REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Impact of climate change hitting home, U.S. report finds

POSTED BY: NIKI2
UPDATED: Saturday, January 26, 2013 05:02
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Saturday, January 12, 2013 9:26 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Quote:

The consequences of climate change are now hitting the United States on several fronts, including health, infrastructure, water supply, agriculture and especially more frequent severe weather, a congressionally mandated study has concluded.

A draft of the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released on Friday, said observable change to the climate in the past half-century "is due primarily to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuel," and that no areas of the United States were immune to change.

"Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont have observed changes in their local climate that are outside of their experience," the report said.

Months after Superstorm Sandy hurtled into the U.S. East Coast, causing billions of dollars in damage, the report concluded that severe weather was the new normal.

"Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts," the report said, days after scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2012 the hottest year ever in the United States.

Thirteen departments and agencies, from the Agriculture Department to NASA, are part of the committee, which also includes academics, businesses, nonprofits and others.

Disruptive impacts include:

- threats to human health from increased extreme weather events, wildfires and air pollution, as well as diseases spread by insects and through food and water;

- less reliable water supply, and the potential for water rights to become a hot-button legal issue;

- more vulnerable infrastructure due to sea-level rise, bigger storm surges, heavy downpours and extreme heat;

- warmer and more acidic oceans.

"This draft report sends a warning to all of us: we must act in a comprehensive fashion to reduce carbon pollution or expose our people and communities to continuing devastation from extreme weather events and their aftermath," Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who heads the Senate environment committee, said in a statement.
More at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=impact-of-climate-cha
nge-hitting-ho


So how hard does it have to impact us--and/or our "bottom line"--before we start doing anything about it? Or even getting the nay-sayers to believe it exists??

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Sunday, January 13, 2013 8:31 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Some people won't pull their heads outta their butts even as they go over a cliff. Future civilizations will find all kinds of skeletons in wildly contorted positions, leading to speculation that the species was felled by some disease which took hold when the climate shifted. They will wonder why such a technologically advanced species couldn't seem to have saved itself.


Quote:

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.





MEANWHILE, IN THE USA, THE TEXAS DROUGHT CRISIS OF THREE YEAR PREVIOUS HAS EXPANDED TO THE ENTIRE MIDWEST, ALONG WITH SOARING HEAT. AND, NO- THE DROUGHT ISN'T OVER YET.

Quote:

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.



All the records broken in June

drought index
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DM_midwest.htm

Arctic Sea Ice Sets a New Low That Leads to Warnings


And now a word from our propagandists, who happen to stay in power by catering to the wealthy who are making beaucoup bucks outta this clusterfuck, and the troglodytes who follow them...

Record heat doesn’t change Joe Barton’s mind on climate change

Quote:

Many House Republicans have long resisted such steps, and Rep. Joe Barton of Arlington — one of the most outspoken climate change skeptics — remained unmoved by the latest data.

“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. “Climate has always been changing.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week that temperatures in the contiguous United States averaged 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit last year. That topped the old record from 1998 by a full degree and the average for the entire 20th century by 3.2 degrees.



Oy. And people wonder if we're brainwashed? Baby, my brain is squeaky clean!

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Sunday, January 13, 2013 8:53 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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.

Okay, just kill this guy. I'm fed up with this political bullshit. Just kill anyone too stupid to SEE what's in front of them. Or too evil to not play political games.

Wait... that could lead to the death of millions...

Nevermind.


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Sunday, January 13, 2013 9:41 AM

JONGSSTRAW


In South Forida the only climate change we have is when it goes from hot to very hot. But I do understand that most of the country goes through these things called seasons. From cold to cool to warm to hot, then back to warm to cool to cold over and over, year after year....must be a real bitch having to suffer through all those constantly inconvenient thermal adjustments.

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Sunday, January 13, 2013 10:26 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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

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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Sunday, January 13, 2013 10:38 AM

JONGSSTRAW


Quote:

Originally posted by chrisisall:
Quote:

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

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.


