Climate change

[PowerPuff Grrl]

How would sea creatures be effected?
Are there any that depend specifically on cold waters to survive? I mean, I'm pretty sure they'll survive if the water is a tad warmer, only problem I see are changes in the ocean current that may seriously fuck em' up to extinction. Other than that if the ocean current stays constant; ice melts, ocean grows bigger, more room to swim.

I think it's mainly the eco-systems located on-land in extreme weathers that will seriously be affected like the life that lives in the Arctic tundra, what with the polar bears drowning cause the ice caps are melting and the fragile eco-systems in the deserts relying on rain that falls few and far in between. That rain stops too quickly and all that lives in the Kalahari desert dies. So on and so forth.

What really gets to me though is that some seriously fucked-up conservative "think tanks" have actually realized profit potential in this whole thing. While the Southern Hemisphere may become uninhabitable and the coasts may go under water, present uninhabitable areas inland; like East Russia, Northern Canada and Greenland, will warm up and become land prospects to welcome new settlers. (And you just know this will not be given away to the people who had nothing to do with this).


You know I was always concerned for Global Warming but never as much as I am now. Before last winter I seriously thought that it wasn't a pressing issue, like I knew the climate would change but not in my lifetime, nor my children's (if any), but perhaps in a hundred years or so. I thought that movie Day After Tomorrow, where the one half of world is completely frozen over in just a couple of days due to Climate Change, was the biggest practise of suspending disbelief one could ever hope for in a film. But just this past winter, snow didn't fall in Canada until late January!!!
We had a green fucking Christmas.
Canada.
No snow.
Lord have mercy, we are all going die!

[forre]

Originally Posted by Talyubittu

I don't think I am invincible or immortal...but I still don't want to die, or have my life/other species be threatened.

No offense forre, but if thats your honest outlook on this situation, I'm going to provide you with a number to a mental health facility in your area.

What I'm saying is that a global warming shouldn't be causing a global panic. We are trying to take care of our wastes, they research on the causes of this warming. It's not like we are sitting and doing nothing.

Talyubittu, I personally think that you should learn how to communicate without offending another people. Next time you'll get a warning.

[freddie]

Originally Posted by forre

Climate change is irrelevant indeed. The humanity survived ice age, so it will survive the dry age too. Then, the Earth isn't center of the Universe, so sooner or later it's going to dissapear. If to speak using the Universal measurment, 1000 years of the acceleration towards the planet collaps mean nothing. Though, it's good that people try to take care.

Yeah but see... the inevitable end (the Sun running out of hydrogen) is coming in approx. 8000000000 years, which as far as we're concerned is pretty much eternity. If there'll indeed be our ancestors still present at that time they're almost certainly bound to reach for the stars anyway.
What we have here is a much more pressing issue. As you pointed out in cosmic time where 1 million years means nothing, our 100 years is literaly a nano-second in the life of the cosmos, but a very important event in the life of our planet. Okay not the planet per se - (cause I'm sure the Earth will survive no matter what we do to it) - bur rather the planet as we know it - self-regulated, green, lush and hospitable to up to 10 billion humans.

[Amy_Lee_Rocks]

Originally Posted by forre

No it isn't. Our problem is that we think we are invincible and immortal. None of this material world is immortal. Find your own ways of thinking and you'll be happy because that's the only thing we want.

I dont think I am invincible or immortal.
I know we're all gonna die someday, sooner or later.
I just think its scary cause you never know what might happen next.

[forre]

Originally Posted by Amy_Lee_Rocks

I just think its scary cause you never know what might happen next.

Don't be scared. Live your life instead because we do not know what will happen next. We plan a bit here and there but there's no guarantee that our plans will hold.

freddie, You got it right, the only problem is that we still don't know for sure what causes this global warming. Some scientists say it's the pollution and some say it isn't.

[Talyubittu]

Originally Posted by forre

Talyubittu, I personally think that you should learn how to communicate without offending another people. Next time you'll get a warning.

I said no offense. It was sarcasm.

Because your opinion on dieing and this dramatic change isn't the same as many of ours. A lot of us don't like having unexpected things that will change our way of life happening. Just becuase it doesn't bother you, doesn't mean it shouldn't anyone else. Because honestly, a new climate means a lot of change. And that does scare me. I don't like the unknown.

[forre]

Talyubittu, The sarcasm used isn't precisely brilliant. Such things should be used with care.

I actually like it when it gets warmer. Less cold winters.

[Amanda]

Originally Posted by forre

I actually like it when it gets warmer. Less cold winters.

Offtop:
I'm the opposite. Most likely because we have really hot summers, it's already 80°F.

[Amy_Lee_Rocks]

Originally Posted by forre

Don't be scared. Live your life instead because we do not know what will happen next. We plan a bit here and there but there's no guarantee that our plans will hold.

Thats true, especially for me..but oh well, i guess thats how it will be untill I die.
Being 17 and trying to live life..right now is pretty hard..I honestly dont know what i want
or where to go...but thats besides the point.

Originally Posted by Amanda

Offtop:
I'm the opposite. Most likely because we have really hot summers, it's already 80°F.

