The core problem today is the poles, ice caps, and permafrost melting. Huge sinkholes have appeared in like Siberia because of said permafrost melting.
And as I alluded, the billions of tons lifting off the crust over the poles, are not good at all.
Also noted, Northpole is very well studied, the South Pole, yeah, some rather big things being discovered there ito melting.
Another titbit, there was a case a little while ago in I think Mongolia, where a deer was defrosted due to permafrost melting, that released anthrax into a community that came in contact with the long-dead dear.
So there is that interesting titbit too, what the permafrost keeps contained. Some scientists fear that melting permafrost will release some more things that the human race, and animals, have no resistance against.
EDIT1: One last point I read about ā¦ the ocean needs to keep its temp, the saltiness is quite important for the thermoclines, fresh water due to melting glaciers and polar ice caps, is quite bad, as the oceans drive not only the currents around the world but also the jet stream. If either or both are affected, weather patterns will drastically change, and that will be rather bad, not to mention the animal deaths in the ocean, the food chain is disrupted (plankton dying first), and also animals on land. It has happened before, the ocean temps heated a bit, with disastrous effects on life on earth.
EDIT2: Iām no scientist, Iām just noting the things I read, stored as pictures in my mind.
The Earth is a closed system. CO2 must be consumed at exactly the rate it is produced, or CO2 will just continue building up until the atmosphere is 100% CO2.
Obviously, this isnāt happening, so CO2 consumption and CO2 production are (or at least were) perfectly balanced.
Yes, there are large natural CO2 releases (for example volcanoes). But these average out, and our environment has evolved to handle that average level of CO2 release. (When these donāt average out, you end up with climate extremes, like glacial periods or carboniferous periods, which act to restore the balance.)
Any change (no matter how small) in the rate of CO2 production requires a corresponding change in CO2 consumption, or the CO2 will just keep on building up. But unfortunately we have been destroying carbon sinks at the same time.
The human race, and all the plants and animals we depend on, has evolved to live at the current atmospheric CO2 levels. Even small changes (up or down) from the current levels can have massive long term impacts on the ecology. The human race is just barely sustainable as it is - it will not take much of a change to bring on a complete collapse.
I think the sharing of what is actually happening, which each person can then Google for themselves, is the key, vs as Sarel pointed out, telling anyone they are wrong, the other parties telling them they are right.
A whole new journey to embark on.
As Sarel said Cognitive dissonance, I had that experience really close to home. Years ago my boet and one of his friends (he works in nature conservation) and I had this global warming debate. His friend and I held one view, my boet the naysayer. My boet got quite animated at times, he threw back āpeer-reviewed scientific studiesā countering whatever we were saying.
So imagine that discussion taking place, no moderators involved, raw emotions, arguing using scientific studies saying the oppositeā¦ it made for one very tense debate, one had to think very hard.
Today, without any further prompting from us, my boet has changed his view, all by himself. We calmly and patiently held out views, we just changed the focus.
We kept on pointing out what is currently happening in real life, stuff that can be measured, seen, and not āemotionsā, articles from Nat Geo, NASA, documentaries made by scientists on the ground, not blaming anything or anyone, just the facts, as Sarel also pointed out. There are facts and then there is politics/big money, the twain shall never meet unless there is political/money benefit involved.
Just look at what is happening all over. Then give it some thought.
The trouble with that, and I think @mariusm also hinted towards it, is that even when you establish that something is happening, you still have to establish that humans can be blamed for it, and you have to establish that it maters.
There are many people who will agree that something is happening, but they will deny that it is humans doing it. In other words, they concede climate change, but they deny anthropological climate change (caused by humans), or they will say our part in it is so small that we hardly have any effect, or they may also say that the natural effects are so much larger than whatever we could ever do to mitigate it that there is no point.
There is however a fairly large deviation that starts around the time of the industrial revolution, and even though correlation does not imply causation, correlation on its own is enough to warrant concern.
Horses for courses, lead a horse to water ā¦ we can debate it here, safely and with insight.
My hope is that someone reads this thread and a penny or two drops.
There is only so much one can do.
ā¦ unless I become Pressi, then yeāall will deal with a Benevolent Dictator, Iāll sort it all out for everyone, breaking eggs to make an omelet comes to mind.
Years and years ago I was assigned a debate topic I didnāt agree with. And I mean, I really really didnāt agree with it. It was a topic on which I disagree to the extent that, by analogy, you might as well have asked me to argue FOR slavery.
The upside: It forced me to look for the best arguments that the opposing side had. And it helped me to also remember why I reject those claims.
In this debate then, I also think it helps a lot when you just list the best arguments of your opponent, the ones that are difficult to argue against (even if not totally convincing on their own). In this debate, the argument that much larger processes are at work, and those processes have a much larger effect on the climate (eg volcanic activity, methane released from the sea, etc), thatās a tough argument. Having to show not only that we should do something about the climate, but that we even CANā¦ I will concede it is hard for me (because Iām not a climate scientist). I love @justinschoeman 's contribusions though, he sounds like heās read up on the topic. More of that please!
