Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Climate change after all

Looks like the climate is changing after all.

Tree deaths soar in Western U.S.

Ann

The climate is always changing.

Except for when it's not. But usually it is.

PJ

How many of us know why Greenland is called Greenland? Come on now, raise your hands. I see a few. Good.

For those who don't know why a subcontinent which appears to be covered with glacial ice is called Greenland - and it really is a puzzler - I will elucidate. Eric the Red and his son Leif helped establish a colony in southern Greenland to take advantage of the rich farmland and low population density (a group of Irish preceded them but left before the Vikings arrived). The land was cold in winter but warm in summer, warm enough to raise crops and cattle and even establish a robust trade with people from the British Isles and nearby countries. All this began in 991 AD.

The settlement remained until the early 13th century, when they were frozen out by the changing climate. The ground became so hard they couldn't bury their dead and had to cremate them. The crops failed and they couldn't feed their dairy cattle, so they had to eat them. And eventually Greenland was pretty much covered with ice and everybody either packed up and went back to Norway or died. Given the much lower population density of the Earth back then, and the far lower level of pollution-creating technology, it's highly unlikely that human activity brought on this climate change.

My point? Global cooling and global warming have been happening for thousands of years. Sometimes asteroids or meteorites or comets cause problems, sometimes volcanoes erupt and cause problems, sometimes the sun heats up or goes into an intense solar flare cycle or even cools down. Here\'s a description of a solar flare in 1859 that shorted out telegraph wires on the East Coast of the US and started a number of fires.

And sometimes the climate changes for no apparent reason, like in the late 13th century. Did you know that southern England was warm enough to grow grapes similar to the ones now grown in southern France? And that the resulting wine was famous world-wide? And that the global cooling in the early 13th century wiped out the crops? Maybe we're just getting back to what was the norm a thousand years ago.

Or maybe Al Gore was right and we're all doomed, doomed, I tell you!

Is the climate changing? Yes. That's not open for debate. Our climate is changing world-wide.

Is human activity the primary cause, or even a strong contributing cause? Unclear. No one can produce anything really concrete on the subject, and there is still no so-called "consensus" among scientists world-wide concerning the subject.

Can we stop climate change? Again, it's unclear whether we can stop it. There may not be a way to stop the shift.

Should we try to stop climate change? That's a difficult question to answer without any firm idea on what to do, how much of it to do, and when to do it. What if the climate change is something that the earth needs to happen to it to stay healthy? What if this is something that happens every once in a while irrespective of human activity? What if we try to "fix" global warming and totally screw up the entire ecosphere?

It's unreasonable to expect change not to come. People get older and die. Trees die, and not just because of climate change. Did you know that the American chestnut tree, which dominated the eastern American landscape from the time before the first European settlers, was nearly wiped out in the first part of the 20th century by a fungus? You can read about it at this website, among other sites.

The story about trees dying due to global warming is only partially factual. It assumes that man-made global warming is a fact, and therefore implicitly accuses the reader of complicity in the murder of all those magnificent and stately trees. Aren't we terrible?

But we have to remember the lesson of Yellowstone National Park. For decades, the Forest Service protected the forest from fire. And when fires finally came in 1988, they were so intense that they killed the soil in some places. New growth is coming in (see this site), but not as quickly as wild forests where fires are not kept away from the forest for such a long time and therefore aren't as intense. Just because we can do something to Mother Nature, it doesn't mean we should do it. She gets cranky sometimes.

My other point is that we don't know nearly what we think we know. And a lot of what we know is wrong. Before Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, most scientists believed that something called "ether" or "aether" occupied the space between the planets. Whole systems of thought were built around the concept. Famous physicists tried to measure the aether's effect on light (check out this site or Google Michelson-Morley) and failed, and then went on to build even more elaborate explanations for their failure - because the aether really was there, you see.

Of course, there is no aether in space. So something that everybody knew about space in 1880 was totally wrong. What will we feel stupid about believing today when we learn something new tomorrow? Scientists once believed that atoms could not be split. Then we learned that they were made up of even smaller particles, which were then the smallest things in existence. Then we learned that there were even smaller things in the microverse which make electrons look immense by comparison. I don't doubt that the CERN accelerator will teach us lots of new things in the next decade or so.

