Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak 416
ananyo writes "Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years, a study published in Science suggests. Researchers have reconstructed global climate trends all the way back to when the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from the most recent ice age. They looked at 73 overlapping temperature records including sediment cores drilled from lake bottoms and sea floors around the world, and ice cores collected in Antarctica and Greenland. For some records, the researchers inferred past temperatures from the ratio of magnesium and calcium ions in the shells of microscopic creatures that had died and dropped to the ocean floor; for others, they measured the lengths of long-chain organic molecules called alkenones that were trapped in the sediments. From the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest, they report (abstract)."
If only we could figure out.. (Score:5, Funny)
If only we could figure out how the cave men managed to make the earth cool off for the last ten millenia...
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:5, Insightful)
They had a very limited ability to burn hydrocarbons.
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Cow farts are the scourge of today, I guess the cavemen had to deal with Dinosaur farts "back in the day'...
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe he's a Creationist, you insensitive clod!
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That's not what your graph says? I'm confused. Am I just being obtuse and you're saying we'll burn all of it?
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Yep, and it'll suck if we can't synthesize plastics anymore when that happens.
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We'll still have plastics but they'll be from a different source than old oil. Corn has been modified to produce plastic instead of starch. Plastics can be synthesized from other organic molecules and we can produce those by fermentation from agricultural waste. Heck, when the program to reduce the human population really gets going we'll have lots of organic material to synthesize plastics from. Well, what doesn't get run into the soylent green factories, anyway.
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Taco Bell was a little less common, you see.
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If only we could figure out how the cave men managed to make the earth cool off for the last ten millenia...
Not sure how they cooled the Earth but the discovery of beans and the resulting release of methane ended the last ice age.
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I don't know it sounds to me like he has the plot to Deus Ex: Human Revolution down pat.
It's at least a good question to ask even though he states it as a fact.
I think there are some people out there who fear what 300 years may be like from now. It's to bad because without judgment because you know we cannot predict the future so well yet. It might be good.
The answer is to know and make our own choices. I would probably draw the line at violating freedom for the advancement of technology.
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that people are arguing about the wrong things. Instead of arguing about global warming we should be arguing about how to mitigate the effects. Crazy weather is a common byproduct of global warming and it has huge economic effects here and now. Think about the money the state of FL invests every year to keep their beaches from receding. Raise that water a few more inches and see how much harder it gets.
I have every faith that 300 years from now we'll still be around, how many people had to die to get us there is a huge looming question. If we continue to bury our heads in the sand about the issue then we'll ultimately cause more harm. Will good come of it afterwards? Absolutely, once things are destroyed we have a tendancy to build them back up and build them better. It's a heavy price to pay when we could invest in technology now instead of going to war and end up with workable solutions to move forward with. Instead we'll continue to fund the military industrial complex along with the healthcare debacle that everyone refuses to actually deal with as well.
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The runaway effect will come from arctic and oceanic CH4, and has nothing to do with historical CO2 levels million years ago.
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:5, Insightful)
By introducing great government controls (economy doesn't care why) you will slow down technological development. How stupid would ancestors of 100-300 years ago have been to put clamps on industrialization? Would we be better off with, maybe, year 1900-level tech today?
You mean like the hundreds and thousands of laws we put in place to control and limit the abuses of industrialization - from labor rights, to tarriff controls to bar dumping, to environmental controls to prevent pouring spent lubricants into our lakes and rivers, etc. I think it seems to have worked out pretty well when we've, say, stopped industry from hiring 8 year olds - even though it is absolutely provably true that their little hands ARE better at fitting into tight spaces between trapped gears to release them -- and other dangerous tasks in tight spaces.
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it seems to have worked out pretty well when we've, say, stopped industry from hiring 8 year olds
Well, it's worth noting here that we in the developed world have created a few generations of rather incompetent workers as a result. I've run into people in their early twenties who have never held a job before. In such situations, an employer takes on a big risk by hiring such people.
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I demand all my new-hires in their early 20s to have 10 years of experience in widget production. It's not my problem if you whiled away your pre-teen years by going to school!
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You're saying that hiring an eight year old with no experience is less risky than hiring a twenty year old with no experience?
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Where do you get your information from? Child labor was extremely common and still is today in other countries without such strict labor laws.
