It's Too Late to Stop Global Warming, Scientist Says

[PunkTheFunk 125,734]

2 hours ago, ZacharyMark said:

It's always been too late though. I thought we all knew that. However, these policies, like the Paris Agreement, are more about stabilizing and doing what we can to make the best of what we have of the world today and hopefully for the next few decades. 

I heard someone describe global warming like humanity is in a car, speeding towards the edge of a cliff. The Paris Agreement was us trying to slam the brakes and slow down, and Trump pulling out is like the driver of the car lifting his foot off the brake and saying "meh, my foot is tired"  Basically we might have had a chance to stop the car, but now it's too late. We are going over that cliff whether we like it or not, and we need to be ready for whatever's at the bottom.

[myOWNtable 182]

Why do you people think that this Paris nonsense is somehow going to save the Earth? I'm worried that politicizing the weather has accomplished nothing and that you all simply insult Trump as if his one decision will destroy the planet. Have any of you researched the reasons behind pulling out of the agreement? It's disturbing to me that people act like they care about these issues when they truly don't. Constantly talking about figments of your imagination that were invented by people with an agenda gets nothing done. If you really care about the planet, you plant trees. You reduce your pollution. You stop throwing plastic into landfills. You call out developers when you see forests destroyed in your neighborhood.

Do explain to me how a rise in Earth's temperature over the past 150 years is an "alarming phenomenon." I'm eager to hear! Also explain why, if it were actually a cooling trend, would we still be alarmed that we're heading into an ice age? While you're at it, blatantly ignore the cyclical fluctuations in the planet's temperature dating back millions of years. I'm honestly tired of seeing these threads on this website, because this is one of the places I go to escape the nonsense the media keep repeating on television and online. I urge all of you to stop thinking that a "0.003-inch rise in sea level" will be the end of humanity, or that since we backed out of the Paris nonsense that our planet is over. Unless you have pictures or other tangible proof of these phenomenon, you are overreacting, fueling the machine, and simply making politics out of the weather. 

Please don't do that. And don't come for me, because I love the environment and have called out developers numerous times on their reckless actions. 

[donutellha 13,819]

we live on a god damn planet that we are too selfish to take care off??????????????????

[ooo 407]

we're all going to die like in interstellar, just without the interstellar but absolutely with the corn and no bees. 

[CannaeDrive 3,412]

Tough luck, we'll just have to deal with that situation and adapt to the changing climate. We can do that, no worries.

[LMAlejandro 546]

This is very sad, makes me feel depressing

[MJHolland 12,725]

As if the Paris agreement was going to save us in the first place 

[Avenues 4,370]

A true scientist never says never.

Science can always find a way.

Spoiler

Just get trump outta the way 

 

[Ariana Grindr 3,173]

This breaks my heart in ways I absolutely cannot explain.  Our sis KARMA is real. you get what you give.

 

We are a plague to this beautiful planet. 

WE

DESERVE

IT

 

[Bebe 17,289]

1 hour ago, myOWNtable said:

Why do you people think that this Paris nonsense is somehow going to save the Earth? I'm worried that politicizing the weather has accomplished nothing and that you all simply insult Trump as if his one decision will destroy the planet. Have any of you researched the reasons behind pulling out of the agreement? It's disturbing to me that people act like they care about these issues when they truly don't. Constantly talking about figments of your imagination that were invented by people with an agenda gets nothing done. If you really care about the planet, you plant trees. You reduce your pollution. You stop throwing plastic into landfills. You call out developers when you see forests destroyed in your neighborhood.

Do explain to me how a rise in Earth's temperature over the past 150 years is an "alarming phenomenon." I'm eager to hear! Also explain why, if it were actually a cooling trend, would we still be alarmed that we're heading into an ice age? While you're at it, blatantly ignore the cyclical fluctuations in the planet's temperature dating back millions of years. I'm honestly tired of seeing these threads on this website, because this is one of the places I go to escape the nonsense the media keep repeating on television and online. I urge all of you to stop thinking that a "0.003-inch rise in sea level" will be the end of humanity, or that since we backed out of the Paris nonsense that our planet is over. Unless you have pictures or other tangible proof of these phenomenon, you are overreacting, fueling the machine, and simply making politics out of the weather. 

Please don't do that. And don't come for me, because I love the environment and have called out developers numerous times on their reckless actions. 

"Why do you people think that this Paris nonsense is somehow going to save the Earth?"

I don't think the Paris agreement was enough to totally prevent climate change, I would have loved it if the goal was higher. 

"I'm worried that politicizing the weather has accomplished nothing and that you all simply insult Trump as if his one decision will destroy the planet."

