Posted on 05/11/2008 10:48:45 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Civilization's last chance The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast. By Bill McKibben May 11, 2008 Even for Americans -- who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.
It's not just the economy: We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem ... how best to put it, right.
All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.
There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted....
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Someone, please, post the chicken little picture.....sheesh.
We’re all gunna FReepin die.
You took the picture right out of my mouth. ; )
That “tipping point” they keep talking about will never be reached. To do so would rob them of the chance to scare everybody into pouring money into their schemes. Once it’s “too late” to do anything, people will, well, give up on doing anything. And they just can’t have that.
Utter bunk. The danger we face is another ice age. And fools, such as the author of this article, who will do everything in their power to prevent us from focusing on and dealing with the real problems we actually face, preferring to frighten themselves and others with pseudo-scientific fantasies.
bull sh-t, 6 billion people and other mammals exhaling CO2 and the earth can’t handle it?? bullsh-t!!!
I totally agree. These idiots are forcing billions of dollars to be spent on something they can’t even prove. Climate changes. With or without human beings. We have survived because we adapted to real problems, not phantom alarmism. We would be much better served by learning how to adapt to climate change than alter it. Flawed logic from the start with these fools.
Perhaps the earth is warming. I'm not sure we have enough accurate baseline information to make that determination but maybe it is warming. I understand that there are similar, shaky, measurements that suggest Mars is warming too. So what?
Earth has always been either warming or cooling; the possibility of long term stable temperatures seems remote if not impossible.
Is there a deadline date? You’d think the least they could do is tell us when, so we can get our houses in order.
When it came to war in Iraq, no argument for preemptive action could ever be good enough. No evidence was strong enough to believe Saddam was a threat.
When it comes to global warming, no argument against preemptive action could ever be good enough. No evidence is strong enough to thwart immediate action.
The consequences of action against Saddam in terms of money and lives will dwarf the consequences of the decision to make war on global warming
James Hansen, global warming shill extrordinaire.
“Call the men in the white coats”
That is the correct remedy.
Give these people some Jim Jones Koolaid so the rest of us can live in peace.
Hasn't this guy been fired for incompetence yet?
What a quandary.
What is more profound, the absurdity and a$$inine conveyance that the Earth to die by our own hands or the desperation being shown to keep this dead horse of an issue alive?
That volcano in Chile just wiped out any effect we could have on C02.
If we cut down the trees and burn them, more C02.
If we let the trees live, more C02.
Cut down all the trees, and ship them to the Sun.
(ohcrap. That will just make the sun burn hotter)
OK. Ship them to...... Jupiter, or Venus. Heck, anywhere we don’t plan to move to.
These "experts" need to realize that when you are up to your nose in ****, you need to keep your mouth shut. The more they talk, the less people are listening....
The entire human population can fit within the boundaries of Jacksonville, Florida.
I guess being named "a scholar" isn't what it used to be. McKibben is a fiction writer with no scientific credentials whatsoever. He wrote a sci-fi story years ago about environmental collapse, rather entertaining at that, in the "Day After Tomorrow" genre but better. But clearly, as an authority he is right up there with Cheryl Crow. He should stick to writing fiction...oops, actually he has.
WE’RE GOING TO FREEZE!
(no wait, that was the 70’s)
WE’RE GOING TO ROAST!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Wow! The validity of the author's argument was increased because they used strong language. Science has been advanced by the words they use!
If only Newton and Einstein and Pauling knew this, think how much better the world would be right now.
This “tipping point” stuff is nonsense. Anyone who has taken grade school chemistry or physics (private school anyway) knows what equilibrium is. Adding CO2 to one side of the climate equation will balance the other side, not push it over the “edge”
OMG, this moron wrote with a straight face coal-fired power plants are as dangerous as nuclear power plant meltdown
Exactly. And get ready for “Back to the freeze, Pt II”
The magic number is 350 ppm. Not 349 ppm. Not 351 ppm. It is 350 ppm.
Where do we find such men? Such intellects, such insights, such scientific prowess? Hansen is a prophet, nay!, Hansen is a GOD!
I propose we immediately promote him to GS 18.
They shriek just like real women, don’t they?
James Hansen is funded by George Soros’ Insititue for the Politicization of Science. He is a sellout with no credibility.
http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/2008/02/nasa-jim-hansen-and-politicization-of.html
Providing the Jacksonville Jaguars with an unbeatable level of fan support!
