Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

It should not be surprising to us to understand how Bronze Age societies associated the forces of nature with gods, seeing no clear separation between themselves and the world/cosmos, seeing it as one seamless whole. Science has since evolved to such a stage where we can now separate the natural from the supernatural, which doesn't in fact mean all scientists are atheists, but does offer a different kind of rationality to explain climate change in terms of its varied components. The Bronze Age explanation was rational in its day whereas the 'avengalist' of today is irrational having up-ended the cause: but it is still the fault of human agency and its sinful ways that induces God's anger. By contrast, violations of the commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, do not seem to produce the same level of wrath. Most curious.

Perhaps woman seeking abortions should appeal to the Castle Doctrine, something modern bronze-agers seem to "understand."

One point I left out in my previous point. The two modern Bronze-Age theories there mentioned are attempts (albeit failed attempts) to explain the mood swings of our current climate. On the other hand, the theory of energy imbalance (i.e. global warming) came before the current mood swings and predicted them. Note no one drought or storm can be said to be caused by the global energy imbalance. But the growing collection and frequency of such events is evidence that corraborates the hypothesis.

Hmm maybe what happened in the Bronze Age should stay in the Bronze Age...?

Climate change and polar bears:

How to get selfish humans to care about climate change: Polar bears!

It does raise the question -how far can we go to protect animals in their natural environment? In the Indian sub-continent and Africa animals that once had a natural environment all to themselves are now on the margins of expanding urban settlements -but people don't want tigers or baboons in their back yard and the tendency is to kill them, quite apart from the distress living so close to humans causes some primates and wildcats. The same is true for the bears of North America, some of whom have given up foraging for nuts when they forage in a nearby trash can, courtesy of the humans moving into their territory. Many species of bird no longer visit the UK in the summer because the hedgerows that supported them have gone, and the pesticide soaked fields no longer contain nutritious worms -you don't need to go to the Arctic to start a campaign for wild-life.

Polar Bears are doomed, unless they can be taken to zoos or be persuaded to live in Antarctica if it will support them. I am still not sure if climate change will see off sea ice in the Arctic, but over the next 25 years it will become as busy an oil province as the North Sea -and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
If Polar Bears, why not gorillas, tigers, Kangaroos? If all them, then must people stop building homes in environments they share with animals?

http://www.ted.com/talks/george_monb...the_world.html

Monbiot at his articulate best -and politically naive. He is an incurable romantic at heart. Yellowstone is not much of an example as it is not densely populated so it is hard to square with parts of India and Africa where the de-wilding is at its most intense. Re-wilding could only make sense if the people moved somewhere else- there are over a billion in India alone, where will they go? Instead of going to the city, rural dwellers will find the city coming to them; if you want a perfect example of environmental desecration, go to Israel -outside the desert area of the south, the love affair with concrete will probably make this country the most built-over area in the world.
But I am a pessimist on this issue.

I agree. It’s probably unwise to release tigers into the densely populated regions of India. Rewilding seems impossible without setting aside large grants of protected lands. Given political pressures this is difficult enough for wealthy nations to do. The endangerment of pandas, koalas, tigers, snail darters, krill, whales etc. seems frivolous compared to the dangers people are subjected to when under the pressures of politics, poverty, overpopulation and the greed.

I posted the Monbiot clip because it helps us better assess the costs of covering a desert with concrete and the benefits of reintroducing gray wolves into Wyoming. He illuminates such a multitude of unexpected connections, it’s almost enough to make an atheist believe in karma.

Here in the Midwest of the USA, we have deer, muskrats, beavers, raccoon, coyote, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, rats, eagles, hawks and song birds living side by side with people in cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati etc. Because of monocultural farming, pesticides and fertilizers, our cities and towns have a greater diversity of microbial fauna in the their soil than the farmland that blankets the region the way concrete and asphalt blankets Manhattan. We are only now discovering the vast variety of biota that once lived in the soil here when the Midwest was prairie land.

