It's getting warm

[Per]

No, he won't get impeached.

One thread isn't enough for politics?
But what about UFOs, weather phenomenons, etc
Randomly saying, FFS

July 2019 confirmed as hottest month on record.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49238745

[Strangelove]

WASHINGTON POST The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. - November 2, 1922

[Per]

WASHINGTON POST The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. - November 2, 1922

Wow! Quite an early report, but sure, the industrial revolution in the late 19th century is what set this whole global warming thingy off, and it has just kept accelerating.

[Strangelove]

A hundred years of ridiculous climate scare tactics...

[Per]

The Arctic sea ice extent in April is still roughly 70% of what it was in the 70's, but the extent in September has fallen to just roughly 30% of what it used to be. Two thirds of Arctic ice gone in just forty years. Within a decade we could probably have an open sea at the Arctic during autumn. That's food for thought.



And of course this is why Greenland has suddenly become so interesting.
As the Arctic thaws, mineral and oil resouces become more easily exploitable.
And everyone wants a piece of the cake...

[Cousin Strawberry]

Its not like the planet hasnt thrived with an ice free arctic Per. The concern is all about humanity not the environment we live in.

The climate emergency should be renamed human species emergency.

[Per]

Its not like the planet hasnt thrived with an ice free arctic Per. The concern is all about humanity not the environment we live in.

The climate emergency should be renamed human species emergency.

Absolutely! I’ve stated before that the planet was much hotter back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
I’m not worried about the planet.

I think we’re in the early stage of a mass extinction event though. If you take the longer view, like Topper, I think you can actually say it started in neolithic times, as the invention of agriculture allowed for an exponential increase of the human population. The globe could only sustain a few hundred thousand hunter/gatherers, but with the advent of agriculture and husbandry we have been able to continually increase the production of food, thus enabling a population of several billion people. As this has happened, we have clear cut forests, polluted rivers and hunted animals to extinction.

The list of exterminated species is long, from sabre toothed tigers, cave bears, moa birds, the dodo, etc, and up to the current mass death among insects and amphibians. As the climate change continues, more and more species will be pushed to the brink of extinction.

We are not one of them. Humans, rats and cockroaches are experts at adapting and are some of the very few species that can be found on all continents.

[Cousin Strawberry]

Which is why i will always circle back to overpopulation.

Everything else is just window dressing masking the real issue

[2Fingers]

Which is why i will always circle back to overpopulation.

Everything else is just window dressing masking the real issue

Maybe Thanos was correct all along?

[Per]

We’ve already reached ”peak child”. The number of children in the world is no longer increasing as more and more people opt to have two children or less. There are of course different possible predictions of the future, but the most likely trajectory is the red curve in the chart below. The world population is still growing, but only because of increased life expectancy as far less people starve today and more people have access to health care. Before the end of the century the lower birth rates should catch up with the increased health and after peaking somewhere around 10 billion the population should start to drop.



So, even though the massive amount of people is putting strain on the environment, there shouldn't really be a problem feeding ten billion people. We can't do it on organic food though. If all food should be grown organically, we would need twice the amount of land used for agriculture today, and we really can't go on reducing the amount of forest there is. Thus the idea that organic food is better for the environment must be questioned. What we need to ensure is that industrial fertilizer does not spread to the water. The fertilizer is needed, if we are to feed the world without cutting down more forests, but it should not be allowed to pollute our lakes and waterways.

But one of the more important things is to decrease food waste. Today roughly 30% of food in the western world goes to the bin. That's not sustainable.
France has already passed laws that ban shops from throwing food away. Instead they have created programmes where food that is close to the best before date gets donated to homeless shelters etc, and as a last resort spoiled food can be converted to animal feed, fertilizer and/or biogas.

In Sweden we haven't passed such legislation yet, but there are two apps that have become hugely popular that help reduce food waste. MatSmart allows you to by food with short best before dates wholesale online at a reduced cost, and Karma lets grocery stores and restaurants sell meals/products at half off. If you have registered you'll get alerted when a restaurant near you needs to offload food. You pay the meal online and go pick it up within a given time frame. It's a win-win-win situation. The environment benefits from less wasted food, the restaurant gets something instead of nothing for excess food they've prepared, and the customer gets a meal at half price.

