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How Silly is Climate Change Denial?

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Burnt you and Tyger might enjoy the Billy Meier thread. This one is way above your heads.


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I suppose Burnt will trot out the dwindling polar bear population next or the hockey stick graph .. Lol.


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Whatever he says, you can be sure he believes it, right or wrong, i personally do NOT believe him when he says he believes catastrophic warming is taking place, i believe he is convinced we need to insure against the possibility the earth is catastrophically warming, regardless of the cause, in other words the consequences of the scare mongering coming true, are well worth the extortionate trillion dollar insurance policy's.

I personally do not think burnt or people who think like him have the right to load their childrens future lives with debt, because of their unfounded fear's and hijacked humanist nature.
 
Admissions of defeat are in order. Tyger and Burnt can start. Maudib can stay in hiding where he belongs.
Now can we discuss REAL environmental issues?


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Theres nothing to be won pixel, theres no prize, just the odd awakening is a result in itself.

This catastrophic warming claim issue, is as global, as the ''world'' superbowl, and they both have about the same importance to a non American.
 
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Fair enough. They were discredited before they started anyway. They just didn't know it.


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Well you are witnessing history, you are witnessing a 'big lie' being played out, Gore and his cronies have painted such a grotesque future, that people think if they are only half right we gotta act now.

Its a reichstag moment in history, if we live another 10 years we may get to see how it plays out.

And because we do have to act now in many many ways to heal our environment, the fear mongering hits home, but green and pollution issues are a different ballgame they will play out how they do.

Iwill be happy when this catastrophic nonsense is finally blown out of the water, and is only fit for ridicule.

The 97% of scientists claimis another example of a big lie, its such an overwhelming percentage even when you knock abit of for 'exaggeration' that still leaves 'most' scientists doesnt it ? to anyone who just gets their information from the American media, thats exactly how they see it.


By the way, can you think of a bigger lie than catastrophic warming leading to extinction of the human race being played out in our lifetime pixel, i dont think i can, the 'cold war' maybe.
 
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And people like Tyger and Burnt believe this dumba$$


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FYI: I thought highlighting sentences in the text was helpful but I have gotten feedback that it is - or can be - more distracting than engaging - so I will cease the highlighting unless something really pops for me. :)

Acid Maps Reveal Worst of Climate Change
By David Biello | November 20, 2014
LINK: Acid Maps Reveal Worst of Climate Change | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

TEXT: "Much of the change in climate change is happening to the ocean. It’s not just the extra heat hiding within the waves. The seven seas also absorb a big share of the carbon dioxide released by burning the fossilized sunshine known as coal, natural gas and oil. All those billions and billions of CO2 molecules interact with the brine to make it ever so slightly more acidic over time and, as more and more CO2 gets absorbed, the oceans become more acidic.

"[Graphics Inserted throughout article] Now scientists have delivered the most comprehensive maps of this acid phenomena, a global picture of the oceans in 2005 against which future scientists can track just how much more acidic the oceans have become.

"The maps are an attempt to bring to visual life a problem that is just as invisible as the excess CO2 piling up in the atmosphere for the past couple of centuries. People cannot see, taste or feel the subtle shift in the seawater and it has taken years of measurement around the world to gather enough data for this new global picture. Calls for such measurements had been made since at least 1956. Charles David Keeling heeded the call back then, producing the Keeling Curve, which tracks rising CO2 levels to this day. But a similar set of measurements for the oceans has been lacking—until now.

"Geochemist Taro Takahashi of Columbia University has spent four decades measuring these changes, which amount to a generally basic ocean growing 30 percent more acidic—a change in pH from 8.2 to 8.1. That’s the result of absorbing roughly 25 percent of annual CO2 pollution, which now amounts to 36 billion metric tons in total.