There has been no 'politicising the weather' we are talking about climate, not weather. Climate change is a political issue, like it or not. I wish it wasn't a political issue and was just treated for what it is, a scientific fact that requires urgent action.

"Have any of you researched the reasons behind pulling out of the agreement?"

Yes, lies that it will save the coal industry and bring coal jobs back to the U.S and some idea that it was a 'bad deal' for the U.S which is absurd.

"Constantly talking about figments of your imagination that were invented by people with an agenda gets nothing done"

??? What exactly are you trying to say here?

"If you really care about the planet, you plant trees. You reduce your pollution. You stop throwing plastic into landfills. You call out developers when you see forests destroyed in your neighborhood."

Whose to say people here don't do that? Why can't 'giving a f*ck about climate change, working to reduce your personal emissions, and putting pressure on governments to reduce your countries carbon footprint' being included in that list?

"Do explain to me how a rise in Earth's temperature over the past 150 years is an "alarming phenomenon." I'm eager to hear!"

OK:
 

 

 

Impacts from human-induced climate change are already occurring. In Australia, where I live, we have seen increases in the number, duration and severity of heatwaves. We have seen changes in the growth and distribution of plants, animals and insects; poleward shifts in the distribution of marine species; and increases in coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef and Western Australian reefs.

The number of extreme fire risk days has grown over the past four decades. Future hotter and drier conditions are likely to cause further increases in the number of high fire-risk days and in the length of the fire season. CO2 fertilisation may lead to increased foliage cover and hence increased fuel loads in warm arid environments such as parts of southern Australia. A study of southeast Australia has projected that the number of fire danger days rated at ‘very high’ and above could double by 2050, under high emission climate scenarios. 

 

 

As a result of climate change:

Hurricanes and other storms are likely to become stronger, Floods and droughts will become more common, Less fresh water will be available. The recent National Climate Assessment found that Category 4 and 5 hurricanes (the strongest) have increased in frequency, intensity, and duration since the 1980s. One model predicts up to an 11% increase in hurricane intensity, as well as about a 20% rain increase within about a 60-mile radius of the storm’s center (these numbers are based on a climate scenario with an average of 2.8 degree Celsius warming).

Four times as many New Yorkers could live in areas that flood by 2050.

One day, New York City may have flood days the way it has snow days, Malcolm Bowman, oceanography professor at Stony Brook University in Long Island, warned on WNYC.

The graphic above shows what the Federal Emergency Management Agency flood zone might look like should extreme sea level rise occur (2.5 feet or about 0.8 meters by 2050).

“Areas in the 100-year flood zone have a 1 per cent chance of being flooded annually and are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels,” NOAA said.

This zone includes several areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy, including the Brooklyn-Queens Waterfront, the East and South Shores of Staten Island, South Queens, Southern Brooklyn, and Southern Manhattan.

Since the mid-1800s, the chances of storm tide over-topping the Manhattan sea wall have increased 20%, according to one recent study, as storm water levels have risen. The researchers expect the seawall to be submerged about once every four to five years. In the 19th century, that only happened once every 100 to 400 years.

“What we are finding is that the 10-year storm tide of your great-, great-grandparents is not the same as the 10-year storm tide of today,” the lead author of the study said in the press release.

Millions of people and trillions in assets are at risk in coastal cities. 

Assuming a sea-level rise of .5 meters by 2070, with an extra .5 to 1.5 meters to account for storms, a 2008 study ranked the most exposed cities in the world. The analysis found staggering potential losses in cities around the world. Calcutta, India, may be the most exposed, with 14 million people and $US2 trillion in assets at risk. Miami is also in big trouble with 4.8 million people and $US3.5 trillion at risk.

If global temperatures rise one degree C, more than 40 of the more than 700 UN world heritage sites will be seriously threatened by water within the next 2,000 years, according to a study published in Environmental Research Letters.

If temperatures rise 3 degrees C, that number rises to 136 sites. Historical city centres like Venice, Istanbul, and St. Petersburg would be among those impacted.

Some diseases will spread (such as mosquito-borne malaria and the 2016 resurgence of the Zika virus). As summers become longer, temperatures go up, and rainfall patterns change along with species patterns. Mosquitoes carrying diseases will likely have a longer season in a wider area, according to the Natural Resources Defence Council.

Entire ecosystems will change causing mass extinctions with Polar Bears, Tigers, Snow Leopards, African Elephants, Orang-utans, Asian rhinos all at risk of dying out.

A sea level rise created by a temperature increase of 3 degrees C would force more than than 600 million people to find new homes leading to an unprecedented refugee crisis. António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has warned that if this happens “not only states, but cultures and identities will be drowned.”

