Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

The report covers the last 200 years. Earth is over 4 billion years old and there is evidence that life has been around for 3.7 billion now and it too the report's authors 4 decades to unveil nothing, probably because they focused on a tenth of a percent of humanity's existence... We have been around for 200 thousand years. We haven't become extinct even though there were some global calamities as described e.g. in the Bible. Climate change has been around throughout Earth's history and I am sure that humanity has had nothing to do with it. Now, we may indeed contribute a bit, but to say that climate change might mean our extinction is just silly.

As to Stavros, he can fuck off no matter whether he is indeed an idiot who cannot understand simple things, like that the UK's government has changed a lot since Thatcher's demise, or some sour old twat born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a very long butt-plug up his stinking arse.

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

The report covers the last 200 years. Earth is over 4 billion years old and there is evidence that life has been around for 3.7 billion now and it too the report's authors 4 decades to unveil nothing, probably because they focused on a tenth of a percent of humanity's existence... We have been around for 200 thousand years. We haven't become extinct even though there were some global calamities as described e.g. in the Bible. Climate change has been around throughout Earth's history and I am sure that humanity has had nothing to do with it. Now, we may indeed contribute a bit, but to say that climate change might mean our extinction is just silly.

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This first paragraph is sort of topical and philosophical so I might as well speculate too.

I don't see how there's any imperative for the Earth to continue to be habitable. The human body has all sorts of negative feedback mechanisms in order to withstand shocks and buffer itself against them and there are good reasons these have developed. Is there any reason that our climate should tend towards stability in the same way and not actually have more positive feedback mechanisms that compound whatever changes we induce?

At least, that's my intuition on it though I could be wrong...there was some discussion of various ways that equilibrium might be sustained between organisms that expel oxygen and those that expel carbon dioxide, but what human beings have done in creating civilization is so external to this system. Organisms can manipulate their environments, but there has to be a difference between a beaver building a dam and millions of pounds of concrete being poured and all of the industrial processes we've developed.

Those are my thoughts. What we've done is not matched by the activities of other organisms. There's also no imperative for the environment to sustain human life. Plenty of other planets do not. So even without this report and its attempts not just to document temperature changes but downstream changes in extreme weather events and other disruptions to various ecosystems, there's intuitively no reason to believe what we're doing could not lead to harm.

If you say believe that there is no imperative for the environment to sustain human life, then why would you believe that whatever we are doing to the environment is positive or negative? From our planet's point of view, and it's environment, it does not matter whether or not do we survive or become extinct. From our point of view it also does not matter much: if we all die then it doesn't matter once we are dead. If we survive then it doesn't matter, because future generations will be facing the same problems we are facing now.

Maybe you have heard of entropy, which is, to put it in simple words, the degree of disorder in our world. All matter aims to lose all its energy and achieve the highest entropy naturally. However, human beings, are created by nature, but we are unnatural creatures. We want to have "law and order" and we actually measure the advancement of our civilisation by the amount of energy we can gather and use in an "orderly" manner, for specific purposes. We are meant to oppose whatever nature comes up with. Whether it is global warming, a super-volcano eruption, an asteroid hitting our planet, a supernova explosion, a black hole that might start sucking the galaxy we live in at some point, and ultimately, at least as of today, be capable of opposing the end of the "big bang". We need to try and eventually be capable of acquiring enough energy to transport ourselves into safer dimensions one day, or indeed find an ultimate balance point and sustain it to stop what commenced in the "big bang". Thinking we should sacrifice technological development in the name of a planet's environment, or even worse - in the name of some mafia or state's economical profit, is just unworthy of humanity. - At least from the point of view of those who actually care about their children, grandchildren, and future generations. The rest can indeed just eat whatever the statutory dole or minimal wage allows them to buy...

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The report covers the last 200 years. Earth is over 4 billion years old and there is evidence that life has been around for 3.7 billion now and it too the report's authors 4 decades to unveil nothing, probably because they focused on a tenth of a percent of humanity's existence...

