http://www.breitbart.com/news/na/061221021851.h3kfaxex.html http://www.telegraphindia.com/1061030/asp/frontpage/story_6933888.asp At 3.5mm a year that equals about 4 inches over the next 30 years. I'm pretty sure that Island was more than 4 inches above water 30 years ago. In fact, if a satallite can't see the island then it went down even deeper than that in the last few decads. A more reasonable explaination is that the land mass is sinking into the ocean. Not that the ocean is rising above the island. In other words. Global Warming has nothing to do with this any more than it has anything to do with Venice sinking.
Yes I do. They didn't fool me with the Freon/Ozone hoax and I am not buying this one but they're working it pretty well with CNN and billions of tax dollar of funding.
Hahahah, I would have expected no less, TBarr. It is obviously just a media-driven hoax, a conspiratorial one at that. Of course, there is that pesky mountain of evidence provided by lefty-propagandist, addle-headed lightweights such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, among others. I guess I would like to say I left the earth to my children better than I had found it. Right now, I, and my fellow globe-dwelllers, are just taking a big, stinky crap.
Personally, I just dislike the method in which the UN is generally trying to achieve their means. There's many practical and wise reasons to try to seek alternatives or conserve (muchless those concerns environmentally), but the UN-driven perspective is almost ill-conceived. It seems more political than ethical. California has done fairly good in small ways. Just mandating the use of higher energy efficient bulbs, has done wonders. Now with moderation on methods like that, I welcome. Democrats should also move to end oil subsidizes...prices have to rise for investment into alternative. But I'm for a slow trend upwards, and do still support oil drilling offshore. Laser technology will enable much higher yieds in oil, and extremely fast speeds. I believe they'll have laser that will drill a hole within hours....what would take months. We still need oil for plastics, fertilizers, etc....so we have to be realistic and make that slow shift over. The middle ground on this issue must be met or real conflict could arise, imo.
Rick, my problem is that I don't believe a retooling within the paradigm is feasible. I hear what you are saying, but I believe we are under such exigent circumstances that a wholesale shift is precisely what is needed. I belong among those who say we are on an exponentially headlong rush to hell.
So you believe in a 1-10 spectrum as far as danger goes...it's very close to 10? Personally, even if there was an extreme danger,... such a drastic change would be very hard for the public to grasp...muchless do. It's very hard for me to conceive a future that's completely without petro. It encompasses our whole life. Almost everything we do is based on it. People think that if we just change the vehicle fuel will be off it...nah, we have a long ways to go, before it's no-longer important at all. But who knows!? Maybe we're just a few decades away from groundbreaking technologies that will incredibly marginalize petro. I just know the government won't wholly solve this problem. Fusion would great. Cheap replacements for plastics and fertilizers....add that to biodisels...and we're talking real progress. We need to get some of these going (which many are starting to move), but the alternatives have to be economically feasible. I'm hoping fusion comes for other reasons as well. Long-term space travel would be feasible.
There may be global warming at this point in time but it was obviously not responsible for the sinking island. 4 inches of rising water does not sink an island sufficiently to keep it from being seen by satilite.
Yep, Rick, the evidence I've seen tells me we are close to 10. I also agree with your bleak view - the public generally doesn't change anything until forced to. I am sadly of the mind that only when it is too late will we wake up. However, there are glimmers - for one, I think of the Baltic Sea and pollution, particularly the Baltic Sea, post-Baltic independence. A concerted effort has done well to stem the trend towards wanton destruction. But again, I don't believe "management" within a paradigm is possible...I believe a wholesale change is required.
Oddly that's how I perceive some other things. What sort of real-life solution do you think could be probable? Just curious if you have any that comes to mind. KLB's made suggestions that are more within the paradigm, while you suggest a clear break from what we have. I'm wondering what that clear break would resemble.