A report from the World Food Program expects extreme weather events like floods, droughts, forest fires, and tropical cyclones to damage farmlands, threatening food security for millions of people. Climate impacts on crop yields will increase the number of malnourished children by around 11 million in Asia, 10 million in Africa, and 1.4 million in Latin America, the report said.

By 2050, crop yields in Asia are expected to fall by 50% for wheat and 17% for rice compared to 2000 levels, according to the report. This will threaten billions of people who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

By 2030, climate change costs are projected to cost the global economy $US700 billion annually.
 

 

There is a lot more if you are interested, I only lightly scratched on some of the major problems we will face as a result of climate change.


"Also explain why, if it were actually a cooling trend, would we still be alarmed that we're heading into an ice age? "

We are not in a cooling trend.. If we where then yes... That would be alarming...

"While you're at it, blatantly ignore the cyclical fluctuations in the planet's temperature dating back millions of years."

It is undoubtedly true that there are natural cycles and variations in global climate, but if you insist that current warming is purely natural — or even mostly natural — you have two challenges.

First, you need to identify the mechanism behind this alleged natural cycle. Absent a forcing of some sort, there will be no change in global energy balance. The balance is changing, so natural or otherwise, we need to find this mysterious cause.

Second, you need to come up with an explanation for why a 35% increase in the second most important greenhouse gas does not affect the global temperature. Theory predicts temperature will rise given an enhanced greenhouse effect, so how or why is it not happening?

The mainstream climate science community has provided a well-developed, internally consistent theory that accounts for the effects we are now observing. It provides explanations and makes predictions. Where is the skeptic community’s model or theory whereby CO2 does not affect the temperature? Where is the evidence of some other natural forcing, like the Milankovich cycles that controlled the ice ages (a fine historical example of a dramatic and regular climate cycle that can be read in the ice core records taken both in Greenland and in the Antarctic)?

So could current changes be part of a natural cycle? Well, no natural cause has been identified. There is no climatological theory in which CO2 does not drive temperature. And natural cycle precedents do not exhibit the same extreme changes we’re now witnessing.

In short: No.

[PunkTheFunk 125,734]

2 hours ago, myOWNtable said:

While you're at it, blatantly ignore the cyclical fluctuations in the planet's temperature dating back millions of years.

Oh boy

Spoiler

If the Earth’s temperature had been steady for millions of years and only started rising in the past half century or so, the answer would be obvious.

But the temperature has not been steady at all. Twenty thousand years ago, the planet was going through an ice age, with glaciers covering much of Europe and North America. A hundred million years ago, the Earth was so warm that crocodile-like creatures prowled through tropical vegetation not far from the North Pole.

In other words, climate variations are not at all unusual. So how do we know this one is caused by humans?

Several reasons. First, we know that burning coal, oil, and gas releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide, or CO2. And we know, thanks to careful measurements that started in the late 1950s, that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have been steadily climbing as we burn more. Not only that — chemists can tell the difference between the CO2 released naturally by plants and animals and the CO2 from burning fossil fuels. About a quarter of the CO2 now in the atmosphere is the result of human activity.

The one obvious natural suspect — the Sun — can pretty much be ruled out. It is an obvious suspect because astronomers know that the Sun can vary in brightness. When it does, the amount of heat it sends to the Earth varies too. It would not take much brightening to cause the increases in temperature we have seen. But satellites have been monitoring the Sun since the 1970s — when the fastest warming has been taking place — and the brightening just is not there.

There is plenty of other evidence — the pattern of warming, for example, which is greatest in the Arctic, and the pace, which is faster (as best we can tell) than prehistoric warming episodes. The upper atmosphere has actually cooled, because so much heat has been trapped below.

The bottom line is that nobody has come up with a natural explanation for the current warming episode that fits the observations. At the same time, the un-natural explanation—that our industrial civilization is a big part of the cause—fits the evidence.

That’s how we know it is not natural. One last thing. If the Earth has survived earlier warming episodes, what is so bad about this one even if it is not natural? The problem is that our civilization — where cities are located, where we grow food, where we get fresh water—is all based on the climate we have experienced for the last 10,000 years. So are many of the world’s ecosystems. If the climate changes, many of those things will suddenly find themselves in the wrong place.

http://www.climatecentral.org/library/faqs/how_do_we_know_it_is_not_a_natural_cycle

At least educate yourself on basic climate science before trying to school us

[Edonis 28,974]

8 minutes ago, PunkTheFunk said:

Oh boy

  Reveal hidden contents

If the Earth’s temperature had been steady for millions of years and only started rising in the past half century or so, the answer would be obvious.