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The Earth’s atmosphere has undergone a number of transformations and the climate has seen many fluctuations. Each one had a cause: the precession of the Earth’s axis, the expulsion of greenhouse gasses through periods of extensive vulcanism. the dumping of oxygen into the atmosphere by the then newly evolve process of photosynthesis, periods of fluctuation in solar activity etc.

Climate is balancing act between the flux of incoming Solar energy and the outgoing energy radiated away back into space. What is certain is that we are currently experiencing an exponential rise in the average global temperatures of the oceans and atmosphere, that extends over a period of time that is pretty much co-extensive with what we call the industrial revolution. It’s certain that, in this case, the cause is due to a rise over that period in the levels of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which obstruct the escape of radiative energy into space thereby creating an energy imbalance. It’s also certain that those gases have been released into the atmosphere primarily through the burning of extensive amounts of fossil fuels. Those fuels have sequestered those gasses for a geologic period of time, and in a blink of an eye (within the last two centuries - a time period that coincides with the current warming of the Earth’s climate system) we released them.

That’s why the report covers the last two centuries. It’s a report on the current climate change and it’s causes - not a report on all the changes of climate the Earth had ever experienced. Climatology involves the study and investigation of all those previous eras, but no single paper or report needs to recount the entirety of what occurred over the last four billion years.

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to say that climate change might mean our extinction is just silly.

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Could a change in climate result in our extinction? Of course it could. But it would depend upon the extent and nature of the change. I do not know how to measure the level of threat in relation to our survival as a species. But the current change is definitely a threat to the continuation of our civilization, as are famine, ocean rise, plague and political upheaval which are all connected to the habitability of our surface world.

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Thinking we should sacrifice technological development in the name of a planet's environment, or even worse - in the name of some mafia or state's economical profit, is just unworthy of humanity.

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No one I know of is suggesting we abandon technological development in the name of the planet’s environment. Developing new technologies to help us endure, cope and conquer the energy imbalance we must now live with is exactly what many scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs are engaged in. I do know some people who’d rather sacrifice those technologies and trudge on with the old fossil fuel technologies because the cooperation required to make a concerted change threatens their beleaguered ideology of individual greed and selfishness.

I cannot predict what solution, if any, we will find. Will future industries be powered by solar cells and wind power? Or geothermal energy? Perhaps we’ll build space elevators to launch satellites and utilize the thermal difference between the base and higher reaches of the elevator to create the power we'll need to heat or cool our homes and drive our industries. What seems certain right now is that fossil fuels are at best an eventual dead end and at worst a nearly immediate and catastrophic end.

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

As to Stavros, he can fuck off no matter whether he is indeed an idiot who cannot understand simple things, like that the UK's government has changed a lot since Thatcher's demise, or some sour old twat born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a very long butt-plug up his stinking arse.

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In the other thread you were telling us that we need to return to "the values that made our civilisation great". Is this sort of childish abuse your idea of those values?

I thought I’d respond to the philosophical discussion here in this post as opposed the the prior post devoted to facts of climate change.

Is there an imperative for the Earth to be habitable? Or for the environment to sustain human life? Does it matter?

The answer to the second question is pretty clearly: No, there is no apparent imperative for the environment to sustain human life. The occurrence of humanity is accidental and has so far been brief.

Does it matter? Neither the universe nor the Earth has no point of view on the matter. We do. By and large humans care about whether or not there will be future generations of descendants to continue our history, our advances in knowledge, explorations and our human spirit. If we die out, no one will be left to care, but that doesn’t change the fact that we do now. Future generations, should they exist, will always have problems to solve. But I fail to see the bearing that has on our desire for the survival of the species. If we do things right, those generations will have different problems then the ones that currently occupy us.

