If you really want to be worried about Mother Nature...

[jducoeur]

So this weekend was a fine reminder that, while tsunamis are devastating and scary, we may have more pressing things to worry about.

On the one hand, there's the new report about climate change, indicating that the global climate patterns (practically the definition of a dynamic system) may be on the brink of potentially-irreversible changes that would radically alter weather worldwide. Once we pass the tipping point, things become very unpredictable. The *best* plausible outcome is changes that are significant enough to cause major economic disruptions. The worst is a long-term spiral that devastates the agricultural assumptions that modern human civilization is built upon. (No, I don't consider it very plausible that the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable. But it's pretty easy to envision famines severe enough to kill a billion people.)

And then there was the blizzard. In and of itself, it really wasn't that horrible (unless you were on Cape Cod), but it does sort of drive the point home. One blizzard in isolation is just a statistical blip. But this was the third "100-year storm" we've had in less than ten years. While that's possible, it's strange enough that it forces the rational mind to re-examine assumptions. I'm starting to get nervous that we're already beginning to see the leading edge of the climate-change reality.

This isn't just blind fear. There was a good article in Scientific American a few months ago, that summarized a likely course that "sudden" climate change would take. One of the major effects it cites is changes to global ocean currents, which drop the temperature of the Northeast US (and Europe) significantly. I'm seeing a few early studies on the Web that suggest that this process may already have started.

In the long run, this may be the issue that this decade is remembered for, for good or ill. All of the governmental problems we get het up about, from privacy to abortion to civil rights to religious freedom, are likely to be viewed as quaint social quirks a century from now -- matters that count only in the here-and-now, but are so fluid that no one except history professors remembers them in the long run. But if we screw up ecologically -- especially through the sort of wilfull blindness that the Bush administration is practicing, intentionally ignoring a growing wealth of evidence -- it may be remembered bitterly for centuries.

I've never been much more than a very casual environmentalist; I'm enough of an libertarian to be suspicious of the centrally-planned solutions often propounded for environmental problems. But I also don't think we can afford complacency, nor to spend decades arguing minutiae and doing nothing. It's time to start exerting some political will in this direction, and demanding that the US government take the problem seriously and realistically, and start working with the rest of the world community to find some practical solutions...

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

The question I have i... is this a thing we as people have cuase through use of greenhouse gas producing stuff, or is this just a shift in climate, which seems to happen every several million years or so? Can we stop it? Should we? Or should we just adapt?

Realistically, we'll adapt... once a bunch of people freeze or starve or something. Adapting to a change that hasn't happened yet is highly unlikely.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Plus, everyone (even me) believes that disaster will happen to everyone else. I'll be a survivor! they think.

I belive the much of climate change is human-derived. Here is a recent article which summarizes some new findings: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4171591.stm -- Measurably less sunlight reaching the ground due to pollution. Somewhat ironically, this has been counteracting global warming due to ozone issues. Finding this effect closes a hole in the theory that deniers have had about the warming. There are related articles in the sidebar.

[(Anonymous)]

Climate changes happen more often than several million years.
The developmenat during the middle ages can take credit in a warming trend, while up until recently we were experiencing a "little ice age".
Did you know people were actually as tall as they are now almost 1000 years ago? With the little ice age, people suffered.
http://earth.usc.edu/geol150/evolution/lastmillenia.html
Welcome to life on earth

[(Anonymous)]

For most parts of Antarctica, reliable records go back less than 50 years, and data from satellites and overflights like the ones going on here have been collected over only the past decade or so. But that research, plus striking changes that are visible to the naked eye, all point toward the disturbance of climate patterns thought to have been in place for thousands of years.

N Y Times

[metageek.livejournal.com]

is this a thing we as people have cuase through use of greenhouse gas producing stuff

We've certainly exacerbated it. A recent Horizon episode (the BBC program that gets repackaged as Nova here) discussed "global dimming", the effect of particulate pollution in climate change. Global dimming reduces Earth's insolation pretty drastically. It probably caused the Ethiopian famine of the 80s, and threatens the Asian monsoons which bring 60% of humanity its rain. The catch is that it's been slowing down global warming; areas that have cut their particulate pollution substantially, such as Europe, have been warming up much faster over the past 10 years (remember the thousands who died in France in summer 2003). There's more; read the article.

Can we stop it? Should we? Or should we just adapt?

We're talking about something that, at the mild end of the scale, could mean drought and disease for the majority of humanity; it's hard to see how anybody could claim we shouldn't try to stop it. (Even on a purely economic basis--what happens to the global economy when Asia becomes a desert? Fixing the problem would have to be pretty damn expensive not to justify itself.)

At the extreme end of the scale, we're not talking about something we can realistically adapt to. We're talking about a change that could reduce humanity to a handful of nomadic populations struggling to survive in the Arctic heat. Even if the species survives, our entire cultural heritage will be destroyed; the remnants will be lucky if they can hang on to agriculture, let alone science and democracy.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Such shifts happen more like every few tens or hundreds of thousands of years, if Greenland ice cores are reasonable evidence. It may be something that would eventually happen naturally, but we certainly aren't helping.

Adapt? We are talking about a changet hat turns North America and Europe into places like Siberia, and makes the Sahara even bigger at the same time. In the article, they suggest that the change could take as little as a decade or so, and could last for thousands of years. Yeah, we'll adapt - by having large portions of our population die.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

What I meant was something along the lines of preparing before it happens, and if there's nothing we can do to prepare, and not much at this point we can do to stop it, well, I'm feeling pretty cynical towards humans this week, and since we screwed up the planet, then I see very little downside.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Preparing can be done.