Please feel free to do your own research but here's a place to start: http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/opinion/nationalcolumns/article_1382472.php
Rick, you are right to hold me to more than railing against the problem, and you have set me to think on this. "Real life" means many things to me - i.e., a rejection of modernity and industrialization, if forced upon our species, is just as "real life" as any switching to new technologies, in my mind. Industrialization and its partner, nationalism, is such a recent human phenomenon - we impute such authoritative weight to it, though it is a baby in the history of humanity - and I do not believe there is anything necessarily permanent about its existence. For now, I am thinking of what many our way do, which is to live totally off the grid. As I write this, I realize the hypocrisy in writing on a computer while advocating this; but I have learned much from the organic farmers that supplied my restaurant, for instance. They live in wonderful homes fabricated from straw bale and found materials, entirely off the grid. They grow produce and raise pigs, cattle sheep and chickens entirely without the aid of electricity or gas, and in this I find much to admire.
That same journal your linked article cites, Science, shows over 80 articles from 2000-2004 alone that clearly establish the main thrust of climate science and global warming, in contradiction to your article cited, TBarr. If we are searching for truth, I think it's important to gather as much evidence as possible, to look more deeply into the research one does cite and not to data mine to find the solitary material merely supporting one's position. Moreover, any scholarly work I know is fully transparent about datasources and cited literature to support one's claims, and I do not see such transparency in the article you cite. I read the research your article cites. The conclusions I draw from that same research (among others, Dr. Kossin and American Meteorological Society's Environment Science Series) do not at all square with those of your linked article. If anything, Dr. Kossin (whom your article uses as a support for its theme) seems to be supporting the main thesis with respect to long term trends, and calling for more research into the area, more than drawing firm conclusions based on current research, for "multidecadal analysis" from the 1950's on. Here's a few quotes from Dr. Kossin's research that I think are germane: (in other words, the long-run trend is clear and well established - greenhouse gases, generated by human activity, have brought on the significant, climatic changes discussed in the above paragraphs; research based on the historical record from the 1950's on needs further elucidation). -[emphases mine]. How this research was characterized as a refutation of the mainstream climate theses - namely, that we are screwing up the climate by exogenous, human activity - is beyond me, Tbarr. Perhaps you can elucidate how the author of the above study, the same author your article cites as refuting the current research, is doing so? Here's a smattering of others, from Science, the journal your article cites: realclimate.org - Climate Science by Climate Scientists Just a couple of idiots that run the site: - and many others. From "It's Official: Humans Are Behind Most of Global Warming.(report from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included). RICHARD A. KERR," Science, 01/26/01, pp. 566 et seq.: This planet is all we have. Putting one's head in the sand will do nothing.
I personally plan on buying a hybrid for my next vehicle. I have also been trying (not always successfully) to remind myself to conserve power. I use lower wattage bulbs than anyone else in the house (in part because I’m the only one concerned about the warning of fire danger from using higher watt bulbs in the fixtures we have, I must admit), and when I move out of my house and rent an apartment I will try to get one close to the places I would drive daily (such as my job, and the school I intend to do continuing education at), hopefully within biking or walking distance of one or the other. That said, I’ve got leaky tires on my current car (they are so old), and I need to replace them. Guess where the rubber is coming from?
This is what the envirowackos don't get. I don't need lies about a sinking island to convince me that global warming is real. In fact, that sort of thing makes me question global warming even more since they can't seem to come up with any concrete examples of its effect. I can see the charts and see that climate warms, climate cools, etc. So as far as I can tell there's nothing new going on here. But at the end of the day global climate change has zero to do with my decision to want to be more environmentally friendly. That decision is made every time I look out my 11th story office and see the disgusting air that I'm breathing. And every time it rains for hours on end and I get a short glimpse of what a blue sky really looks like. I never understood why people go on and on about the theory of global warming when it's the facts of pollution that can be clearly seen. And you know what? The same things that fix pollution also may have an effect on the temperature of the earth. So instead of bitching about global warming, how about we focus on something a little more obvious? Instead of arguing that we should cut pollution because of "global warming" and the included outragous claims of destruction, maybe, just maybe, we should focus instead on the air we breathe.