Offtop:
OMG!, I feel the same way!
It gets really hot and humid here in Texas...You cant even walk arround
the park between 12-5 without being badly burned...or feeling sick..fainty
and just sweaty!
I love the winters! They dont last long..so i sit outside when its super cold.

[Talyubittu]

Originally Posted by forre

Talyubittu, The sarcasm used isn't precisely brilliant. Such things should be used with care.

I actually like it when it gets warmer. Less cold winters.

I'm more of a cool person. I like being warm...but it begins to bother me. Thats why I like my location, it balences. Freezing winters, but the winds make the summers extremely hot. Hotter than the south gets sometimes.

[simon]

Originally Posted by PowerPuff Grrl

How would sea creatures be effected?
Are there any that depend specifically on cold waters to survive? I mean, I'm pretty sure they'll survive if the water is a tad warmer, only problem I see are changes in the ocean current that may seriously fuck em' up to extinction. Other than that if the ocean current stays constant; ice melts, ocean grows bigger, more room to swim.

Many sea creatures are adapted to a particular temperature range, but in general it is easier for most of them to migrate than it is for land animals.

It's going to be difficult for sea creatures that live in the Arctic or Antarctic because there are no colder waters for them to move to.

The most vulnerable ecosystem of all is coral reefs. Corals 'bleach' when they are under stress and often die as a consequence. High temperatures are one of the causes and the 1998 El Nino led to massive coral bleaching around the world. Climate models indicate that such temperatures will occur almost every year in a few decades' time. Scientists think the future for coral reefs is very bleak. Reference

I think it's mainly the eco-systems located on-land in extreme weathers that will seriously be affected like the life that lives in the Arctic tundra, what with the polar bears drowning cause the ice caps are melting and the fragile eco-systems in the deserts relying on rain that falls few and far in between. That rain stops too quickly and all that lives in the Kalahari desert dies. So on and so forth.

The polar regions are particularly vulnerable because the temperature changes tend to be much more there and there is nowhere colder to migrate to. Climate change has complicated effects because as well as warming it changes the pattern of rainfall. Some regions tend to become wetter and others dryer. In general, regions that are wet tend to become wetter and regions that are dry tend to become dryer, but that's not always the case. Climate change is already drying out the Amazon and some models predict that later this century the Amazon will dry out so much that what remains will burn and the area will turn to grassy scrub.

This is what the summary of the 2007 IPCC report for the United Nations by the world's leading experts says:

The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g., flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification), and other global change drivers (e.g., land use change, pollution, over-exploitation of resources).

Over the course of this century, net carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems is likely to peak before mid-century and then weaken or even reverse, thus amplifying climate change. Approximately 20-30% of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5-2.5oC. For increases in global average temperature exceeding 1.5-2.5°C and in concomitant atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, there are projected to be major changes in ecosystem structure and function, species’ ecological interactions, and species’ geographic ranges, with predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity, and ecosystem goods and services e.g., water and food supply.

(I know Argos thinks the experts are all wrong, but he also thought that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than our burning of fossil fuels, so you can't take his claims seriously.)

You know I was always concerned for Global Warming but never as much as I am now. Before last winter I seriously thought that it wasn't a pressing issue, like I knew the climate would change but not in my lifetime, nor my children's (if any), but perhaps in a hundred years or so. I thought that movie Day After Tomorrow, where the one half of world is completely frozen over in just a couple of days due to Climate Change, was the biggest practise of suspending disbelief one could ever hope for in a film. But just this past winter, snow didn't fall in Canada until late January!!!
We had a green fucking Christmas.
Canada.
No snow.
Lord have mercy, we are all going die!

The Day After Tomorrow was an extreme exaggeration of the possible sudden shutdown of the thermohaline circulation (popularly referred to as the Gulf Stream), which is what happened over a few years (rather than a couple of days) at the beginning of the Younger Dryas when a large ice lake on the eastern coast of Labrador suddenly melted and poured into the sea, dramatically cooling the strait between Labrador and Greenland. It's been suggested that the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet could have the same effect. It's unlikely that the collapse would be sudden enough to do that, though.

Climate change isn't going to happen in the extremely sudden way it happened in the movie. It is happening faster than was expected, but it's going to take several decades to play out. One of the problems in getting people to take it seriously is that there's a lag of decades between carbon dioxide emissions and the full effect being felt. We're currently experience the warming effect of emissions up to about the 1960s. If we stopped adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere tomorrow, the Earth would continue to warm, although more slowly, for a few decades more. What's going to happen is that the warming will accelerate. We don't know how quickly it will accelerate because it depends on our future emissions path and how quickly the terrestrial carbon sinks such as forests, soils and permafrost turn into carbon sources themselves due to warming.

