picking science to further their own goals.
Here is a discussion about the threat that climate change poses focused on the economic impacts.
Thinking Smartly About Climate Change - Imprimis (hillsdale.edu)
I’ve read his book. It is a worthwhile read.
Ok so if I understand correctly the surface of the earth is where all life is located and that’s the area that is heating and we are concerned about that seems logical. It also seems to me what is below the surface is far from an insulator and should be having some effect on sinking some heat away. The common thing I hear is the surface warming is also putting more moisture into the air and that’s the increased rainfall we hear about. Greater CO2 along with H2O and sunlight is what promotes plant life to happen. So I guess that is rational from the standpoint that millions of years ago when CO2 was much higher along with temps than today the planet was a lush vegetative state. Without man around it was even likely more lush as there wasn’t mankind to exploit all the vegetation.
So in short global warming is not the warming of the globe it is the warming of outer couple feet of the worlds skin.
If we think and believe in the balance of nature in any animal population of any species, it is not too hard to see a population of mankind growing say from 1 billion to 10 billion should be a problem nature would correct on its own if given freedom to do so. This is likely what global warming or climate change is attempting to do. We are not a cruel species though and we have the intelligence to both make individuals live longer and also survive way past the numbers nature would support naturally with innovation. Each time the population doubles we figure out a way using energy to feed and shelter the new number. So the real question is do we back down to 5 billion or do we push on to 20 billion and keep those 20 billion alive to the age of 150?
As to what is reported 4 days ago the UN announced global warming was now gone and we are in a phase of global boiling.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/29/un-what-is-global-boiling/
This to me sounds like something intended to get something started. We are having a hot summer so it gets ramped up to global boiling.
Is the globe going to boil and can I expect no snow or sub zero weather this winter. It is not uncommon here to hit –30f a few nights each winter.
The language that the UN Chief uses in the article is the type of language that makes me skeptical. I find arguments using that type of alarmist, emotional language not very convincing, and it leaves me wondering how weak the actual data is.
Now I’m thinking about heat being trapped next to the earth by greenhouse gases some of this extra heating mixing in with water and I assume heating the full body of water to some degree as water transfers heat quite well and waves and currents should mix it to a much greater depth than surface heat over land that as we all agree isn’t heating to any great depth. Heat without any place to go will be a more intense heat. So based on that the air above land should prove to be more uninhabitable than the air above water. Humans that manage to survive may be forced onto boats and a life at sea.
Waterworld here we come?
A lot of what you are saying sounds reasonable to some point. the thing is, you are not alone in trying to think about this. Some have actually spent their whole careers looking into this, playing devils advocates, and trying to find alternative explanations, and how they could be missing things that would paint a very different picture.
that is why I suggest starting with understanding what the IPCC has found. Get familiar with that and you will save yourself a lot of work. Then go hard at trying to find hidden assumptions, mistakes, biases. The scientists studying this have done their best, but they are only human and can miss things, make mistakes, etc. Questioning science is all part of how we get closer to understanding how it all works. Science welcomes it, in general. A great quote:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’
–Isaac Asimov
My point exactly and I could spend a year on the IPCC site and study till my hearts content. Or I could find someone way more intelligent than myself that has done similar and found contrary information. I could then not believe that person but go point by point trying to disprove their conclusions where the IPCC is getting it wrong. I could look for a motive they would have to go against the mainstream science. I could look at their background and education and try and find someone debunking their claims. Then I could find articles written by other prestigious sources like Scientific America debunking the claims only to find their arguments not to hold water.
Now I’m just a simple man that’s been thinking about this for a while and only digging deeper for a week or so. Surely someone else has had similar thoughts and dug way deeper I thought and so I found someone. Now I have no idea if I’m correct just that I’m not totally alone in my thinking.
One I could be being duped by the mainstream scientific thoughts or I could be duped by the ones de-duping the first party. You really never know but at some point a persons Spidey Senses kick in and you get a gut reaction.
Any way if someone is following along the first video is over an hour long and the part I found best is the open exchange between the professor and the students in the Q&A section in the second half. I would strongly suggest watching it all. The second video is someone that took my approach of looking closely at those that disagree and what their counter points were. It is only 10 minutes long and will ether point out one way or another what your Spidey Senses are telling you.
Being YouTube videos I also often read the comments below when I’m done to get a feel for what others may be thinking. They often disagree.
The atmosphere and the oceans are not the first couple of feet. A bit of hyperbole there on the order of perhaps boiling.