That's a very namby-pamby description. Civilization is what grows up from man's furious exploitation of the ruthlessly hostile natural world.
The graph above represents temperature and CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. It is the same exact data Al Gore and the rest of the man-made global warmers refer to. The blue line is temps, the red CO2 levels. The deep valleys represent 4 separate glaciation periods. Now look very carefully at this relationship between temps and CO2 levels and keep in mind that Gore claims this data is the 'proof' that CO2 has warmed the earth in the past. But does the graph indeed show this? Nope. In fact, rising CO2 levels all throughout this 400,000 year period actually lagged behind temperature increases --and by an average of 800 years! So it couldn't have been CO2 that got Earth out of these 4 past ice ages. Yet Gore dishonestly and continually says otherwise. I think he uses the graph in his sci-fi flick as well.(?)
FWD:
So, greenhouse [effect] is all about carbon dioxide, right?
Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere.
In simple terms the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total tropospheric greenhouse effect (e.g., Freidenreich and Ramaswamy, 'Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models,' Journal of Geophysical Research 98 (1993):7255-7264).
The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other 'minor greenhouse gases.' As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/ ______________________________________________
FWD:
Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many 'facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html ______________________________________________
These people are INSANE!!!
"...they exchanges the truth of GOD for a lie, and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator...
Agree completely. However, I would put the percentage at something like .0000000000001. This old planet is very resilient.
“...they exchanged
From BBC News [yr: 2004]:
"A new [2004] analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past. They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer." ... "In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface. This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it. Ice core disc, Epica Ice cores record climate trends back beyond human measurements It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3869753.stm
It's really hard to imagine how this little ball of fire could have any impact on our climate at all.
But the main arguments being made for a solar-climate connection is not so much to do with the heat of the Sun but rather with its magnetic cycles. When the Sun is more magnetically active (typically around the peak of the 11 year sunspot cycle --we are a few yrs away at the moment), the Sun's magnetic field is better able to deflect away incoming galactic cosmic rays (highly energetic charged particles coming from outside the solar system). The GCRs are thought to help in the formation of low-level cumulus clouds -the type of clouds that BLOCK sunlight and help cool the Earth. So when the Sun's MF is acting up (not like now), less GCRs reach the Earth's atmosphere, less low level sunlight-blocking clouds form, and more sunlight gets through to warm the Earth's surface...naturally. Clouds are basically made up of tiny water droplets. When dust particles in the atmosphere become ionized by incoming GCRs they become very 'attractive' to water molecules, in a purely chemical sense of the word.-Eye On The Left
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2008: "The Center for Sun-Climate Research at the DNSC investigates the connection between variations in the intensity of cosmic rays and climatic changes on Earth. This field of research has been given the name 'cosmoclimatology'"..."Cosmic ray intensities – and therefore cloudiness – keep changing because the Sun's magnetic field varies in its ability to repel cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy, before they can reach the Earth." :
http://www.spacecenter.dk/research/sun-climate
At The Atlantic magazine, where the June cover story is...
THE SKY IS FALLING
IT'S INEVITABLE: ASTEROIDS WITH THE POWER TO ANNIHILATE US WILL COME THIS WAY.
CAN NASA DIVERT THEM BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE?
By Gregg Easterbrook
(With, of course, a cartoon-like image of a flaming asteroid zzzoooming towards earth.)
Climate change will be like so yesterday.
China is excused from the carbon limitations of the Kyoto treaty. Yet China plans to build 500 new coal-fired power plants in the next 10 years as well as 30 nuclear power plants -- all with that "dependable" Chinese technology. How come this dildo isn't screaming and yelling about that?
From his website at: http://www.billmckibben.com/bio.html
Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent.
Bill grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the “Talk of the Town” column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.
His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.
His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation’s largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in a new edition in 2006.
Subsequent books include Hope, Human and Wild, about Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India, which he cites as examples of people living more lightly on the earth; The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, which is about the Book of Job and the environment; Maybe One, about human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, about a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; Enough, about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering; Wandering Home, about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks.
In March 2007 McKibben published Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.
In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation’s history. A guide to help people initiate environmental activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming Now was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following November 3.
March 2008 saw the publication of The Bill McKibben Reader, a collection of 44 essays written for various publications over the past 25 years.
Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.
Bill has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Green Mountain College, Unity College, Lebanon Valley College and Sterling College.
Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.
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