Arctic ice melting at 'amazing' speed

[doodab]

But we arent living in the past. Population is now concentrated in densely packed cities, that are unable to support their own food needs and people routinely jet around the world. A pandemic would spread far quicker than has ever been possible, food, energy would soon run out / fail. Shortly people would start to fight over the limited supplies and law and order would collapse.

Unless it's a disease that we cannot treat and cannot contain that is both highly infectious and has a high fatality rate it's not going to kill half the worlds population.

A better candidate might be a regional nuclear war that kicked up a lot of dust and disrupted global food supplies. Some estimates reckon that could kill a billion or more people.

Which begs the question as to whether climate change, which might be equally damaging, is worth worrying about just as much as nuclear war and infectious disease?

[mudskipper]

Unless it's a disease that we cannot treat and cannot contain that is both highly infectious and has a high fatality rate it's not going to kill half the worlds population.

A better candidate might be a regional nuclear war that kicked up a lot of dust and disrupted global food supplies. Some estimates reckon that could kill a billion or more people.

Which begs the question as to whether climate change, which might be equally damaging, is worth worrying about just as much as nuclear war and infectious disease?

I think viruses are cleverer than us.

[EternalOptimist]

I think viruses are cleverer than us.

You will never find a virus that has been educated beyond his intelligence, unlike some humans.
ask SasGuru what he thinks

[mudskipper]

You will never find a virus that has been educated beyond his intelligence, unlike some humans.
ask SasGuru what he thinks

Dr Virus, I presume?

[IR35FanClub]

of dear
this fellow is supporting an opening thread about a seven year observation 12-07 - 05

then doesnt like others looking at a 13 or fifteen year series.


what a travesty

I missed this one.

a) I have made no references to anything to do with supporting the sea ice statistics, only the subject of climate change in general.

b) sea ice records don't go back 10-15 years...
Measurement of sea ice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Which I presume is why Hansen made the comment - unprecedented for 1500 years.

Can I ask some questions of those involved in this debate....

a) What is your driving force in your belief. Whether that is proAGW or the contrarian view?
b) Do you think you could change your view point?
c) Do you think climate change is an opportunity or a threat to humanity?
d) do you think dealing with climate change (based on accepted norms of what we need to do) is an opportunity or a threat?

For the record:
a) I got involved in the mess of doing EPCs for HIPs back in 2007. I was thinking of it as an alternative career to IT [but never did it as too many people signed up like lemmings and the bottom dropped out the market, though it got me to realise settingup a training company is a great way to makemoney ;-)]. Just as I was thinking of shelling out £3,500 to do a course in energy assessment Channel 4 showed the Great Global Warming Swindle documentary. I thought, hmmmn, if I want to start working in an industry that is mandated by government policy, I better check the science behind it. I spent about 4 months reading as much as I could on the subject, a lot of hot debates were had on C4 forums at the time - heavy weight climate scientists from both camps were chipping in, and the usual idiotic comments from the general public - its the sun and volcanoes. It turned out the swindle was the documentary. Al Gore [the knob] also made his film that year, but it's main message that has stuck with me is that maybe the big conspiracy is not climate scientists wanting to control the population, but big business wanting to keep doing what they do free of government intervention. After all climate scientists have to beg to get funding where as energy companies are rolling in money, but only if we keep buying their product. If they can put an article here, a semi-scientific paper there, it only takes 1 or 2 dissenters, to cause enough doubt in the public mind they'll challenge all of the science as bogus. Which is still the status quo.

b) Yes. Show me some evidence, not just people knocking the way things are done to sell another book, generate traffic to their blog, or to further the aims of their pay masters and I'll start to take note. But for every climate conversation/argument I get involved in, the same types of argument come up over and over. something along the lines of 1 person has said this, or such and such has said that, and can you prove it to me without me having to do any reading. [hell no]. So ALL the evidence and science is assumed to be bogus as naturally we are skeptical of new concepts. But it's ridiculous, it's like trying to frame an argument along the line of saying "the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are not a real band", because some bloke on a wrote a blog article saying "the red hot chilli peppers are not a band as the 7th song on their last album used a synthesiser".

c) Climate change itself - it not a threat as in its not a Armageddon event or the end of the world , but it isn't an opportunity either. I would have to describe it as a risk. As in something that could happen which would cost more to deal with later than it does now. If you've not seen this video before - it kinds of explains my thinking. As in not doing anything has more risk than doing something...

