Where Did the Climate Change Debate Go Wrong?

[ICametoLurk]

My Red Pilled Honorary Aryan Cartoons tell me that Global Warming is a lie

 

[AnOminous]

Non-scientists got involved, so now you have a bunch of jackasses cherry picking shit they don't understand at each other to justify the opinion they arrived at for the sole reason that they either like or don't like Al Gore.

 

[Cosmos]

Honestly, I don't understand how a lot of people seem to believe that habitat destruction, air/water pollution, overhunting, and other activities that harm the environment aren't gonna result in something terrible. Like, okay, I understand that the concept of climate change has become a clusterfuck, but do you truly and honestly believe that we can keep polluting and harming our environment without any consequences?

And, like others have said, the problem is that climate change has become so politicized. Scientists usually aren't the ones talking about it, it's politicians, journalists, and other laypeople. Instead of climate change being about "Guys, let's all work together to stop this because Earth is the only planet we have!", it's become yet another political football for left-wingers and right-wingers to REEEEEEEE at each other over.

To paraphrase George Carlin, the Earth is doing fine. It's us humans who are in trouble.

The Earth and life itself are unbelievably durable. 252 million years ago, something so devastating happened over 95% of marine and 70% of terrestrial species went extinct, and yet both the planet and the life on it bounced back better than ever. The same thing happened when that meteor crashed into Earth and killed off all the dinosaurs.

Life always goes on, it just leaves everything behind when it does. Of course I really hope that humanity survives (because I believe that we're pretty cool and have a lot to offer), but if we do happen to go, I just hope that we don't seriously fuck up the environment with nuclear weapons or anything beforehand.

 

[Pikimon]

Also, the Earth had a lot of climate changes. Ice age, anybody? I'm not saying that things won't get hotter, but I'm saying that it tends to happen naturally and there is a good hope that by the time it gets serious, we will have the technology to deal with it.

Humanity has gone through climate changes yes, but those are in the scope of thousands of years where the changes have had enormous ramifications on all of life. The changes we're talking about are in the scope of hundreds of years to decades, much too fast to basically rearrange all of humanity into a new way of life.

For some perspective here is an easy to understand chronological graph of temperature over the course of human civilization.

Spoiler: Warning: HUEG

 

[Oh Long Johnson]

Humanity has gone through climate changes yes, but those are in the scope of thousands of years where the changes have had enormous ramifications on all of life. The changes we're talking about are in the scope of hundreds of years to decades, much too fast to basically rearrange all of humanity into a new way of life.

For some perspective here is an easy to understand chronological graph of temperature over the course of human civilization.

Spoiler: Warning: HUEG

The comic is cute and all but it is missing about 100,000 years of history as well as rather seriously misrepresenting human migrations. I have no doubt this is done to intentionally skip the Toba eruption which would show the effects of rapid climate change on human and other animal populations but bump up against the sacred heresy of showing a rapid change not due to co2 or human involvement.

Thinking about volcanism and its effects and combining that with the current warming trend and the ozone solution, you'd figure there would be an aerosol we could pump into the atmosphere that doesn't destroy ozone and isn't a toxic pollutant - just something to reflect sunlight for a couple years before succumbing to entropy. As an added bonus, something like that might get hippies to use deodorant for once.

 

[Pikimon]

The comic is cute and all but it is missing about 100,000 years of history as well as rather seriously misrepresenting human migrations. I have no doubt this is done to intentionally skip the Toba eruption which would show the effects of rapid climate change on human and other animal populations but bump up against the sacred heresy of showing a rapid change not due to co2 or human involvement.

It was a comic to show how climate change has an effect on civilization in general, and to put into perspective the extent of the change in temperature.

And data about the Toba eruption is readily available.

Roughly 74,000 years ago, a "super-eruption" took place in Indonesia, the largest know eruption in the past 100,000 years. The Toba eruption was enormous, throwing out roughly 1000 times as much rock as the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens (Fig. 1). Dust trapped in polar ice cores shows that ejected material spread around the globe, indicating that the eruption injected substantial material into the stratosphere, where it can strongly affect climate. How much and for how long the Toba eruption actually affected climate and life on the Earth's surface has been the subject of intense debate.

