Global Warming/Climate Change Discussion Thread

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Which of the following statements best reflects your views on Global Warming?

  • Global warming is occurring and human activity is the main cause

    Votes: 159 32.0%

  • Global warming is occurring, but human activity is only playing a minor role

    Votes: 88 17.7%

  • Global warming is occurring, but it is entirely natural

    Votes: 57 11.5%

  • Global warming is occurring, but anthropogenic global warming theory is a fraud

    Votes: 23 4.6%

  • Global warming is occurring, but the causes are not known

    Votes: 32 6.4%

  • Global warming is not occurring at all

    Votes: 17 3.4%

  • Global warming is not occurring at all and anthropogenic global warming theory is a fraud

    Votes: 50 10.1%

  • Global warming is occurring, and human activity plays a significant role (this option was added afte

    Votes: 71 14.3%
  • Total voters
    497
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I'll just leave this here.

Also, there are other reasons to want to preerve wild life than just cuteness/awesomeness.
 
Want to save an animal from extinction? Find an effective way to farm them for food. Look at cows. You think they could survive in the wild?

Plus, members of PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals), like myself, are far more likely to work towards sustainanable food practices when there is a risk of losing said food. I love canned tuna. If I can find low sodium (health reasons) tuna that was caught via sustainable methods I will buy it first. I switched from catfish snd cod to tilapia and try to only purchase farm raised catfish when applicable. I cut back my consumption of stuff like swordfish and mahi mahi to only special occasions. I'd rather eat it only on occasion than never again.

Same goes for global warming. The biggest supposed effect I have see is a longer growing season. I'm motivated by my stomach and telling me we must stop this greater supply of food seems backwards to me. Telling me that some foods with very narrow harvest times, like honey crisp apples or blood oranges, are slightly less narrow excites me. Next you will tell me the McRib will be available for longer.

And there is the key. You want the average first-world citizen to care? You need to present us with a very near first-world problem and have a very easy and equally satisfying solution.

When I was confronted with sustainable seafood at first I didnt care. Some feh may die out? Meh. The Chef Alton Brown presented it to me as my food may not be around and calamari is a highly sustainable source of seafood. That I can respond to.
 
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I actually agree with everything you've said FK (particularly the part about eating lots of different animals), though as I know you're a proponent of "unintended consequences" I'd also add that while a longer growing season is one outcome, it's no use if, for reasons linked to climate change, that expected bumper growing season goes through long periods of drought. Or flood. Or any other buggered-up weather system that actually results in a poor harvest rather than the expected haul.
 
homeforsummer
I actually agree with everything you've said FK (particularly the part about eating lots of different animals), though as I know you're a proponent of "unintended consequences" I'd also add that while a longer growing season is one outcome, it's no use if, for reasons linked to climate change, that expected bumper growing season goes through long periods of drought. Or flood. Or any other buggered-up weather system that actually results in a poor harvest rather than the expected haul.
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I was pointing out a better way to approach the situation to bring about change, not using a one-time event to make a point. I leave that to the AGW guys. I do not believe my good crops were because of climate change.

When corn suffers a single bad season you have a lot of spin to blame all ills purely on climate change when it is publicly known that a minimum amount of the harvest is required to be sold for ethanol production, thus artificially hiking cost across the board. And when the administration is petitioned to waive the requirement and they refuse no one is feeling the pain of climate change as much as they feel the pain of bad government. When the administration did respond by buying up more corn (again causing market costs to increase) it only makes the problem seem more like government.

There is also the that one area's drought meant my perfect growing season. I pickled a gallon of banana peppers, from one plant growing in a pot. And it had new peppers coming in up until it got frost bitten last week. I have another quart's worth waiting to be pickled as well as another couple of quarts worth a friend gave me because he had too many.

And don't even get me started on my herbs. I had trouble using them before they would grow too big. I had to cut them and freeze them for later use. I made a gallon of tomato soup from my last harvesting of tomatoes from one plant.

If climate change brings a drought in one area then the growing areas will move. In this case, east.

Now the better question is, is my unusually incredible growing season and the midwest's drought a trend (the climate changed) or was it a once every ten years event like we have had forever? Droughts and storms are not new or even unheard of. This isn't the first time I've seen this in my lifetime. Natural disasters are a fact of life. I've been in sweltering, dry heat, massive flooding, and snow and ice that shut down my entire state for a week. Which is normal? Which is suddenly climate change?

If I learned anything from religion, it is easy to predict doom by predicting natural disasters. I can't see a natural disaster without having religious fanatics say its a sign of the Bible on one side and climate change fanatics on the other side saying its a sign of AGW.

