Author Topic: Climate change.  (Read 18437 times)

Jocko

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Climate change.
« on: February 21, 2019, 10:20:42 AM »
I have just started to read a brand new book on Climate change. It is called "The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future" and is written by David Wallace-Wells, an American journalist who writes pieces on science related material.
It is very scary. In fact it has been criticised for being at the pessimistic end of forecasting. The only saving grace is I won't be here to see the final outcome!
I'll keep you informed as I read on.

peteo48

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #1 on: February 21, 2019, 12:58:58 PM »
Climate change sceptics will tell you that the scientists are exaggerating but I read a review of a book by an American novelist - Jonathan Frantzen - a few weeks ago. The book is called "The end of the end of the earth." In short it's game over so we need to start planning for the destruction to come. Apparently he spoke privately to a leading scientist who said that the warnings were toned down and that 5 degrees of warming was almost certain to happen by 2100. They were deliberating understating the danger to avoid alarm.


Interested to hear what your book has to say.

Jocko

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #2 on: February 21, 2019, 01:09:07 PM »
They were deliberating understating the danger to avoid alarm.
That seems to be the gist of what I have gleaned so far. What we are seeing now, with storms, floods, heatwaves, big freezes and such are "The better than best likely outcome" for the future.

richardfrost

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #3 on: February 21, 2019, 01:39:57 PM »
I take the view that it is not 'the end of the Earth' but merely the end of mankind's time as the dominant species. In much the same way that the age of the dinosaurs came to an end and things changed drastically in favour of mammals, the coming catastrophe will simply change the makeup of life on Earth. Earth itself will endure.

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #4 on: February 21, 2019, 03:50:18 PM »
I take the view that it is not 'the end of the Earth' but merely the end of mankind's time as the dominant species. In much the same way that the age of the dinosaurs came to an end and things changed drastically in favour of mammals, the coming catastrophe will simply change the makeup of life on Earth. Earth itself will endure.

+1

The real problem is population growth.

Many "under developed"countries have seen a population growth of 3 times in 50 years, e.g. Nigeria or India, all of whom will become consumers of stuff.

Just read this to be (a) shocked (b) see the scale of the problem quite soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth

Jocko

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #5 on: February 21, 2019, 05:43:44 PM »
15% of every human that has ever lived is alive today!
There have been 5 extinction events in earths history, where anything from 75 - 96% of the flora and fauna on earth went extinct. The asteroid took the dinosaurs and the rest were down to climate change!!

culzean

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #6 on: February 21, 2019, 06:08:32 PM »
https://www.livescience.com/9701-save-planet-kids.html


https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/100-reasons-why-climate-change-natural-and-not-manmade

Plants need CO2 to grow, more CO2 is greening the planet, more CO2 means vegetation grows faster,  deforestation has a big effect on atmospheric CO2 as trees act as sink to store the gas.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2019, 06:23:09 PM by culzean »
Some people will only consider you an expert if they agree with your point of view or advice,  when you give them advice they don't like they consider you an idiot

Jocko

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #7 on: February 21, 2019, 06:37:51 PM »
Man made or natural, we (the human species) are going to have to live and cope with it.

culzean

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #8 on: February 21, 2019, 07:00:40 PM »
Man made or natural, we (the human species) are going to have to live and cope with it.

Agreed.

For most of Earths history the climate has been unsuitable for humans to survive - we have been in a 'goldilocks' zone for a very short time compared to age of our planet.  Scientists have found fossils of huge insects, which because of the way insects breathe (and the way it limits their size ) means that atmospheric oxygen was over 30% when they were alive. They also found evidence that higher CO2 in the past ( and it has been a lot higher ) lagged warmer periods, so the warming caused CO2 to rise..
« Last Edit: February 21, 2019, 07:02:57 PM by culzean »
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peteo48

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #9 on: February 21, 2019, 09:02:58 PM »
I take the view that it is not 'the end of the Earth' but merely the end of mankind's time as the dominant species. In much the same way that the age of the dinosaurs came to an end and things changed drastically in favour of mammals, the coming catastrophe will simply change the makeup of life on Earth. Earth itself will endure.


Yes. I agree. Once humanity has destroyed itself, then the planet will regenerate.

Jocko

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #10 on: March 08, 2019, 01:43:51 PM »
Ploughing through this book and it is scary. It would appear that there is nothing we can do to reverse climate change, and at best we may be able to slow it.
It is not just the things we immediately associate with climate change either. Rising Sea levels, droughts, storms. These are just some of the problems. One thing I never considered was productivity. For every degree of temperature change, productivity of the workforce falls, increasingly so as the temperature ramps up. So we say, well we will just have to air condition the workplace. But that has costs which push down productivity. They reckon that 4 degrees of a rise would give us a depression twice that of the 1930's, and with no rise afterwards. There is so much intertwined and interleaved around climate change that it is very difficult to take in. As I say I am "ploughing" through it.

culzean

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #11 on: March 08, 2019, 03:31:09 PM »
The way humans are behaving pretty much everything on the planet will be extinct before climate change makes us extinct as well. Watched Sue Perkins going through Vietnam and Cambodia the other night, they had a massive lake ( the size of Gloucestershire ) and were catching fish with 1/4 inch mesh nets, one of the elders said ' we used to catch big fish' well they are catching the babies now, so they don't get chance to grow any bigger. They also catch water snakes to sell to crocodile breeders who feed them to the crocs, the crocs are used to make handbags, now the snake population has crashed. The same is happening all over the world, in the Philippines they dynamite reefs, also throughout Indonesia.  We are turning the world into a species desert, too many people, too many mouths to feed.

Saw a program about the Zambezi river as well, same problem with people catching baby fish so the never get chance to grow up..

Look in a mirror and you see an example of the most dangerous animal on the planet, a naked ape who think they are above nature and can do anything they want without consequences..including overbreeding ( and a lot of it is down to religions who instruct their followers to ' go forth and multiply' ( so that we can be bigger than the other religions).
Some people will only consider you an expert if they agree with your point of view or advice,  when you give them advice they don't like they consider you an idiot

Jocko

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #12 on: March 16, 2019, 06:54:15 PM »
Still struggling through "The Uninhabitable Earth". It is not an easy read. Currently talking about how economics are warming the planet.
Seemingly the search for Bitcoin produces as much CO2 as 8 million transatlantic flights.

Jocko

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #13 on: March 17, 2019, 11:28:37 AM »
Scary thing about concrete. Concrete manufacture is the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world. In the last three years China has poured more concrete than the US did in the entire 20th century!
If the concrete industry was a country it would be the third largest CO2 emitter.

John Ratsey

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Re: Climate change.
« Reply #14 on: March 17, 2019, 12:11:58 PM »
Scary thing about concrete. Concrete manufacture is the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world. In the last three years China has poured more concrete than the US did in the entire 20th century!
If the concrete industry was a country it would be the third largest CO2 emitter.
So use wood for the blocks of flats instead - it's locked in carbon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_wooden_buildings. From what I've read big chunks of laminated timber aren't a big fire risk - they just char on the outside. Using more wood in construction will increase the demand for timber and consequently the growth of more trees which will absorb some CO2 (but trees also need rain, which is becoming increasingly erratic).   
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