Climate Change

>> I have quit it forever a few times, too.

LOL!

>> if you will go back to using Global Warming, which describes your belief that the world is gettinng warmer, and stop hiding behind Climate Change,

No, because they are different things, and no matter what you think, the global conspiracy that disagrees with you is not "hiding behind" a contrived lie. That's your world view, not mine.

1.
Global warming is about the long run average.

All that extra CO2 in the atmosphere HAS TO hold in a lot more heat than the atmosphere ever held in before, going back 400,000 years. That's the basic physics of the greenhouse effect: all frequencies of sunlight come in and are absorbed, They are re-emitted mainly as infrared (heat), but CO2 very strongly absorbs some IR bands. Now, that heat can't escape. Worse, it is being absorbed right into the atmosphere where weather happens.

No matter how the complex system shuffles that heat around, like into the ocean surface, it has to go somewhere and make those things warmer. Energy is conserved. That change in (?) surface temps(?) oceans (?) stratosphere (?) has to affect atmosphere and oceans in some way that, on average, raises averaged global temperatures.

Climatologists agreed on that right away and unfortunately talked to reporters who ran stories of rising oceans flooding New York City. Duhh.

But that's what I meant by "a brick through a window". There's an incredibly complex climate system with at least a dozen complex sub-systems like the water cycle with clouds, rivers and oceans, the carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, plants, crops, algae, heat transport ... convective heat transport which is even harder to predict, cloud structures which are even harder to predict ...

... Let's say it is around as complex as 10 Swiss watches. Now you make one important gear in each watch square instead of round (double or triple the insulation caused by CO2) and wonder if it will have a major effect on how the watch runs..

In the long run, however, the details can be allowed to blur together. In the long run, say 100-500 years, if you trap more heat, the temperature rises.

(Unless God or Gaea intervenes and pull some very unforeseen rabbit out of the hat that amazes everyone, like so many glaciers in some spots and deserts in other spots, that we reflect so much heat instead of absorbing it that we avoid some amazing amount of that inevitable warming, say half. But you can't grow crops or build cities on either glaciers or deserts.)

(Equally as likely as a Christian or Pagan miracle that almost saves us in the long run, is some fluke in the other direction, that kills us off much faster than predicted or guessed form the existing models).

The long-term prediction is hard because it will include huge changes we have never observed before. Predicting something very different is very hard. But "more heat = more warming" does get 97% agreement from those studying it. Apparently, they've even agreed that the human contributions are a significant factor.

I guess seeing 2-3 decades already agree with their long-range projections gave them a lot of self-confidence!

You can use the admission that long-run models can't yet predict details, only a net heat budget. You could use it to say :if we don;t know everything, we don;t know anything, so maybe nothing bad will happen - like some 0.01% likely optimistic case in someone's speculative model.

That's about as likely as the 0.01% likely pessimistic case where we have a runaway greenhouse effect in the next 50 years and boil the oceans.

Don't bet on double-zero to save the planet!

2.
Climate Change describes or tries to predict the closer-term changes (say, the next 50 years) in more detail and better accuracy.

NOW the fact of constant variability obscures detailed predictions.

And one thing the modelers somewhat agree on is that there will probably be chaotic flopping around until some new stability is found (probably with many things changed that we will have to adapt to, if we can).

And I don't mean "adapt to" by losing 90% of mankind to famine and reverting to hunter-gatherers, or becoming Mongols and conquering Patagonia.

Since they are trying to make detailed predictions that they can test against recent data, they keep discovering new factors. That is scientific progress, even if they are discovering how f----ed we are.

It's not a global conspiracy to increase taxes, changing its story to deceive you, it's a new science trying to understand something hugely complex and probably delicate, that we are banging on with a big, big hammer.

(Science is not like abstract math where you prove something in one theorem, BANG. You have a theory, see where it fits, adapt it, see if it gets better, compare it to facts, find a way to measure some new factors, someone disproves another part of it, thereby improving the theory, repeat 30 times, until you have a pretty complete idea of all the major factors and are mostly arguing about details, like stellar evolution is right now.)

So yes, there are fluctuations like "one year the polar ice cap did NOT retreat farther than it ever did before." It might be 15 or 200 years before we understand and can measure enough climate factors to predict details more than 3 days ahead.

But looking at the unbiased data (as in the links back40bean found), you can already see the long-term trend already visible and the more-chaotic near-term extremes.

That darned back40bean showed us that the long-term changes that I thought might take another decade or so to be incontrovertible can be seen clearly already even without the glaciers and ocean warming): " the last decade has been the warmest on record". That graph even shows a clear trend going back to around 1910.

And other comments in that link show that climatologists noticed some of the same things in their data that I was thinking just from random news items. The chaotic change is also here already.

I was hoping that I was being alarmist! Unfortunately not. Thank you back40bean ... but can't you arrange for the facts to be more pleasant when you find the next few?

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus

>> I recall a lot of people did not believe the Ozone was disappearing, it was just moving. Remember there was a big hole in the ozone over Antartica and surely Freon did not cause that.

