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For those not following the news, Australia is in the middle of some of the worst heat in its history with wildfires to match, a heat [wave] so intense, the Australian Bureau of Meterology had to add two new colors to its maps to properly reflect the heat.

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In 118 years of U.S. records, July 2012 stands as king, hotter than any month previously observed. NOAA reports today that the average temperature across the continental U.S. was 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average, 0.2 degrees hotter than the previous record set in July, 1936.

Not only was the month of July unrivaled for its hot temperatures across the nation, but so too were the first seven months of the calendar year and the last 12 months. In fact, the last four 12-month periods have each successively established new records for the warmest period of that length.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

“I’m not going to bet the U.S. economy or the Texas economy on a theory that is not proven,” said Barton, former chairman of the House Energy Committee and still a leading GOP voice on energy policy.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
I do understand that most of the country goes through these things called seasons.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
I do understand that most of the country goes through these things called seasons.

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I would expect a flip attitude from one so young as yourself. One day, when you're all growed up, you'll be able to make observations and draw rational judgements.
I've been around a half century, and I don't need no scientific data to know there's been a RADICAL change in the climate. Man made? Don't really give a felgercarb. Just know it's happening.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
The only thing that's "radically" changed is how many mindless groupies there are these days, all hopelessly devoted to making Al Gore and his legion of doom charlatans richer.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Oh wait, that would cause the death of millions". As opposed to the death of tens of millions if things keep going on as they're going?

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

When I was a kid we could make HUGE snow forts every winter. Then suddenly (mid-to-late 60's), the size of the forts reduced each year....

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:

Same thing happened to the swingset and slide we had in our backyard. Just seemed to shrink in size every year as me and sis grew up.

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Chris, I've come to respect Jon on some issues, and I admit, it surprises me that he is one of the die-hard deniers.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
^^

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
^^

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Can we at least bring the fleet to a state of alert?

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Launch Silver Spar Squadron.

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Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality.

.... Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate.

...We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

...“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever.

...“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal."

... And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.

“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. ... People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.”

...“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea,” Wright said.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
You should be happy that it's raining instead of snowing.... no need to shovel your driveway and risk having a heart attack.

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Originally posted by Niki2:
And go ahead and snark, deniers, it's not about just heat, it's about "extreme" weather of every kind.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yes, it's about EXTREME weather. The more energy in the overall system, the greater the weather-event drivers.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
I do understand that most of the country goes through these things called seasons.

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I would expect a flip attitude from one so young as yourself. One day, when you're all growed up, you'll be able to make observations and draw rational judgements.
I've been around a half century, and I don't need no scientific data to know there's been a RADICAL change in the climate. Man made? Don't really give a felgercarb. Just know it's happening.

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Hey daggitbreath, I lived up North in the 1960's, and the Summers were so hot your face would melt off. The only thing that's "radically" changed is how many mindless groupies there are these days, all hopelessly devoted to making Al Gore and his legion of doom charlatans richer.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
There is no such thing as man made global climate change.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
There is no such thing as man made global climate change.

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How about just climate change, then?
And before the childish response, OTHER than seasonal.

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Originally posted by Storymark:

What is it with deniers?

Faced with mountains of scientific evidence, they think "But, but.... AL Gore!" is somehow an argument...

Weird.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
it's all occured before in decades and centuries past. Reasonable people, aka non-hysterics, think of it as the natural order of things.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

But who has ever said the Earth's climate doesn't change?

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
it's all occured before in decades and centuries past. Reasonable people, aka non-hysterics, think of it as the natural order of things.

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If we can get past the emotional political/personality-based bullshit for JUST A MOMENT please, I don't give a fuck if it's man made or a natural cyclical occurrence, can we PLEASE just all agree that long term changes are happening (measured in our puny human history), and that if we don't DEAL with them, we may be endangering our food supply (ie, our existence as a civilized world)?
Is THAT so hard?

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:

If you're looking for a Kryptonian ending to planet Earth, or simply an end to human life

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
you can't get past your own bias and hysteria even for a minute.