Man-made global warming doesn't fall into the "believed whole-heartedly but totally false" category, but neither does it fall into the "fact" slot. I hope we can all be reasonable about such discussions and not adopt dogmatic positions which do not invite reasoned discourse.

I found an editorial written by the founder of the Weather Channel about global warming. The man is a meteorologist and businessman, not a politician.

Here it is.

Hope this informs. Mind you, it's not proof of anything, but I'd rather listen to a scientist than to a politician with an axe to grind or money to control.

Regardless of your stance on warming, most of the things that might cause it involve a waste of money, pollution, etc., all of which are undesirable for reasons unconnected to warming.

For example, brownouts are caused by too many energy-inefficient appliances trying to get power from a grid that doesn't have enough capacity; it isn't particularly difficult to reduce power consumption by improving insulation, swapping light bulbs with mini fluorescents, etc., and regardless of the effect on the environment, it will definitely reduce pollution, your electricity bill and the load on the grid.

Good point, Marcus, it does no one any good to get to the point of insisting that if something is said to be good for global warming (or whatever), then it must be utterly worthless. (Or vice versa; someone can dislike flourescent bulbs without wanting to kill the earth). Changes should be judged individually on a cost/benefit analysis. Where you get into disagreement is how much "avoiding global warming" counts as a benefit. But if something's got other benefits as well and small enough costs, then sure, go for it.

PJ

I'm old enough to remember the sixties, and I remember that here in Sweden at least, smoking was allowed pretty much everywhere. No, not inside stores. But there was smoking in movie theaters, and in about half the compartments of trains, and on airplanes, and in absolutely all restaurants and cafés. At most workplaces, the staff rooms had an impenetrable fog of smoke in them. I remember when I worked in the largest hospital in Malmö in the mid-seventies. All the nurses spent their breaks in a tiny little staff room, where the smoke was so thick that you could hardly breathe. Sometimes I snuck down into the non-smoking staff room in the basement. When I did, I would be there all on my own. And let's not even talk about what it was like when I was fifteen years old, and I did my 'school practice' (which was something everyone had to do) in the newsroom of a newspaper! No, you don't want to know how much smoke there was in there! And what about when I started working as a teacher in 1981? The first school I worked at consisted of several buildings, and the building I worked in smelled suspiciously mouldy. I can't tell you what it was like to come into the staff room in the morning, which smelled just awfully of mould and yesterday's tobacco smoke!

My point? My point is that as far back as the sixties, there were newspaper articles and warnings from scientists that smoking was dangerous. But you can't believe the chorus of denial that was heard from the smokers, and from those who thought they made money by accomodating to the smokers. Smoking isn't dangerous! This person's grandfather smoked all his life and he lived to be a hundred. You can die young even if you don't smoke - there was this young woman who got lung cancer at thirty even though she had never smoked. And what about all the exhaust fumes from traffic? Why should anyone stop smoking when the city air is going to poison them anyway? Lots of things are dangerous, so why do some people insist on picking on smoking?

I can remember a Readers Digest article on smoking from the 1960s. I specifically remember that the article advised non-smokers not to be afraid of the puffs of smoke that smokers blew in their faces. "The smoker gets most of the smoke inside himself, and he is relatively harmless," said the article.

Today there is very little doubt that tobacco is one of the major killers in the world. But for decades, the danger of smoking was pretty much denied. And for decades, extremely little was done to regulate smoking.

I think it is the same thing with climate change today. There is so much research insisting that climate change is real and that it is at least to some extent caused by humanity, but this is denied by a lot of people. My feeling is that a few decades from now, humanity's (partial) responsibility for climate change will be as generally acknowledged as the danger of smoking is acknowledged today.

Ann

Your opinions and feelings, Ann, while quite valid, are not facts. Yes, there are a number of scientists who insist that global warming is at least partially the result of human activity, while others insist that there is insufficient evidence to make that claim. In this regard, the debate over climate change does indeed parallel the one over smoking in the 1960's.