For my grandfather it wasn't an option, he stopped going to school when both of his parents died during the flu pandemic of the late 20s. He dropped out after third grade and spent the rest of his years working. When he turned 18 the war was brewing, he signed up and then toiled in the same paper mill when he got back. He probably spent 50 years of his life working a
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By the time child labor was outlawed, the industrial base had been built up to the point that child laborers weren't needed, and were vanishingly rare.
This is incorrect, and in an important way.
First off, the timeline: The first attempts to restrict child labor in the US were as early as 1837. By 1900, about half of the states in the US had banned child labor entirely. In 1916 and again in 1922, Congress passed child labor bans, but they were struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1938, most child labor was banned once and for all, and this time it passed constitutional muster due to FDR's appointments to the Supreme Court.
The really interesting period, the
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By introducing great government controls (economy doesn't care why) you will slow down technological development.
Limitations on experimentation on humans and even the most basic pollution controls do as well, we should get rid of those too! ALL GLORY TO THE ECONOMY, MAMMON WILL DELIVER US FROM DESTRUCTION!
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I want a DO NOTHING HAT.
What color do they come in?
Industrial revolution came too early (Score:2, Interesting)
We're at perihelion now, already where Earth is at its hottest. In a few hundred or thousand years they'll welcome global warming... if global warming hasn't killed everyone by then.
We're at the worst possible place to add to the warming.
Re:Industrial revolution came too early (Score:4, Informative)
Er, you know that Perihelions happen every year, right? That the kinetic energy of the earth doesn't vary year-to-year? This is physics 101 stuff.
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Yeah, what they probably are referring to is the timing of perihelion with respect to the seasons, or other parameters. Those do cause variations in the amount of solar energy arriving at the surface, and how it is distributed on the Earth. Look up Milankovitch cycles [wikipedia.org].
Clear bias against the oil industry (Score:5, Funny)
(That's sarcasm, by the way.)
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Why would the oil industry be opposed to a scare that's mostly been used to close down coal mining?
Re:Clear bias against the oil industry (Score:4, Insightful)
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because obviously the man-made climate change crowd is stupid, and therefore they don't realize that hundreds of thousands of dollars per year are better than tens of thousands of dollars per year, and don't realize they could be doing better!
And if they they aren't smart enough for this simple math, how can we ever trust them with the more complex math required to analyze their data?
(also sarcasm)
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It didn't take a vast money machine to convince millions of young people to tattoo and pierce themselves in weird places. It doesn't take a vast money machine to convince everybody in academia that AGW is fact.
In both cases, all it takes is peer pressure.
Just because corporations prefer to use big money campaigns as their tool, doesn't mean it's the only tool required to instill a mass belief or activity.
Now, I'm not saying that AGW is or isn't real. The debate over the GW part is pretty much over. It's
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There are probably literally a handfull of people who actually have opinions formed on science. They're sitting in universities looking at models run on supercomputers. Everybody else is using these people as priests, even if they didn't ask to be priests.
And for those of us who want to form our opinions based on science, but aren't climatologists, looking to the people who are and actually do study and understand climate science and asking them is wrong... how exactly?
For any other non-controversial field of science, this wouldn't be controversial either. Nobody says we're treating particle physicists like "priests" when we go with their best working picture of the microscopic universe with the understanding that this picture may change. How is that like
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Whilst I agree with your comment in general, you're about a week behind the times [guardian.co.uk] on that one.
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I'm not an AGW denier, but I can't tolerate the scare tactics. And I'm still pretty mad at East Anglia -- you just don't do science by gathering data, adjusting that data, and then throwing the original data out and not allowing (or even recording) the methods by which you adjusted that data. They could have just fucking made it all up, it's non-verifiable UNLESS someone else was keeping track of those weather stations that oh, no, all the records were kept at one place and then thrown out 20 years ago. Bad science. Heck, it could be accidentally bad science, but FUCKING OWN UP TO IT! Cannot stand people who talk their way around unsubstantiated data and try to pass it off as fucking immutable gospel.
Perhaps you should get your information somewhere other than denier blogs, your version of what happened at UEA is pure fantasy. They didn't collect any original data of their own, the data came from the organisations that ran the weather stations who have their own records. They deleted THEIR copy of the data not the originals which still exist. Their results have been confirmed by three separate organisations including one funded by deniers to disprove it.
