DescentBB

i'm glad someone else finally wrote about this, it's been on my mind.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/li ... 07-ad.html

...

\"Without mega-engineering projects to protect them, a 5-metre rise would inundate large parts of many cities – including New York, London, Sydney, Vancouver, Mumbai and Tokyo – and leave surrounding areas vulnerable to storm surges. In Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and elsewhere, whole regions and cities may vanish. China's economic powerhouse, Shanghai, has an average elevation of just 4 metres.\"

This is obviously meant as a warning.
However, the main problem I have with using maps and scenarios like this to get people worked up about climate change is that these warnings often seem to have the opposite effect.
In other words, these things are actually so evocative, and so imaginatively stimulating, that it's hard not to get at least a tiny thrill at the idea that you might get to see these things happen.
Nothing against Miami, but all of south Florida under several meters of water? With Cape Canaveral lost under a subtropical lagoon and St. Petersburg an archipelago?
The problem, it seems, is that climate change scientists, in describing these unearthly terrestrial reorganizations, are science fictionalizing, so to speak, our everyday existence. The implicit, if inadvertant, message here seems to be: hey, south Floridians, and all you who are bored of the world today, sick of all the parking lots and the 7-11s, tired of watching Cops, tired of applying to colleges you don't really want to go to, tired of credit card debt and bad marriages, don't worry.
This will all be underwater soon.

...continues

anyone else here feel it too?
Or Tyler's images of FightClub in the mind's eye, did they really sit so horribly?:

\"Imagine,\" Tyler said, \"stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.\"

and: It's the end of the world as we know it, and i feel fine?

There is honestly a big part of me that does kinda wish global warming would come, fast, and change everything into a magical steampunk world - or take any sci-fi situation from someone's dreams.

I'm all for whatever gets rid of hip hop.

Testiculese wrote:I'm all for whatever gets rid of hip hop.

ROFL!

roid wrote:There is honestly a big part of me that does kinda wish global warming would come, fast, and change everything into a magical steampunk world - or take any sci-fi situation from someone's dreams.

Or at least prove to the naysayers that it will in fact happen. Then we can lynch them for their stupidity.

roid wrote:There is honestly a big part of me that does kinda wish global warming would come, fast, and change everything into a magical steampunk world - or take any sci-fi situation from someone's dreams.

Part of the reason so many people are skeptical about global warming, global cooling, global climate change, or whatever they're calling it these days, is that we've been hearing ridiculous exaggerations of the coming catastrophe for like 50 years in a row (which, by the way, change every 10 years or so.) We've been hearing all these steampunk and sci-fi scenarios, when what we actually see is a very small change in the climate that nobody would notice without a substantial amount of statistical analysis of massive data sets. And we're told we need to make radical changes to our lives (changes that, coincidentally, many of the same people would tell us to make even without the threat of global whatever) in order to avert disaster, instead of being told that it might be wise to make small changes in order to generally care for the environment better.

Finally, in the past few years, I've heard a few climatologists talk sensibly about it -- the earth is getting slightly warmer; human activity contributes some percentage of that; we should be careful not to contribute too much, because bad things (small and large) can happen if the climate shifts by small amounts.

And then we've got Al Gore sounding like a fire-and-brimstone religious leader...

But in this day and age why would anyone be interested in the climate change doubts of a Bush administration shill.

Why wait to see climate change destruction. Come visit the interior pine forests of British Columbia where the lack of a week of -40 weather each year for the last decade or so has lead to this:
http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hre/bcmpb/Year2Graphics.htm

So before the prediction of a new ice age looming some decades past we had:

\"D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing Page 2 headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: \"Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.\"

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/ ... /108140063

What's your problem, Woody? He turned out to be right, after all. The warming started in the 20ies, and despite a stop in the 50ies to 60ies continued till now.

Lothar wrote:Part of the reason so many people are skeptical about global warming, global cooling, global climate change, or whatever they're calling it these days, is that we've been hearing ridiculous exaggerations of the coming catastrophe for like 50 years in a row (which, by the way, change every 10 years or so.)