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I AM NOT HYSTERICAL!!!!

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chrisisall 8:51AM
I was just at a science fiction site where I'm astounded to learn that there are a lot of creative, intelligent & educated folks that attach some kind of hyper-emotional twisted political-conspiratorial thing to a simple, scientifically provable fact, that fact being that the Earth is on a warming trend. Big fights also over whether man is causing it, which I think is rather useless since so WHAT if man IS causing it? It's not like we could just STOP tomorrow, and if it's a natural cyclical function of this planet, all the more reason to not bother with the argument. Oh, but then it goes to man isn't causing it because it's not happening.
Just wondering about people here... is all the science owned & distorted/fabricated by left wing world domination desiring liberal fascists (as some actually say in places), or is the changing climate something that could or will affect our way of life on this planet (specifically, in the area of sea level rise & farm land arability)?


echo 9:23AM
The scientific community is united in affirming the existence of man-made global warming, except for a few outlier studies sponsored by the oil companies for their own nefarious ends.


Chrisisall 11:09AM
Here in America it seems there is a strong belief among many that the Earth's climate is just business as usual, ignoring mean temperature rise, sea level change & storm severity increase. Seems to be an extreme right-wing thing...


DarthDimi 11:46AM
Warnings concerning global warming, caused by industrialised man, have been advanced since long before I was born. Science writers with absolutely no political agenda whatsoever, like Isaac Asimov, wrote countless essays and books in which global warming was discussed as both a natural phenomenon to which we owe our lives and a process we are constantly pushing further and further beyond acceptable levels.

Furthermore, evidence can be taken not merely from statistical figures (which one could argue could be bent and twisted), but also from - here goes - common sense. Chemistry 101: heats gets trapped in certain molecules such as methane, carbon dioxide and even water vapour. Burning fossil fuels, by the very nature of the substances, releases large amounts of both carbon dioxide and water vapour. Mind-bogglingly large areas of our planet are spent on cows, who will eventually get slaughtered for the benefit of our hamburger consumption, and who release, from their digestive processes, tremendous amounts of methane. The cumulative effect of all these fast-food cows results in, again, a powerful increase in our atmospheric methane levels.

What's even worse is the runaway effect this will eventually cause. By that I mean that the more we keep our planet's heat trapped within its atmosphere, the more the Earth's average temperature rises. While this only includes a mere few degrees at most over an entire century, this means, on a global scale, a massive vaporization of liquid water. As more water thus enters our atmosphere, the global warming effect increases even further, resulting in more vaporization, and so on. Hence, the runaway effect. At one point, things will inevitably grow beyond our control and Earth sadly becomes Mars 2.0.

Some say: what damage could it do? Things get a little hotter... so what? It's bloody cold during Autumn and Winter; I could use a bit of warmth. Obviously it's much worse than that. Firstly, ice caps melt, causing vast amounts of liquid water to pour into the ocean. Larger waves and general oceanic unrest lead to more tsunamis and unpredictable weather conditions, a retaking of land by the seas and so on. Secondly, as the Earth heats up, it tends to lose hold on its atmosphere, causing the various gasses we need to breath and to protect us from hostile radiation from space to float outward into space. Basically, the same thing that happened to Mercury, the Moon and Mars, would happen to us.

I'm quite honestly a trifle worried, though I'm by no means an environmentalist in the 'political' sense. I consider myself a sober-minded scientist above all, but I'm nonetheless worried.

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What's even worse is the runaway effect this will eventually cause. By that I mean that the more we keep our planet's heat trapped within its atmosphere, the more the Earth's average temperature rises. While this only includes a mere few degrees at most over an entire century, this means, on a global scale, a massive vaporization of liquid water. As more water thus enters our atmosphere, the global warming effect increases even further, resulting in more vaporization, and so on. Hence, the runaway effect. At one point, things will inevitably grow beyond our control and Earth sadly becomes Mars 2.0.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

...Uh... WHAT?

No. Just no.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

But who has ever said the Earth's climate doesn't change?

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So... that means that you DO recognize the warming trend of this planet?
?

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