The earth has a molten core and a paper thin in comparison surface crust of rock and water and air. Water covers 71% of the earth’s surface… NOAA says our oceans have absorbed about “90% of the of the excess heat trapped in the Earth system due to human-caused global warming”. The exposed crust is just 29% of the surface. The atmosphere the entire surface. The rest of the mass of the planet is not impacted by climate. Just the rocks, water, and air which make up a very small percentage of the earth’s mass, and where weather and climate exist. What impacts that is what impacts us in real time and is the most important in terms of life. I don’t get the point you tried to make about it.
You don’t seem to grasp the time spans it takes for a balance of nature to recover and produce a resilient web of life. It takes orders of magnitude of time more than we have practiced agriculture or lived in cities which happened about 10,000 years ago. Evolution is always happening but is a slow process. You might say “glacially slow” to use an expression. You noted the in the past there were periods much warmer than today. Yes, they have come and gone, and that change was slower than you seem to imagine allowing the time for life to evolve new forms that could better survive the changes. I guess I take it for granted that people know this.
What makes you think that 10 billion people are all fat and happy, when nearly 10% of the world’s population are facing starvation. Sure, we have modern marvels and agriculture. What percentage of the world population actually realize the benefits? We are lucky as a nation because we are at the cutting edge, but more than double our nations entire population are facing starvation in the world today. We also have people in this country that face hunger daily. Then we are seeing environmental degradation continuing worldwide even as we have made improvement here in this country in some areas.
We could use speculation all day long and go nowhere. I have tried to present the science as best I can.
If I were to speculate, I suspect we will not do enough to offset more extreme climate change due to the headwinds of established economic practices and the considerable inertia of the economy. The failure to act on the science and the recommendations that come from it. As well as the majority being focused on their day-to-day survival. We caught a glimpse of how fragile the global economy can be during the Pandamit.
Here I go with metaphor. We won’t be able to get off the train as Cassey Jones races down the track. We will most likely only change kicking and cussing when we are forced too. That may prove to be to the demise of many more of the planet’s life forms that might have been saved. As for humanity I think we will still be around, but it will be a different reality we will be faced with. In the short-term things will be disrupted at a disturbing level. Just what the repercussions will prove to be is anybody’s guess. Civilizations and populations have collapsed in the past. Are we immune from that happening again. 40 years ago, I was much more optimistic. It’s the intervening years that have changed my perspective. I sincerely hope I am wrong, but my logic and experience deny me that comfort.
My old man used to say " Boy ,this world is going to hell in a handbasket!"
I think he was referring to Democrats but he had already been through WW2 in the South Pacific.
Maybe he was just sounding like an old man. I’m his age now and life is pretty good. I’m not going to spend my remaining years sweating what I can’t influence.
As an example to how cruel the balance of nature can be. We have a huge overpopulation of white tail deer here. Between the deer and the groundhogs some farmers are showing a 20% crop loss. In the summer they are not a problem except to the farmers and in the winter they attack every residential yard they can find and eat the landscaping to the ground. People are kind by nature and have begun buying trunk loads of grain to feed the deer in the winter. The grain could well feed a lot of those starving people in the world but keeping the overpopulation of almost pets going is a solution to this first world problem. Nature and the game commission would like to keep the population at the correct number but the same people feeding them in the winter to protect their landscaping is also posting their land as no hunting. In the end the deer are the ones suffering as there are way more competing for less resources every year.
I doubt man made climate change is going to end the human race to the point evolution is going to have to start over. Just like the white tail deer population would go to zero if nature was left to its own.
Again we are not by nature cruel and no one wants to watch people die of starvation. If you watch the video above the poor nations of the world are wanting advancements fossil fuels can provide.
I had a friend that as part of his church group went to a very poor area in Africa and spent a couple months solving a problem of fresh drinking water. The people there were drinking river water they carried a great distance that was not clean to start with. They dug a well and built a building around it and inside they had a gas powered gen-set to power the pump and they gave instructions and supplied them with gas etc. It was wonderful he said they would start the pump at the same time each day all the village would come and fill their water cans. I remember him coming back really feeling good about his time there. It was about 5 years later he went back with his wife and he was excited for her to see the project. He gets there and finds a family living in the building people toting water from the river again the pump and equipment all gone. He asked what happened and was told the engine stopped working and someone came along and couldn’t fix it and gave them stuff for the scrap value of the equipment and that was that.
It is sad that this happens and sadder to just watch the results. He came back and said I really don’t know what we could have done different except stayed there forever.
Now we want to jump people over even that step of fossil fuels and straight to wind and solar. Maybe we should build nuke plants in third world countries.