But the temperature has not been steady at all. Twenty thousand years ago, the planet was going through an ice age, with glaciers covering much of Europe and North America. A hundred million years ago, the Earth was so warm that crocodile-like creatures prowled through tropical vegetation not far from the North Pole.

In other words, climate variations are not at all unusual. So how do we know this one is caused by humans?

Several reasons. First, we know that burning coal, oil, and gas releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide, or CO2. And we know, thanks to careful measurements that started in the late 1950s, that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have been steadily climbing as we burn more. Not only that — chemists can tell the difference between the CO2 released naturally by plants and animals and the CO2 from burning fossil fuels. About a quarter of the CO2 now in the atmosphere is the result of human activity.

The one obvious natural suspect — the Sun — can pretty much be ruled out. It is an obvious suspect because astronomers know that the Sun can vary in brightness. When it does, the amount of heat it sends to the Earth varies too. It would not take much brightening to cause the increases in temperature we have seen. But satellites have been monitoring the Sun since the 1970s — when the fastest warming has been taking place — and the brightening just is not there.

There is plenty of other evidence — the pattern of warming, for example, which is greatest in the Arctic, and the pace, which is faster (as best we can tell) than prehistoric warming episodes. The upper atmosphere has actually cooled, because so much heat has been trapped below.

The bottom line is that nobody has come up with a natural explanation for the current warming episode that fits the observations. At the same time, the un-natural explanation—that our industrial civilization is a big part of the cause—fits the evidence.

That’s how we know it is not natural. One last thing. If the Earth has survived earlier warming episodes, what is so bad about this one even if it is not natural? The problem is that our civilization — where cities are located, where we grow food, where we get fresh water—is all based on the climate we have experienced for the last 10,000 years. So are many of the world’s ecosystems. If the climate changes, many of those things will suddenly find themselves in the wrong place.

http://www.climatecentral.org/library/faqs/how_do_we_know_it_is_not_a_natural_cycle

At least educate yourself on basic climate science before trying to school us

Thank you for saying all of this  I was about to upload figures from my environmental chemistry and ecology books from university, but you basically ended them already 

[myOWNtable 182]

23 hours ago, PunkTheFunk said:

Oh boy

  Hide contents

If the Earth’s temperature had been steady for millions of years and only started rising in the past half century or so, the answer would be obvious.

But the temperature has not been steady at all. Twenty thousand years ago, the planet was going through an ice age, with glaciers covering much of Europe and North America. A hundred million years ago, the Earth was so warm that crocodile-like creatures prowled through tropical vegetation not far from the North Pole.

In other words, climate variations are not at all unusual. So how do we know this one is caused by humans?

Several reasons. First, we know that burning coal, oil, and gas releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide, or CO2. And we know, thanks to careful measurements that started in the late 1950s, that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have been steadily climbing as we burn more. Not only that — chemists can tell the difference between the CO2 released naturally by plants and animals and the CO2 from burning fossil fuels. About a quarter of the CO2 now in the atmosphere is the result of human activity.

The one obvious natural suspect — the Sun — can pretty much be ruled out. It is an obvious suspect because astronomers know that the Sun can vary in brightness. When it does, the amount of heat it sends to the Earth varies too. It would not take much brightening to cause the increases in temperature we have seen. But satellites have been monitoring the Sun since the 1970s — when the fastest warming has been taking place — and the brightening just is not there.

There is plenty of other evidence — the pattern of warming, for example, which is greatest in the Arctic, and the pace, which is faster (as best we can tell) than prehistoric warming episodes. The upper atmosphere has actually cooled, because so much heat has been trapped below.

The bottom line is that nobody has come up with a natural explanation for the current warming episode that fits the observations. At the same time, the un-natural explanation—that our industrial civilization is a big part of the cause—fits the evidence.

That’s how we know it is not natural. One last thing. If the Earth has survived earlier warming episodes, what is so bad about this one even if it is not natural? The problem is that our civilization — where cities are located, where we grow food, where we get fresh water—is all based on the climate we have experienced for the last 10,000 years. So are many of the world’s ecosystems. If the climate changes, many of those things will suddenly find themselves in the wrong place.

http://www.climatecentral.org/library/faqs/how_do_we_know_it_is_not_a_natural_cycle

At least educate yourself on basic climate science before trying to school us

Climatecentral.org? Thank you all for schooling me! 

[Bette Davis 12,742]

The human race is the worst  just end us already Mama Earth, we don't deserve you.

[Bette Davis 12,742]

25 minutes ago, myOWNtable said:

Climatecentral.org? Thank you all for schooling me!