I thought you were good at maths CT? 46 million acres is a tad bit smaller than 1.8 billion acres.
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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Global Warming
- Thread starter Disco08
- Start date
Pretty sure humans have already done this a heap of times over their existence. Might have something to do with adaptability.
Excuse the hyperbole. It's not all of Australia that's on fire. Let me rephrase.
"Deliveries are at a standstill because 46 million acres of Australia is on fire, while the rest of it (and some of New Zealand) chokes on the fumes."
Much less worrying.
Well as someone involved in a business that delivers all over Australia deliveries aren't at a standstill and even deliveries to places like Batemans Bay are getting through. Yes, the highway between SA & WA was closed but has re-opened. Yes, deliveries were delayed for over a week but almost all locations in Aust are now receiving goods.
Should we be concerned about the recent events and will they result in significant change? Almost certainly yes and yes.
Should we be composting ourselves now? Probably not.
Hopefully those on the this is the end hyperbole bus are doing enough worrying for the rest of us.
yeah I'm pretty sure we haven't too, there has only been one industrial revolution. There are a few analogous situations though. Rapa Nui for example (Easter Island), was a wealthy, resource rich island kingdom that started to put more and more effort and resources into appeasing the gods via sacrifice and idols until they ran out of everything and all died.
The Rapa Nui situation is a good analogy, but the predictable response highlights the lack of intellectual capacity of the deniers. They will inevitably say 'but that's a small island, we're talking about the planet'. They just can't, or more likely won't, conceive that the planet can be damaged, messed-up, despite all the common-sense and scientific evidence to the contrary. They just think, completely irrationally, that the planet can just absorb everything we throw at it, like Dusty swatting off would-be tacklers. As I've said on here, the deniers can conceptualise messing up a room, house, a street, a town, a region, a small country, maybe even a medium-sized country, and a chunk of the ocean, but for some weird, self-delusional reason, putting all the compelling science aside, just can't seem to grasp that we can damage the planet.
Hyperbole is the enemy of reason. 46 million acres are fire affected. Only a small % of that is currently "on fire". 46m is the total area either burned or still burning. Not a pleasant thought, but I don't like handing my opponents the stick to beat me with.
post doesn't wash. significant change will only happen if people get worried and demand action. Popping a few mogodons and telling dudes to chill will get us nowhere.
It's like they've either never heard of compound interest (unlikely as at least one is pretty handy with statistics) , or are actively refusing to extend the concept to other areas. If you understand compound interest, even a little bit, or have ever heard the chessboard parable then you have no excuse. For the uninitiated:
"As the story goes, when chess was presented to a great king, the king offered the inventor any reward that he wanted. The inventor asked that a single grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard. Then two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, and so on. Doubling each time.
The king, baffled by such a small price for a wonderful game, immediately agreed, and ordered the treasurer to pay the agreed upon sum. A week later, the inventor went before the king and asked why he had not received his reward. The king, outraged that the treasurer had disobeyed him, immediately summoned him and demanded to know why the inventor had not been paid. The treasurer explained that the sum could not be paid - by the time you got even halfway through the chessboard, the amount of grain required was more than the entire kingdom possessed."
In fairness this more a story about exponential growth but it helps to illustrate the nonsense of the claim that small effects have negligible consequences. All systems have "feedback loops". These are usually in the form of negative feedback, that is they pull on the reins to keep the system in something approaching balance. The global system of carbon sources and sinks that can be observed through ice cores etc. seem to show a system in balance. The sinks are able to soak up the excess CO2, CH4 etc. to keep the whole thing from running away. But what we don't know is what happens when you add in another factor in the form of CO2 from industry and human activity. That could push the system into positive feedback. The forcing factor, CO2, could overwhelm the ability of the sinks to keep the system in balance. Positive feedback is like the exponential growth of the grains of rice. This is the "China Syndrome" for global climate. It would be nice to feel so disconnected that you could "take the long view" and say "let's wait it out, it may not be so bad". But that is the 100-1000's of years view. I don't know anyone that lives that long and has the power to reverse the effects if the whole thing goes belly up. The sensible option is to start now. Haul on the brakes and try to get the rig into a manageable state. Doing nothing just isn't an option. The idea of "adapting" is utter nonsense. You can't "adapt" to a runaway system, you have lost control and doomed the species. If that can be avoided I am at a complete loss to understand why anyone would resist trying to?
"As the story goes, when chess was presented to a great king, the king offered the inventor any reward that he wanted. The inventor asked that a single grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard. Then two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, and so on. Doubling each time.