Here's another point to get evil, white, carnivorous, gas burning westerners to listen: Don't sound like the same guys that think the Earth is 6,000 years old.
 
FoolKiller
I was pointing out a better way to approach the situation to bring about change, not using a one-time event to make a point. I leave that to the AGW guys. I do not believe my good crops were because of climate change.
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Fair enough - I wasn't really asking a leading question, more responding to your previous post which seemed to suggest that you were hoping for a positive outcome from global warming. Possibly just a small misunderstanding based on your tone.

If global warming is happening at all, there's no guarantee just yet what effect it'll have - and it's fair to assume 50/50 good/bad. Depends where you live really.

Also, I still don't really like the term "global warming". It implies that everything is simply getting hotter, when that isn't necessarily the case. "Climate change" is a bit more doom-mongering a term, but it's also a bit more accurate.
 
But even climate change leaves a large window for people to blame weather events on it. I've purposely avoided Sandy news because I don't want to hear the comments about it being evidence. An uneducated guess can see it that way. But those familiar with history know this is not the first hurricane to hit New York.
 
The problem with climate change is that it has a chaotic effect on what we can grow and where we can grow it. Adding this to the already complex problem of political, economic and social issues... (pesticide reliance, "GMO" resistance, groundwater contamination, erosion, trade barriers, competing land use, lack of training, war, drought, poor rotation, variable demand, etcetera)... in farming and you have a problem.

Ideally, we have enough farmland to plant all the food we will ever need for everybody. "Ideally" being the operative word.

This is not to say that storms, drought and poor growing weather... Or even climate change itself are something new... The "Dustbowl", Irish Potato Famine and mini-Ice Age are proof of that.
 
FoolKiller
But even climate change leaves a large window for people to blame weather events on it. I've purposely avoided Sandy news because I don't want to hear the comments about it being evidence. An uneducated guess can see it that way. But those familiar with history know this is not the first hurricane to hit New York.
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It's no surprise that Sandy has been linked to global warming, and it's no surprise who did the linking:

Al Gore
[the hurricane is] a disturbing sign of things to come.

We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather.
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Link
 
I don't like the term "climate change". Duh. Of course the climate is changing, as it has done for billions of years. Everything changes all the time. Climate change is a stupid term for anything. I suppose the only reason they call it climate change is because they don't actually know what's happening. For example: Melting glaciers aren't climate change. They're melting glaciers. An unusually hot summer in Dayton isn't climate change, it's an unusually hot summer in Dayton. Long-lasting droughts in Texas aren't climate change, they're long-lasting droughts in Texas.

The term "climate change" needs to be defined clearly before people start using it to describe how man is messing up the planet, because that's what it's used for 95% of the time.
 
I have to agree Keef, in my opinion the ‘Climate Change’ debate is has gotten off course. We simply don’t have enough historical scientific data to prove that the human species has recently accelerated a change in global weather patterns. We are certainly entering what we interpret to be period of greater climate change (or instability) based purely on what we’ve experienced in our short history. This period of so called greater climate instability may in fact be part of long term climate cycles that we are yet to fully comprehend - however it's one hell of a gamble to ignore the possibility human influence on climate change completely.

For mine, I hope in time the political debate and the collective consciousness on climate change shifts to a greater focus environmental sustainability to deal with reversing global degradation and pollution of our sea's, land and air and protecting bio-diversity.

I’m going off topic, but in my opinion what we’ve managed to very successful at altering is our level of impact on the earth. Never before in history has one species been so dominate in terms of how we interact with and as a result, changed the environment in which we live. The rapid ramp up in global populations and consequential increased usage of the earth’s resources as we strive to ‘modernise’ ourselves while basing our measures of success on various forms of growth continues to places unprecedented strains on our environment and ultimately our longer term ability to sustain ourselves as a species.

Whether or not the choices we’ve made in last 100 year or so on how we use the environment for our 'progress' has influenced the climate globally remains to be conclusively proven but for me there are more immediate problems – we're likely running out of planet.
 
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Tesla
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/...mission-of-enhanced-solar-forcing/#more-75705

Interesting read, especially looking through the IPCC AR5 draft itself.
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"The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes everything."

Yes, it sure does. Man, in his pride and arrogance, is oh so eager to leap to conclusions, and then force them down everybody else's throat at the drop of a hat - or even the point of a gun. But it turns out, the more we look into these questions, the more we learn that we don't actually know what we thought we did. :dunce:

I only wish this could be a precautionary lesson to us all, as the principle of it it applies in so many ways.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve
 
The latest IPCC report, released today, states with 95% certainty that humans are the driving force behind climate change. [BBC News]
 
DK
The latest IPCC report, released today, states with 95% certainty that humans are the driving force behind climate change. [BBC News]
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BBC actually uses the phrase "dominant force". The report states it is 95% certain that anthropogenic sources have contributed to more than 50% of the increase in average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010.