But here's a critical difference. The people who insisted that tobacco was not a major health risk were largely economically beholden to tobacco sales, either directly or indirectly. Those who refuse to join the human-caused global warming parade are generally not economically beholden to any anti-global warming entity. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Those who insist that mankind is destroying the Earth through global warming are largely the ones who have some economic reason to make sure that we think that it's our fault that the earth is heating up.

If the UN-sponsored think tanks and research organizations - along with the ones funded by the US government and American businessmen - all held news conferences this week and said something like, "Well, we know the earth has been getting warmer for the past few decades, but we can't prove that humans are responsible. We don't know how to stop climate change, and we don't know what would happen if we did stop it. It's just as likely that we'd make things a lot worse."

Their funding would be cut off, that's what would happen. I don't know of anyone who'll pay scientists to say "I don't know," even though that's often what the truth is, irrespective of the discipline in which they work. True, they know lots more than us non-scientists who only read extracts of the results they produce, but that doesn't mean that scientists have dropped an exclusive lariat around the truth. And scientists have bills to pay just like the rest of us.

My feeling - which is just as valid as anyone else's - is that in fifty years, people will look back at the 20th century and the early 21st and think, "Man, they were dumb! First they had the Piltdown Man, then all those holocaust deniers, the Y2K scare, and the global warming fakeout! How were they even smart enough to breathe regularly?"

I can't argue with you there, Terry. Of course my opinions and feelings are not facts. And of course I can't know what the future will be like.

But I have to disagree with you here:

If I get you correctly, you are saying that most people who blame climate change on humanity do so because they can make money for themselves by spreading this idea to others. Well, you may be right there. But I also get the impression that you are saying that those who reject the idea of humanity's responsibility for global warming do so from a mostly rational, objective and altruistic point of view, not because they are motivated by economic self-interest or greed.

To that I will only say that when the question about global warming has been discussed on these boards, some people here have actually said that it would cost too much to change the general behaviour of humanity in order to try to save the climate. In other words, these peoople have said, pretty much, that they don't want to help paying the cost of trying to steer humanity down a different path.

To me, that means that at least some people who oppose the idea of humanity's responsibility for climate change do so at least partly because of economic self-interest, not because of objectivity or altruism.

I worry about climate change and humanity's responsibility for it, and I don't think I stand to make any economic gains if there is a global effort to fight climate change.

Ann

Terry can speak for himself, but I'd add... yeah, of course, those motives are in the mix. We're talking about human beings here; not very many of us are as pure as the wind-driven snow. I think we're talking about degrees of dependency here, if that's the right word.

Scientist A has a job where he researches global warming, makes predictions, speaks at conferences (in Bali!), etc. If he sees trends in his research that contradict global warming theories, he has a choice: speak up and possibly lose his job, or just kind of abandon that line of research in favor of other areas. Scientists are human; most of us would have a hard time giving up lucrative careers for a matter of principle, especially if the data are unclear. Some are more cynical, I'm sure -- if there's a good scam in progress, why not cash in on it? Anyway, there are people who get paid to tell other people about global warming.

Then there are those of us who aren't getting compensated by any anti-global warming groups, but who don't want to spend twice as much as we currently do on groceries, considering that there's still reasonable doubt on the science.

Both economic self-interest. Are they really equivalent?

PJ

You are in error, Ann. Your statement above assumes that global warming is something which humans have either caused or have materially contributed to. This premise is false.

Here\'s another story about Al Gore and his dishonest global warming presentation. Be sure and watch the YouTube video linked within this story.

If humans are indeed causing global warming - or even significantly accelerating it - no one can prove it. You don't know that humans are causing global warming. You may believe it, but you don't know it, because there is no proof for the assertion.

Mind you, I'm not claiming that the assertion is untrue, only that it's unproven. And the more that Al Gore changes his presentation, the more we see scientists go on record saying that global warming is a farce, the more weather data that comes in each year which contradicts all the warming models, the less inclined I am to give this theory the time of day, much less accept it as a given.

