Earth may be near tipping point

[yeahwho]

I know that most people don't give a shit, deny, debate and generally get agitated and irritated if confronted with science, but here goes...

Another alarm to file away as you wish... false or real Earth may be near tipping point, scientists warn from the LATimes 6/7/2012

"The net effects of what we're causing could actually be equivalent to an asteroid striking the Earth in a worst-case scenario," the paper's lead author, Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, said in an interview. "I don't want to sound like Armageddon. I think the point to be made is that if we just ignore all the warning signs of how we're changing the Earth, the scenario of losses of biodiversity — 75% or more — is not an outlandish scenario at all."

Global population just passed 7 billion and is expected to reach 9.3 billion or more by 2050. "By the year 2070, we'll live in a hotter world than it's been since humans evolved as a species," Barnosky said.

BTW
PS BTW
Almost 400PPM

[JoLovesMCA]

I love all things science. I watch a lot shows on the science and history channel about this. Thanks for the links.
Because the Mother Earth needs to be respected
Been far from too long that she's been neglected

[abbott]

ah yea ... party at PB ...

[yeahwho]

Originally Posted by abbott

ah yea ... party at PB ...

Recycling Party, or political action party to force our country to participate in serious environmental protocol.

[yeahwho]

The LATimes has actually taken the lead over the other major newspapers of the nation on what is happening to planet earth. They did a great series on particulates in the air a few years ago correlating these pollutants to the huge rise in asthma in children.

Now they're doing a series from a very interesting direction on our planets atmosphere that is fascinating reading, even if science/earth's warming is not your thing.

New Wyoming supercomputer expected to boost atmospheric science

The National Center for Atmospheric Research's supercomputer has been dubbed Yellowstone, after the nearby national park, but it could have been named Nerdvana. The machine will have 100 racks of servers and 72,000 core processors, so many parts that they must be delivered in the back of a 747. Yellowstone will be capable of performing 1.5 quadrillion calculations — a quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros — every second.

That's nearly a quarter of a million calculations, each second, for every person on Earth. In a little more than an hour, Yellowstone can do as many calculations as there are grains of sand on every beach in the world.

The study of climate and weather patterns has always been hamstrung by volatility — by elements of chaos in the seas and the air. That challenge is most famously summed up by the "butterfly effect," the idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wings on the coast of Africa can determine whether a hurricane will strike New Orleans.

[M|X|Y]

this is really alarming.

the ONLY encouraging thing i heard from this story is that there has been significant progress on ozone layer depletion. i remember when this seemed like a lost cause many years ago.

are we doomed? i just don't see people taking this seriously at all. i see waste everywhere - its depressing

[yeahwho]

Originally Posted by M|X|Y

this is really alarming.

are we doomed? i just don't see people taking this seriously at all. i see waste everywhere - its depressing

We are a very narcissistic society, so much so that Madison Avenue can sell us and will sell us anything regardless of the waste outcome of that product.

The environment will be a minor issue again this election cycle. Outside of those who've invested in de-regulation of current environmental policies.

[M|X|Y]

is it society or is it people that are narcissistic?

how many civilizations have been wiped out before?

[Dorothy Wood]

I think sometimes people just want the world to end already. I know I do, I'm fuckin exhausted.

[M|X|Y]

the world will not end. people could end, but the world will be ok

[yeahwho]

Originally Posted by M|X|Y

is it society or is it people that are narcissistic?

how many civilizations have been wiped out before?

It's a a social/cultural problem, not simply a personality trait problem. A mass mental illness to not embrace reality other than by commercial means. I'm guilty to a certain extent and I'm not quite sure how to stop and fully embrace what my heart knows to be true.

Blaming it on Madison Avenue seems too simplistic, excessive consumerism is more of a by-product or result of trashing earth. Advertising appeals to the symptoms of "Why" we as a whole neglect guardianship.

I live in a city where a very large number of people face the reality of over-population and the effects of global warming head on. The fucking Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is right under the Space Needle. They deal head on with reality 24/7/365... yet within a few feet the advertising and reality twisting begins in earnest.

This planet is not that big of a riddle.

[yeahwho]

Climate change to worsen hunger as U.N.'s Rio+20 begins

Politically the presidential candidates will take the lead in avoiding the #1 problem on planet earth this election cycle.

Thanks in no small part to Citizens United.

This is not a mystery is it?

[yeahwho]

Report: Washington to get seas rising 4 inches by 2030

[yeahwho]

USGS: Sea level in Atlantic 'hot spot' rising faster than world's

[yeahwho]

Heat wave: 1,000+ records fall in US in a week

[yeahwho]

Another week has gone by, now it's 1928 heat records broken in the U.S.

Here is an interesting article & YouTube from the NYTimes,

David Roberts on the Simple Climate Problem

The challenge I took on was to convey the gist of my “brutal logic of climate change” post in a reasonably short amount of time, using as little scientific jargon as possible. Just: there is a problem that calls for urgent action. Business-as-usual means disaster.