So, anyway, even though the crazy number of people today is wreaking havoc on the planet in terms of bio-variety (there are today more chickens than wild birds and domesticated animals make up 80% of the total mass of mammals worldwide), we're about to peak and the numbers will start to drop by themselves within 50-70 years, even if we don't do anything. I think the main problems that need to be adressed is rather that we must get rid of fossile fuels asap and make sure the total amount of forest does not continue to decrease. The fires in the Amazon rainforest, combined with the clear cutting encouraged by Brazilian president Bolzonaro, could turn the Amazon into a savannah, which would have devastating effects on the climate worldwide. Not least because the rainforest is a huge carbondioxide sink, and losing it will accelerate the climate change even more.

I think we must accept that it is going to get warmer. But if we can prevent desertification, that will make a huge difference in how much warmer it gets and whether people can continue to live near the equator.

Climate change will not "destroy" the planet, nor will it mean the end to humans or even civilization, but it will reduce the habitable areas, as deserts increase in size and coastal lowlands get flooded. This could lead to a massive movement of people from those cities that vanish to other areas, and as you may have noticed, even the rather limited trickle of refugees we see today makes people freak out. We need to start planning for this. Heck, maybe Greenland could swallow a sizeable influx of climate refugees? as the ice retreats there will be plenty of new land made available there, and I guess Nunavat and the North West territories are other places that could become more and more attractive as eg Florida and Texas become uninhabitable.

I saw a documentary on Russia's threat from the east on TV... The Siberian region closest to China has some 200,000 inhabitants, and the numbers keep going down as people move to cities further west. The Chinese district right next to it has some 30 million people living right on the border. Already today the logging industry on the Russian side employs more Chinese than Russian workers, and several of the towns in the area are increasingly populated by Chinese. Guess Siberia might be a great place to offload people from the parts of Asia that will become desert or underwater. We'll just have to see how the Russians feel about it.

So, in conclusion: I do not think the climate change will destroy the planet or kill us. That's not the problem. I think the climate change will lead to unrest, large scale migration, increasingly authoritarian tendencies and war. The US expressing interest in Greenland could actually be a part of that disturbing scenario.

[Topper]

I laugh that our species believes it can reverse natural forces controlling climate for 4.6 billion years.

The ultimate display of a species in stasis that is doomed to extinction.

[Per]

I laugh that our species believes it can reverse natural forces controlling climate for 4.6 billion years.

The ultimate display of a species in stasis that is doomed to extinction.

Well, we have managed to make a significant change in the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and judging from history, CO2 content and temperature seem to have a rather strong correlation. The only argument would be whether there is cause and effect or if both are symptoms of a third variable, and of course whether CO drives climate or climate drives CO2.



If, as it is assumed, CO2 serves as a green house gas in the atmosphere and locks in solar energy, then it does seem logical that if we by digging up coal, gas and oil that has been assembled over millions of years and release all this carbon at once, so that we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, there should be a slight shift in temperature.

Now, in the geological sense, it may only amount to a quick blip on the radar, but for ephemeral humans it could be life changing.

[Per]

This similar graph has the years 1800, 1900 and 2016 pinpointed for comparisson.



It can be noted that modern homo sapiens have been around for roughly 200,000 years, and the previous heat wave almost wiped us out. Some believe that the few that survived did so in coastal regions of southern Africa, where they spent most of the day in shallow waters, switching to a seafood diet, which could be why we are the only primate to have subcutanous fat, something otherwise mostly found in aquatic mammals.

This near extinction is why there is so little genetic diversity in humans. They say there is more genetic diversity in your average pack of chimps than in all mankind. We're basically all first cousins....

[2Fingers]

I laugh that our species believes it can reverse natural forces controlling climate for 4.6 billion years.

The ultimate display of a species in stasis that is doomed to extinction.

Top are you saying that Humans have had no impact on the earth's climate change?

[2Fingers]

This similar graph has the years 1800, 1900 and 2016 pinpointed for comparisson.

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/empty ... -decline/

A book you may be interested in.