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See - YouTube .

I just think the title should be "The worlds most cheesy man present a logical argument for doing something". Not the worlds most terrifying video (surely that's Paranormal Activity)

d) Definitely an opportunity. Why use oil and gas and coal. When there's enough sun falls on the planet every day to run our energy infrastructure for a year. Capturing and using it has to be a nice little earner for someone. I had some figures for a presentation I did once(factual ones) and we burn the equivalent of 13,000 times the earths biomass cover each year. As in, we inherited the worlds mineral deposits of several billions, and we are just pissing them all away. (Which makes me think we haven't mentioned peak oil yet. LOL.) I'm a big fan of techonology, but to much of it is vapour ware. We need to roll out a massive home insulation and solar thermal program here. But insulation isn't sexy and visible on peoples roof so has little snob value.

The funny thing is - despite being in general agreement that climate change is happening and we need to do something, I've made very little change to my own lifestyle. I believe the little bits that people try are futile until we tackle the major issues of replacing oil burning with electric (road based induction chargers) and coal burning with solar thermal (and inter-seasonal heat storage). Planes will always need liquid fuels, but they can be synthesised. What I'm saying is that it needs to be tackled at source, by replacing CO2 intensive generation with alternatives, and to replace heavy energy consuming items with efficient ones. Though, I'll still want my electric car to have 4wd and 300kW power output. In the mean time Vauxhalls Ampera seems a good buy if you have £30k (on life time costs), and must have a new car, but me I'm hankering after an Audi TT 3.2V6 DSG ;-)

Even China is doing better than we are. And will probably be selling Thorium reactors to us in a few years if we don't pull our fingers out.

[doodab]

I think viruses are cleverer than us.

Well you don't see them trashing the planet or wasting their lives arguing about things on the internet, so you may well be right.

[VectraMan]

Well you don't see them trashing the planet or wasting their lives arguing about things on the internet, so you may well be right.

And all the dolphins do is muck about in the water having a good time. So clearly more intelligent than man, and they don't seem overly concerned about global warming so why are we?

[Scoobos]

I'll play :

a) What is your driving force in your belief. Whether that is proAGW or the contrarian view?

My own personal experiences then followed up by getting involved in a couple of events in particular and reading up and learning from affected people. I'm no expert at all, but believe in listening to people and think that the western culture as a whole has an "I know better" mentality that's unjustified. Unlike many who combat this, I've been (living, not holidaying) to the remote communities of the Yukon, Alaska, Labrador & Newfoundland, Northern Europe, Australia, Indonesia etc ... It's on the fringes that you see the biggest changes, and everywhere I go (back in the mid 2000's) everyone was saying the same thing "Strange for this time of year" - this has continued for years and is getting progressively worse.

In my view, if a qualified scientist or doctor says "this disaster might happen and might be caused by eating yellow food" then I'd rather not eat yellow food and be wrong in 10 years, than continue to eat , or perhaps as I suspect some people do, consume EVEN MORE yellow food (Clarkson) - and then have the whole thing fall over and set us back 100 years.

b) Do you think you could change your view point?

I think I could yes, in fact I think I have moved more to the centre of the argument (Carbon trading gets my goat). The main thing to change me was the fact that this whole subject moves us away from other, bigger, environmental concerns - such as the pollution of our food supplies and damage to biodiversity in the name of profit. I don't think it’s going too far to say that our mass consumerism is making us parasitic on the planet and externalisation is killing people every single day. Big examples would be Old Crow in the Yukon, Union Carbide, BP etc.

c) Do you think climate change is an opportunity or a threat to humanity?

Both, but I also think it shows how we are not interested in working together at this stage, unless there’s profit. This saddens me. Corps such as shell buying all the prototype alternative fuel technologies doesn’t help either.

d) do you think dealing with climate change (based on accepted norms of what we need to do) is an opportunity or a threat?

Both again, but anything that requires a certain growing section of society to curb their lifestyle, even 10% will be met with big objections.

I used to be passionately involved in environmental issues, but I don't think the average person with power in the UK gives two hoots about anything that will occur outside his lifespan, even with his own kids. (e.g. people having kids who put them in care/nursery within 8 weeks of birth, to carry on with their careers).

