[Closed] So who here reckons humans don't cause climate change

Lots of places suddenly becoming more habitable (or attractive to exploitation). There'll be winners and losers.

I won't be giving a shit. Unless it doesn't stop raining.

I suspect you will when a whole load of Bangladeshis move in to your town.

We can all just move to Bangladesh, our northern European industriousness will find a way to deal with the floods. Plus, the climate is much nicer and we can just pop over to Thailand for a holiday and a wife.

I won't be giving a shit. Unless it doesn't stop raining.

Millions dead and you really wouldn't give a shit?

Isn't it down to personal/political preference? Seems to be all the rage 🙄

Did anyone watch that thing on C4 the other year back, the consipiracy thing where the goverments were spreading a virus to effectively sterilze a very sizable portion of the population? Oh for the days scaring myself reading about the forthcuming culling of all the useless eaters. And business... is it always such a terrible thing if the growth of the growth rate is in decline? We've finite resources! Hellooooooo!??!?!?

We're all doomed.

According to many we're now in the Anthropocene ... defined as the point where man's activities are having a lasting effect on earth systems - atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, etc etc. Looks pretty convincing to me ..

[url= http://www.anthropocene.info/great-acceleration.php ]the anthropocene[/url]

Maybe it's a tool to aid slowing down industrial growth of competing world powers/interests and to help us first worlders transition away from our unsustainable reliance on finite imported fuels and wanton wastage. As a bonus it's a convenient tax tool for governments to prop up flagging incomes.

The people need a cause to fight for and who can argue the climate isn't changing, it clearly is and always has been.

I wouldn't doubt that.

It is one of the major reasons I choose not to have kids.

Earths orbit isn't circular. Shouldn't the concentration of the Sun's radiation vary regardless of axis tilt?

I'm not sure, but I reckon that "some scientists" may have taken this into account already. Probably

Though our affect on the climate could be debated, shirley its beyond doubt that we are polluting it to such a level, and breeding in ever increasing numbers, that climate change may just be one of the factors that would have an effect on all life in the near future?

Quite nickc. Always makes me laugh when folk talk about Earth's orbit, or solar activity, or natural cycles, or "the climate has always changed" in a way that suggests they think those silly climate scientists, who do this for a living, have overlooked these things.

Like they are going to read this thread and go:
"Dave, we did remember to account for Milankovitch cycles didn't we??",
"I thought you were going to do that.",
"No, I distinctly remember saying I'd do solar flares."
"I dunno, what are we like eh? We better call Al Gore"

😀

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I think this really sums it up, the things we are doing to reduce carbon and pollution and end a dependence on fossil fuels has so many added benefits. As many have said oil is far too valuable a resource to simply burn.

Ming The Merciless, you abject [i]nerd[/i].

It is one of the major reasons I choose not to have kids.

Stone cold serious, me too.

same here

Should've kept the hole in the ozone layer, all the CO2 could have escaped then...

Depressing thread

I'm not sure, but I reckon that "some scientists" may have taken this into account already. Probably

Well indeed. I doubt there's anyone on this forum actually qualified to judge the details of the climate change science - I know I'm not - so beyond a certain point we have to trust a process that leads to the current consensus among those who do have the time and ability to do so.

It does seem that more and more STW members are convinced anthropogenic CO2 is a problem. Still only a tiny number letting it influence their lifestyle decisions though. Take a look at any car thread, the 174ps + models are still the ones to have. Take a look at heating threads, gas central heating is still the favourite and properly insulating walls dismissed as too expensive. Check out the utilities threads where somewhere around a grand seems the norm - but it's not hard to make individual houses energy positive. People still have to have a long list of countries visited on their Facebook page even if people are universal in slagging off many of the destinations as tourist infested hell holes.

DrJ you are referring to Milankovitch cycles

Edukator summarises it quite well, which means we will have a very difficult future.

I think it's pretty likely that some on this forum are well qualified. It seems a diverse bunch. The problem is the ones who are not qualified, but think that they are. (I don't mean "qualified" in any formal sense.)

As for house insulation, I'd like to see anyone's ideas for making my draughty stone house energy positive. Got a lovely south facing roof, perfect for solar...but in a conservation area facing a road, isn't possible (being in a particularly wet and cloudy bit of the country doesn't help much either).

If the earth was round we wouldn't have this problem 😉

Starvation, wars, mass migration. Not could happen, already is. Syria case in point.

Of course there are cyclical climate changes but I think it's undeniable that we as a species are having a huge impact on the environment and climate. All lifeforms do and we are a pandemic. Hopefully we'll run out of fossil fuels to contribute to global warming before it's too late.