1: don't buy any property that's below about 40' sea level. (My astro prof said a 2F rise in temp would raise the seas by about 20 feet.) 2: figure out how to live off the grid (electricity) and off of municipal water systems, and how to preserve your own food that you grow.

This last one is the most difficult.

I don't think going to the far end of the survivalist spectrum is at all warranted (those ends are fairly far out) but considering some of these things is warranted. And doing some of it for yourself reduces your individual load on the ecosystem.

Home grown

[cristovau.livejournal.com]

The last one is the hardest, since the local environment you rely on will undoubtably change, and how do you store years of food?

Bess and I have a few homesteader friends on the survivalist edge. They claim to have three years of food for the family stockpiled. I'm not sure if their animals are considered family or food or both.

Would their plans would work if their land became a dustbowl? Dunno. This is where preparation is toughest. My opinion on taking some of the survivalist actions matches yours. Many of them not only lighten the eco-load, but can save money, especially in the long run.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

if there's nothing we can do to prepare, and not much at this point we can do to stop it

Well, hold that cynical thought for a minute. It seems to me that part of Justin's point is that precious little has been done to see if there are things we can do to prepare, or to stop it. So far, the Powers That Be have yet to properly recognize the threat, much less taken a good hard look at what should be done about it.

And while we as a species may have screwed up the planet, the kids currently in school haven't really done anything to deserve a crappy world, have they? And it isn't like the bears and wolves and parrots and dolphins and other animals asked for it. There's a bit of moral responsibility here to at least try.

[jducoeur]

So far, the Powers That Be have yet to properly recognize the threat, much less taken a good hard look at what should be done about it.

Even worse: the current US administration has done essentially everything it can to undermine the efforts of the rest of the world to tackle the problem. There is valid argument about whether the Kyoto Protocols were a good approach, but they've largely replaced it with a tactic of sticking their fingers in their ears and going, "la, la, la, I don't want to hear this". They are consistently focused on the short term, to a degree that is sometimes breathtaking.

My suspicion is that it's too late to entirely head off change -- everything I'm seeing indicates that it's already started. But it's plausible that the worst of the damage can be mitigated, if the problem is taken seriously...

[sun-in-splendor.livejournal.com]

When it comes to the current administartion, it's much worse than that. Many of the people around the White House, and possibly Bush himself, subscibe to "dominion theory", an extreme form of Christian fundamentalism based on Genisis 1:26. They believe that Christian should have domination over all things on earth. That includes all animals, all nature, all societies and all people on the earth.

Cheney and others have made comments about not needing to take care of the earth because there are not very many generations left until the end-times. They tried to pass them off as jokes afterwards, but I'm not so sure.

Try this for more info
Christian Domination (http://www.religioustolerance.org/reconstr.htm)

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

Plenty of stuff we can do. Mostly there is plenty of stuff which if we don't do, we improve our situation. People talk about 'not doing anything' (say until we know more), but that would mean stopping everything we are currently doing.

The much discussed Kyoto Protocol proposes that we reduce greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels. 1990, doesn't seem like that would be a) very hard, afterall it is only 15 years, and things don't seem that different b) much help, for the same reasons.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

1990 is hard because significant parts of the Third World are quickly developing and using more energy (often more significant polution causing energy). To go back to 1990, without doing fundamental changes vis a vis energy production/storage, you basically have to do one or both of two things; have the First World (read: US, Canada, Western Europe) drop their emissions significantly below 1990 levels to allow Second and Third Worlders to have substantially more emissions than they had in 1990 or have Second (Eastern Europe) and Third (China and India in particular) regress their development.

[jducoeur]

Okay, I gotta ask: do I know you? Between your friends list (which has several second and third-order mutual friends with mine but no firsts) and your obvious interests (I mean, hey, I named Brainiac 5 as the most interesting Legionnaire in the Legion panel at Arisia this weekend), it seems entirely plausible. But I'm not succeeding in winkling you out.

I quite agree with your point, although I think we probably *could* do a fair amount to improve energy transmission tech if the economic incentives were constructed properly. It isn't clear that Kyoto was entirely realistic, but it was at least engaging the problem, which I took as a step in the right direction...

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

Kyoto is completely realistic, meainging we should have no qualms about signing on, if the rest of the world is.

The current batch of cars coming off the assembly lines have worse gas mileage than the 15 year old ones they are replacing (a new trend). This seems, to me, to be deplorable retrograde progress. We should more than do our share (i.e. get our levels below what they were in 1999) merely by converting to higher efficiency automobiles.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Yep, you do from r.a.c. days. Think quote file, and note my IM address in user info.

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

I had a similar startling moment. I recently saw 'The Day After Tomorrow', and thought it was a pretty far-out concept. The idea, in case you didn't know, was that global warming melts enough polar ice to change the salination level of the oceans, which alters the Gulf Stream, and causes another ice age over the course of a few _weeks_.

Then, a couple days later, I heard an interview on NPR with an apparently respected scientist who either never saw the movie or intentionally avoided talking about it because he never mentioned it, despite laying out EXACTLY that scenario as being very possible, considering some data being collected right now.

A bit scary.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

The Day After Tomorrow had the basic idea right, but the timescale was off. If you melt polar ice too quickly, you lower the salinity fo norther seawater, wich screws up the mixing process that's currently making the ocean conveyor work. If you shut down the heat conveyor that brings warm water from the tropics to the north, you would probably start what we'd call an ice age.

The movie had the effect setting in over the course of a few days, and that's malarky. If nothing else, the planet just doesn't lose heat to space that quickly. But over a few years to decades, you might well have great issues.

[jducoeur]

My understanding that it's unlikely to happen *that* quickly. When most scientists talk about "sudden climate change", they're generally talking about a span of a few years. But that's still sudden enough to send massive shocks through human civilization, even at the milder end of the scale...