Promted me to share this:
Do a Google search for the term āglobal warming consensusā and youāll find more than 24,000 links (and more than 19,000,000 results without the quotations marks). The first link for āglobal warming consensusā is to this NASA webpage with the title āScientific Consensusā and the following statement:
Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.
Hereās what Michael Crichton had to say about āscientific consensusā back in 2003 when he gave a lecture at the California Institute of Technology titled āAliens Cause Global Warmingā (emphasis mine):
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because youāre being had.
Letās be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If itās consensus, it isnāt science. If itās science, it isnāt consensus. Period.
In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Letās review a few cases.In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no.
In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no.
In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent āskepticsā around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
Iāve read at least one of his novels (not Jurassic park though). Heās not a bad storyteller. I think he even made one of the people he disagreed with a bad guy in one of the books (turned him into a child rapist). Colourful fellaā¦
On that topic, another writer that later started venturing into using his writings as a soapbox, is Robin Cook. Some of his later works are essentially warnings to his readers that a dystopian future may well await if we continue on the present course. And of course that is always the case. A story is never just a story. There is always a moral involved, and if you want to know what is being criticisedā¦ just check out the bad guy in the story.
Who are the bad guys in Jurasic park? The scientists who were more concerned about whether something could be done, than with whether it ought to be done at all
There is only one experiment we can perform, and we are living it now, monitoring the results as they come in.
The worldās climate is a complex interaction of solar weather, the various layers of the atmosphere, the land masses and the oceans. All are continuously interacting with each other in insanely complex ways.
Climate science is about trying to build mathematical models to accurately model all of these systems and interactions in order to predict how it will react to current stimuli in the future. So they write equations that describe everything as accurately and completely as possible. Fit those equations to past measurements, and see what the future predictions will be.
The problem is that there are a lot of models, and they are all ārightā, in that they match known historical climate to known historical stimuli.
How do you decide which is more correct, or which to base your planning on? This is where the āconsensusā comes in. The UN panel had the bright idea to gather all the models they could find, and all the models which climate scientists were willing to propose. If the model (a) accurately predicts historical climate from historical stimuli, and (b) has plausible physical parameters, then it is added to the pot. They then look at the percentage of these models which (1) show that climate change is driven by human actions, and (2) show future catastrophic results.
These models are regularly evaluated as we get more data (both from progressing time, and from more detailed measurements of the environment). If any models fail to work on the new data, they are either tweaked to work, or discarded if there is no way they can fit the data any more.
I am too lazy to look it up again, but I think at the start about 95% of the models showed that climate change was influenced by human actions. And as time has progressed and models have been tweaked and eliminated, we crossed ā3 9sā last year 99.9% of models. And of those, pretty much all of them say climate change will be catastrophic following current trends.
This is what they mean by the āconsensus modelā and the percentage probabilities that they give.
So back to the original quote. All of these models are ārightā in that to the extent of our experimental knowledge they are plausible and accurate.
And there are indeed a tiny handful of these ācorrectā models which do not have catastrophic predictions. So eventually it is actually possible that one of these optimistic models will turn out to be correct, and nothing bad will happen.
The problem is, we are living in the experiment. If it turns out that one of the 99.9% of models was correct, and we planned for one of the 0.1% of models, then we are screwed.
So the only sane option is to plan according to the consensus and try to control what aspects of the environment we can (eg CO2 output) in order to reduce the likelihood of one of the catastrophic outcomes.
I must point out that I am not a climate scientist, and have only the vaguest notion of how this all works.
I have a masters in electronic engineering, with a specialisation in device physics. So I have a solid grounding in maths and physics. I tried to actually understand some of the current climate models, and was lost within the first few pages. It is an insanely complex problem which only a few thousand people around the world are truly competent to comment on.
So I cheated. I know one of the lead authors on the last IPCC report, and he gave me a rundown on the current climate science and how the consensus models work. (It was a while ago, so any mistakes I may make in restating this are mine.) If the science is beyond you, get the opinion of a scientist you trust, who is actually involved in the field, to inform your opinionā¦
Also, it may be worth noting for the āfollow the moneyā crowd. He does not make a lot of money, and probably missed out on many well funded research grants while dedicating 3 years of his life to that report. There is very little money to be made in climate change science. (Probably the only real money to be made is producing the bogus research for cash reports that various āthink tanksā publish to support the status quo.)
The problem is that it is a field without a reasonable feedback loop. They cannot be proven wrong in their lifetimes. Theyāll just move the date out.
Predicting doom and gloom and the destruction of everything we know is a human past time. Since I can remember, every few years there was a new thing that will destroy us all. And these ideas often times were quite widely spread. I recall widespread draught, an asteroid, Y2K, famine, all coastal towns flooding due to all the ice meltingā¦ weāre still here.
Iām highly skeptical of the knowledge we think we have and what we actually have, unfortunately, because I work in a field where predictions based on models we construct are in fact our bread and butter. Much simpler models and much shorter term predictions.
