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

Found a link! Not the same one I saw before, but still.

From Andrew Bolt, in the Adelaide Advertiser

Excerpt (since almost nobody follows the links <g>) -- emphasis mine:

PJ

ETA: Okay this (from the Age) is the article I first mentioned. Excerpt:

By the way, I don't know much about this, but the mention of "bushfire season" interests me. If this sort of thing happens every year, then why weren't they better prepared?

Thank you for admitting that Americans are relatively insular. That is very gracious of you. I agree that the 'live and let live' approach has a lot to recommend if. The problem is that when it comes to climate change we have only one world, only one atmosphere and only one biosphere, and we are all dependent our planet, our atmosphere and our biosphere to survive. If we interfere with our atmosphere and our biosphere, there can really be no 'live and let live' approach. Think of it like this. Imagine that we are all locked inside one big room. Suddenly you find that somebody is pumping a huge amount of carbon monoxide into this room. The keep pumping more and more and more CO inside this enclosed space. You can decide that you don't care about that, because you are not pumping any carbon monoxide into the room, so it's no concern of yours. The problem is that everyone who is locked inside this room will have to breathe the same air. You can't say 'live and let live' here, because when there is enough CO in the air no one can live there any more. We will all start suffocating. And that is why the fate of our atmosphere and out biosphere ultimately is the concern of everybody.

As for that link you showed us, I don't think that the person behind it sounded very serious or objective. These are some of the words and expressions he used:

He made this claim without showing any proof backing it up:

He made this claim without explaining what 'worse conditions' he was referring to:

He made this sweeping accusation with extremely little proof to back it up:

He twisted the observation that no single 'weather catastrophe' can be certifiably attributed to climate change, and turned it into an argument that the horrible fires in Australia can not be attributed to climate change:

All in all, I find his argumentation lousy.

Without a doubt there are parts of the world today where the climate is changing in a way that bodes ill for people, plants and animals that try to live there. And when the heat and drought get severe enough, it is very difficult to prevent fires.

Ann

That's the sound of my head hitting the wall.

Ann, you can't prove that humans are causing global warming. No one can. No one can prove that the warming is a bad thing. After all, we know the global climate has never remained constant for very long, at least as geologists reckon time. I just don't understand why you write these posts with the assumption that humans are either a major cause or the major cause of global warming.

There's an Antarctic ice shelf gone? Fine. It hasn't been there since the earth came into being, so it can't be necessary for life to continue. Does it prove the globe is getting warmer? It proves that the southern pole is getting warmer. Is it our fault? Don't know. Is it a bad thing? Don't know that either. Can we stop it? Don't know. Should we stop it? No way to tell for sure. If we do stop it - or even reverse it - who's to say we wouldn't make things far worse?

Conclusion? Blaming humans for global climate change is not unlike blaming robins for the coming of spring. Ever notice that? Whenever the robins come back, the weather gets warm. If we could only hold back those pesky robins, we could cool off all of North America! And then we can start working on the grackles in Europe!

Has it occurred to anyone that it's summer in the southern hemisphere? Every summer the ice shelves break off. So what? They have done that for a very long time but we haven't had satellites up until recently so we could tell when it happened.

Right now it's winter in the north -- and the ice is getting thicker and covering more area in the north. When summer comes up here, it will decrease again. So what? That's what happens in summer. It's called *seasons*.

Nan

They were unprepared for bushfire season because this one was so much worse than usual, in the same way that 2008 had more flooding than usual in the US. It always happens, but when it reaches the 300 year floodplain people are caught unprepared.

Elisabeth
who is too lazy to log the big guy out

Terry, you are writing your posts with the assumption that global warming is not humanity's fault.

Take a look at this graph:



This graph shows the exponential growth of the human population. But not only is the human population growing in a way that would have alarmed us if we saw it in another species, but it is also true that, on average, each individual human consumes more and more, ever more than our ancestors did as individuals. So there are ever more of us and each one of us consumes ever more.

One day last September was the 'global overshoot day'. That is the day when humanity has 'used up' the resources that the Earth can naturally produce during a year. For the rest of the year, we live on borrowed resources.

The recent economic crisis happened, to a large extent, because people borrowed more than they could pay back.

When are we going to pay back to the Earth what we are borrowing from it? How will we pay back our debt? And what happens if we don't pay up?

Terry, you are assuming that humanity has no adverse impact on the Earth, so you advocate doing nothing to lessen our human footprint on the Earth.

I have certainly never claimed that humanity is the only factor that affects the climate of the Earth. Making such a claim would be utter folly, since it can so extremely easily be disproved.

But just because there are other factors affecting the Earth and our climate, it doesn't follow that we can play any irresponsible games we want to, as if our own actions don't matter. Would you tell your kids that it is all right to play with fire if other kids are playing with fire anyway?