I would agree if this was a general remark about the mass media/politicians using scare tactics to gain money/power, and the cry-wolf effect that has on people. But the concrete example you picked is so wrong it's not even funny.

In the 70ies, a small minority of scientists predicted "global cooling" (which became hyped beyond all proportions by Newsweek and others). The majority said, however "uh-oh we're not so sure about that. The state of the science does not allow us to make such a prediction."

To apply that to now is totally illogical becaue the roles are reversed: there again is a small minority, but now they are saying "everything is fine, don't be alarmed" and this is hyped out of proportion by mass media insisting on "balanced reporting". The vast majority of climate scientists, however, agree that the science is settled: the earth is warming and it is caused by us and our greenhouse gases.

In other words: to argue that we should disregard warnings of global warming because global cooling was a hoax is the same as saying: trust the hyped minority, because they were wrong before...

I was just reading an interesting paper on this subject by Freeman Dyson.

\"I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.\"

And thus, I am skeptical.

Pandora wrote:The vast majority of climate scientists, however, agree that the science is settled: the earth is warming and it is caused by us and our greenhouse gases.

Exactly right...

Another good article in the magazine I get every week.

http://environment.newscientist.com/art ... print=true

And another article I like.

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/pr ... 071880.pdf

Lothar wrote:...And thus, I am skeptical.

I wouldn't put the planets trust in Freeman Dyson.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/8/16/10857/5135


Bettina

I personally don't care about what scientists say, them experts on science? Pfft, cójalos! I'm gonna go ask my kitty cat!

\"Hey Bawt, does global warming exist?\"
\"Meow\"

Point proven!

Dakatsu wrote:f**k 'em!

Did you forget which DBB your on?

Bee

It is always amazing to me that when a P.H.D. in climatology hires a group of grad. students who spend two or more years designing a climate modelling program, books months of time on a institutional high capacity high speed computer and then more time analysing the results that more press is given to accountants, physicists and \"think tank analysts\" that spend half a day reading their report and two hours writing a \"rebuttal\".
Nice links Bett.

moral of the story:
Don't build your house on the sand.

Bet51987 wrote:Did you forget which DBB your on?

Umm.... descentbb.org?

Okay I'll change it, never knew language was an issue on this board if you just astericked it.

Then again, on the other board they probably sell dead kittens for food...

In fact, just for you Bet:

Duper wrote:moral of the story:
Don't build your house on the sand.

hehe, yeah. Have you considered buying land on the soon to be "new beach", or am i the only one who checks a house's altitude above sealevel?

I know I haven't done enough study to take a well-backed stance, so I'll just voice my (admittedly less knowledgeable) opinion:

From what I've read on both sides, the bulk of the data seems to me to be pretty clearly indicative of a warming trend, that it's not just a local phenomenon, and that it's significant enough that it will cause problems if it continues.

Most of the arguments on the other side seem to revolve around interpretation of the data, and alternative explanations for it. They make some valid points, but I haven't seen how any of those points directly contradict the data.

Now, I certainly don't subscribe to the \"doomsday\" rhetoric going around (frankly, I think Al Gore's \"An Inconvenient Truth\" video just hurt the credibility of his cause), and I until recently I thought global warming was just a sensationalist idea to promote a certain agenda. But the wealth of data from multiple credible sources is beginning to convince me that despite the sensationalism and political angles surrounding the issue, there's something to it.

Have you considered buying land on the soon to be \"new beach\", or am i the only one who checks a house's altitude above sealevel?

Well I live on an island on a river delta. My city is only liveable because of dykes and pumps. My back yard is approximately 1 foot above sea level (that makes it well under water at high tide). The soil under my house is prone to liquification in a seismic event and this is a seismically active area. So hmmm..... I guess not everyone worries about altitude in real estate. Remember it's location, location, location

haha, yeah location location location

i wonder if what will happen is we'll raise our beach buildings onto stilts. And all towns will become stilted like Venice

It like folks that complain about the danger or plane crashes ..... that bought6 a now NEXT to an AIRPORT.


(Ive seen this a LOT recently here).