<end depressing stuff>

[pjclarke]

(a)What is your driving force in your belief. Whether that is proAGW or the contrarian view?

Well, belief is not quite the right word. I'd prefer 'understanding'. I guess my 'belief' is that it is not possible to make an objective assessment of the scientific evidence and conclude anything other than the global temperature is rising more rapidly than it has done for as long as we know about, that human activity is largely responsible (possibly wholly responsible), that the trend is likely to continue with serious, potentially catastrophic, risks.

The debate in the media and on some blogs misrepresents the scientific debate for example by pointing to the 2 or 3 dissenting qualified scientists or the single 'resignation' from the IPCC out of thousands of contributors. Scientific debates are played out in the academic literature and professional societies, not on blogs, and in these forums the debate about whether AGW is a reality is pretty much over and has moved on to how we mitigate. So, 100% of professional scientific organisations have issued a statement in line with the IPCC conclusions and when Naomi Oreskes surveyed the climate change peer-reviewed literature in 2004 she found

928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change


(b) Do you think you could change your view point?

Absolutely. The projected temperature increases are dependent on feedbacks enhancing the greenhouse effect, mainly the ability of a warmer atmosphere to hold more water vapour, which gives more greenhouse (and so on). If the models have the feedback wrong, or there is an undiscovered negative feedback then we may get more like +1.5C in my children's lifetime, rather than the more scary >+2C. Also the IPCC put the likelihood of the increase being largely anthropogenic at 'very likely'. In IPCC speak this translates to a probability of 90%. So they estimate a one in ten chance that the warming is natural. I put the probability lower than that, but this being science we'll never get 100%. However, the joint academies of science wrote in 2005 ...

The scientific understanding of climate change is now
sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. It
is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they
can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term
reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions

http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFile.../2005/9649.pdf

(c) Do you think climate change is an opportunity or a threat to humanity?

Well, the WHO estimated climate change is already a factor in 300,000 deaths annually, or about 2 9/11s every week, so for those individuals and their families it is (was) definitely a threat. On a more macro level all the economists who have studied the issue seem to have concluded that spending money on mitigation now saves a lot more money later. From a selfish point of view, I suspect the impacts for wealthy countries at our latitude may actually be positive - increased crop yields - in the short term. But eight out of the 10 largest cities are coastal, for example and something like 20% of Bangladeshis live less than 1m above current sea level. That's a lot of potential refugees.

The planet has been this warm and warmer in the past - however we now have billions of people, and supporting infrastructure and agriculture that developed ('evolved' if you will) during the climate regime of the Holocene. It now seems likely that we are going to change that regime...

Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to forcings, i.e. imposed changes of the
planet’s energy balance. Both fast and slow feedbacks turn out to be
predominately positive. As a result, our climate has the potential for large
rapid fluctuations. Indeed, the Earth, and the creatures struggling to exist on the
planet, have been repeatedly whipsawed between climate states. No doubt this
rough ride has driven progression of life via changing stresses, extinctions and
species evolution. But civilization developed, and constructed extensive
infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now
almost 12 000 years in duration. That period is about to end.

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/...sen_etal_2.pdf

(d) Do you think dealing with climate change (based on accepted norms of what we need to do) is an opportunity or a threat?

Ah but my position is that the 'accepted norms' are woefully inadequate. Lonnie Thompson wrote that we will 'adapt mitigate or suffer'. Had the issue been addressed seriously, oh, a decade or more ago then we might have limited the total rise to +2C, a point at which runaway global warming becomes more likely. But, thanks in part to the denial industry we've left it too late and I suspect we'll end up doing more of the latter. Of course there are opportunities in moving to a low-carbon economy, the technologies are available now, what is lacking is political will. I've also made minor modifications to my lifestyle - driving a hybrid, one medium-haul flight a year - but these are the proverbial farts in a hurricane, rapid changes is national and international policy on energy generation, transport, construction etc are required - in fact a 90% reduction in emissions is feasible without damaging our lifestyles unduly - but the response of Governments around the world is wholly inadequate compared to what the science is telling us.

[EternalOptimist]

Oh dear

the independant research cited in the OP now appears to have been set and driven by Greenpeace


not so independant and scientific after all then