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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Sunday, January 13, 2013 11:08 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Jonggstraw, if you don't mind I'll just ignore your puny experience.


CHRIS... "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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Sunday, January 13, 2013 11:23 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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.

Whew! That's a relief. Now I can look for other reasons for the food shortage & rising prices that is in progress.
Nice to know these record droughts are all in the minds of the farmers, and the stats are all lies.
Plus that phoney satellite imaging...
And of course my own messed-up observation.
Yep, I can ignore all that now because of your resentment of Al Gore and the fact that he's in error in some things he's stated... god knows that once Hitler said the sky was blue... what a fracking liar.

Jong, you need to drop this anti-librul thing- they're ALL pieces of shit, left & right. YOU need to ignore partisan piss-offs and do some clear thinking; all the technical stuff to consider is out there for you to peruse.

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 with less snowfall. Snow drifts that reached a second story window no longer even reached the first story one. And the number of days a fort would last went down too.

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Sunday, January 13, 2013 11:30 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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?

Hopefully the first wave of SERIOUS shortage will wake folks up. Nothing like a few empty spots in the produce aisle for a few weeks straight to drive the point home. Question is, when it comes to that point, will it be slow enough that we can adjust, or will that be a ball down a hill picking up speed?
I don't live in a major metropolitan area, but if I did, I'd be awful worried about even a slight food shortage situation...




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Sunday, January 13, 2013 12:58 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Quote:

Hopefully the first wave of SERIOUS shortage will wake folks up.

I wouldn't bet the house on it, if I were you.

More likely produce prices will rise...and rise and rise and rise. But even getting hit in their pocketbooks won't convince some--they'll just blame it on the Democrats.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Sunday, January 13, 2013 1:04 PM

JONGSSTRAW


Quote:

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....


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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Sunday, January 13, 2013 3:28 PM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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.

Now how did I KNOW you were going to go there?
Did my HOUSE shrink? Was snowfall measured by how high it was by FLOORS just a Matrix-induced illusion?
It's raining here in western Mass right now. When we moved here in 2001 it was snowing at this time. THAT'S a pretty big change.
But Jong, you must be in Rappyworld now, where things don't mean what they do, and things are not what they are, due to the evil Demolition-O-crats and their supreme hold on our society, and indeed, reality itself.
Tell that to the Cylons.

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Sunday, January 13, 2013 3:59 PM

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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Monday, January 14, 2013 7:21 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


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. I guess I expected more from him. Admittedly, hatred of Al Gore (who is so long out of the spotlight at this point that he only serves as a scapegoat) and Democrats can warp one's thinking, but I thought he was more intelligent than that. Too bad.

It is sad, however, the things he and those like him come up with in their attempt to "rebut" the idea of man having anything to do with climate change--or that it even exists!

Deniers will persist until their dying day--even then probably come up with something else to explain what's happening to them. It's terribly sad, especially as the majority of the rest of the supposedly "civilized" world has long accepted the problem and is working on what to do about it. For a supposedly intelligent country, we are particularly stupid about some things. But then the propaganda on the right makes it comfortable to stay ignorant, and given humans would rather be comfortable than face the unpleasant (especially the unpleasant they might feel helpless about if they faced it), it's not all that surprising I guess.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Monday, January 14, 2013 7:58 AM

JONGSSTRAW


^^

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Monday, January 14, 2013 11:00 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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.

Yeah, Jong & I agree on so much, then comes THIS issue.

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Monday, January 14, 2013 11:01 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
^^

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

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Monday, January 14, 2013 12:33 PM

JONGSSTRAW


Quote:

Originally posted by chrisisall:
Quote:

Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
^^

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


Launch Silver Spar Squadron.

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Monday, January 14, 2013 2:02 PM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Launch Silver Spar Squadron.

Now yer talkin'!