"In other words, the oceans currently take in roughly 9 billion metric tons of CO2 each year—a number that is growing. Cumulatively the oceans have absorbed at least 150 billion metric tons of CO2. Despite the size of the increase, it is still just one part in 1,000 of the CO2 already in the ocean.

"The new maps highlight the fact that the world ocean is not uniform. The vast belts of seawater that lie in the tropics and temperate zones vary the least in pH while Arctic and Antarctic waters seesaw as plankton blooms, sucking CO2 out of the water, before the cold waters of winter again absorb yet more CO2 and become more acidic. In fact, in the northern winter the Bering Sea becomes the most acidic ocean on Earth, reaching a pH of as low as 7.7. That won’t remain an anomalously low number for long, however, as that is the pH the entire ocean may experience if present trends continue through 2100.

"Another anomaly is the Indian Ocean, which is about 10 percent more acidic than the Atlantic or Pacific. The exact reason why is a scientific mystery but perhaps it is because it is the most isolated sea, dominated by monsoon rains and river drainage rather than ocean currents mixing the waters, Takahashi suggests.

"Globally, if current trends continue, then corals and other shell-building microscopic sea animals and plants may find it harder to build and sustain their shells. Already, the shells of foraminifera (microscopic amoeba-like animals) are shrinking as a result of more acidic waters in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. And shell-building life in Arctic oceans may become chemically impossible, forcing shell-building sea snails and sea slugs that thrive there now to migrate to warmer waters, if that’s even possible.

"Fossil fuel burning is now making oceans more acidic at a rate unseen in at least 300 million years so it will be important to continue to follow up on these measurements. Perhaps there can soon be a “Takahashi Map” to complement the Keeling Curve. Because as marine chemist Scott Doney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution wrote in Scientific American in March 2006: “Although the effects may be hidden from people’s view, dramatic alterations in the marine environment appear to be inevitable.” "
 
Comment: "If there are people who "do not believe" in human-caused global warming, who claim it's not warming or it is cooling, or it will cool any year now, could they explain why global average temperature in the 1970's was warmer than that of the 60's, the 80's were warmer than the 70's, the 90's warmer than the 80's, and the 00's warmer than the 90's? (By the way, the average for this decade of the teens is already above the average for last decade, according to recent data.) Further, if this is a hoax, then the plants are in on it, too - look at the Burpee Seed Catalog planting zones for the past 50 years - from 1965, say, until now. The plants are moving away from the tropics and toward the poles, away from the lowlands and up the mountainsides. Pretty freakin convincing hoax, hm?"

Response Comment: "And I really hope I'm wrong. But I'm worried, because if the climate and weather patterns change enough to dump several years more heat into the oceans, this will totally cement the deniers' positions in their minds, and they will block all action until it is very late in the game. At some point, that heat is going to come out of the ocean, and when it does, we are going to be hurting big time. The longer it takes, the more we will hurt. I wish you luck where you are, and hope there's a friendly mountain on your island."
 
Noam Chomsky: How Climate Change Became a 'Liberal Hoax'

TEXT: "Uploaded on Jan 24, 2011: In this sixth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, linguist, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky talks about the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute and other business lobbies enthusiastically carrying out campaigns "to try and convince the population that global warming is a liberal hoax." According to Chomsky, this massive public relations campaign has succeeded in leading a good portion of the population into doubting the human causes of global warming.

"Known for his criticism of the media, Chomsky doesn't hold back in this clip, laying blame on mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, which will run frontpage articles on what meteorologists think about global warming. "Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow," Chomsky says. "What do they have to say any more than your barber?" All this is part of the media's pursuit of "fabled objectivity."

"Of particular concern for Chomsky is the atmosphere of anger, fear and hostility that currently reigns in America. The public's hatred of Democrats, Republicans, big business and banks and the public's distrust of scientists all lead to general disregard for the findings of "pointy-headed elitists." The 2010 elections could be interpreted as a "death knell for the species" because most of the new Republicans in Congress are global warming deniers. "If this was happening in some small country," Chomsky concludes, "it wouldn't matter much. But when it's happening in the richest, most powerful country in the world, it's a danger to the survival of the species." "
 
You have us on ignore because you are unable to back up your mouth with facts. Period. A very cowardly approach.