This is all gloom and doom — not even much humor. I know that turns people off or shuts them down. I know people need to feel a sense of hope and efficacy. I know — indeed, have recently been writing — that we need a vision of a sustainable future. But I needed to do my own version of “Danger Will Robinson!” Just to get it on the record.

There's always the outside chance all of these scientists are stoopid and stuff, God knows they sure aren't cashing in making big bucks by spouting all of this global warming stuff.

[yeahwho]

I hate that ipad... it cut the above link short. Sorry here is the link.

David Roberts on the Simple Climate Problem

[GreenEarthAl]

We live in an imaginary fantasy that says eternal growth is sustainable. We live there because wealth concentrationists benefit from us being there. If everyone can close their eyes and plug their ears and sing la la la really loud we can get back to believing that the GDP can grow forever, population can grow forever, resource extraction can grow forever, and "economic development" and industrialization can continue on their merry way. Don't you worry. If you can just hang tight through a little more oceanic acidification and a few million inconsequential species disappearing from the earth, one day it IS ALL GONNA TRICKLE DOWN! OH MAN IS IT GONNA TRICKLE DOWN! (party!)

[abbott]

Trickle up!

[kaiser soze]

I'm looking forward to palm trees in Buffalo

[yeahwho]

I am going to remember this summer as the summer corporate America goes ahead and just outright tries to buy the Presidential race.

plus this - Koch-funded climate change skeptic reverses course

I am also going to remember it as pretty much "The Reckoning" on Global Warming.

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

What frightens me the most is nobody gives a shit. A shitty death on a planet with maniacal assholes in charge seems to be alright with many. That is how jaded billions of people are.

Are our we really that naive?

Demand accountability with politicians, industry and your current government. I'm asking all of them all the time "When are you going to get responsible"?

Below findings from former skeptic, Richard A. Muller

The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.

[yeahwho]

Extreme summer heat linked to climate change, scientists say

In an opinion article over the weekend in the Washington Post that previewed the findings, the paper’s lead author, James E. Hansen wrote: “It is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

The longtime director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen was among the first scientists to warn about climate change and its potential effects during a 1988 Senate hearing. He now says he was mistaken in one critical way: “I was too optimistic.” The effects of climate change are being felt now, not in a distant future, he said.

[HAL 9000]

One possibility that rarely seems to be discussed in these climate change studies is how the 'peak oil' problem impacts climate change.

I mean, around half of the fossil fuel we can reasonably access is now consumed, which means around half of the additional co2 we can produce has already been produced (caveat: we can put more in the atmostphere by deforestation).

So it must be possible to calculate a maximum CO2 level in the atmostphere, the amount that is there when we have consumed all fossil fuels and hammered the worlds forests (and when all the Co2 sinks like the oceans are full).

If that is possible to calculate, then we should also, through our understanding of the greenhouse effect also be able to estimate what that climate would look like - I have never seen this done though, maybe I am missing something.

I suppose part of the problem is that, once you get to a certain temp increase, other factors come in, melting ice reflecting less solar energy away, and you get some runaway effects.

[Dorothy Wood]

I'm worried about floods. Two of my neighbors have boats and I live in an attic, so I'll be okay. My house has been standing for 100 years, hopefully it'll hold up for awhile longer.

[yeahwho]

Originally Posted by HAL 9000

One possibility that rarely seems to be discussed in these climate change studies is how the 'peak oil' problem impacts climate change.


I mean, around half of the fossil fuel we can reasonably access is now consumed, which means around half of the additional co2 we can produce has already been produced (caveat: we can put more in the atmostphere by deforestation).

So it must be possible to calculate a maximum CO2 level in the atmostphere, the amount that is there when we have consumed all fossil fuels and hammered the worlds forests (and when all the Co2 sinks like the oceans are full).

If that is possible to calculate, then we should also, through our understanding of the greenhouse effect also be able to estimate what that climate would look like - I have never seen this done though, maybe I am missing something.

There may be no definitive way to come up with a mathematical formula with any certainty yet, and I'm sure it's been discussed and tried, probably with with wildly different degrees of results each time.

If you search peak oil/climate change (like I did due to your question posed) you'll that see those who profit from these two phenomena have dominated the first few hundred results. Good business platform, not really very scientific.

I just read this book; Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us which really is an innovative look at the peak oil problem.


Scientific American does have an 8 page excerpt titled, Spread Reckoning: U.S. Suburbs Face Twin Perils of Climate Change and Peak Oil, from the above author.

bit of the discussion on peak oil below,

To answer these questions, we first have to know "when." If we have a hundred years before oil production peaks, then we'll be in a very different position compared to that peak happening next year—or last year. The timing of this peak isn't easy to figure out. The world's supply of oil is harder to measure than carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, for the simple reasons that nobody owns the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is well-mixed. Oil, on the other hand, is a business. It comes with trade secrets. It also comes without an industry-wide standard for calculating untapped oil reserves. If one company tells you how much oil it has left, you can't directly add that to another company's number and get a reliable total, because both calculations were figured in very different ways. Unlike the atmosphere, you can't just take a sample from anywhere on the planet and expect it to tell you something about conditions everywhere.