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Monday, January 14, 2013 5:11 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


The Myth of Human Progress (very much abridged)...

Quote:

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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Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:06 AM

CHRISISALL


Basically, magical thinking.
Rap-logic.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2013 6:54 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Ahhh, of COURSE, Sig...I was so accepting of the American Empire falling, that I forgot about all of those. I used to remember all the examples, but over time I guess I got distracted by the political/economical/etc. of our OWN destruction (a la Roman Empire and others) that I forgot it was an ENVIRONMENTAL destruction as well. Yes, it is our habit as a species; there are many cities built on the ruins of other cities, where the first civilization screwed up and went extinct, then after the environment had repaired itself sufficiently, along came another. More often it was deliberate, but it happened that way, too.

I guess unless we colonize outer space (gawd forbid!) real quick, it's pretty inevitable. I'm so glad I don't have kids, tho' I ache for Jim's granddaughter, who is an incredible young lady. At least it (hopefully) won't happen in her lifetime, I can cling to that.

I guess the "preppers" aren't that far off track in their way after all. Trouble is, they won't find arable land, clean water, etc. even IF they survive whatever it is they think is coming. It's all such a shame; we've got such an amazing little blue ball and were "given" so much, only to trash it just as those before us have done. I suppose it would take far too long for us to "evolve" enough to get past our primitive propensity for self-destruction. Saddest thing I can think of.

Maybe it's already too late, but incredibly sad that we still can't work together as a species in time to save it, and that there are so many millions like Jong who still don't even believe it's happening.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 4:03 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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.

50 degrees Monday and today this...



We're waiting for the air to turn to liquid.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 6:23 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Wow! Fifty down to...what? In three days?! That's wild. Glad it doesn't snow here...we're in a "cold snap" (for California, that is). I've had to cover a LOT of plants for five days straight...our highs have barely gotten into the 50s, and one night we even got down to 29!

Have been having to wear socks to bed in the Outback (luckily I have a reeeel good quilt) and the house heater can't keep up (we keep it at 60). I don't remember it ever freezing this many days in a year, much less a week! And go ahead and snark, deniers, it's not about just heat, it's about "extreme" weather of every kind. For us, that's extreme!

I don't think I could handle snow, tho'...nor do I want to. Huskies would adore it, of course.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 6:30 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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

Yeah, that's the whole "If it's global warming, why is there COLD?" tripe. Being not the sciency kind, they don't get that warming introduces moisture into the atmosphere to suck heat from certain places that don't usually get cold & redistribute temperatures globally.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:08 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Thank you Chris; succinctly put. I'd have been much more verbose and probably not made the point as well.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:24 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


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

There is a more specific mechanism to point to, however, and that is the jet stream. The northern jet stream circles the globe at roughly 45 deg latitude, but it isn't a straight-line wind, it has "waves" in it called Rossby waves.

These waves are responsible for bringing warm air up from the Gulf, and cold air down from Alaska or Canada. They also PRECESS... that is, over time, the waves drift eastward, so that a trough that was over California today will be over Nevada tomorrow, and Oklahoma the day after. With increasing heat, the Rossby waves are larger... they dip further south and intrude further north... but they are also SLOWER, taking many days more to drift across the USA. So whatever extreme event you may be experiencing now, it could hang around for a month and then it will change suddenly when the other side of the wave gets to your location.

But, deniers will deny, even if the Greenland ice shield were to suddenly go SPLOOCH! into the ocean! This is not only the age of the big lie, this is also the age of the crisis cult, when large groups of people will huddle into collective delusions about how the answer to poverty is to make rich people richer, the answer to gun violence is more guns, and the answer to ecological crisis is Drill, baby, drill!.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:45 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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


Simply, more energy is getting jammed into the system, right?