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To keep in mind how dynamic the conversation really is -

Where is global warming’s missing heat?
Where is global warming’s missing heat? | Science/AAAS | News

TEXT: 14 November 2014 11:30 am: "Call it the climate change conundrum: Even though humans are pumping more greenhouse gases than ever into the atmosphere, the world’s average air temperature isn’t rising as quickly as it once did. Some scientists have proposed that the missing heat is actually being trapped deep underwater by the Pacific Ocean. But a new modeling study concludes that the Pacific isn’t acting alone. Instead, it finds, several of the world’s oceans are playing a role in the warming slowdown by absorbing their share of the “missing” heat.

" “There are a lot of details about exactly which ocean basin is taking up the energy,” says Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, College Station, who wasn’t involved in the study. But “I don't see anything in here that changes our expectations of long-term climate change.”

"The world’s average air temperature has warmed 0.8°C since the late 1880s, but the warming has slowed precipitously in the last 15 years. Scientists have identified a number of factors—among them a temporary downturn in solar activity and more sun-blocking aerosol pollution—that at least partially explain why air temperatures have barely risen since the turn of the millennium. But recent research suggests that Earth is still taking in more energy from the sun than it’s letting out, to the tune of almost a 60-watt light bulb’s worth for every 100 square meters. This excess energy has to go somewhere. A potential answer? The tropical Pacific Ocean. Changing trade winds here may have helped lower sea surface temperatures by altering ocean circulation patterns and making it so heat that otherwise would be warming the air is now trapped deep underwater.

"But Sybren Drijfhout, a physical oceanographer at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, questioned whether the Pacific can really account for all the ocean heat trapping and maintain the cool state at its surface on its own. He didn’t study this issue with a traditional climate model. Climate models usually struggle to simulate the warming slowdown on their own unless they incorporate the Pacific’s altered state from the start, he says. Plus, some studies have found heat trapped deep in oceans outside the Pacific, but Drijfhout says these studies don’t show where the heat actually first enters the ocean and how it may travel around once it’s underwater.

"Armed with a unique model that simulates the world’s oceans using historical weather data on temperature, humidity, and wind, Drijfhout and his colleagues calculated how much heat is moving between the oceans and the atmosphere, as well as where it first enters the ocean. The model revealed that the oceans were trapping more than 80% of the missing heat. But the change in sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific could account for only 30% of the extra ocean heat uptake. The other 70% was split between the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and waters just off Antarctica, Drijfhout and his team reported online this month in Geophysical Research Letters. That suggests that the Pacific isn’t single-handedly running the show after all.

"The study has prompted disagreement from some other scientists, including Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He maintains that the Pacific is still in charge of the heat uptake elsewhere because its surface cooling effect is strongly linked to how other ocean basins behave. In a modeling study reported online in August in Nature Climate Change, Trenberth and colleagues found that cooling the surface of the tropical Pacific altered atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns in ways that were felt around the globe, including in the Atlantic and polar regions, and resulted in an increase in the amount of heat deep in those oceans.

"Despite the disagreement on which ocean basin is doing what in the air-warming slowdown, however, a broader picture of Earth’s climate is still emerging. “I think all of these things are sort of adding up to an increased picture that, yes, global warming is continuing, but it’s not just at the surface of the Earth,” Trenberth says."
 
Great interview.

