Global Warming Question... - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Pollution, global warming, urbanisation etc.
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#15032258
Sivad wrote::knife: That's the sensitivity estimate. The IPCC "business as usual" projection is north of 4c:

"The scenario with the most warming is the ‘business-as-usual’ RCP8.5, in which global mean temperature could be 4°C or more above pre-industrial times."

Image

http://climatica.org.uk/ipcc-long-term- ... rojections


For further context, a rise of 1C is pretty bad, but "north of 4C" is an outright extinction event.
#15032262
Saeko wrote:For further context, a rise of 1C is pretty bad, but "north of 4C" is an outright extinction event.


Where do you people get this shit from? Nobody except the most hysterical of fringe alarmists is claiming an outright extinction event. And 1c is nothing, it's virtually the same climate regime we have now.
#15032265
I could see how people would invent shit to panic about if there were no real threats but we got real threats aplenty. It's like bad dystopian syfy, technocratic elites are constructing a global AI mass surveillance control grid, a planetary gulag, and people are panicking over the slow rise of a trace gas. :lol:

surreal.
#15032307
Sivad wrote:Where do you people get this shit from? Nobody except the most hysterical of fringe alarmists is claiming an outright extinction event. And 1c is nothing, it's virtually the same climate regime we have now.

As the UN says,

5%: estimated fraction of species at risk of extinction from 2°C warming alone, rising to 16% at 4.3°C warming

https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Releas ... Assessment

So, yes, 4 degrees is an extinction event - one sixth of the world's species.

That's a major change in the environment; some spots will be uninhabitable, and species will have to move or go extinct. But moving further away from the equator may not be an option in many cases; seas and oceans get in the way for land-based organisms, or mountains. Or the organisms' other needs aren't fulfilled by the area they'd have to colonise (eg a major river and the environment it provides). And the interdependent web of organisms gets disrupted; a food source disappears, a new predator moves in or already occupies where a species needs to live.
#15032325
Recent data shows that climate scientists were wrong. Using high-precision measurements, the actual increase in ocean surface temperature is actually higher than predicted. The industry lobby together with its army of useful idiots has done such a good job of denying climate science that the scientists have been intimidated into excessive caution.

I think a 4.5 degrees increase in 100 years is a good bet. It's too late to stop it. If we were to take decisive actions now, we could keep it within manageable limits; however, the rise of Trump and right-wing populism makes an international consensus on climate change virtually impossible.

We are likely to see the first dramatic effects in the coming years and the climate change deniers will disappear after having done their dirty work. But humanity will never forget where to put the blame:

Trump and Yankee imperialism:
#15032368
Rancid wrote:Since we don't know where things are going, we're better off not accelerating it in any direction.


That's actually a strong argument for taking no action at all.

Since we have no idea what the ramifications might be, it's quite possible we could do something, believing it's for the best, and it could end up having horrible effects on the environment...
#15032390
BigSteve wrote:That's actually a strong argument for taking no action at all.

Since we have no idea what the ramifications might be, it's quite possible we could do something, believing it's for the best, and it could end up having horrible effects on the environment...


By choosing to do nothing at all, you are actually choosing to continue to pollute at high levels, causing unprecedented climate change, and causing things like sea level rise.

The evidence for doing something is far stronger than the evidence for dping nothing.

Mind you, reducing pollution has many positives that we would benefit from even if the climate did not change because of our efforts.
#15032392
BigSteve wrote:That's actually a strong argument for taking no action at all.


The flaw in this statement is that "no action" actually means "continue to engage in the same actions and behaviors we are doing today". Thus, it's not actually no action.

As @Pants-of-dog pointed out. Doing nothing, as in we continue to emit CO2 and other pollutants, goes against what the natural course of the earth would be if humans weren't around. What I'm saying is, we should curb our contributions of CO2 and pollution to a level that is very minimal. This allows the earth to actually change more "naturally". Or rather, much more slowly so that live on earth can continue to adapt as it always has.

This way, we are dealing with the devil we know (slow changing earth) versus the devil we don't know (rapidly changing earth).
#15032394
Rancid wrote:The flaw in this statement is that "no action" actually means "continue to engage in the same actions and behaviors we are doing today". Thus, it's not actually no action.


But, as you pointed out, we just can't know the unintended consequences of doing anything, including not engaging in the same actions and behaviors we're doing today. Anything we change will send things off into a different direction, and we have no way to know if that will be a positive direction or a negative one.

The only thing we can be sure of is, regardless of what we do or not do, global warming and climate change will continue regardless of what we do or don't do...
#15032399
Actually, you cannot even be certain of that, since there exists the slim possibility that we could be obliterated by extraterrestrials tomorrow.

The fact that we are unable to know all of the consequences with perfect certainty is both true and ubiquitous. If wr allowed this to stop us from acting, we would literally not be able to do anything at all.
#15032402
BigSteve wrote:The only thing we can be sure of is, regardless of what we do or not do, global warming and climate change will continue regardless of what we do or don't do...

No, we know that if we stop emitting greenhouse gases, global warming will slow. Eventually, it will stop. If we find a way of sequestering significantly more CO2 than natural processes do, we could even reduce temperatures.
#15032404
Pants-of-dog wrote:Actually, you cannot even be certain of that, since there exists the slim possibility that we could be obliterated by extraterrestrials tomorrow.


But there's no reason to believe that climate change and global warming wouldn't continue in our absence. They would just continue at, likely, a different rate...
#15032406
BigSteve wrote:But, as you pointed out, we just can't know the unintended consequences of doing anything, including not engaging in the same actions and behaviors we're doing today. Anything we change will send things off into a different direction, and we have no way to know if that will be a positive direction or a negative one.


This makes me chuckle. You're not thinking about this right.

There is more evidence to suggest that since the industrial revolution, we have dramatically changed the rate at which the earth's climate changes. It's a rate of change that is unprecedented. You're definition of "do nothing", means we should continue this unprecedented rate of change, which we do not know the consequences of. This is the devil we do not know. My point is, this is a bad idea.

From a geological time scale perspective (hundreds of thousands to millions of years), "do nothing" REALLY means pre-industrial revolution activities (i.e. minimal impact to the climate). In order to "do nothing" from a geological stand point, we would have to do something, which is to curb our emissions activities massively. This would shift things back to a more natural progression.

So when I say "the devil you know, versus the devil you don't know", what that means is, the devil we know, is the progression of the earth pre-industrial revolution slow changing earth (there's data on how earth has changed over millions of years, and it's slow), where as the devil we don't know, which is post-industrial revolution fast changing earth (we have no data on where this is going and how it will impact us or the planet). thus, we're better off trying to get ourselves back to levels of emissions that are closer to geological historical rates.

Something tells me you will not be able to understand this idea.
#15032433
BigSteve wrote:But there's no reason to believe that climate change and global warming wouldn't continue in our absence. They would just continue at, likely, a different rate...


The climate would continue to change in our absence as it always has, but anthropogenic climate change would no longer exist.

And the rate at which we are changing the climate because of human impact is one of the problems. There have been very few times in Earth’s history that the average temperature has changed so quickly and so drastically.

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