Scary and scarier (Score:2, Insightful)
Second reaction: We are so screwed
After spending a significant amount of time studying the data and politics surrounding this issue, I concluded that global warming is a baked cake at this point (no pun intended) The US contains a little over 4.5% of the worlds population says Google [google.com] yet we are responsible for the majority of world emissions. Now consider that we are trying to cut back, meanwhile China is rapidly industrializing, increasing its footpr
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Other statistics say that contributions to the problem come from many places, including container ships that blast spend kerosene into the sky, unbridled. The oxymoron of "clean coal" and its dirtier real coal burning adds, too. The hole in the ozone layer has narrowed because we cared enough about halogen release that it's narrowed, at least as a by-product if not a direct result of active human conservation.
MPG gets better and lowered emissions as a byproduct, but the outlook is still abysmal. Buy inland
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Now consider that we are trying to cut back, meanwhile China is rapidly industrializing, increasing its footprint with every passing day. When you think of the footprint China will have when it is as industrialized as the USA, any hope of avoiding serious global damage is tiny at this point.
With any luck they do not have a strong "green" movement that opposes nuclear.
When the hippies start saying that we must go nuclear to avoid global warming I will know that they at least believe in it themselves, until then they just look at it as a political argument.
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With any luck they do not have a strong "green" movement that opposes nuclear.
Wind and solar is cheaper than nuclear, so what exactly is your point?
Re:Scary and scarier (Score:5, Informative)
The US is highest per capita, yes, but China holds the majority in total emissions. [wikipedia.org] And those are 2011 numbers, they've had a whole year to up the ante(note from 2010-2011, the US went down a little bit, China went up 17%). Think where the world will be when China surpasses us per capita.
captcha: equality
Re:Scary and scarier (Score:4, Informative)
I don’t think the US is the #1 greenhouse gas emitter. IRC
Canada and Australia are higher per person then the USA, having a lot of extractive industries.
China admits more than the US, having a higher population and a greater reliance on inefficient coal for energy.
India has the fastest growth.
(Not trying to diminish your concerns, just adding facts.)
Re:Scary and scarier (Score:4, Insightful)
First reaction: How are people still denying this???
If I had to guess, it's probably a reaction to the ridiculous alarmist end-times rhetoric from the less competent believers.
For example, one user posted:
Second reaction: We are so screwed
Followed by some thinly-veiled xenophobia.
Can you blame them for wanting to distance themselves from that kind of crazy?
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When you think of the footprint China will have when it is as industrialized as the USA, any hope of avoiding serious global damage is tiny at this point.
If I were to be wildly optimistic, I'd suggest that there's a non-zero chance the leadership in China will realize that investing in renewables and/or nuclear energy is the smart way to go in the medium and especially long term, and that climate change will threaten their stability.
Realistically, I think if climate change threatens the US and China much, they'll simply inject iron into the ocean [wikipedia.org] without bothering to determine the long-term consequences of that action. Presumably their plan for dealing w
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Thorium is overrated.
There is no working reactor for thorium in existence. The tried designs (reactors that actually got build) had serious flaws and got shut down.
On top of that thorium would solve only a few problems, you still have: risk of accidents, earth quakes, plane crashes, terror attacks.
Bottom line a thorium based nuclear industry is in no way any safer than the current one.
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Coal is on the decline, being replaced by wind and solar and bio mass. So why should a sane person invest into a thorium reactor?
Thorium reactors make only sense for China or India who are *increasing* their power production.
Question: uh, ohm ... should I build a new coal plant, or rather a nuclear reactor? Ah well, lets try nuclear. And even then a solar or wind plant would likely be cheaper.
For countries like germany etc. it makes absolutely no sense to replace a coal plant with nuclear one. Especially w
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This is good news (Score:5, Interesting)
We're preventing the temperature decline that would lead us into the next glaciation. And like another poster mentioned, we're still in an "ice age" but we're toward the end of one of the interglacial periods. If we heat things up enough maybe we can get out of the ice age altogether. ;-)
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To quote (aproximately) Dennis MIller on Global Warming - "Look, I love my kids, I'll love my grand kids, and I guess I care about my great grandchildren, but after that, f__k it - I don't care."
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Seriously? Who'se worried about that? And based on what evidence? It has also been found that increased CO2 cools the upper extremities of the atmosphere causing it to "shrink", which is quite the opposite of bleeding off into space.
To quote the 60's (Score:2)
Burn baby burn.