Oh, we won't run out. Not with the shale oil and fracking, not to mention that lovely oil and methane in the arctic. Enough fossil fuels to get from our current 400ppm CO2 to about 5000ppm. Yes there's an extra zero in there.

It's a sad fact that in the us climet change has become a political item of belief or non belief.

Its more a question of political expedience. Climate change denial in the US is a republican position, the reason of that is its a goal of the republicans to shrink government and deregulate industry and generally pander to the kind of ****-you individualism that the right wing defines as 'freedom'. The problem with climate change for them is if they recognise that it exists at all, or more so recognise that its man-made, then with that recognition comes the requirement for government to do something about it. Doing something would require growing government, imposing regulation and taxation, limiting peoples choices to consume and so on, all things fundamentally opposite to the republican cause.

So the issue is not so much whether climate change is real or not, the issue is the Republican party don't know how to be a Republican party in the face of climate change.

Flame me now - I suspect that we are one of the causes, and we can do something about that bit, but some of it is not of our doing, and outside our control.

That's about the size of it, AIUI.

"Global warming" would be happening right now irrespective of our actions. However, we are making it worse. This is the danger - it's easy to trot out the first sentence and conveniently ignore the second.

i've looked, but can't see anyone claiming that there's been no warming for 18 years.

"Avalanches and pebbles", etc.

this, basically.

(a bit of leadership from our ... er, leaders, wouldn't hurt)

oh, and this:

"It is one of the major reasons I choose not to have kids"

"Stone cold serious, me too."

"same here"

ditto.

I read that, although we are about to enter another every-10,000-year ice age cycle that would result in ice sheets covering most of the northern hemisphere (imagine what a catastrophe THAT would be!), the event will not now occur for another 50,000 years due to it being held back by.... (drum roll)...

mad-made global warming.

Drill baby, drill.

Global warming is the worst phrase ever associated with climate change, there seems to be a one in a hundred year flood every year now, more cyclones, longer hotter summers down here in Oz, more drought bigger more frequent fires. Things are Changing and it's not in a good way.

On the upside, the Arctic ice is retreating and uncovering vast swathes of tundra, presenting new opportunities for exploitation by all sorts of flora and fauna (including us), so it's not all bad...

I remember I once saw the cover of an oil industry magazine which basically said: "Retreat of Arctic ice opens up new drilling opportunities" 😕

Like I said...

[url= http://mattbruenig.com/2011/12/21/environmentalism-poses-a-problem-for-libertarian-ideology/ ]Environmentalism poses a problem for libertarian ideology[/url]

Climate change was a major part of my degree and it baffles me that people can think we're nothing to do with it. But it is complicated and when I think about it if you've not seen all the graphs, data and read the reports I can see why you may be a little reluctant to accept that we are a major factor.

Yes, the global temperature does go up and down on a cycle. But the temperatures now are higher than they have been in the last 10,000 years. (2009 is the cross in the top right of this graph).

[img] [/img]

This graph shows very neatly how it is our fault. There is a very clear link between CO2 and global temperature and the increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1855 and the slightly offset increase in temperature is clear. All the research points to the rise in CO2 being the cause of the rise in temperature.

[img] [/img]

Here's a graph showing the historic link between CO2 and temperature.

[img] [/img]

It's difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people. But the evidence points to it, almost all scientific papers on it say that it exists and once you read some of these it becomes very difficult to deny.

The big scare for the future in terms of climate change is really what we're doing to the ocean. The amount of CO2 we are producing is increasing the acidity of the oceans- the oceans draw down a large amount of the CO2 we pump out, limiting the global temperature rise. Unfortunately this increases their acidity which impacts on calcareous life (corals etc) in the ocean. They are a major cause of the oceans drawing down CO2 and without them what would go into the oceans will go into the atmosphere. Then we're really stuffed.

It's difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people. But the evidence points to it, almost all scientific papers on it say that it exists and once you read some of these it becomes very difficult to deny.

If you're a republican its very easy to deny - 'Scientists' broadly speaking are 'Liberals', science, evidence, fact, being right about stuff, those are all the things the other side do. Republicans aren't interested in whats 'true', they are only interested in the 'the sort of thing that should be true'.

It's difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people. But the evidence points to it, almost all scientific papers on it say that it exists and once you read some of these it becomes very difficult to deny.

Thing I can't get my head around is that reasonably accurate climate data goes back around 300 years. And changes in the climate take place over billions of years.

Quite. There's no doubt it's happening, but once you start thinking in geological time scales the whole thing looks like nitpicking.

And as I said, if it's holding back a catastrophic ice age, it's actually a good thing.