SATURDAY, NOV 15, 2014 03:30 AM PST
Humanity’s epic planetary facelift: Climate change, mass extinction and the uncertain future of life on earth
Salon talks to science journalist Gaia Vince about life on a transformed planet
LINDSAY ABRAMS
LINK: Humanity’s epic planetary facelift: Climate change, mass extinction and the uncertain future of life on earth - Salon.com

TEXT: "The Anthropocene: Don’t worry about trying to pronounce it. Don’t even worry about whether or not geologists decide we’ve officially entered it. This is the Age of Man: the epoch of mass extinction, of rapidly acidifying oceans and of unprecedented climate change – transformation on a planetary scale, all of which we’ve brought on ourselves.

"Gaia Vince, formerly the editor of the journal Nature and the magazine New Scientist and a current editor at the journal Nature Climate Change, has been seeing this all play out for years; for some added perspective, she took an 800-day trip around the world, encountering places where humanity’s influence on the planet is already abundantly evident – and where humans are trying to redirect that influence into something more favorable.

"Problem-solving in the Anthropocene is a monumental task: If people aren’t moving mountains yet, Vince at least documents cases where they’re painting them, and, in Nepal, connecting them to WiFi. They’re creating artificial glaciers in Ladakh, using electrical currents to restore coral reefs in Bali and, back in New Jersey, trying to create artificial trees that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere much more effectively than their natural counterparts.

"Vince, in other words, is an optimist. Or, to put it better, she believes in humanity’s power to change their world – for better or for worse. The problems of the Anthropocene may be dire, and they’re definitely unequal, she tells Salon, but we have innovation on our side. Vince spoke with Salon about her book, “Adventures in the Anthropocene.” Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows:

"You don’t delve into the controversy over whether or not we’re living in the Anthropocene. As you show, it’s very evident that humans are influencing the planet in all these different ways. But is there a certain advantage you’ve found to using that term?

"For me and for a growing group of scientists, the Anthropocene is a recognized term to describe these planetary-scale changes that humans are causing. In terms of the geological definition, that’s going to be decided in 2016, so we don’t know yet whether it will be a geological term, but for me it makes sense just to describe it under a particular word. This is the Age of Man, just as we had, say, the Industrial Age or the Cretaceous Age or the Age of the Dinosaurs. For me, it’s just easier than using a sentence to say the same thing.

"It also seems like there’s a little bit of a moral argument there: If we acknowledge that humans are influencing the planet it also means acknowledging our responsibility to do something about it.

"Yes, that’s a moral viewpoint that you can take or not take. In terms of responsibility, it’s up to every individual to decide whether they feel responsible or not. For me, I think we certainly have a responsibility to the people who are alive now and who will be living in the future, who will feel the impacts and are already feeling the impacts of what we’re doing right now. We’re the only species that can have this big planetary-scale impact and that can change this, and at the same time we have to decide what of nature we think is worth preserving or not worth preserving.

"It’s a very human-centric viewpoint, but we’re humans. Do we like elephants? If we do, maybe we should stop killing an elephant every 20 minutes, as we are at the moment. There won’t be elephants in 20 years, otherwise. In terms of morals, it’s not nice to kill elephants if we’re hurting them, but in terms of future generations, do we want to live in a world where there are no elephants? Do we want to live in a world where people are starving because we haven’t sorted out the way to grow crops? These are all things that I think we do have some sort of moral responsibility for.

"People try to put a loaded moral value to the Anthropocene, and it’s a personal choice. We can decide what we want to do: We can be the best humans for the next generation or we can continue to blunder around. It’s a choice that we’ve got to make. I think there are lots of international and global conversations we need to be having which we’re not having at the moment.

"We’re also dealing with this fact that some of us are influencing the planet to a much greater degree than others. The people you talk to in the book are the ones who tend to have less responsibility but who are also experiencing the effects of the Anthropocene right now. Did you encounter a lot of outrage about that?

"Yeah, well, it’s not fair, is it? There’s a lot that’s not fair about this but again, I think it’s worth getting away from that whole discussion about that and moving to thinking about what we can do right now. Britain started a lot of this; we’re the ones that first dug up the coal and burned it, and we exported our Industrial Revolution across the world. We started all these colonies where we deforested and changed all these things. We started all this in Britain and it was followed in America and across Europe and so on. A lot of people in the poor world have had negligible effects on the climate and they are feeling the brunt of it.