We don't know whether emissions will be brought down quickly enough to avoid crossing very dangerous thresholds. The Earth has already warmed by ~0.75C above pre-industrial levels and climate scientists say that anything above 2C is crossing a dangerous threshold that could easily spiral out of control - that's why it's the EU target to avoid warming above 2C. To have a 50% chance of that would require global emissions to stop rising by 2015 and fall by half (80% in developed countries) by 2050, which is what the EU countries are proposing at the G8 summit. It's very unlikely that the other countries will agree to that. The higher the temperature rise, the more likely we will cross the threshold that makes the warming spiral out of control. But even if we continue on our present emissions path we will probably have a few decades until we pass the 2C point. The trigger may not be at 2C, it may be higher. We'll have to live our lives like Madame de Pompadour, who apparently had a premonition of the French Revolution and declared Après nous le déluge! We've got to do something to stop that happening and not adopt forre's defeatist fatalism, which I diagnose as a kind of psychological denial mechanism to avoid confronting the awfulness of what is likely to happen unless the human race decides to make a dramatic change of course. But we don't need to panic or get hopelessly depressed just yet. There's plenty of time for that later.

[11Russia]

I don't know if it won't happen fast as the movie but the true is that is happening.
In my area we didn't had tornados never, but the past three months have been so rainy which I like it because this area is so hot, but a tornado hit the city in April it was so horrible...
And we never had such thing like that before... :S

[simon]

Originally Posted by forre

freddie, You got it right, the only problem is that we still don't know for sure what causes this global warming. Some scientists say it's the pollution and some say it isn't.

Who says climate change is due to greenhouse gas emissions:

The science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Carribean, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

A large number of professional scientific associations around the world have adopted statements attributing climate change to human activities.

In the United States alone: American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Astronomical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Geological Society of America, American Association of State Climatologists, American Chemical Society, American Quaternary Association

Who says it isn't:

The only professional scientific organisation that rejects the finding of significant human influence on recent climate is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. In May 2007 they announced they are revising their policy as many of their members disagree with it.

A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists detailed how Exxon Mobil has funded organisations and scientists that deny the evidence that climate change is due to greenhouse gas emissions. They actually took over a network of organisations and scientists that had been set up by the tobacco industry to deny that smoking causes cancer.

Most of the scientists who publicly deny the evidence are paid by those organisations or similar organisations funded by other oil and coal interests. It's all documented.

[Talyubittu]

Our weather here was akward. We didn't have snow until even after Christmas, in January. And then it was rain, and show, and even last year I think it was, we still had snow coming down in April.

[forre]

Originally Posted by simon

A large number of professional scientific associations around the world have adopted statements attributing climate change to human activities.

They do but it's not sufficient to force USA and Australia to sign as little as Kyoto Protocol and it's not enough to start manufacturing less gas consuming engines. The technology exists but we still pump like 10 gallons of gas in our cars instead of 1. That's why I care so little about all talks over how dangerous it is because the oil mob is controlling more than we think.

[freddie]

Originally Posted by simon

Most of the scientists who publicly deny the evidence are paid by those organisations or similar organisations funded by other oil and coal interests. It's all documented.

Here's a thought though: it just might be that these organizations are sponsored by oil companies BECAUSE they're sceptics, rather then pressuming they've only become skeptics after recieving funds.

I still maintain my stance that corporate profit will never back down to a greater cause like saving the environment. That's the basic rule of capitalism. It's not just the oil companies. The whole industrial machine works that way. Environmentalists are too idealistic regarding the issue. Fact is we're living in the real world, where financial gain is the only thing that matters and if you're going to make huge coroprate entities (which more than likely sponsor political elites) to give in to environmental concern is to convince them they'll profit financially in the long run. Shell is a good example of this, investing huge summs of money into renewable energy research. Why? Not because they're so greatly concerned about our habitat or because they're altruistically trying to insure the persistant existence of mankind on this planet, but rather because they're counting they'll make big profit of it in the long run (if they catch their fellow petrochemical-selling peers off guard).

Offtop:
Plus I don't think the internal combustion engines are our biggest concerns right now. At least not since the almighty catalytic converter came along. There's much more carbon monoxide being produced by cows than cars these days.

[simon]

Originally Posted by freddie

Offtop:
Plus I don't think the internal combustion engines are our biggest concerns right now. At least not since the almighty catalytic converter came along. There's much more carbon monoxide being produced by cows than cars these days.

Offtop:


The main problem now is carbon dioxide, not carbon monoxide. Cars with catalytic converters are actually slightly less efficient and produce a bit more carbon dioxide. Cows don't produce any carbon monoxide. It's highly toxic for them, like us.

[Amy_Lee_Rocks]

Originally Posted by simon

The main problem now is carbon dioxide, not carbon monoxide. Cars with catalytic converters are actually slightly less efficient and produce a bit more carbon dioxide. Cows don't produce any carbon monoxide. It's highly toxic for them, like us.
[/off]

Offtop:
cows lol

[forre]

Cows, cars, LOL. So where are we? Anyone has a solution or at least a suggestion on what can be done or we are here to scare each other and to complain about the climate change?

[freddie]

Originally Posted by forre

Cows, cars, LOL. So where are we? Anyone has a solution or at least a suggestion on what can be done or we are here to scare each other and to complain about the climate change?

Like I said tempt huge multinational conglomerates, (who indirectly run world politics) with possible profit they could make from saving the environment. The language of money. That's the only one they understand well.