Visiting Costa Rica

[Krom]

So for the last week I've been down in Costa Rica on vacation at the family house, and of all the things that I've seen in my trips down here; water shortages is a new one.

Like take a look at the map here: https://costa-rica-guide.com/travel/wea ... -rainfall/
See that blue spot south east of San Jose, yeah; the one that says 240+ inches of rainfall a year, we are very near that spot and since November there has been less than 3 inches of rain here. There are even electricity shortages in some areas because the hydro plants are running out of water. This is supposed to be one of the wettest countries on earth and the ocean forecast says this pattern will likely continue for another 9 months...

Something is not right, and I highly doubt burning coal is going to fix it.

[vision]

Interesting, and scary. What do the historical records look like? Could it be an anomoly?

[Tunnelcat]

What's scary is that all those rain forests in the region will eventually suffer and perhaps even die if that trend keeps up, which will accelerate the whole process even faster.

[TRUEpiiiicness]

Yesterday it was the hottest February since ~1990 with it being 20C at a town in Wales. And also there was hardly any snow that fell where I live.

[Tunnelcat]

It's been cold and wet as hell here in the states this year though. Even so, the stupid trees are starting to pop their buds right now, in February, all while covered in snow. There's even ants getting into the house and bugs hovering over the lawn when the sun comes out. Never saw them before in February years ago either. But that's what climate deniers don't get. More carbon, more energy. That doesn't have to translate into warmer and drier results. More energy added to the system can produce unpredictable and extreme weather in our planet's climate. More violent storms, more or less rain or snow in any given area, more extremes in local temperatures during the seasons.... Who knows what the future will look like, but everyone can be guaranteed it's not going to be pretty or nice and the same as it was decades ago once we reach the tipping point. It may even be a cold day in Hell, literally, before people get the picture of what we as a species are facing in Earth's climate future, because an Ice Age is also a possible end game with too much carbon in the atmosphere. Glad I'm old.

[woodchip]

The problem is we are only looking at perspective of what, a 1000 years? Do we have a base line for the last million years? And remeber the most fecund long lasting age was the age of the dinosaurs, where hotter temps supported huge animals and planet covering plant life.
Lets also not forget all the tropical forests being cut down and how that affects the land to sky moisture transportation system. So Krom, how much of Costa Ricas forests been cut down to make way for homes such as yours? (no dig intended). Paul Erlich wrote the Population Bomb and maybe his predictions are finally starting to see the light of day.

[woodchip]

Deforestation in Costa Rica has a serious impact on the environment and therefore may directly or indirectly contribute to flooding, desertification, sedimentation in rivers, loss of wildlife diversity, and the obvious sheer loss of timber. Since the end of World War II, approximately 80% of the forests of Costa Rica have disappeared.[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforesta ... Costa_Rica

[vision]

The problem is we are only looking at perspective of what, a 1000 years? Do we have a base line for the last million years?

These are the questions climate scientists ask and they have almost unanimously determined that the warming we've seen over the past thousands of years has accelerated by an unprecedented amount in the last couple hundred. Remember, it makes no difference how hot or cold it was one million years ago or even a thousand years ago. What matters is the rate of change.

And remeber the most fecund long lasting age was the age of the dinosaurs, where hotter temps supported huge animals and planet covering plant life.

Right, and we will probably have that again in thousands of years. But will we survive the current mass-extinction event going on right now? Maybe not, and that's the whole point about climate alarmism. The rate of change, whether extreme temperature rise or drop, can destroy the global ecosystem.

I wish I could get that into people's heads.

[Top Gun]

And remeber the most fecund long lasting age was the age of the dinosaurs, where hotter temps supported huge animals and planet covering plant life.

Is this the part where I get to point out that the Cretaceous featured much of North America covered by a massive inland sea, or that Antarctica was warm enough to support large forests, or that it had just about the highest sea levels in the Earth's history? I mean unless you enjoy swimming from Bismarck to El Paso...

[woodchip]

And remeber the most fecund long lasting age was the age of the dinosaurs, where hotter temps supported huge animals and planet covering plant life.

Is this the part where I get to point out that the Cretaceous featured much of North America covered by a massive inland sea, or that Antarctica was warm enough to support large forests, or that it had just about the highest sea levels in the Earth's history? I mean unless you enjoy swimming from Bismarck to El Paso...