Won't stop us all dying out eventually, though.

Pack up your shit, folks.

but once you start thinking in geological time scales the whole thing looks like nitpicking.

Why would you want to look at it in geological time scales?

What's important is human lives, now.

It's difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people.

I tihnk you need to bring the science out, just to demonstrate to the deniers that there is actual science here and not just a load of wasters sitting around pulling poorly thought out ideas out of their beards.

The big scare for the future in terms of climate change is really what we're doing to the ocean. The amount of CO2 we are producing is increasing the acidity of the oceans- the oceans draw down a large amount of the CO2 we pump out, limiting the global temperature rise. Unfortunately this increases their acidity which impacts on calcareous life (corals etc) in the ocean. They are a major cause of the oceans drawing down CO2 and without them what would go into the oceans will go into the atmosphere. Then we're really stuffed.

ie All the signs point to very serious, anthropogenic, climate change - because the science says so and you have total faith in science.

Yet we might be stuffed (your words), doomed (others on this thread), fked (general guardian wingey-ness) because you contemporaneously have zero faith in science. In respect of science representing the apex of human creativity, invention and problem-solving - there is no greater force for societal change - yet it's going to come up empty-handed when faced with global warming? No chance.

it is complicated and when I think about it if you've not seen all the graphs, data and read the reports I can see why you may be a little reluctant to accept that we are a major factor.

As a layperson one of the things that made me realise we [i]could[/i] have an influence was volcanoes.

I think most folk would be fairly comfortable with the idea that the global output of volcanoes could alter the climate. That seems like a natural thing.

BUT...

The global CO2 emission rate for ALL volcanoes (land and sea) is in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year.

Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are somewhere around 35 gigatons per year!

We'd need an extra 11,200 volcanoes like Mount K?lauea to match the human CO2 output.

[img] [/img]

And I'm pretty sure if 11,200 big volcanoes sprang up then people wouldn't need too much convincing that it was a [i]bad thing[/i].

Source: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php

And as I said, if it's holding back a catastrophic ice age, it's actually a good thing.

really, [url= http://www.webcitation.org/5qnO3Fw2p ]and there was me thinking it could be about another 16,000 years to the next one[/url], give or a take a few 1000 years

It's not just serious for humans Molgrips we're changing the climate faster than the living part of our world can adapt to it, were already in an anthropogenic mass extinction and there's all the crap we're doing releasing toxins like plastic and metals from mineral overburden. We're basically setting evolution back millions of years. In the short term (100 years sort of magnitude) were going to see entire ecosystems unable to cope with this and the survivors wont have the kind of time they need to re-fill the niches as they do in (most) natural extinctions as well us struggling to cope once we've lost massive amounts of the capacity of the ecosystem services we're dependant on (insect pollination, filtration, photosynthesis, etc) to provide us with what we need. It's a pretty shitty state of affairs and I don't think there'll be the political will or the technological innovation to prevent the worst of it.

I don't go in for the apocolyptic end of it but we're going to lose so much and there's no bringing it back.

Thing I can't get my head around is that reasonably accurate climate data goes back around 300 years. And changes in the climate take place over billions of years.

Not necessarily so- we have records from coral and ice that go back much further. Coral records can go back 30,000 years, the Greenland Ice Core (for all its flaws) goes back 5,000 years. Information from sedimentary rocks takes us back millions of years.

Climate changes on a tens of thousand years basis, not billions, and so it's relatively easy to look at all this information and determine whether we are in something normal or unusual. The rise in CO2 in the atmosphere since the 1850s is unprecedented in the climate record, and the temperature is going with it. Because at no other time in the data CO2 rises so rapidly it's fairly easy to then link the rise in CO2 to us and the industrial revolution. As temperature rises with CO2 it's almost certainly our fault, or a major coincidence.

Here's another nice graph showing global temperatures going back half a billion years. The earliest 400 million years are certainly a bit woolly, but if you look at the current projections then we're heading for a temperature that's not been seen for 5 million years in a period of 200 years after 10,000 years of temperatures being relatively steady. Life can't adapt at that rate and this will be the major problem for the future.

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Garry Lager- stuffed may be a bit strong. But there'll certainly be problems of such a large scale that they can't be solved in time by science. And some things, like rising sea levels, are essentially impossible to solve. Where would all that extra water go? The earth is a closed system.

Humanity will survive relatively easily the issues of climate impacting crops, we can genetically engineer stuff to survive, increase the productivity of soil etc. But much of nature will not cope and I don't think it should really be up to us to say that it doesn't matter and we'll be alright so it's fine.

What's important is human lives, now.

I suppose it is.

[url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16439807 ]Suntan[/url]