Recently, we used state-of-the-art climate models to examine this question. Our study included climate models developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Col., and by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City. These are the same models used for climate projections of the near future in studies of global warming. In this case, we simulated the response to an enormous volcanic eruption to test how various processes might affect the climate response. Depending on the assumed size of the eruption and the processes included in the models, the maximum global mean cooling was 8-17°C. This is an enormous change, roughly 10-20 times the size of the warming since pre-industrial times and about the same magnitude as the transition to an ice age. Among the most interesting findings was that in response to the reduced sunlight able to penetrate the think blanket of ash and particles in the atmosphere, broadleaf evergreen trees and tropical deciduous trees virtually disappeared for several years. However, the Earth's climate returned to near-normal conditions within a decade in most simulations.

An ice sheet did not begin to form in any of the simulations as the climate change did not persist for a long enough period. Hence the results do not support the theory that the super-eruption might have triggered an ice-age. However, a "volcanic winter" occurring suddenly and lasting a decade or two could still have devastating consequences on life at the surface, with abrupt massive decreases in food production and potential extinctions of some species. Indeed, there is some evidence for such extinctions and for the presence of a "genetic bottleneck" in human population coincident with the eruption. Our results thus suggest that the sudden and severe climate response to the Toba super-eruption may have wiped out a substantial portion of the world's human population at that time.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_12/

Particulate matter from volcanic ash and eruptions do eventually settle and dissipate, however its a lot harder to recapture CO2 and Methane that has been pumped back out by industrial processes, agriculture, ocean acidification and deforestation.

 

[Oh Long Johnson]

Particulate matter from volcanic ash and eruptions do eventually settle and dissipate, however its a lot harder to recapture CO2 and Methane that has been pumped back out by industrial processes, agriculture, ocean acidification and deforestation.

Absolutely true. I read somewhere the volcanic aerosols clear after two years and the air temperatures normalize shortly thereafter. I don't know what kind of long term effects you get with oceanic cooling from those two years of decreased solar radiation. I suppose you'd want to know about that kind of thing before releasing some custom aerosol into the atmosphere. Snowball Earth and all that.

I just wanted to point out that the comic was irritating, as it kind of represents that all the humans were hanging out in Africa until 22,000 years ago, which is wrong and dumb.

 

[Xarpho]

When it stopped being a "debate" and when all skepticism of it was derided as "denial", for one.

Yeah, that and the dubious science behind it (I think the premise is based on a measure of temperature of a bucket of water) that tends to ignore basic scientific things like controls and a margin of error. I also think the whole global warming thing started creating knee-jerk reactions that tend to oppose any laws on the environment as being anti-commerce.

It really is a balancing act--we can't destroy economies in favor of some slight environmental benefit but we can't destroy the Earth in favor of the almighty dollar.

 

[PT 404]

People don't go outside anymore, so what climate?

 

[DuskEngine]

People don't go outside anymore, so what climate?

Sometimes it gets really humid in my basement and my bitch mom won't let me turn on the air conditioner because it's bad for some fucking trees or something idk

 

[Pikimon]

Sometimes it gets really humid in my basement and my bitch mom won't let me turn on the air conditioner because it's bad for some fucking trees or something idk

inb4 rising sea levels flood basement

 

[Mozzarella Dicks]

I believe pollution and habitat destruction are bad things and we should stop pollution where we can for the sake of improving quality of life.

I do not believe that the symptoms of the pollution manifest as "Climate Change", nor that changes in weather are an omen of impending armageddon. We only have one world and we shouldn't recklessly destroy or deplete it.

Besides which they only started calling it "Climate Change" once they got called on their bullshit of constantly referring to it as "Global Warming" for decades on end.

 

[Joan Nyan]

Besides which they only started calling it "Climate Change" once they got called on their bullshit of constantly referring to it as "Global Warming" for decades on end.

And before they called it Global Warming they called it Global Cooling.

 

[Rainbow Puppy]

here is some irl trolling if u have the attention span, maybe not in todays world of technology atrophied brains

if u do happen to have a technology atrophied brain then the short of it for u is

obscure british man goes to congress. guy looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head but is intelligent. demonstrates climate change is retarded. congress gets ass mad and dog piles him with accusations of not being high up enough on the snooty elite totem poll to have an opinion. ignores his arguments. continues peddling their bs

Edit -

i did not use exceptional as my wording in my original writing of this post, it was forced upon me by this site

 

[PT 404]

Sometimes it gets really humid in my basement and my bitch mom won't let me turn on the air conditioner because it's bad for some fucking trees or something idk

That fucking bitch. Trees are useless and not worth the time.

 

[Pikimon]

In the last 650k years, Earth has gone through 7 periods of glacial advance and retreat. The last was 7k years ago, marking the end of the Ice Age.