So what about the first question? The Earth is four billion years old and has been the home to life for 3.7 billion years. RedVex is correct to connect this with entropy. The second law of thermodynamics (the one which states that the entropy of a physical system -if examined on a sufficiently large scale- decreases with time) is often misunderstood as being in conflict with living processes. In fact living processes; e.g. the metabolism of cells, the electro-chemical processes of the neural net we call the brain, etc. are dependent on the second law of thermodynamics. We are the product of natural processes and we ourselves are as natural as anything else in the universe. Intention is social construction that results from a taking a cognitive stance. The universe has no intentions for us. We are neither ‘meant’ to oppose ‘whatever nature comes up with’ nor go along with it.

Not only is the second law of thermodynamics essential to the physical and chemical processes that are life, but also living systems seem to optimize the production of entropy in the larger environment. Physicist Jeremy England speculates that whenever a system supports it, it will evolve subsystems that maximize the dissipation of thermal energy and that these subsystems are what we call living organisms. I remember reading some years ago a similarly themed popular book by Eric Schneider called Into the Cool.

But there is nothing that says the Earth’s environment will continue to produce and support life. It may happen because of causes not in our control. But we ourselves could be the ones who blow out the flame.

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

We have been around for 200 thousand years. We haven't become extinct even though there were some global calamities as described e.g. in the Bible. Climate change has been around throughout Earth's history and I am sure that humanity has had nothing to do with it. Now, we may indeed contribute a bit, but to say that climate change might mean our extinction is just silly.

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Our close relatives, the Neanderthals, did actually become extinct around 40,000 years ago (maybe less). Scientists don't know for sure why this happened, but climate change (an ice age) is one hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

As to Stavros...who cannot understand simple things, like that the UK's government has changed a lot since Thatcher's demise...

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Trish, I am pleased to say has rescued this thread from is rhetorical depths to remind us of the importance of science in all this. Even if I do sound like a time machine stuck on the same groove, I don't have a problem with you denying the science of climate change as it currently exists and was presented in the report, but note that you have not offered an alternative explanation based on science.

As for Mrs Thatcher, try to understand that the importance of Thatcher in the UK was, as she herself made it clear at the time and for years after, the break with what had been called the 'Keynesian consensus' sometimes 'Butskellism' [an amalgam of Tory Rab Butler and Labour Hugh Gaitskell) or the 'post-war consensus' which, like the New Deal Administration in the USA, responded to economic depression and poverty with the belief that the State had a duty to intervene to remedy the worst effects of economic failure.

In the UK this meant the State, in 1945 taking ownership of utilities such as water, electricity and gas, and public services such as health, education and transport. For reasons too detailed and tedious to go into, the people voted for a change in 1979, the same people whom you have variously described as idiots, proles or just plain silly. Whatever, the outcome was indeed a reduction in the extent to which the State intervened in the economy, with utilities and industry privatised, and attempts made to reduce the State's financial contribution to education and health.

Here are two legacies of Mrs Thatcher.
In the first place, she was, like Reagan, Kohl and Chirac, a Conservative not a Liberal -had you asked her that common question asked of all Conservatives: What do you want to conserve? Her answer would have been, not markets, but State Power, defined as the Monarchy, the Military, the Church of England, the City of London, and Parliamentary Democracy. Yes, she tinkered with 'market reforms', and yes, she signed the EU's Single Market Act on the UK's behalf; but she did not sacrifice state power or tax-raising powers to 'release' the market from the interference of the State. In fact one of the first things she did in 1979 on entering office was to double VAT to 15%. Raising taxes is hardly the work of an economic liberal.

The second legacy is that all succeeding administrations incorporated her policies in government, including that of Tony Blair's 'New Labour' government. In fact, Blair -whom Mrs Thatcher regarded as her 'true heir', went further than Mrs Thatcher in reducing direct income tax for low paid workers so that for all your bleating about socialism and taxes we now have more people than before either paying no income tax on their wages or paying a lower rate, with the additional nonsense (to me) that they can also claim -in most cases have to claim to survive- in-work benefits. Mrs Thatcher may be dead, yet even after the crash of 2008 that supposedly buried her version of 'neo-liberalism' we are living with many elements of her 'market freedoms'.