The technical construction of the models (at a given company) is so specialised, that if you know enough to not be dangerous, you are likely one of a handful. Setting the assumptions that feeds into the model, well now that is again a completely different set of people.
And this is where it gets interesting. Sarel, Justin and Jacques all give eloquent replies.
Let me share what I look at ā¦
There are thousands of people out there today doing their level best to get to grips with the problem/s, for humankind, facing ridicule and semantics, counter reports, and arguments all the way.
Makes me wonder ā¦ are we killing the messengers with semantic debates?
Or is this Cognitive Dissonance and Confirmation Bias?
Like an AA meeting, my version, there is no problem until you admit there is a problem.
Is there a problem?
Yes.
Then why donāt we look at what WE see happening where we live/work ito humankindās influence on nature? Expand from there, one small step at a time.
By illustration, not to derail this: Copper cable, more specifically speaker cables and interconnect cables for HiFi. One would think, by now we know the science, but look at the high end HiFi market. There are people marketing cables worth R500 000.00 and right here in SA, people are buying those. Them cablests people are adamant that even tho science cannot measure the difference between a R200.00/M cable and the uber expensive one, they can hear the difference.
Now a few things of note. We can never tell what someone else can or cannot hear. We cannot know for 100% certainty we can measure everything and a new property we will discover in the future will somehow show a difference. For HiFi to work at all, we need to understand the science pretty well or otherwise no HiFi at all. So one would surmise, since it does work bloody well, not perfect tho, the engineers are ok.
Not so the believers. Even when many well conducted ABX double blind test shows no ability to hear any difference. I documented such an event, and the outcome was predictable, no ability to pick one from the other. This is not the only example, there are many others.
On to the Money part for Scientists. Itās not the salary that is the problem, they all get very little. (A good indication what society consider their worth, in general) But to do science, they need funding. They will be out of a job if they are trying to prove no global warming or prove no CO2 involvement. They will not be funded. It is a mess yes, but that is how it works. Scientists normally have something like a pet project, they get funding for what is fundable and then also run the pet project in there. Do a search.
None of the funders are Scientists but mostly Govements and career administrator or politicians. Sometimes corporations and or donors or philanthropists. Make of this what we want to or not, this is the reality of science.
Many scientists were fired, that cancel culture thing where if you do not support the current thing, you are fired. As was said, consensus does not belong in Science. It is just a way to shut down Science (we all believe X is true, donāt come Z here) and stop debate. Modern culture.
O2 and C boy oh boy. Everything is carbon, life is based on that, without carbon there is no life. The combination is just as important. Plants and animals, we all need carbon. Too little and plants die first, I will leave the rest to your imagination. Too much, well we donāt even know what that means, what is to much? I for sure do not want too much, whatever that number is.
One thing not really discussed, is plants will start growing better in places where, before, they did not grow well. That will mean more absorption of CO2 and more O2 produced and more carbon based plant mass. The oceans also use CO2 and absorbed a lot. We do not yet have reliable data on the effects tho. It is a case of balance, more Co2 in the atmosphere, more the ocean absorbs.
But letās get to CO2. There are lots more radiated energy from the Sun, but we can focus on this bit.
Here we see the absorption of the Atmosphere. Co2 is in there. Red is what the Earth receives, blue is transmission. The link below is to the graph on Wiki. Even the graphs here are not entirely correct. More on that laterā¦
Thinking on this, CO2 absorbs some IR radiation and starts vibrating. It cannot hold onto that IR energy for ever and it will emit that all round again. Molecule height dependent, between 50% and about 80% of the energy will be radiated back out to space. Normally this is where this description is left. This implies, incorrectly that the radiated energy (normally said to be 50%) is kept or trapped in the earth.
This is in itās entirety flawed. Earth will absorb the radiated energy, as does other CO2 molecules on the energyās path towards earth and some will reach the surface. This will again be radiated out to space eventually. The bulk of the atmosphere a few 10ths of meters above the surface, will radiated the majority (more than 50%) out to space.
We will still get into the CO2 vibrations etc.
Some food for thought so longā¦
Groetnis
When the results turns out to be off the mark, then the detractors point and laugh and say: See! They were wrong before! They are wrong again!
I just always remind them that the Christmas pig was having his best life on the 24th of Decemberā¦
I think that is the second stupidest objection. The dumbest one is when the detractors say āOh, they canāt even predict the weather accurately this coming Thursdayā¦ but they want to tell us about climate change!?ā Excuse me sir, those are entirely different disciplinesā¦ you know that right?
Of course, I also have a small amount of training in mathematical modelling. Just second-year level, true enough, but that is more than most of the people making jokes about the models.
The heightened energy of the molecule after absorbing IR energy, cause it to vibrate. There are different modes. Vibration takes energy, so in vibration it uses energy. Then IR emission will radiate the remaining energy. So what be this trap then?
As per the graphs above, the main absorber of the IR energy is actually H2O molecules, water vapour and clouds. They also radiate energy and sometimes need to absorb energy to form clouds. This is not bad, nor good, itās just the Laws of Physics.