Modern extinctions may be bellwethers of our own decline. Here I’m obligated to remind you of the overwrought canary in the coal mine. Of course reviving the canary will not save the miners. What we need somehow to do is figure out how to live in harmony with our planet.

The stoics would perhaps complain that I am in the unhappy state of disharmony with myself. My hopes do not run parallel with my expectations.

I agree with what you say. I think one way to deal with some of these issues is to halt completely the kind of logging going on in Brazil, Indonesia and Russia in particular -the level of deforestation is greater than any natural re-growth or re-forestation can deal with and I would rather leave it as a wilderness than open it up for financial exploitation -but again, as with hydrocarbons, I suspect the lobbying power of the corporations overrides environmental concerns. In fact with the impasse at the COP in Warsaw, the hostility to carbon reduction policies in Australia, an intellectual attempt to undermine climate change science and other sorties, the forward momentum that appeared to be taking place say 10 years ago now looks like being derailed. It's cold.

The latest from James Delingpole on the great hoax...this time using an article that charts deaths from extreme weather events, 1900-2008-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...opaganda-myth/


the source in the image is tiny and barely readable but I expanded it on my iPad and found it is an article from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol 14, no 2009 by Indur Goklany, the link is here:
http://www.jpands.org/vol14no4/goklany.pdf

Richard Manning on the Psychosis of Civilization - YouTube

Richard Manning on the Green Revolution and the End of Cheap Oil - YouTube

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Santa losing his mind over climate change/chaos:

Santa Cancels Christmas Over Climate Change - YouTube

A rare sight.Snow Closes Roads to and from Jerusalem - YouTube

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...continues.html

The snow in Jerusalem yesterday was fifty year event. It remains to be seen if the frequency of such Middle Eastern snowfalls increases substantially. What happens when Hell freezes over?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...e34_story.html

And also in Saudi Arabia -snowfall is not uncommon in the mountainous region of al-Baha in the south on the border with Yemen, but this is from Alkan -can't locate it but I don't think its south.

http://vid.alarabiya.net/images/2013...x9_788x442.jpg

And Cairo has a one in a century snowfall.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...historic-snow/

Slaying the "Zombies" of Climate Science: Dr. Marshall Shepherd

Slaying the "Zombies" of Climate Science: Dr. Marshall Shepherd at TEDxAtlanta - YouTube

http://i.imgur.com/eEvzZCb.jpg

Someone should teach the Saudis how to play in the snow. :)

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movie - YouTube

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Originally Posted by trish

movie - YouTube

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Very good vid, Trish, and very very scary...

The US Department of Energy has released a preview of its Annual Energy Outlook for 2014, and it is clear that if the current trends are maintained the US will be in an intriguing position over the coming decades to say 2040: the 'fracking' revolution promises to simultanously increase domestic gas supplies, reducing foreign imports; while the increased volume pushing prices down will enable power generators to swap carbon-emitting coal for gas: on the other side of the coin, this means a decline in the coal industry in the USA which must impact on communities in those states where coal is still sort-of-king; and if world prices in gas decline then so do revenues for major gas producers such as Russia and Qatar, as well as the private companies like Shell whom the US relies on to invest in its energy sector. This may benefit smaller companies, but do smaller companies have the long-established process safety mechanisms that the supermajors like Shell and Exxon have? Fracking is bursting ahead in the US in spite of genuine environmental concerns.

I wonder how Americans see this changing energy profile in the context of the Obama Presidency, after all, the new lease life given to hydrocarbons has seriously undermined the alternative energy agenda...yet Obama could benefit from it as 'energy security' is happening on his watch...

There is a precis here, and a link to the DoE website after (the precis is from Oil & Gas IQ Newsletter).

Yesterday, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) released its abridged version of the Annual Energy Outlook 2014 with projections for “trends and issues that could have major implications for U.S. energy markets” up to 2040.