What does this have to do with climate change? Believe it or not, Mrs Thatcher's government was one of the first in Europe if not the world to take direct action to reduce the volume of greenhouse gases entering the upper atmosphere and creating a hole in the Ozone layer - it was her government that banned the use of chloro-fluorocarbons in household products that can be marked down as an early example of a government taking action to combat the human element in climate change, as noted here-

Back in the 1970s, CFCs (HFCs’ cousins) were burning a hole in the ozone layer and risked sending skin cancer rates through the roof. But very few in power were heeding the warnings.

That changed when a group of scientists managed to persuade the ex-chemistry student, and then prime minister of the UK, Margaret Thatcher, of the situation's severity. The speech she made to bring the world together on this issue is still worthy of the most globally-minded eco-warrior today. “We carry common burdens, face common problems and must response with common action,” she told the UN General Assembly in 1989, when the agreement was on the brink of disaster.

The resulting Montreal Protocol not only banned CFCs but also ensured that rich nations would help developing countries to pay for the greener alternatives.
http://www.citymetric.com/horizons/h...te-change-2533

I have this vision of Margaret Thatcher, a science graduate of Oxford University (Somerville College), sitting you down and tapping you gently on the knee, 'You know, my dear, it is not as you think it is...'

The idea that markets work better than governments, that carbon taxes are wrong because they are taxes, that subsidies for alternative energy are wrong because they are subsidies -she might agree with you there, and this aspect of her legacy as it unfolds with the environmental vandals in the administration (if not all the states) in the USA is deeply depressing.

And yet, as far as Thatcher is concerned, she understood the science, and however one judges her legacy on politics and economics, on the Ozone Layer, she got it right. And the policy -adopted worldwide- worked. Because when we pull together and act we can change the world, for better. I know, because I am an idiot.

I have found something for you knaves, who promote all this "global warming" and "more bureacracy and regulation helps development" communist bullcrap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJBDI7jVMqM

Thank you for over an hour’s worth of tired, worn, laughable, conspiracy laden and previously debunked falsehoods and misunderstandings about climate and science in general. You will find these claims have already been addressed elsewhere. You might try

http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/16/eig...al-scientists/

which nicely dispenses with 176 false claims by climate change deniers.

Whether you’re someone who believes climate change isn’t anthropogenic or simply an outright denier, I’m sure this link will get you scouring the web to satisfy the cravings of your unsupportable preconceptions.

Look, I get that hardcore libertarians don’t want climate to be something that humans can effect. The fear is if we can influence the climate, then that would place a moral burden on all of us to perhaps cooperate in ways certain libertarians find abhorrent. Unfortunately theories of governance are distinct from physical science and wishful thinking doesn’t turn fact into fiction (although wishful thinkers can sometimes be convinced to believe outlandish fictions).

I personally am interested in the science of climate change. [It’s happening and it’s anthropogenic. It’s due to the rapid and massive release (over the past century or two) of greenhouse gasses that have been sequestered for geologic periods of time within the fossil fuels we use to power our industry, transportation systems, cars and homes.]
I’m not much of a solutions person - definitely not an engineer. So aside from the fact that I prefer we not continue the practices that destabilized our climate, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m neither a communist, a monarchist nor a libertarian. If you can find a libertarian solution, fine. But continuing on as we have been is not a viable option. I’m not advocating (very few people are) that we end the industrial revolution and return to the agrarian lifestyle of our ancestors. That’s the exact opposite of my desire. To continue civilization as we know it we need to find and develop new and cleaner sources of energy to power our industries.

Perhaps we could convince several billion people to sell themselves to the rest of us as armed slaves. We’d have them run around power generating treadmills for us. We could pay them in ammunition. (For a good laugh and to see the relevance of this last response see http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/sho...=1#post1799449 ).