"You could spend a lot of time worrying about this, and it’s definitely not fair, but hand-wringing about that isn’t really, I don’t think, going to help solve some of the problems that these people are facing right now around the world — disproportionately in the poor world, of course.

"I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about some of the local solutions that you came across. What were some of the more innovative or promising things that people have come up with to deal with some of these problems?

"Humans are really ingenious, and we do come up with solutions to our problems, and we’re doing it all the time. We don’t have to wait for the big multi-disciplinary approach from Stanford or Cambridge or wherever to be kicked into gear. People are already dealing with their problems straightaway.

"There are all sorts of problems that people are facing right now. Climate change is having a daily impact on people because it’s making rains less reliable; monsoon downpours that have been able to be relied on for generation upon generation to do planting and harvesting, they’re now so out of whack that people don’t know when to sow and when to harvest. What that means is that people have to think about storage of water in a way they’ve never had to think about it before, perhaps. I’ve seen all sorts of interesting ways that villages are coming up with solutions to this, whether it’s social reorganization or different types of drip irrigation or coming up with underground storage of water and trapping what rainfall there is. The largest amount of water that humanity had, traditionally, has been stored for free in glaciers, and the glaciers are melting in the tropics. That’s a source of river water; it’s a source of water in some of the driest parts of the world. I’ve seen people who are trying to bring back glaciers that have melted, I’ve seen people trying to protect rainforests, trying to stop deforestation, stop hunting of species that are essential. All sorts of different techniques.

"Some of these are transferable — they might work in multiple geographic locations — but at the moment there’s not much incentive to communicate how these are working and to coordinate a rollout. Or for other villages to learn how one place has used it and not necessarily copy the same thing, but learn from it, and so make an incremental improvement that caters to their particular situation. That is improving, and it’s already starting because of things like smartphones and because of better communication — radios are available across the developing world and that’s helping with things like weather and planting and which seeds to plant. People get text messages telling them which agricultural tools to use, so communication is improving and that’s one of the ways the poor world can take advantage of a technology to improve the situation in a large region.

"What about geoengineering on a larger scale? There’s a lot of controversy about whether that will ever be feasible. You describe some promising areas where people are working on that, but is there a limit to our ability to innovate ourselves out of these crises?

"I don’t know. We are pretty innovative; we can try all sorts of things. We can go to the moon, so presumably… We can already make rain fall: people are cloud-seeding. In China they’re trying to get rain to fall in certain areas and I think they’ve tried it in California as well. We’ve got lots of ability to geoengineer and we’re doing it already; we’re warming the climate, that’s a massive amount of geoengineering.

"Intentional geoengineering is a little different from what we’re doing now, where the climate warming is more of an unintentional byproduct of energy production…

"I mean yeah, and that’s arguable in itself — it may have been an unintentional byproduct maybe 100 years ago, but now that we know what carbon does and we’re continuing to burn it I’d say it’s not unintentional anymore. We’re fully culpable for the carbon dioxide we release and for the climate warming that ensues from it. I think we really are geoengineering. We’re changing the acidity of the oceans, and we’re basically doing it deliberately because we know perfectly well — it’s very, very simple science — what the effects of this are, and yet we’re continuing to do it because we’ve made the choice that this cheap, easy energy is worth the climate change that results.

"That’s a societal choice that we’ve made. We could equally make the societal choice that, I don’t know, putting in reflective clouds to lower the temperature is worth the risks that that might entail. It might make crops grow more. These are all choices that we have to make; the thing is who’s making the choices and who’s experiencing the effect. That’s a problem, and we haven’t really had those decisions made yet. While we’re deciding, the simple physics means that the earth is already being geoengineered. We’re living in a different world already; this is already the Anthropocene. The climate has already changed. We’re already living in different circumstances where extreme storms are much more likely, where hurricanes and storm surges and erosion are much more likely, where drought is much more likely in certain places and floods are more likely in other places.