Originally Posted by Dorothy Wood

I'm worried about floods. Two of my neighbors have boats and I live in an attic, so I'll be okay. My house has been standing for 100 years, hopefully it'll hold up for awhile longer.

I'm always worried about earthquakes, it's a west coast thing. The global warming situation is much more of something I feel I owe to future generations. I can't pretend this isn't happening or deny it isn't happening. So I just keep bringing it up, hoping to see more and more people bringing it up, skeptics too.

[HAL 9000]

^ thanks, I reasd the article you linked to. I suppose part of my thought process here, is that the 'twin perils' of peak oil and climate change are, at least partially, offsetting.

Because if peak oil hits today, then that means there is not much more economically viable fossil fuel, which is good for CO2 emissions. But if there is still a huge amount of economically viable oil out there, thats great for the peak oil problem, but terrible for climate change.

[yeahwho]

The lagging United States response to climate change.

How to Parse Climate Change and Extreme Weather? NYTimes

These are questions that have not only scientific implications but political consequences as well. If one believes – as President Obama does – that human activities are contributing to climate change, then it follows that people have an obligation to take steps to slow emissions and mitigate the impact. If one believes — as Mitt Romney now appears to – that recent weather phenomena are merely cyclical events, then an aggressive government response seems like a costly and ineffective solution.

These are core political questions that the candidates and the electorate will face this fall, even though so far we have not yet heard a vigorous public debate on them. The Times hopes to kick-start that discussion through its Agenda project.

Here and here are links to more detail from the Hansen study, with some fascinating visualizations of the spreading heat.

The media and laypeople do not follow statistical arguments, so we need people with competence in both Climate Science and Communications (like Hansen) to translate statistics into clear statements. Global warming is causing heat waves. It is important to say that directly so general audiences understand.

Accusations that Hansen is "politicizing the science" are pointless. His results have enormous political implications. It would be inhuman to finish such a paper and go home and shut up. The man has genuine concern for younger generations and feels a moral obligation to communicate his results. If you discovered that hundreds of millions of people were in danger, and you didn't speak up because you were afraid of a little political mudslinging, shame on you.

Make some noise.

[yeahwho]

Originally Posted by GreenEarthAl

We live in an imaginary fantasy that says eternal growth is sustainable. We live there because wealth concentrationists benefit from us being there. If everyone can close their eyes and plug their ears and sing la la la really loud we can get back to believing that the GDP can grow forever, population can grow forever, resource extraction can grow forever, and "economic development" and industrialization can continue on their merry way. Don't you worry. If you can just hang tight through a little more oceanic acidification and a few million inconsequential species disappearing from the earth, one day it IS ALL GONNA TRICKLE DOWN! OH MAN IS IT GONNA TRICKLE DOWN! (party!)

I never did give you proper credit for such an astute observation. Consider it given even if it is a half a year late.

Fast forward to 2013......




Climate assessment delivers a grim overview


"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," the report says. "Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer."

[kaiser soze]

I heard Australia is great this time of year...

last night I had a very sinking feeling in my stomach - the way consumerism and head in the sand type of thinking is being bestowed on our kids is horrific. Do any of them understand the exceptional damage that is happening at the Poles? In China? Australia? The Gulf of Mexico? Africa? The Amazon?

I wish we could all collectively look at our two neighbors (Venus and Mars) in the solar system - they are virtually dead planets - we are not immune to that fate.

Economists and Corporatists don't realize or care how expensive climate change will be to produce and sell their products in the future, not to mention difficult if people just don't have the money for it.

climate change denial and failure to act is absurd for all involved.

[M|X|Y]

people/society will not stop being consumerist and, in a way, that's comforting to me. there are bad sides to everything but i strongly believe that capitalism drives progress. we wouldn't be sitting in our mini-palaces, poking at our knowledge boxes right now had civilization taken a different, say, collective approach.

at the same time, its undeniable that there are major and dangerous changes taking place and that the earth has a low-grade fever.

it'll probably continue to get worse but i'm hopeful we'll adapt and that, if anything, all of this will be a slap in the face to all... that we need to change the way we consume. not stop consuming, but shift how we do it. this is the catalyst. it may get worse before it gets better though. there's no choice but to roll with it

making money and profit aren't evil in themselves, they're the engine that drives everything. IMO, the faster we can work greentech into the equasion, the faster climate change will have a chance of being stabilized.

maybe i'm completely wrong, but i'm optimistic.

greentech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=9noGsz_HVcI < the good and the bad. the opportunities and pitfalls. half full or half empty?

my 2¢