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 8:10 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Many thanx, Sig (as usual when it comes to science!). I've always known about the jet stream and Rossby Waves, but I didn't know about the wider and slower aspects, and it makes so much sense! Also probably partly explains why we just had this cold snap, five nights of freezing temps in a row, when usually we only get one or two nights of freezing all year! That's something I will remember, and share with both Jim and Choey because I know they'll find it as new and educational as I am.

We've always known that a lot of what hits us will "jet-stream" across the states and how it will move--sometime we laugh about it, sometimes (like when it gets really ugly as it moves East or gets fed into by Northern weather) we try to extrapolate what we experienced to how much worse it will be for those East of us, and be sympathetic. But no, the correlation never occurred to me before--or rather, I never knew about it--so that's a valuable piece of oh-so-sensible information.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 8:24 AM

STORYMARK


Quote:

Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Quote:

Originally posted by chrisisall:
Quote:

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

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.


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.



What is it with deniers?

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

Weird.




Excuse me while I soak in all these sweet, sweet conservative tears.

"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." -- Rick "Frothy" Santorum

"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"

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Sunday, January 20, 2013 2:35 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...




Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Sunday, January 20, 2013 3:11 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!


There is no such thing as man made global climate change.




"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." - Socrates

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Monday, January 21, 2013 8:01 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Quote:

What is it with deniers?

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

Weird.


See above.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Monday, January 21, 2013 10:23 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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

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

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013 5:02 PM

CHRISISALL


Okay. That answers it AU.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013 5:32 PM

JONGSSTRAW


The Weather Channel and The History Channel often feature specials about weather and how it has impacted events in history. From freak storms, typhoons and hurricanes to blistering heatwaves and droughts, 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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Tuesday, January 22, 2013 6:27 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!


Quote:

Originally posted by chrisisall:
Quote:

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

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



Damnit! You're one clever cat!

But who has ever said the Earth's climate doesn't change? That was the point I made with the cave paintings from 27,000 years ago, which were above sea level then, but are now below sea level.

There's also evidence in the Caribbean of similar finds, from at least 10,000 years ago.

The myth that the AGW crowd is pushing is that weather is stable and unchanging, save for when man fires up the coal fired power plants and drives around in SUVs.




"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." - Socrates

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013 6:32 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!


Quote:

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.



You sound exactly like a Christian fundie, confused as to how ANYONE could doubt the bible.

There's " mountains of evidence " which supports the bible to being 100% true !

Heard that line of logic more times than I care to remember.

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." - Socrates

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013 8:55 PM

STORYMARK


And once again, the idiot rappy equates worldwide, evidecne-based research science to mythology from a storybook - because he just can't accept that he is wrong.

And he doesn't get why no one takes him seriously. It's sad.




Excuse me while I soak in all these sweet, sweet conservative tears.

"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." -- Rick "Frothy" Santorum

"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 3:32 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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.

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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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 3:35 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

Originally posted by AURaptor:

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

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

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 4:52 AM

JONGSSTRAW


Quote:

Originally posted by chrisisall:
Quote:

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.

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?


You say...
"all agree"
"changes are happening"
"deal with them"
"may be endangering our food supply"
"our existence"

And you want to talk about getting past...
"emotional bullshit"
"political bullshit"

Seems that's all you got. Despite your admirable intent, you can't get past your own bias and hysteria even for a minute.

If you're looking for a Kryptonian ending to planet Earth, or simply an end to human life, best to sit back and wait for a large meteor or asteroid to slam into us in the next fifty to a thousand years. That has happened before. It's inevitable it will happen again.

If that's too abstract, you can always think about terrorists setting off a nuclear or radioactive dirty bomb in a big city or somewhere close to home. That'll be a real bitch.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 5:36 AM

BYTEMITE


I wish people would stop using local temperature and precipitation variations as indications for or against climate change - when we have record cold in the US winter 2013, deniers are able to say but look how cold it is, nothing is really happening here. It's hard to form a cogent picture just looking regionally for the highest temperatures or drought areas.

