Who says polar ice caps melting is a bad thing?

[Zeus]

Cross-world shipping charges should drop thanks to a new pathway opening up for ships to take

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2 ... outes.html

+1 for greenhouse gases! :-)

[Don]

I missed the part where some divine entity says the current temperature is Earth is the best it can possibly be an any deviation from it must be stopped.

There's a reason why even though global warming has become 'we got cold weather covered too', there are some countries like Russia who they have a hard time getting along with it. Not only is Russia a major oil exporter but it's really hard to see how Russia can possibly end up worse if things got warmer overall. By the way, we probably can't grow enough food to feed everyone on Earth without stuff like fertilizers, which requires a source of energy that puts more greenhouse gases.

[Zeus]

It's the science part that all but guarantees cataclysmic effects on all life on earth that I think people are more concerned about......

[Don]

The era the dinosaurs lived was one of the more fertile eras and it was hotter back then it is now. Of course that's kind of irrelevent since modern civilization is supported by fertilizers but life generally thrived in hotter as opposed to colder conditions. Now life will suck if you're living at certain part of the world right now if it gets warmer but it may also be better if you currently live in say, Siberia.

I saw a guy who says global warming is basically a problem for those without air conditioning, namely the developing countries. Unless you happen to live somewhere that's about to be flooded, air conditioning solves any immediate problem you may have. For stuff like global hunger and whatnot, the whole system is more dependent on stuff like fertilizers as opposed to any natural factor. There's nothing natural about using fertilizers on genetically engineered crops that yield way more yield than any natural process, and here the issue we should be concerned is whether this is sustainable at all with or without global warming. Malthus originally predicted that people will all starve to death since population growth will outstrip food supply and that didn't involve global warming at all, and it was only averted because we found ways to grow way more food than any natural process can possibly do. In the end the problem is only relative to your technology. If cancer can be treated by taking a pill, you probably don't have to worry too much about walking around in radioactive stuff as long as you took your pill on time. Food supply issue is far more dependent on energy as opposed to global warming, and all other aspects of climate change can be mitigated by air conditioning. Some of the Middle East countries have temperatures like 120+ F in the summer and I can assure you that's far less hospitable compared to any normal place on Earth even if we have 'cataclysmic climate change'. Of course Middle East people are relatively rich thanks to oil money, so they just build air conditioning. That's why we have the World Cup there even though you'd have to air condition the entire stadium so people don't just die from the heat.

[Zeus]

Worked out great for the dinos, didn't it?

No scientist worth his salt will ever debate that there are serious effects of global warming, evidence is too great. What they argue over is the extent and source but never the existence, that's just silly

[Don]

Dinosaurs died out because the temperature got much cooler (presumably due an asteroid). The temperature of their era was much hotter than what it is now.

Honestly I'm tired of people just making some of Gaia-type argument over this subject. The current day earth is not at some kind of utopia in terms of temperature. Life in general slightly favors too hot over too cold. There are major cities in the Middle East but not Antartica. Basically you've a guy living in some normal place saying if it gets hotter life would suck here even though a guy living in permafrost in Siberia would certainly prefer things get warmer overall, and there's no divine entity that says life is supposed to suck in live in Siberia compared to other places.

The whole argument of extent and source is sidestepping the question. The better question is why do you think the current temperature of Earth is supposed to be some kind of magical equilibrium. It's not even an issue about sustainability and whatnot because otherwise people wouldn't be living in the Middle East in the first place, a place that's far less hospitable than most places even in the worst case predictions of global warming. Basically if you've air conditioning you don't have to worry about global warming, so the question is are there enough people without air conditioning (3rd world countries) that are adversely affected, and whether it's any worse than whatever they had to suffer from before, and whether does somewhere else in the world get better to compensate for that. The Russians are quite in favor of global warming and it should be easy to see why.

[Zeus]

I guess that whole meteor-thing had nothing to do with it either...

Don, it's nothing to do with 'equilibrium'. It's simple science: temperature goes up, weather gets more extreme, bad shit happens. This becomes much more magnified due to the fact we've populated such a large portion of the surface of the planet and around 50% of that lives in poverty. Again, not an opinion, all fact. Arguing against it is like saying "if i drop this pen, it will float there instead of dropping due to gravity". Sure, in some weird, theoretical physics conceptualized theory there's a fraction of a billionth of a chance it may happen, but some of us live in the real world and there are certain aspects of science that are law.

I've never said "it needs to be in this x range" or any shit like the tree-huggers love to spew. Hell, I've never even said "we're fucking up, we need to stop!". But what you can't do is deny that a) it's happening and b) ain't nothin' good is gonna come of this. It's happening before your eyes whether you want to open them or not.

My thread was poking fun at how the article was trying to make light of the positives of global warming while ignoring the extreme negatives we're continuously experiencing, that's all.

[Don]

So back in the ice age the climate must have pretty stable because it's way colder back then? Extreme weather makes for good headlines but far more people die from a steady drought than a hurricane. Again you're making these quasi-true statements that basically amounts to "change is bad, no change is good". Life thrived in the era of the dinosaurs that is much hotter than today, because it takes a lot of life to support huge beings like dinosaurs due to the way the food pyramid works.