The king, baffled by such a small price for a wonderful game, immediately agreed, and ordered the treasurer to pay the agreed upon sum. A week later, the inventor went before the king and asked why he had not received his reward. The king, outraged that the treasurer had disobeyed him, immediately summoned him and demanded to know why the inventor had not been paid. The treasurer explained that the sum could not be paid - by the time you got even halfway through the chessboard, the amount of grain required was more than the entire kingdom possessed."
In fairness this more a story about exponential growth but it helps to illustrate the nonsense of the claim that small effects have negligible consequences. All systems have "feedback loops". These are usually in the form of negative feedback, that is they pull on the reins to keep the system in something approaching balance. The global system of carbon sources and sinks that can be observed through ice cores etc. seem to show a system in balance. The sinks are able to soak up the excess CO2, CH4 etc. to keep the whole thing from running away. But what we don't know is what happens when you add in another factor in the form of CO2 from industry and human activity. That could push the system into positive feedback. The forcing factor, CO2, could overwhelm the ability of the sinks to keep the system in balance. Positive feedback is like the exponential growth of the grains of rice. This is the "China Syndrome" for global climate. It would be nice to feel so disconnected that you could "take the long view" and say "let's wait it out, it may not be so bad". But that is the 100-1000's of years view. I don't know anyone that lives that long and has the power to reverse the effects if the whole thing goes belly up. The sensible option is to start now. Haul on the brakes and try to get the rig into a manageable state. Doing nothing just isn't an option. The idea of "adapting" is utter nonsense. You can't "adapt" to a runaway system, you have lost control and doomed the species. If that can be avoided I am at a complete loss to understand why anyone would resist trying to?
This is the problem with climate models - the feedbacks are poorly understood, or not understood at all.
Earth's climate is self-regulating to an extent. 'Runaway climate change' is an extreme theory that not many climate scientists subscribe to. For such a scenario to eventuate, temperatures would need to reach a level which is not survivable anyway (about 67C). Certainly, "Venus 2.0" is science fiction.
If I thought there was any realistic possibility of temperature rising exponentially then I'd probably be calling for more significant emission cuts - just in case.
The bad news is that the sun is slowly getting brighter and the oceans are destined to evaporate completely...
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Okay, so please try to respond to my actual points (if you are going to quote me) and not some alarmist *smile* I definitely didn't write. I didn't say anything about Venus, or extreme temperatures. I was talking specifically about greenhouse gases. The only timeframe I mentioned was in the 100s to 1000s of years. I used the analogy of a big rig hauling the brakes. Think more of a mining train that runs to km's long trundling along in remote northern W.A. If the driver is told there is an obstruction 10km down the line, he needs to start winding on the picks now not wait until he sees the obstruction. By then it is too late. What most here on the "too late/doesn't matter" side seem to want to do is jam on the picks when the danger is clearly visible. They are arguing that tapping the smaller retardation system now is pointless, it will hardly change the momentum of the train. Better to wait and then stamp on the emergency brake later.
Venus, which I didn't mention, is used only to help people understand just how important greenhouse gases are and how they work. Venus is hotter than Mercury. Mercury lives some of the time inside the Suns outer atmosphere! Venus is hotter because of the greenhouse effect gone wild. No one is saying the Earth is on that path. Only that greenhouse gases are capable of causing massive heating and so we need to be very aware of what they are doing, and that their accumulation in the atmosphere will definitely cause warming.
Yes positive feedback is a possibility and anything we can do to ensure that we keep from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a good idea. Period. The fact the effect will take hundreds to thousands of years isn't important if you are interested at all in the ongoing survival and thriving of human society on Earth. As someone who is interested in space travel and colonies on Mars and a Moon base etc. I want future human civilisations to be around to continue making new discoveries and eventually going to the stars. For that to happen we need to take action now.
And as I often say, even if you aren't that interested transitioning to renewable just makes sense. It is cheaper and more sustainable. So you build nuclear, now. You keep upgrading the grid to allow for the variability and distributed nature of renewable generation. You reform federal energy policy and upgrade the links between energy networks internally to avoid the problems we have seen when a link fails and whole state loses power. You work towards a regional project to link northern Australia in to South East Asia with an energy link and you become a nett supplier of energy to the region. A project that creates way more jobs than coal and encourages new ideas and new disciplines.
Politics isn’t about explaining one’s position. It is actually a losing strategy. That’s why CC is about mud slinging and hyperbole and latching onto anything that supports your world view.
If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck...
I don't give a stuff if I hurt the feeling of bloody minded fools. Just like I don't give a stuff if I hurt the feelings of Essendon supporters when we play them.
The activist community is not interested in a discussion - they are only interested is deplatforming those who would oppose their radical policies (the ‘deniers’). They do this by ridiculing and claiming intellectual superiority. The reality is this is exactly what happened in the last election.
You can tell all the points have been made when all the deniers are latching on to the 'Yeah but you didn't have to hurt my feelings' defence.