"While we have to decide what we’re going to do about these situations in the future — Are we happy to live like this? Or do we want to somehow roll it back? Or are we going to adapt? — we have to, at the same time, adapt our everyday living to this changed reality. Are we going to carry on letting people rebuild houses in New Orleans when it’s bound to be flooded again pretty soon? Are we going to just step up the bill for the insurance? We have to make these decisions, and I think this is a really interesting time to be living, because this is a changed world and we have to face things that none of our ancestors faced with the same ability to do anything about it.

"Watching those decisions being made right now — I”m thinking of the attempts, globally, to reach some sort of agreement to reduce emissions, especially leading up to next year in Paris — what’s your take on what’s going wrong there or what needs to change?

"I don’t hold that much hope for the IPCC process. We’ve had a quarter of a century of that and nothing’s really changed in terms of that. I don’t bother going to them anymore. I don’t know if things are going to change there, but in the meantime, what’s going to happen, I think, is that we’re going to get more bilateral agreements, more national action. Just partly because the economics is driving it — it’s becoming quite expensive to live in this way, with 20th-century energy systems and infrastructure in the Anthropocene. We have to adapt everything to this new world we’re living in.

"Some countries are forging ahead, and they’re going to be the ones who don’t have to spend quite as much money, but everyone’s going to have to change sooner or later. Those countries and the businesses that are at the front of this adaptation are going to be the ones with the skills and everything already in place, and will find it cheaper than the ones who will have to play catch-up later.

"I want to ask you a bit about the book’s epilogue, where you imagine the year 2100 through your son’s eyes. I found it very haunting — you describe this world that’s powered by renewables, that’s in a time of peace without a lot of poverty, but with a lot of tradeoffs: the loss of biodiversity, of corals, and major conflicts leading up to it. Do you see that as an optimistic scenario for the future?

"I am an optimist. I have to be, because I have a son and I’m very fond of people, and I hope to be alive for many decades to come. I try to be optimistic, but at the same time… That epilogue is just one tiny little view of what could happen. We can’t see into the future, but what we can see is the trajectory we’re going on. I try to be optimistic with that; I try to find a positive outcome in a world where there is a lot to be nervous about. A lot of things, we’ve kind of left it too late. Other ones we’ve still got time to turn it around, but are we going to be able to act in time? I don’t know.

"And then there are game-changers that we don’t know anything about. We can’t see into the future, but some things could completely transform the whole of the Anthropocene. For example, if there was another Spanish Flu or some sort of epidemic that wiped out an enormous portion of humanity, that would completely change things; it would completely change everything. Or fusion power could happen; that could work, and then we’d have instantly cheap, available, carbon-free energy. We don’t know what could happen. I try to be optimistic."
 
The book referred to in the above quoted interview -

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince Hardcover – December 9, 2014

TEXT: "We all know our planet is in crisis, and that it is largely our fault. But all too often the full picture of change is obstructed by dense data sets and particular catastrophes. Struggling with this obscurity in her role as an editor at Nature, Gaia Vince decided to travel the world and see for herself what life is really like for people on the frontline of this new reality. What she found was a number people doing the most extraordinary things.

"During her journey she finds a man who is making artificial glaciers in Nepal along with an individual who is painting mountains white to attract snowfall; take the electrified reefs of the Maldives; or the man who's making islands out of rubbish in the Caribbean. These are ordinary people who are solving severe crises in crazy, ingenious, effective ways. While Vince does not mince words regarding the challenging position our species is in, these wonderful stories, combined with the new science that underpins Gaia's expertise and research, make for a persuasive, illuminating — and strangely hopeful — read on what the Anthropocene means for our future."
 
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