I’m not saying I have the answers and I don’t want to see 90% of the people of the world starving.
I just have a hard time seeing how if I buy an EV and charge it from a power company burning fossil fuels how that is going to make a difference for those starving halfway around the world.
Bud, I think it is important to talk about. I think people are struggling to come up with solutions. We are all in this together. I really hope we find workable solutions to where we have put ourselves today facing the inadvertent problems of our own making. I feel recognizing them is just the first step. The need for honest discussion is the only reason I have kept posting to this thread. String said life is good for him and he isn’t going to sweat what he can’t influence. I think that is the common attitude of many of our generation. It isn’t mine.
You may regard nature as cruel and humanity as kind, but nature makes no such distinction. Nature did nearly eliminate the buffalo, the whitetail deer, the wild turkey, the Atlantic salmon, and the bald eagle to name a few well-known species several others like the passenger pigeon went extinct. Climate change for them wasn’t the driving force as it is becoming for many other life forms today. That agent of nature was humanity. We are a part of the natural order and ruled by the same biology as the rest of life on the planet. Probably from a strictly biological perspective the most invasive species.
The introduction of hunting and fishing licenses and seasons, size and sex restrictions, harvest limits and reintroduction programs, and the banning of DDT made a difference. All enacted based on scientific study and recommendations. That’s what kept them from going the way of the dodo. People protested many of the early restrictions at the time. Yet we made the changes and improved the outcome for sportsmen and the animals too. It wasn’t people putting out feed which is misguided.
Part of the problem with the abundance of deer is the lack of natural predation other than human predation. It’s been years but I recall that deer vehicle collisions in PA killed more deer each year than hunting did. The car as surrogate predator. In the case of white-tailed deer many hunters lobby for more not less. Another is that our land use practices favor deer populations in a way that it didn’t before we cut almost all of the old growth forest. Here in the east, you might as well say all of it. People protested those restrictions at the time. Yet we made the changes and improved the outcome for sportsmen and the animals too.
How do I know these things. I have a degree in wildlife ecology and worked for a time with the FL Game and Fish Commision.
I feel we can make the changes we need to stop pushing climate change. I just don’t think we have the will to timely do what is needed because it requires change now not decades from now. I think I do understand some of the cost and consequences this will mean for me. I know I probably won’t like many of them. Yet I am willing to try.
Developing countries around have skipped or are skipping copper wire for communication infrastructure. Why not aspire to something similarly beneficial for energy infrastructure … beneficial for people and the environment.
What is beneficial for those people is water, and the energy the well uses should be affordable and one they can maintain. If that is fossil fuel or some renewable should be secondary to meeting the basic need of water. Aspirations are a first world luxury.
Not to mention the source of the raw materials to make those EV batteries, impoverished Congelese, including children, mining them with hand tools with no protection from the toxic exposure.
I think the elephants and gorillas in the room is human overpopulation. When I was high school aged the book “Population Bomb” was popular. People read and talked about how many people the planet could comfortably, reasonably support. Folks don’t talk about it now. Too uncomfortable, I suppose.
It has become less of a concern because of current birth trends, and many projections predict that the world population will begin to shrink after about 2050. Shrinking to levels much smaller than the current population by 2100.
Simply math. Need to depopulate to save the earth. Some world governing body says by 33% (meaning us, not them). Problem is, nobody is standing in line to save the planet. In 50 years of owning my own home, I never had air conditioning. Lets start a petition to ban home air conditioners.
You don’t want to learn what the IPCC has to say. It is too long and hard to deal with. I get that, science is daunting. It is like math, some just can’t get their minds to be willing to deal with those subjects.
However, so far you only seem to be willing to seek understanding from short videos on one side of the debate. That gives you a biased picture.
If you want short, easy to assimilate pieces in order to understand whether to have confidence in climate science, then you should be spending just as much time gathering the short pieces that offer insight on the pro side as well. So far you are not, and yet there are many available.
In a Psychology class the instructor told us about cognitive dissonance. He said it was essentially one part of our brain in disagreement with another part of our brain. His example was “I love smoking cigarettes” while also believing that “Cigarette smoking is bad for me”. The instructor said we humans do all sorts of mental gymnastics to try and deal with that discomfort. I suspect that human population may be the ultimate cognitive dissonance. “There are so many humans on the planet that other species are fast going extinct and the ice caps are melting”. While the other part of our brain says, “Little babies are wonderful!”
Then there’s the climate thing… “The ice caps are melting”. vs “But I love my fast, loud car and international plane rides”.