The report forecasts a year-on-year increase of two per cent in natural gas production for the 2012-2040 period, culminating in a total US domestic production of 37.6 trillion cubic feet (1.06 trillion cubic metres) per annum, 56 per cent higher than current levels and 37 per cent higher than world-leader Russia’s natural gas output in 2013. Concomitantly, gas imports from key energy partners will fall by as much as 30 per cent as domestic supply grows to fill demand, and exports to continental neighbours Mexico and Canada will increase by six per cent and 1.2 per cent per year respectively.

Perhaps even more interesting, is the projection that price decreases will facilitate natural gas to overtake coal as the primary provider of US power generation, delivering more than one third of the nation’s electricity by 2035 and allowing the country to dip below a CO2 emissions level of six billion metric tonnes for the first time since 2005. As positive as the promise of America’s energy future may be, it will all come down to price. The recent shelving of Shell’s $20 billion GTL plant in Louisiana has showed the reluctance of companies to make huge capex investments when natural gas prices are not guaranteed to stay feasibly low.

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/

Shocking Percentage Of Americans Don't Trust Scientists - YouTube

What’s wrong with these statements?

• I believe in global warming.
• I don’t believe in global warming.
• We should hear all sides of the climate change debate and decide for ourselves.

Don’t see it? How about these?

• I believe in photosynthesis.
• I don’t believe in Newton’s Laws of Motion.
• We should hear all sides of the quantum mechanics debate and decide for ourselves.

Climate change is a scientific phenomenon, rooted in physics and chemistry. All I did was substitute in other scientific phenomena, and the statements suddenly sounded wacky and irrational.

Perhaps we have become desensitized by people conflating opinion with fact when it comes to climate change. However, the positions of politicians or media outlets do not make the climate system any less of a physical process. Unlike, say, ideology, there is a physical truth out there.

If there is a physical truth, there are also wrong answers and false explanations. In scientific issues, not every “belief” is equally valid.

Of course, the physical truth is elusive, and facts are not always clear-cut. Data requires interpretation and a lot of math. Uncertainty is omnipresent and must be quantified. These processes require training, as nobody is born with all the skills required to be a good scientist. Again, the complex nature of the physical world means that some voices are more important than others.

Does that mean we should blindly accept whatever a scientist says, just because they have a Ph.D.? Of course not. People aren’t perfect, and scientists are no exception.

However, the institution of science has a pretty good system to weed out incorrect or unsupported theories. It involves peer review, and critical thinking, and falsifiability. We can’t completely prove anything right – not one hundred percent – so scientists try really hard to prove a given theory wrong. If they can’t, their confidence in its accuracy goes up. As Peter Watts (science fiction author and marine-mammal biologist) says, “You put your model out there in the coliseum, and a bunch of guys in white coats kick the s**t out of it. If it’s still alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time.”

Peer review is an imperfect process, but it’s far better than nothing. Combined with the technical skill and experience of scientists, it makes the words of the scientific community far more trustworthy than the words of a politician or a journalist. That doesn’t mean that science is always right. But, if you had to put your money on it, who would you bet on?

The issue is further complicated by the fact that scientists are rarely unanimous. Often, the issue at question is truly a mystery, and the disagreement is widespread. What causes El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean? Science can’t give us a clear answer yet.

However, sometimes disagreement is restricted to the extreme minority. This is called a consensus. It doesn’t imply unanimity, and it doesn’t mean that the issue is closed, but general confidence in a theory is so high that science accepts it and moves on. Even today, a few researchers will tell you that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that secondhand smoke isn’t harmful to your health. But that doesn’t stop medical scientists from studying the finer details of such diseases, or governments from funding programs to help people quit smoking. Science isn’t a majority-rules democracy, but if virtually all scientists have the same position on an issue, they probably have some pretty good reasons.

If science is never certain, and almost never unanimous, what are we supposed to do? How do we choose who to trust? Trusting nobody but yourself would be a poor choice. Chances are, others are more qualified than you, and you don’t hold the entirety of human knowledge in your head. For policy-relevant science, ignoring the issue completely until one side is proven right could also be disastrous. Inaction itself is a policy choice, which we see in some governments’ responses to climate change.

