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About LinkBacksNo I don't.Originally Posted by PAD10H
Also, if people don't have money to invest, how will the government generate revenue through taxation to fund their "climate change mitigating activities/research". . . .
No I don't.
Also, if people don't have money to invest, how will the government generate revenue through taxation to fund their "climate change mitigating activities/research". . . .
In the great scheme of things, humans didn't exist at all for 4,539,000,000 of those years, because the climate wasn't suitable to our evolution. So I'd be rather concerned if we go beyond the range of the past million years.
Now look at human "civilisation". This has only existed for about 4,000 years, so operating outside of those climatic conditions could pose a problem for us too.
Who is this "we". The Permian extinction wiped out 99% of life on the planet. The Cretaceous meteor wiped out 95%. "We" (humans) didn't even exist until the past 1 million years.On a sidenote, the climate seems alright considering we've been hit by some pretty devastating meteors, and come through a few ice ages. . .
The planet will recover no matter what sort of climate change takes place, but humans (among millions of other species) may be wiped out forever.
Hi BaudrillardNE,
My point is only that the earth is still around despite these phenomenon as you said.
Are you saying that global warming caused by human civilisation may wipe humans out forever? What is your timeframe for this? I'll be interested in hearing your answers to this.
I think this is scaremongering to the highest degreeIt's not going to happen everyone don't worry about it
My point is simple. The Earth will always endure, it's inhabitants will not. Referring to any climate data before the evolution of humans is pointless. If the climate was not amenable to our existence then, it wouldn't be amenable to our existence now.Hi BaudrillardNE,
My point is only that the earth is still around despite these phenomenon as you said.
Are you saying that global warming caused by human civilisation may wipe humans out forever? What is your timeframe for this? I'll be interested in hearing your answers to this.
I think this is scaremongering to the highest degree
The earth will not always endure, but it is certainly capable of outlasting humans I agree.
My point is that how do we know that the current trend in the climate isn't an "after-effect" or result of previous dramatic climate change occurrences over millions of years (for whatever reasons)?
Last edited by Hazlitt; 17th February 2009 at 04:14 PM. Reason: change of view
Well, we'd be in trouble a good way before that. All of human history since agriculture has taken place within quite a narrow climatic range. Even quite small and slow changes like the Medieval Warm Period (a change of about 0.3 degrees over 400 years) and the Little Ice Age (a change of about 0.4 degrees over about 650 years) had very noticeable impacts on agriculture. Indeed, there is research that suggests that agriculture didn't develop until about 11,000 years ago because prior to that the post-glacial climate was too unstable, experiencing relatively rapid swings between states over the course of a few decades every 3-700 years.
That's why all this talk of the Earth's climate over billions of years is utterly irrelevant. Our agricultural infrastructure is highly developed, but highly tuned for current climate limits. Yields are far greater than historically, but the range of agricultural species is far narrower, and thus their potential for adaptation lower - and the warming will not magically cause fertile soils to develop as climate bands shift. A collapse in current farming systems is probably the major concern in real climate change, rather than the Hollywood dramatisations.
The impact on natural ecosystems is even larger - research has found that 1,700 plant and animal species are moving toward the North or South Poles at a rate of 6 km per decade, but over the past 30 years, climate zones have been moving poleward at a rate of 40 km per decade. That means that ecosystems are being left behind by the climates they are adapted for.
Nor is the talk of sudden natural climate change as comforting as our 'skeptics' apparently believe it to be. The IPCC projections of climate change are gradualist, with the built-in assumption that we can adapt and make do as we go along, but the swift changes being identified in the pre-historic climate record suggest strongly that climate is only meta-stable. You push it to a tipping point and it changes rapidly to a new state - and that, while it is something that has happened repeatedly in Earth's history, is something that has never happened since humans invented agriculture.
If the 'skeptics' prefer to believe that the current changes are natural, by all means let them do so - let them concentrate, in that case, on mitigating the impacts that, according to their logic, are inescapable. The rest of us can concentrate in addition on those measures which, if we are correct, may well avoid or temper some of those impacts.
Never let the best be the enemy of the good.
False logic. Given that we hadn't evolved, you can't say that climate at certain lengthy junctures during the period before human existence was not amenable to human life.
It was. We just weren't there to enjoy it yet.
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Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."
Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.
"They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.
Schmitt, who grew up in Silver City and now lives in Albuquerque, has a science degree from the California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.
In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission.
Former astronaut speaks out on global warming - BostonHerald.com
http://digg.com/politics/Former_astr...rming?FC=PRCT6
"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.'' ~ J. Edgar Hoover
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It's a funny thing, but so many of the skeptical scientists are emeritus rather than active - which, in scientific terms, tends to mean that they are part of the reactionary 'old guard' (for example, the opposition to plate tectonics came from the emeritus level, as did the opposition to evolution originally). Also, their claims that people have lost their funding, or fear to lose their funding, are generally non-specific, whereas the suppression of climate change data and the removal of non-skeptical scientists by the Bush administration is, again, well-documented.
Last edited by ibis; 17th February 2009 at 05:10 PM.
Never let the best be the enemy of the good.
a retired scientist with a doctorate from 1964 that thinks there is a global conspiracy to control american lives says what now?
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