I'm not so impressed with that report. The word "likely" comes up a lot, which is explicitly defined to mean "66-100% likelihood of specified result". In scientific terms, that's horrendously inaccurate.
 
It's a farce; the tree huggers cry wolf, the media laps it up, the people buy it, and the governments celebrate their new found powers of control :p
 
What is to be done about non-human methane gases? Cattle are a huge source of greenhouse gases, and that's just when they're alive.

I read somewhere once, which obviously means this is to be taken with a pinch of salt, that an ice age is defined as any period where there are ice caps. Are we not then, in a period where the 'previous' ice age warms up? That is, we are still in the last ice age.

Personal opinion? Yeah, global warming's true. But I don't think human factors are as big as they are made out to be. That though, is no excuse to not be conscious of the benefits of good environmentalism.
 
arora
It's a farce; the tree huggers cry wolf, the media laps it up, the people buy it, and the governments celebrate their new found powers of control :p
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Yeah isn't it in the IPCC's interest to convince the populous that it's happening.

I agree it's happening but I can't help feel that the IPCC saying so, isn't that different of Hershey's telling me that tons of chocolate is good for me. Maybe I'm paranoid. Either way I believe it is happening and we have a hand in it for sure, but not as massive as some would like to say as if self-sacrificing apologist to mother earth.
 
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The new IPCC report, at least at a superficial level, goes some way toward legitimizing scientific skepticism of at least some of the more hysterical claims of warming.

1. It newly allows that global temperatures have not risen for 15 years.

2. It newly allows that arctic ice is increasing.

3. It newly allows that some glaciers are increasing.

4. It newly allows that the issues are more complex than they had thought.

Based partly on the facts that the current solar maximum is the weakest in 100 years, and that the magnetic field strength of both Earth and sun are decreasing, I'm predicting at least an immediate minor Ice Age. Northern Europeans take note!
 
arora
It's a farce; the tree huggers cry wolf, the media laps it up, the people buy it, and the governments celebrate their new found powers of control :p
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That pretty much sums it up. 👍
Also, of course, the new-found sources of revenue like the carbon tax.

LMSCorvetteGT2
Yeah isn't it in the IPCC's interest to convince the populous that it's happening.
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Indeed. That's a big part of the reason I remain skeptical. That plus the whole issue has become far too politicized.
 
The Global Warming Thread? I didn't realize there were still people out their who still believed in it. I'm still claiming we have no way of knowing for sure (Other than the fact that we know the climate is always changing).
 
Sam48
The Global Warming Thread? I didn't realize there were still people out their who still believed in it. I'm still claiming we have no way of knowing for sure (Other than the fact that we know the climate is always changing).
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Humans are bad and there are to many. We must kill off the population.

Sounds like something Hitler would dream up!
 
I find it interesting that in the period of the largest greenhouse gas emissions in the history of the planet, the temperature has only gone up 0.05C in the last decade. At that pace it would take 200 years to go up 1C. I also find it interesting that the tree huggers are now proclaiming global warming took a holiday the last ten years but we're now 95% certain that 50-100% of that 0.05 degrees was caused by man. In other words they are 95% certain that at least 0.025 of that 1 degree in 10 years was caused by man. That's 1/40th of a degree. Does anyone still believe this hogwash?
 
Johnnypenso
Does anyone still believe this hogwash?
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I honestly believe those who do still believe really have no idea as to why they believe. They simply never educated themselves after the fact. They watched "An Inconvenient Truth", and then never had a second thought.
 
Yes, I believe this "hogwash". :rolleyes: When >95% of peer-reviewed papers on climate change back the hypothesis that humans are the driving force behind it, I find it hard to disagree.

I'm probably going into whataboutery here, but for all of this talk about "corrupt" climatologists publishing papers on climate change because their jobs depend on it, no-one mentions the oil giants spending billions on lobbying and funding climate change skeptics' research.
 
DK
Yes, I believe this "hogwash". :rolleyes: When >95% of peer-reviewed papers on climate change back the hypothesis that humans are the driving force behind it, I find it hard to disagree.
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It's one thing to agree with peer reviewed papers, it's another thing to actually research the topic yourself and discover what they're actually peer reviewing. There's no use in agreeing or disagreeing until you know what their actual parameters are.
 

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