I would also like to address the economic part of your statement, where you accuse those who disagree with you of being selfish and greedy. I personally don't agree with you at all. I do not oppose the global warming theorists on the grounds that "fixing the problem" will take money out of my pocket. I oppose the global warming theorists on the grounds that there is no problem. We've been having this debate for more than twenty years now, and if humans were causing global warming there would be a strong consensus in the scientific community. There is not. If we were burning up the planet, there would be reams of data with multiple corroboration across multiple disciplines. There is not. If we were drowning in our own CO2, we'd know it. And we aren't.

Your logic is flawed because your premise is faulty, Ann. The data does not support your assertion.

Terry, you told me that you know this:

You said that you don't believe that global warming is a problem, if it exists at all. And you say that there is no proof that global warming is a problem, or, if it exists, that it is man-made.

I googled 'global warming' and got 43 million hits. I googled 'global cooling' and got 900 000 hits. I googled 'climate scam' and got 3.3 million hits. No, there is no consensus here, of course, but people find a lot more reason to talk about global warming than about global cooling or climate scams.

Most certainly there are very many sites and very many scientists who claim that there is no global warming, or that humanity has nothing to do with the Earth's climate. But there seems to be many more sites and many more scientists who think that global warming is real, and that humanity has something to do with it.

I know you are critical of Wikipedia, but I still found it interesting that Wikipedia definitely seems to come out in favor of the existence of global warming and humanity's partial responsibility for it:

Wikipedia on global warming

I also found a site managed by a branch of the U.S. Government, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The way I read what they say about what we know, scientifically, about climate change, they are saying that we still don't understand many aspects of climate change, but that we have very good reasons to believe that humanity is contributing to global warming:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the scientific knowledge about climate change

So while I have to agree that I myself don't know if global warming is happening at all or if it man-made, I have to counter that you don't have more or better knowledge about it than I do, and therefore you can't say that global warming isn't happening or that it isn't man-made.

Of course, the fact that there seems to be more believers in than skeptics of global warming does not in itself prove that global warming is real or man-made. History is full of paradigm shifts, where the existing best science was proved to be completely wrong. However, the fact that you belong to the minority in a scientific debate does not in itself prove that you are right.

I made my point about smoking earlier because I think there is an interesting similarity between smoking cigarettes and releasing greenhouse gases and smoke into the atmosphere. In both cases we are talking about producing smoke that wasn't there before and exposing other life forms to that smoke. Like I said in my post on smoking, for the longest time it was denied that cigarette smoking could harm the smoker, much less the passive smoker. This was denied even though there was a lot of circumstantial evidence to the contrary. But in my opinion, just as it makes perfect sense that cigarette smoke is dangerous to the human body, so there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that humanity hurts the Earth's biosphere by releasing large amounts of man-made greenhouse gases, soot particles and other pollutants into the atmosphere.

Ann

Ann, do you remember a few years back when so many people were sure Y2K would be the end of civilization or the world? And what about the current 2012 thing? I got 619,000 results for 2012 doomsday, 887,000 for 2012 end of the world, and 1,320,000 for 2012 predictions. Does this mean the world is going to end in 2012? I seriously doubt it. Just because you can find tons of websites about something doesn't mean it's true. All it says is that a lot of people are talking about it.

Tara

Absolutely. And I remember Y2K, but it didn't scare me all that much. The general sense of worry was nothing near what the persistent and long-lasting worry regarding global warming has been, not the way I remember it. Besides, if Y2K happened, it would be a one-time thing, and hopefully there would be a relatively quick and easy fix for it.

Like I said, the simple fact that people talk a lot about something doesn't make it a serious problem. But when so many scientists worry about global warming, you won't have me saying that it's all just so much hogwash or that all those scientists are only motivated by the prospect of making a bunch of money for themselves.

Again, scientists have been known to be wrong so many times before. Today's scientists don't know nearly enough about how the Earth's climate works to be able to say with any certainty that the climate is really changing, or that humanity is responsible.

But so many of them are worried. And if you picture all the chimneys and exhaust fumes in the world as humanity's collective smoking, then I think it is more than reasonable to see the Earth as a patient that is growing ever sicker because of the effects of passive smoking.

Ann

Well... I guess we can't argue with that.

Actually, while I was googling, I did come across mention of a greenhouse gas that sounded very alarming. Ever heard of DHMO?