Let’s bring the whole issue down to a more personal level. Imagine you were ill, and twenty well-respected doctors independently examined you and said that surgery was required to save your life. One doctor, however, said that your illness was all in your mind, that you were healthy as a horse. Should you wait in bed until the doctors all agreed? Should you go home to avoid surgery that might be unnecessary? Or should you pay attention to the relative size and credibility of each group, as well as the risks involved, and choose the course of action that would most likely save your life?

Excellent post Martin, very well argued. Send it to James Delingpole c/o Daily Telegraph, or Lord Lawson of Blaby, c/o the Bullshit Foundation.

Ice in Antarctica Proves 'Global Cooling', says Fox Host

Ice in Antarctica Proves 'Global Cooling', says Fox Host - YouTube

Why is it so Darn Cold? - YouTube

US polar vortex may be example of global warming:

http://www.theguardian.com/environme...global-warming

Donald Trump Explains the Polar Vortex - YouTube

Some kind of vortex has been through his hair

Another capitalist asshole who confuses weather with climate

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Originally Posted by martin48

Some kind of vortex has been through his hair

Another capitalist asshole who confuses weather with climate

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I'm pretty sure The Donald -- :) -- is aware of the core difference between climate and weather. And, too, he should explicate what's going on in Australia. I'm curious -- :)
And, too, is The Donald heavily invested in the oil and mining sectors? If so his position is understandable, is quite rational. He is serving his own interests. And, too, why should he care about anyone else? Why should he care about, say, future generations.
Ya know, even if you think climate change is a hoax aren't there, say, benefits to CONSERVing energy (isn't conservation at the core of being a conservative? No? Yes?) for, say, future generations?
But Trump has internalized certain values anyway. I disagree with his values. But they are his values. That's the problem with values: your values could be wrong and very destructive -- to others.

Australia hit by heat wave and wildfires - YouTube

Australia faces extreme heat wave - YouTube

Thousands of bats killed in Queensland heatwave - YouTube

This is loosely related to the topic but I thought this was interesting enough to share.

Take one step forward and then one step back --> Before and after of Hurricane Sandy. I thought it was pretty amazing.

https://maps.gstatic.com/m/streetvie...511702928,,0,0

DDerek -amazing!! Thanks for the link.

I thought this was an interesting item on the BBC: Why has the sun gone to sleep?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotat...&v=DueVWamHmYs

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Originally Posted by dderek123

This is loosely related to the topic but I thought this was interesting enough to share.

Take one step forward and then one step back --> Before and after of Hurricane Sandy. I thought it was pretty amazing.

https://maps.gstatic.com/m/streetvie...511702928,,0,0

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Thanks dderek:
And, too, this is pretty interestin':

Mohamed Nasheed: Some Conservatives failed over Mandela. Others are failing now over climate change.
http://www.conservativehome.com/plat...burn-coal.html

New, privatized African city heralds climate apartheid:

http://www.theguardian.com/environme...eid?CMP=twt_gu

As an addendum to my previous post -- :)

Eko Atlantic City Half Way To Complete - YouTube

Elysium is the future:

ELYSIUM - Official Trailer - In Theaters August 9th - YouTube

Or better yet: The Road Warrior:

The Road Warrior (1981) - Movie Trailer - YouTube

Hottest year on record.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...on_record.html

"Were you born after 1976? Then you’ve never experienced an average year: 2013 is the 37th year in a row with temperatures above the 20th century average."

After Hansen and 17 other climatologists published their newest assessment of global climate change

( http://www.plosone.org/article/info%....0081648#close )

Dr. Mann of Penn State wrote a NYC opinion piece saying in effect scientists can no longer sit back and watch politicians fumble the ball. Of course, Rush Limbaugh (with the intellectual integrity of a Stalanist Lysenko) compared Mann to Penn State child molester Jerry Sandusky!

Hansen's PLOS ONE paper is a worthwhile read. Here it is again.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%....0081648#close