CO2 was demonstrated to trap heat in the mid 19th century. In the course of the last 650k years, Earth atmospheric CO2 levels has never been above 300ppm, and we know that through mineral deposits, fossils, and arctic ice leaving telltale predictable signs of how much CO2 must have been in the air at the time. Today, CO2 is over 400ppm. Not only have we kept fantastic records pre-industrial revolution, especially the Swedes for centuries, but arctic ice has acted as a more recent history of the last several dozen centuries. CO2 levels has been growing at unprecedented rates and achieving levels higher than we've ever known to occur that wasn't in the wake of planetary disaster and mass extinction. It follows that if CO2 traps heat, and there's more CO2 in the atmosphere than ever before, it's going to trap more heat than ever before.

Sea levels are rising. 17cm over the last century. The last decade alone has seen twice the rise of the previous century. So not only are the oceans rising, but the rate of rise is increasing exponentially.

The Earth's average temperature has increased since 1880, most of that has been in the last 35 years. 15 of the 16 hottest years have been since 2001. We're in a period of solar decline, where the output of the sun cycles every 11 or so years. Despite the sun putting out less energy, the average continues to rise and in 2015 the Earth's average was 1C hotter on average than in 1890. That doesn't sound like much, but if we go some 0.7C hotter, we'll match the age of the dinosaurs when the whole planet was a tropical jungle. That's not a good thing.

The ice caps are losing mass. While we've seen cycles of recession and growth, you have to consider ice is more than area, it's also thickness and density. Yes, we've seen big sheets of ice form, but A) they didn't stay, and B) how thick were they? Greenland has lost 60 cubic miles of ice and Antarctica has lost at least 30 cubic miles, both in the last decade. Greenland is not denying global warming, they're feverishly building ports to poise themselves as one of the most valuable ocean trading hubs in the world as the northern pass is opening, and it's projected you'll be able to sail across the north pole, a place you can currently stand, year-round.

Glacier ice is retreating all over the world, in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.

The number of unprecedented intense weather events has been increasing since 1950 in the US. The number of record highs has been increasing, and record lows decreasing.

The ocean absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 and water makes carbonic acid, - seltzer water! The oceans are 30% more acidic since the industrial revolution. 93% of The Great Barrier Reef has been bleeched and 22% and rising is dead as a consequence. The ocean currently absorbs 9.3 billion tons of CO2 a year and is currently absorbing an additional 2 billion tons annually. Not because the ocean is suddenly getting better at it, but because there's more saturation in the atmosphere.

Spoiler: Sources

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5

B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46

Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306

V. Ramaswamy et.al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141

B.D. Santer et.al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.

In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded from the CSIRO website.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20160120/
T.C. Peterson et.al., "State of the Climate in 2008," Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.

I. Allison et.al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, UNSW Climate Change Research Center, Sydney, Australia, 2009, p. 11

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/ 01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm

Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).

L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7

R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009

http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html

National Snow and Ice Data Center

World Glacier Monitoring Service

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification?

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification

C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371

Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36.

National Snow and Ice Data Center

C. Derksen and R. Brown, "Spring snow cover extent reductions in the 2008-2012 period exceeding climate model projections," GRL, 39:L19504

http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html

Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, Data History Accessed August 29, 2011.

 

[AnOminous]

The ocean absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 and water makes carbonic acid, - seltzer water! The oceans are 30% more acidic since the industrial revolution. 93% of The Great Barrier Reef has been bleeched and 22% and rising is dead as a consequence. The ocean currently absorbs 9.3 billion tons of CO2 a year and is currently absorbing an additional 2 billion tons annually. Not because the ocean is suddenly getting better at it, but because there's more saturation in the atmosphere.

If climate change is real, then how come Al Gore rides in airplanes?

Checkmate atheists.

 

[Joan Nyan]

There should be a betting market for climate change.

 

[Brandobaris]

I think the problem is Humanity and Capitalism. We are a capitalist consumerist throwaway society, we feel guilty about harming the planet but not at the expense of insane utility bills and tax hikes that as usual would hit the poorest the hardest. Governments could do more to encourage alternate energy and such, but Capitalism means corporations will attempt to suppress that since it challenges market share and profits. So really its a go no-where situation really. The world runs on money, not good will or the willingness to help the next generation.

But I did enjoy this video because it brought up interesting points.

 

[Vitriol]

Try and keep discussion impersonal and civil, ive deleted some bickering.