Very Encouraging! (Score:5, Funny)
As a Canadian I completely support the global warming movement and am always glad to see reports like this showing its' progress.
GO WARMING GO WARMING IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY, GO WARMING!!
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As a Canadian I completely support the global warming movement and am always glad to see reports like this showing its' progress.
GO WARMING GO WARMING IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY, GO WARMING!!
So beer really does cause brain damage? That's more disturbing than global warming.
Warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Articles like this can be scaremongering with misleading titles for headline purposes. "Warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 years" means that is has been cooler than about 2700 of the last 11,000 years. This of course can turn around and bit you when your trying to do something for political gain instead of scientific gain. After all it's all too easy to point to something like this as proof that things aren't as bad as they have been in the past pre-industrial era.
I'm not taking sides on this issue, what I'm arguing is that people need to let science do the talking and leave politics on the wayside. The result of failing to do so is that otherwise perfectly sound science research gets tainted by politics. More science and less politics please, that is all.
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Re:Warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 years (Score:5, Insightful)
The science is well understood
And part of the science is that temperature measurements go back to the mid 19th century and actual direct measurement of global average temperature since the 1980s. With such a pausity of observation, one should be very careful about claiming that the science is "well understood". Or at least comfortable with being outrageously wrong.
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Title vs summary (Score:5, Informative)
Title: Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak
Actual first line: Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years
Some peak - it's barely in the first quartile.
Man-Made Global Warming vs Natural Climate change? (Score:2)
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The big problem with this is that we're warming up while we should be going into another ice age.
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Solution that can make all sides happy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sides who won't be happy: The coal industry, anti-nuclear nuts, NIMBYs.
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Didn't you people know that PR agencies lie for a living?
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I'd add to that advice blatantly specific statements than cannot be shown to be true.
Also take a look at what India is doing with thorium. It's a few decades more advan
Interesting article at your link but many errors (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor
It's worth writing about on it's own merits instead of pretending it has anything at all to do with LFTR.
Good News! Warmer since the ice age (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that is wonderful news since about that long ago was the 'end' of the last ice age when temperatures were so low we were having massive die offs due to the cold climate.
Warming is good for life. You might not be acclimated to it but the reality is when we have periods of cooling we have die offs and when we have periods of warming there is an expansion of species, of biodiversity. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and that was good for life.
I welcome warmer temperatures. It has been too cold in the last thousands of years.
All this fussing about warming is ignoring the real problem. Global Warming is just a distraction from the real issue of toxic pollution.
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Of course, since gradual warming over centuries or millennia in the past was good for life in the past it makes sense that rapid warming over decades would be just as good now (though humans will have to acclimate to some floods and famine).
11,000 Year Peak: So we are going down! (Score:2)
Great news. We have an 11,000 year solar cycle then, right?
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No, 22,000. This is the upswing. You forgot to include the down-swing.
This (Score:3, Informative)
As with all "global warming" topics, I can divide the opinions based on their mod points:
[-1,1] = "global warming is a farce"
[2,5] = "global warming is supported by a majority of scientists, debate over, hand over the keys to your SUV"
Yeah (Score:2)
I'm so sick of snow.
Ok, get over it (Score:2)
Yes, the planet is heating up, time to figure out what to do next.
All this bullshit about blaming us for warming up the planet. Whether we have directly done this, or some natural occurring change has happened, its irrelevant.
Bottom line is, yes lets stop living as an excessive society. If we can make technology that don't pump pollutants or excessive CO2 into the atmosphere then lets do it. Don't do it to "Save the Planet" do it because it its just about being state-of-the art. Like, how about we stop
Good news to me (Score:2)
"Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years"
Good?
I thought we were all burning to a crisp in completely unprecedented temperatures in human history. 75th percentile doesn't frighten me. The assumption of 100th percentile at the end of the century hardly seems terrifying either.
But... (Score:2)
Cooler than it has been 25% of the time the past 11,000 years.
So much misleading. (Score:2)
1) Cherry-picked data alert: when someone picks a data set of "11300 years" it suggests Cherry-Picking. Why not 10k, 20k, 50k years? Does that not 'fit' the message?
2) from the article:
"...After the ice age, they found, global average temperatures rose until they reached a plateau between 7550 and 3550 bc. Then a long-term cooling trend set in, reaching its lowest temperature extreme between ad 1450 and 1850...."