In the greater scope of things we have to look at the continental drift starting at the early cretacious where NA was breaking away from Europe to the mid cretacious where the inland seas formed to late cretacious where NA seems to have dried out. So predicting at what stage NA might resort to in a new heating period might be a little tough to do so.

I think concentrating soley on co2 emmisions is the wrong idea. Not understanding how the whole ecosystem works is a guarantee of failure. Simple things like the removal of apex predators leads to the over breeding of the grazers which inturn impacts the over browsing of their food supply and erosion of the land. While vision is concerned with the rapidity of temp change I'm more worried about the holistic view of the environment or lack there-in. Try not to blame the US too much as we have more EPA rules concerning it than countries like Brazil or China, India, Africa or even Kroms Cost Rica.

[Vander]

I think concentrating soley on co2 emmisions is the wrong idea. Not understanding how the whole ecosystem works is a guarantee of failure. Simple things like the removal of apex predators leads to the over breeding of the grazers which inturn impacts the over browsing of their food supply and erosion of the land. While vision is concerned with the rapidity of temp change I'm more worried about the holistic view of the environment or lack there-in. Try not to blame the US too much as we have more EPA rules concerning it than countries like Brazil or China, India, Africa or even Kroms Cost Rica.

The problem, as I see it, is not that you're wrong, but that your argument is mostly used to justify doing less. It's like we've recognized we're digging a hole, and then we've recognized that digging in certain areas goes faster and deeper than others, now that we're saying 'hey, we need stop digging this hole,' we're told we shouldn't stop unless we know the exact geology everywhere underneath us. Or there's no reason to stop because standing next to us is China and they're still digging. Or we can't stop because we have all these people whose entire way of life is making shovels. Or the hole is simply a lie told by the people you hate.

The overarching goal for every single person on earth should be the long term ecological sustainability of our species on this planet. Those limitations are provided by scientific observation, and we need to greatly err on the side humility rather than hubris, because we don't know everything. Everything from ideology to economics is completely subordinate, otherwise, whats the point.

[Tunnelcat]

Woody pointed out the biggest elephant in the room and one of mankind's biggest problems, excessive human population growth and the consumption that goes along with that. Unless we as a species face it, everything else we do is akin to spitting on a forest fire in the effort to douse it. The population bomb never went off when it was first proposed, but it WILL go off sometime in the future. Because people have to eat, drink water, pass waste, build a place to live, heat that place to live and get around the their local world in the most convenient and cheapest mode of travel possible, not much is going to change in the near future. Our species is running on inertia and complacency right now like happy little rats in a maze, at least until the climate forces a change in our behavior, or kills off our species en masse. So that means gasoline and other fossil fuels are going to be king and forests are still going to be cut down in developing countries to grow food and build homes. No matter how much we gripe about carbon output, we can't do anything about it unless there's a drastic change in the number of people who put out that carbon.

[vision]

Thanks for contributing to a level-headed discussion.

I think concentrating soley on co2 emmisions is the wrong idea. Not understanding how the whole ecosystem works is a guarantee of failure. Simple things like the removal of apex predators leads to the over breeding of the grazers which inturn impacts the over browsing of their food supply and erosion of the land.

I agree insomuch we are way past looking solely at levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. A couple decades late, actually. We need to invest heavily in both reducing emissions and studying the ecological impacts of climate change, man-made or otherwise.

While vision is concerned with the rapidity of temp change I'm more worried about the holistic view of the environment or lack there-in. Try not to blame the US too much as we have more EPA rules concerning it than countries like Brazil or China, India, Africa or even Kroms Cost Rica.

I bring up rapid temperature change because this is the point most people get confused on when talking about global warming. It's Ok that the planet gets really hot and cold, as long as it's not too fast. I agree it's time for a holistic approach to environmentalism. Also, regardless of the quantity of EPA rules we have, they aren't enforced like they should be. There is too much corruption in the US. That's why a coal lobbyist is now running the EPA. And regarding other countries, all of them are adopting renewables at a faster rate than the USA and every other country in the world has a lower per-capita carbon footprint than we do. The US is still the biggest polluter, period.