There was a guy giving a speech at where I work and he highlighted exactly what's wrong with the global warming stuff and why no one takes it seriously in terms of actual effort to fight it. He says people talks about it and then they'll point you to something like '25 easy ways to save the environment'. That's an outright lie. It's going to be absolutely painful to save the environment. It's going to cost a ton of money to figure out what can replace oil, and if something ends up being able to replace oil you probably end up destabilizng the entire Middle East because half of the government there are ruled by dictators who are only able to hold onto power due to petro dollars. If oil isn't worth much, the Middle East is not exactly a prime spot to inhabit and you'll probably end up having wars or people starve to death or flee the country and whatnot. It's going to be the Green Revolution and people will die for it. If you believe the problem is truly serious (and this guy obvious does), it's something where it's not clear even throwing a significant portion of the world's GNP will have any immediate effect, but you'll definitely have people die because the money you normally spend on welfare or other technology gets sucked up into fighting global warming with no immediate results which indirectly leads to people getting killed, and this will be a significant amount because every report out there suggest you need a staggering amount of money to try to fight global warming. Russia is another country that can potentially be harmed significantly since they derive a very significant of their income from oil and they're also sitting on a ton of nuclear weapons. As long as you're just making fun of 'climate denier' and think you can plant a tree somewhere will do anything about the problem you're part of the problem. Even if they discovered pixie dust tomorrow that totally replaces oil for no cost, you're still likely to have a statistically significant percentage of the world's population dying just because Middle East is a total mess that's supported only by oil.

[SineSwiper]

I missed the part where some divine entity says the current temperature is Earth is the best it can possibly be an any deviation from it must be stopped.

Planet Earth with do just fine with global warming, though it'll kill us off in the process.



http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom ... in_11.html

Dinosaurs died out because the temperature got much cooler (presumably due an asteroid). The temperature of their era was much hotter than what it is now.

No, they died out because the resulting dust field BLOCKED OUT THE FUCKING SUN! They found the 100-mile wide asteroid impact about 30 years ago.

Quit pretending you know what you're talking about.

[Don]

Things tend to get a lot colder when the sun gets blocked out, or is it that hard to put 2 and 2 together? The whole point was that warm blooded mammals can adapt to cold weather better than cold blooded mammls since primitive mammals sure weren't going to fight dinosaurs for food. Hot weather is far easier to adjust than cold weather for life in general, so easy that a rather prodigious lifeform (dinosaur) was able to thrive in such an era. See the population in extremely hot places (certain parts of Middle East) compared to extremely cold places (Antarctica) if you need to be convinced that human can adapt to extremely high temperatures easier than extremely cold weather.

Dinosaurs are considerably less adaptable in general being cold-blooded and thrived in temperature significantly hotter than now. Mammals do just fine in hot weather like virtually any species. Las Vegas is way hotter than 99% of the places in the world even if you put the craziest prediction for global warming and people live there fine (because they have air conditioning). Of course the whole problem is you got people living in places that are nowhere near hospitable that is using an exoribant amount of energy to sustain this lifestyle that might no longer be sustainable in general just due to the fact that energy isn't infinite. Las Vegas had some water problem and they said people had to stop watering their lawns and probably blame it on global warming too. Problem is, you're never supposed to have a lawn in Las Vegas. Grass simply doesn't grow there. Heck, not even weed can grow there. Do you know Alaska has one of the worst quality of air in the world? That's because they got to burn all this coal just to not freeze to death even though it's probably about as far away from industrialized civiliation as one can think of within the United States. Even with global warming it's still likely to be pretty cold down there. Human history developed roughly at the end of Ice Age so sea levels is historically low, which means normally the sea would be a bit higher but that didn't stop people from settling at places that would be underwater if the climate merely reverted back to normal let alone hotter than normal even in the complete absence of global warming.

But no people just point to these psuedo-scientific argument that is basically a rehash of the Gaia theory instead of asking 'why is there large centers of population in extremely hot, cold, or places that should be underwater under a normal temperature'. There's no money to be made pointing out that the entire city of Las Vegas or nation of Qatar probably shouldn't exist because it's not somewhere that'd be a good idea to live. The crux of the matter is that the Western way of living, even in the complete absence of global warming (which is mostly irrelevent because technology allows people to live in far less hospitable places than global warming predicts) is not sustainable due to the simple fact that energy is not infinite. Unless there's some kind of miracle replacement for fossil fuels you'll run into some kind of energy crisis at some point anyway, especially if people continue to insist on moving large amounts of water to Las Vegas so they can water their lawn when water is already considered a limited resource in certain areas of the world.

There's a chapter in Yotsuba where Ena says air conditioning contributes toward global warming and Asagi says it's because there's global warming that's why we need air conditioning to cool the earth down. And as long as you're the guy with the air conditioning and as long as you don't care about the guy without the air conditioning that argument is perfectly valid. It is not possible to have everyone in the world with air conditioning because we don't have that mucn energy to go around. To fix the problem you should take away people's air conditioning, so to speak, which would basically be some kind of massive energy tax. And then people who live in areas like Las Vegas will most likely be unable to afford to live there anymore but that's fine because Las Vegas isn't a place where anyone should live in as a function of habitability. Likewise people living in extremely cold places will eventually have to leave too but again you don't want too many people live in areas where you have to burn up enough coal to make the air worse than Beijing just to not freeze to death. But an energy tax, at least in US, is pretty much impossible because people don't want to give up cheap energy and besides stating the obvious isn't going to get you a new grant. I forgot if it was the Navy or the Air Force that bought like a million gallon of biofuel at a price that's like 50 times of oil. People are apparently more interested in just pouring money down the drain than having an energy tax. I know people always talk about economies of scale and maturing technology but if buying a million gallons of biofuel still costs you 50 times that of oil, I'm pretty sure that price isn't going to come down to anything remotely competitive for a long time. But wasting a billion dollars on a million barrels of biofuel makes it look like you're doing something to help the planet even though you could just buy regular oil and store it in a safe and never use it and it'd achieve the same effect, with a lot more money left over.