Clearly you haven't been reading the press or even UN speeches
Christopher Flavin, Commentary: Reconciling Poverty, Sustainability, and the Financial Crisis WorldChanging TeamOctober 1, 2008 2:02 PM
The following is adapted from a speech given by Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin at a high-level United Nations event on September 25, 2008.
Across large areas of the Indian subcontinent, diminishing supplies of fresh water are undermining food production and leaving people with inadequate drinking water.
And from the Arctic to the Equator, the world's climate is changing rapidly - and undermining ecological systems on every continent, from forests to oceans and fresh water. Many scientists believe that a dangerous climate tipping point may be near-unleashing a runaway greenhouse effect that would feed on itself for centuries to come.
The bottom line is clear: the inefficient, carbon-intensive, throwaway economy that was so successful in an earlier era is not suited to today's world. Our planet in now in mortal danger of an ecological collapse whose human impact would dwarf the financial collapse the world is now seeking to avoid.
Are you saying that an ecological collapse is not going to kill much of life on earth?
Ecological collapse would necessitate a "stressing" of the system, surely many biological groupings will die out. No different from many other known
mass extinctions in geologic history. And we all know that life did not end in most of those.
Bosh, the economic damage to the earth by a doubling of CO2 will only be 1.5% of the world's GDP. We will see more loss than that in the current downturn.
I will definitely have to read this. I am from the Midwest in the U.S. I am from an agricultural state the likes of which is almost unrivaled on the planet earth. It is an amazing thing to behold. America currently produces a huge amount of its agricultural output from my current home-state of California, which, by all estimates, is
decidedly not optimum in terms of water availability (it's main advantage is longer or double growing seasons). It should not match the state of my birth but in some cases it does. It is largely a synthetic agricultural system. The key being that when water issues become a major factor and make California's agricultural system completely unsustainable (as it most assuredly will sooner or later), then my home state can still sustain a major agricultural output. It was a breadbasket long before California "forced" nature into being one. It will be one again, unless we shift the "hardiness zones" significantly northward.
I should think the large-scale collapse of
food crop infrastructure in the Midwestern U.S. would result in significantly more impact than a mere 1.5% GDP.
But look even further, we do have the potential of sea level rise and a huge portion of our population is currently on the peripheries of this continent. Large-scale migrations from shore to inland must surely impact our economy. Couple that with the fact that I currently live in Southern California. We won't be able to move the millions upon millions of people just a few miles inland from here...that's a desert. We will move them hundreds upon hundreds of miles inland. Again, a massive stressor on habitable lands.
Indeed the 100th Meridian is, if I recall
Cadillac Desert correctly, kind of the demarcation of what is the eastern "productive and agriculturally robust" landscape with regards to water availability and the "high plains and deserts" of the west.
We are not "optimized" in the U.S. Our economy is robust, but massive shifts even in "growing zones" and "population densities" will, I should think, affect more than a mere 1.5% GDP.
But again, I have not yet read the report you linked.
I wouldn't worry about the melting of Antarctica.
I would:
Recent Sea-Level Contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
Andrew Shepherd1 and Duncan Wingham2*
After a century of polar exploration, the past decade of satellite measurements has painted an altogether new picture of how Earth's ice sheets are changing.
As global temperatures have risen, so have rates of snowfall, ice melting, and glacier flow. Although the balance between these opposing processes has varied considerably on a regional scale,
data show that Antarctica and Greenland are each losing mass overall. Our best estimate of their combined imbalance is about 125 gigatons per year of ice, enough to raise sea level by 0.35 millimeters per year. This is only a modest contribution to the present rate of sea-level rise of 3.0 millimeters per year. However, much of the loss from Antarctica and Greenland is the result of the flow of ice to the ocean from ice streams and glaciers, which has accelerated over the past decade. In both continents, there are suspected triggers for the accelerated ice dischargesurface and ocean warming, respectivelyand, over the course of the 21st century, these processes could rapidly counteract the snowfall gains predicted by present coupled climate models.
(
SOURCE)
(Emphasis added)
I am fully aware that icesheet loss on the water will not result in sea level rise, but clearly the ice is not simply being lost on the water of the Ross Sea, but also from land.
The press doesn't tell you (and neither do the global warming hysteriacs) that we have had record ice extent in the southern Hemisphere (read that Antarctica) within the past 2 years. See the picture below. It is the Sept Ice extent in million sq km for Antarctica. WHERE OH WHERE IS THE RISK OF ANTARCTICA MELTING?
It is a matter more of paying attention to the signal now, while it is smaller, that we might be able to stop the problem as it grows larger.
I am not speaking of climate models. I don't care about climate models. Models are models. They are not data. The data, the temperature data does not allow us to know what is happening temperature wise.
All models are best fits to the data, and while there may be uncertainty around any data set, presumably a good "Gauge R&R" helps us understand the source of variability. Models are not merely "black boxes". Each model can, if properly populated, yield information about the validity of the input variables. That is where
variance component analysis comes in handy.
That makes you a believer in GW. One of the things I learned in my transition from YEC to Theistic evolutionist was that one places trust in a certain group of people and then one ceases checking the data. We all become believers. We should always have scepticism and check the data and go with the data.
I could not agree with you more. However, I will place the caveat that the data is out there and can be verified. I am impressed by the
monolithic nature of the response of the vastness of Climate Research scientists, the majority of whom appear to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming. More than mere global warming, but anthropogenic.
Again, to veer back to statistics, with a large enough sample the Central Limit Theorem leads me to believe the majority of scientists who study this are likely
not coordinating on a massive error. But, there is always a possibility. It just becomes less likely.
In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's
climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (
4)].
IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements.(SOURCE)
I, in my ignorance of details on this, must rely to some extent on the climate scientists on this. Some of whom I've had the pleasure to meet or work at the same facility as them.
But you are correct, we as people are inherently lazy and often rely on the work of others. As a chemist I daily utilize the work of the quantum mechanics revolutionaries, but I've never attempted to "solve" the Schroedinger Equation or assess the validity of many of the fundamentals. I am, however, able to do my work quite handily. The basics are solid. Indeed, were they not, this would have been hammered out previously.
I've yet to meet scientists who agree on much of anything
without a fight over it. That's why I like the robustness of science.
