Climate Change - The Simple Argument

[Old Rocks]

Aleady got one from the lowlife. My rep is my conscience. It rests peacefully.

Whine, cry, snivel, piss and moan.

Your own words can be directed right at you Old Rocks.

Sticks and stones.........

 

[Old Rocks]

Right, little things cannot effect the whole planet. Something as simple as blue green algea could not possibly change the whole atmosphere of a planet, could it?

 

[KittenKoder]

Right, little things cannot effect the whole planet. Something as simple as blue green algea could not possibly change the whole atmosphere of a planet, could it?

If that's all you have you fail worse than the other poster. Blue-green algae? That's evolution in action, you know, one of the many sciences you are ignoring. It's another clean up crew that could ultimately create even stronger species. Try again.

 

[eots]

Climate Change, Global Warming, man-made or not, what does it matter? It doesn't.

Here is the simplest way I can think to put forth the argument:

Just for the sake of argument let's say all of the science, all of the scientists, all of those who agree that global warming is happening and/or is man-made are right, and we as the human race don't make drastic changes to slow or stop global warming (and other looming environmental disasters) then in a few decades our children and grandchildren will live in a wasteland where a gallon of water costs $20. Many species of animals that have existed for thousands and even millions of years will no longer be seen in the wild or may even be totally extinct. Outside of 30 latitudinal degrees of either of the poles and below 20,000 feet in elevation snow will no longer fall or maybe even exist. And the offspring of our grandchildren will live in a world that is polluted, without wilderness, and rife with wars over dwindling resources and think back to how nice it must've been in the 20th Century while they eat food manufactured in a factory. And they're grandchildren might grow up in dying world while the human race, as well as most life on Earth, resolutely face extinction. That could happen. We don't know. But research shows that it is a potentiality.

Now let's say all of the science, all of the scientists, all of those who agree that global warming is happening and/or is man-made are wrong. But we change our policies to use less fossil fuel, to put less greenhouse gases into the air, to stop polluting the atmosphere and using sustainable methods to produce energy, for transportation, for food production, for use of water resources, and instituting a global fight against poverty, etc. etc. Then decades from now our descendents will live in a cleaner, greener world with less disease, famine, and poverty. We'll give our race the time to develop into more advanced civilizations and leave an honorable legacy for offspring and the world a better place than we found it.

Are you willing to take that bet for short-term economic stability, comfort, and unwillingness to make personal choices that reduce your impact on the environment? Because if we don't and we lose that bet....

So which is it?

A) Change and stop or slow global warming and/or live in a better world; or

B) Not change and potentially ruin the world or, at the very least, not leave it better than we came into it?

and when are those martins going to stop driving those big SUVs and go green for real
thats what I want to know

Mars is Melting
The south polar ice cap of Mars is receding, revealing frosty mountains, rifts and curious dark spots.

Listen to this story via streaming audio, a downloadable file, or get help.

August 7, 2003: It's not every day you get to watch a planetary ice cap vanish, but this month you can. All you need are clear skies, a backyard telescope, and a sky map leading to Mars.

Actually, you won't need the sky map because Mars is so bright and easy to find.

Just look south between midnight and dawn on any clear night this month. Mars is that eye-catching red star, outshining everything around it. It's getting brighter every night as Earth and Mars converge for a close encounter on August 27th.


Mars is Melting

 

[eots]

IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe - space - 23 March 2009 - New Scientist

 

[FactFinder]

IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe - space - 23 March 2009 - New Scientist

Oh geez! A prime example of alarmism at it most heinous. Let's see! What the hell did people do to survive before we had freaking electricity???????