Yesterday, when it was snowy here in Malmö and I was going to take the bus instead of cycling, a young woman stood next to me waiting for the bus and blew smoke in my face. I asked her to please blow her smoke in another direction. She replied that it didn't matter what she did with her smoke, because there was heavy traffic all around us and the air was polluted anyway.

Why don't we all start smoking? And then let's tell our doctors about it. Let's tell our doctors that we have decided to smoke because it doesn't matter what kind of junk we breathe, since the air is polluted anyway. Do you think our doctors will agree with our assessment?

Terry, can you really say that the human population can grow almost exponentially, and the average consumption of resources per individual human being can grow, too, and still the Earth, its atmosphere and biosphere will remained unaffected by our presence, our consumption of resources and our deposit of waste products?

Ann

Ann wrote:

Uh, no, I never wrote that. And I don't believe that. You are putting words in my mouth.

I'm sorry you got smoke blown in your face, Ann, but you can't blame me for that woman's faulty reasoning. I'm pretty sure I've never talked with her about this subject.

Ann also wrote:

Once again, you are putting words in my mouth. I never said this! You are making a mistake when you assume that because I don't agree with everything you say, I must therefore take the view which is the polar opposite from yours. There's a middle ground on this subject whether you admit it or not.

Let me also respond to your graph on human population growth with this website. And here's another one on declining fertility rates. The thrust of this research shows that we're still filling up the planet, but at a slower rate. And in developed countries like the US, the median age is moving upwards. And senior citizens have a pretty low birth rate.

There are two basic reasons for this. The first and most pervasive is that people are living longer. The second reason is that younger people are having fewer children. This site tells us that many nations in Europe actually have negative fertility rates. (The optimum rate for zero population growth is 2.1 children per couple, which allows for a minimal pre-reproductive period death rate.) And population growth in the US is credited largely (but not solely) to immigration, both legal and illegal.

Accusing me of holding extreme views because I disagree with you is - oh, how did you put it in an earlier post?

If you don't believe that humanity is even significantly responsible for, say, creating the conditions necessary for those devastating wildfires in Australia or for a horrible ongoing drought in large parts of Africa, why would you think that we should concern ourselves with how we treat the Earth?

Maybe you think we should do things not to lessen climate change, but to lessen other effects that humanity may have on the Earth. If so, I would be interested to hear what you think we should be doing and what problems we should be addressing, Terry.

Ann

The reason why so many 'disasterous' events are so bad is because people don't wisely live in harmony with their environment.

If you live in a floodplain, expect to get water damage. Live in a heavily forested area, and expect to get some fire damage. Fire is one of God's ways of allowing some species of evergreens to germinate cause the fire allows the pinecones to open properly. (When I find a link for that I will post it...but I know that is true)

'Disasters' are how God cleans out some areas for new growth.

I admit that we often cause our own problems, but God has made the Earth to be wonderfully resilient.

James

Ann, that's a great graph you've posted showing the population increase. Can you find one showing the global temperature patterns over the same time span to compare global temperature to population?

Well, I found some Wikipedia graphs. Here is one showing average annual global temperature from 1880 to, I think, 2007. The last few years have been slightly colder than the years around the turn of the millennium, but if you are to believe this graph, temperatures are still very high. Note, too, that this period, 1880-2000, is the time when the human population really exploded.

Here is another graph showing what parts of the world are hardest hit by global warming. You can see that parts of Antarctica are heating up very badly. No wonder ice shelves are disappearing. Scandinavia is getting a lot warmer too, but because of our cool climate most people here are not complaining. But many of our trees, used to colder temperatures, are dying.

Here is a graph showing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 1960 and, I think, 2008.

This graph shows the solar activity between 1975 and 2005. You can see that the Sun is getting less active.

This graph shows the reconstructed temperature on the Earth between the years 0 and 2000 AD. As you can see, it was generally warm during the Middle Ages and cold during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

What about the climate on the Earth during the next one hundred years? Here are a few predictions. Will they come true? No one knows. But perhaps we shouldn't say that just because we don't know if these predictions will come true, we don't need to worry about them.

Ann

Ann, the point of my posting wasn't to convince you with brilliant argumentation, but merely to show that the idea that environmentalists contributed to the danger was not, as you seemed to suspect, my own idea.

I tend to believe it, because of pre-existing biases, but I'll be the first to admit I know almost nothing of the facts on the ground.

I'm looking for a link re: the Antarctic shelf, but in the meantime ran across this fascinating comparison -- why do we assume climate models will be any more accurate than financial ones turned out to be?

Excerpt:

I'm just saying.

PJ

Just a little tangent here, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) just reported that they were underestimating the level of arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles (500,000 square kilometers).

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2009/021809.html

That's a lot of ice to just miss, isn't it? They're blaming it on satellite problems and sensor drift.

Tara

ps, just for reference, the state of California is 163,707 square miles and the nation of France is 211,207 square miles. Size of the states of the US

I thought it was appropriate to post this here.

YouTube: Australia mourns fire victims

Ann