Regional weather interactions with human factors are very unpredictable. I mean, yeah, I'm a skeptic, it's my job to look critically at all the data, and I'm not sure I really see an end of the world scenario yet, but I can say what we're seeing in most places is a bit weird, and I think it's real (whether it'll kill us or not is another thing). All the same, there's very few things that we can really say definitively that YES, this is climate change.

Other measures, such as the range of west nile virus, or encroaching killer bees, or unusual mass animal migrations - and big storms - are better indicators. The drought would also be a big indicator... If it lasts beyond the 2012-2013 La Nina pattern, which is what the government is currently attributing it to.

http://www.drought.gov/media/featureditems/2013%20Drought%20Update%20J
an%2015.pdf

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:29 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

Originally posted by Jongsstraw:

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

I'm NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT!!!
This economic thing is changing life for us on Earth right now, and no one can deny that because it's all MONEY. Once climate change affects us ECONOMICALLY all you deniers will have to accept reality FINALLY.
A lot of peeps here predicted a 10+ year war in Iraq & Afghanistan, no WMD, and the bubble bursting, all the naysayers clung to all kinds of reasons why not believing wasn't wrong. Even today, AU will say there WAS WMD, just, er, not, kinda like we thought, er, sorta.

No end of man, dude, just an end to strawberries and cheap milk.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:32 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

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


I AM NOT HYSTERICAL!!!!



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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 7:05 AM

CHRISISALL


And... a look at a UK-based site I'm on:

Quote:


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.



Wow, away from America, away from brainwashing, eh?

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 7:26 AM

BYTEMITE


Quote:

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.


...Uh... WHAT?

No. Just no.

Here you go. The scientific explanation for Mars.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/08/-mars-vanished-water-atmo
sphere-where-did-it-go.html


Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, yes, but there's a such thing as condensation pressure folks. It doesn't just disappear endlessly into an infinite holding volume of atmosphere. The reason scientists think that the atmosphere might have boiled off on Mars doesn't have anything to do with a runaway greenhouse effect, it's because Mars doesn't have a magnetic field and a Van Allen belt to stop the solar wind from blowing the atmosphere away, and its gravity is a lot less than say Venus or Earth.

Yeah, friggin' Venus has no atmosphere DOES it, runaway greenhouse effect leads to atmosphere loss doesn't it.

The "runaway" refers to the TEMPERATURES, not the gases causing the greenhouse effect.

I HATE it when science becomes sensationalized for people's bloody personal DOOMSDAY scenarios. You tell your UK friends I said that.

And for the record, we won't become Venus either.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 7:49 AM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

...Uh... WHAT?

No. Just no.


Okay, so he's not so science-based in his 'science' with regard to our neighbouring planets, heh heh. Point is, people in the UK know something's up, climate-wise. It's not a 'political' thing there. They don't even discuss Al Gore in any of it.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 9:57 AM

BYTEMITE


I guess that's fair.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 10:12 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!


Quote:

Originally posted by chrisisall:
Quote:

Originally posted by AURaptor:

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

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



Honestly ? Nope. But for a planet 4+ billion years old, what takes place over a few years, decades or even centuries is pretty irrelevant.


But I have to admire ( while being sickened ) at the slick PR tactics the extreme, far Left has deployed on those who refuse to buy into the fairy tale of AGW. The labeling of anyone who questions the data, the political motivation, the contradictory messages, anyone who even dares to suggest we wait and see to collect more data before we go screaming like chicken little , everyone is collectively branded as a " denier ". That word has a very distinct and powerful meaning, as it was used, rightfully so, to cast asperscions on anyone who doubted the horrors of the holocaust, or that " denied " there ever was one. With one single word, the entire argument, it is hoped, can be put to rest, and the character and motivations ( as well as the intelligence and sanity ) of ANYONE who doubts that AGW is real and of any significant concern, can be mocked and marginalized.

This isn't 'science', in the least. It's propaganda, thuggery and intimidation.



"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." - Socrates

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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