It is often used
I mean, I first heard about this 15 years ago and *still* the stuff is legal? There have been efforts in the New Zealand parliament to do something about this (they're very environmental-minded) but so far nothing's come of it.

PJ

p.s., I forgot to add links. The stuff I quoted is from here

A good site to start with actually would be the DHMO Research Division website.

At the weekend, I watched one of a series of programmes called "Explore..." They have a small group of reporters doing little reports on various aspects of a particular country each week. Areas off the beaten track. So far, they've been absolutely fascinating. This week it was a small group of countries in Africa.

One of the reports was about a tribe who are actually living with the consequences of the fact that the climate in their part of the world has changed drastically in the last few years.

What was once a fertile region is rapidly becoming desert. A group of emaciated men sat in a despondent circle and spoke of how soon they may have to give up their way of life because they are finding it harder and harder to survive.

They now all carry machine-guns. To protect their small herd of cattle from other, raiding tribes. The tribes used to co-exist peacefully, but as the climate has changed, resources have become a source of conflict. Raids on their cattle are frequent; gun battles to protect them occur almost daily. This week, one man said, they killed 6 raiders, lost three of their own. But they saved their cattle. This time.

A charity paid to have a large man-made reservoir of water built - but as it's now the only source of fresh water in the area, it's also become a focus for conflict and war among the tribes as they fight for control of it.

Watching and listening to these people it made me ashamed that here in the West we have the luxury to talk about and debate climate change as an abstract theory.

Some in the world aren't so fortunate.

LabRat

Just because you weren't scared and I wasn't scared doesn't mean that there weren't a bunch of people scared that it would herald the end of history, or civilization or some such rot. There seems to be a number of people who are truly concerned about 2012 being what Y2K was supposed to be.

That would be the point. We don't know enough to say with any certainty that humanity is responsible. OTOH, we can say with certainty that the climate changes. That's a recorded fact. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had ice ages, it would always have been like it is now.

That's a different topic. Pollution is nasty. It's responsible for making people sick and causes all manner of health problems. However, a single volcano releases more CO2 and other greenhouse gases than all of humanity has in all of history. Go measure what any volcano that's erupting right now is producing and you'll see what I mean.

I'd say more, but I've got to get my daughter to a dental appointment to deal with a chipped tooth.

Tara

Tara, are you seriously comparing the 2012 thing (which I had most definitely never heard of until you mentioned it in your post) with the warnings about climate change? I googled 2012 to find out what on earth it was all about, and as far as I can figure out, it has something to do with some cryptic utterance made by Nostradamus some four hundred and fifty years ago. So tell me, Tara, are you seriously comparing a prophecy by Nostramus with the warnings about climate change made by a majority of today's scientific community? Do you think these two warning bells deserve the same attention?

I'm going to return to the question about smoking. Like I said, the dangers of smoking were denied with the help of arguments much like yours. Why pick on smoking, when so many other things are dangerous? Even if you never smoke you may slip in the tub and fall and break your neck. Or you can choke on a chicken bone. A friend of mine visited a stand-up comedy club in London in the summer of 2002, and she told me afterwards that the main joke had been that America should not worry about another terror attack, because more Americans die because they step on rakes. (Well, you know, when you step on a rake the handle flies up and hits you on the head, and you die.)

This is my point. It's ridiculous to say that we shouldn't worry about smoking because people may slip in the tub anyway. It is ridiculous to say that we shouldn't worry about terror attacks because people may step on rakes and get hit on the head and die anyway. And it is ridiculous to say that we shouldn't worry about climate change, because the world might end in 2012 anyway, because Nostradamus said so - well, maybe he said so - back in the sixteenth century.

I don't have much to add, except that the opinons of today's scientific community mean more to me than a prophecy by Nostradamus.

Ann

No, I'm comparing the hysterical reactions surrounding the two subjects. IMO, anytime you get a hysterical knee-jerk reaction to something, especially something that there just isn't enough scientific evidence for (such as human caused global climate change or 2012, which also claims to have scientific reasoning behind it) that tells me that reason has flown out the window.

Tara

Isn't there supposed to be some kind of sunspot activity in 2012 that will destroy all communications without any notice or something?

I know I read something about that...

Carol