So let's see, after an ice age it warmed, then it reached a "low temp extreme" and now it's hi
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Hm, almost like it's cyclic.
You might be on to something here....
Re:So much misleading. (Score:4, Informative)
2) It is the rate of those changes that the authors are highlighting. Absolute temperatures aren't that telling (it has been both much colder and much warmer on earth at various times in history). If the current rate of temperature change had previously occurred in the past 11,300 years (i.e. was driven by natural sources) then they would have seen some indication of it. It would not have been as pronounced as the current trend, due to lower temporal resolution (which acts as a low pass filter), but it still would have appeared.
I don't think anyone is arguing that there are not climate cycles (see Milankovish, also, straw man). But you are comparing events that are happening on much different time scales. Prior to 100 years ago, the temperature had been falling for ~5000 years. In the past 100 years, the temperature has risen to what it was 5000 years ago. Clearly whatever cycle was occurring on a 10000 year period is not the same cycle that we are dealing with now.
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Sure, why not, at least the roads would be a better place.
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Sure, why not, at least the roads would be a better place.
That is true.
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No, it's an 11,000 year cycle that follows Earth's perigee and apogee. We're already at the warm spot, which makes AGW worse. We're not due for another ice age for another 9,000 years or so.
Re:Most recent? (Score:4, Informative)
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Wrong, we are still IN the last 'Ice Age'. We are in a period known as an 'interglacial'. For much of Earth's history there was little or no ice on the planet at all.
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There are two different frequently encountered uses for "ice age" that conflict; the less-technical one of which is for what is more-technically known as a glacial period within what is, in the more technical use, known as an "ice age".
If someone says "most recent ice-age", they are reasonably unambiguously using the less-technical usage.
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The "less technical" meaning is meaningless. Basically when the media or average person says "ice age" they mean glacial maximum, or more personally, ice sheets extending from the pole to... wherever they happen to live.
We will be out of the current ice age when Greenland and even Antarctica are ice-sheet free... Which is the normal (average) state of the planet. Cool glacial periods, like the one we're in now, are the exceptional periods vs. the rule Average global temperature, geologically speaking, i
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Which would be a relevant comparison if we weren't concerned with the effects of and on human civilization, which arose about 10,000 years ago.
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Well, ten thousandish, but who's counting?
Re:Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
ok, this stinks of troll, but I'll take it:
"So calm the fuck down about religion, deniers, AGW, man made causes, SUVs, smug ass Californians, and Al Gore. Just realize accordingly, spend less money on ski equipment and more money on boats."
I dig your cool complacency, and actually I kind of agree. Global climate change probably won't make much of difference to your life during your lifetime, and maybe not even to your kids. Because you're rich. You can afford to pay 50% more for food (as agriculture is disrupted): the worst that will happen is you might move house, accept a slightly lower standard of living and bitch about the price of things. Oh, and 'buy more boats'.
It's the poor who will pay. I don't mean the middle class, I mean the 1 billion+ people who live on less than $1 a day. They will starve in greater numbers and die in greater numbers - they can't move, or "buy less ski equipment". I get that you don't care about that, but I hope that as a society we can bring ourselves to give a shit.
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The middle class will suffer too. If you currently live in a coastal city, you're going to have to either move (expensive) or fund flood defences (expensive).
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Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Here's why you should care:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives-intermediate.htm [skepticalscience.com]
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Benefits: We get great new places to live in northern Canada, Siberia, Greenland, etc
While making the tropics, where most of humanity lives, uninhabitable.
Billions of tons of food will be able to be grown where it never has been before
And billions of tons of food will be unable to be grown where it has been before.
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The cited statistic is enough to mock this report. It's warmer now than it has been 74% of the time in the past 11,300 years. Seriously? WOuldn't that mean for 25% of the past 11,300 years the average temperature was HIGHER?! WHat makes the current temp so noteworthy? Because it is above the average, but below the highest temperature in the past 11,300 years?
Re:As an anti-science, pro-ignorance republican... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the article didn't note the alarming part of that so well. The issue isn't the temperature at the moment so much as the really alarming rate of change. Here's [climatedesk.org] a chart that documents the history and recent changes. Notice anything odd about the recent record relative to the entire temperature record going back to the dawn of agriculture?
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Thank you Mr. Kennedy, I'd love a ride home after the party...
Sincerely,
Mary Jo Kopechne [politicsdaily.com]
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Shhh! You're harshing my paranoia!