No, CFCs diffuse all through the atmosphere. They are so persistent that they have plenty of time to distribute themselves evenly.

>> what i thought was so stupid about banning it just in the United States, it was still available across the Mexican border for a dollar a pound, while we were paying 15 or 20 a pound. Ozone does not stop at the border, so if they could not ban it world wide, they should not have banned it just for us.

That turns out not to be the case. I had to look it up, when I wondered how widespread the agreements had become. Try Googling some of these and you'll be surprised also! This is the first encouraging thing I've read in a long time!

- "ban cfcs"
- Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer
- Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer)


Wikipedia:
"The two ozone treaties have been ratified by 197 parties, which includes 196 states and the European Union,[3] making them the first universally ratified treaties in United Nations history.[4]"

The agreement about ozone was more widespread than either of us thought!

I think the reason it is worst at one of the poles is because there is also some factor like seasonal concentration and release of some bromine compound there (I may be wrong, there may be other factors and the bromine story may be some BS artist.)

But the claim was that it was cold enough in the polar winter that this bromine compound froze out and precipitated on stratospheric ice clouds. Come spring, a whole winter's worth evaporated all at once and further weakened the local ozone - enough that it was super-easy to measure as a "hole".

Let's see ...

Yeah, Google "ozone depletion bromine".

The spring "hole" in the troposphere over Antarctica is a local symptom or consequence of the ozone layer DEPLETION over the whole Earth's stratosphere. I guess comparing two numbers wasn't dramatic enough for newspaper reporters: I also mainly heard about "the hole".

But it was the depletion of the rest of the globe's stratospheric ozone LAYER that would have progressed to more melanoma and retinal damage.

This seems to say that it is chlorine compounds that freeze out in ice clouds over the Antarctic and then are released all at once come spring.

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/hole_SH.html
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/research/themes/o3/

"Because it is completely dark, the air in the vortex gets so cold that clouds form, even though the Antarctic air is extremely thin and dry. Chemical reactions take place that could not take place anywhere else in the atmosphere. These unusual reactions can occur only on the surface of polar stratospheric cloud particles, which may be water, ice, or nitric acid, depending on the temperature. "

I'm surprised that no one proposed geo-enginerring on those winter ice clouds, like zapping them with orbiting SDI lasers to blast the chlorine compounds into space.

Sorry, I can't stop myself. It's "entrepreneur".

Rick,
When we first started hearing about the problem, the only words being used to describe it was Global Warming. Then when some of the Scientists got caught cooking the books, I believe in England, they found out it was not selling, so then we started hearing it change to Climate Change, to make it more palatable.

Now you and I may have read different dictionaries when we were boys, but it is pretty obvious that they mean different things.

I agree the Climate is going to Change both in the near term and the far term, but I do not believe anyone can predict whether it is going to be hotter or colder in fifty or a thousand years.

One thing I admire about you, is even when you are as wrong as a three dollar bill, you are sincere and believe every word you say.

I was Googling today during a conversation with Bean I believe, about when the conversation about Global Warming started heating up, and I wound up on a Yahoo search page that seemed to be a full blown discussion like we are having here. I did not open any of the articles, but judging by the article headlines, there seemed to be more contributors that do not think it is a looming apocalypse than do believe it is. You should take a look at it, since you believe 97% of legitimate scientists, not just the Boys in the Choir, believe it.

I have clarified it before to you,since you keep trying to mis-characterize my position, I will say it again. The increase of Carbon has been measured and proved. I accept that as a fact. But then the fantasies begin about trying to predict the future and then being terrified by what is possibly a mistake. The truth is, as you acknowledge, that many different things may,{or may not} happen. Warmies believe the worst possible is going to happen. I do not know which is going to happen, the best or the worst, so I am not going to buy a lot of land near the Arctic Circle for a future farm. I am just going to let the Coal Miners keep supporting their families until we see what develops.

rrr“I guess seeing 2-3 decades already agree with their long-range projections gave them a lot of self-confidence”

eee I do not think the last fifteen years, which has not seen an increase in temperatures, has given the Alarmists much confidence.

Ernie

Rick,

Having bought industrial canisters of Freon 12 while my boat was in Mexico, both in 2000/2001 and 2002/2003 it was readily available, as well as in Panama and some other countries.

Having suffered much sun damage to my skin from spending my life outdoors, if the ban actually worked i am happy to hear it, but the last i heard, skin cancer is still rapidly increasing, instead of decreasing as would be expected. I just had some skin cancer, squamous, not melanoma, removed last week.

Ernie

You think its a global conspiracy of liars, I think it's science.
Lets agree to disagree.

>> I do not believe anyone can predict whether it is going to be hotter or colder in fifty or a thousand years.

I think that adding the extra insulation of 400 PPM CO2 makes it an obvious and easy conclusion for the next 50-200 years. Like most climatologists think, I recently had confirmed. I'll agree to agree with all of them, and respectfully disagree with you.

I have not heard of any climate model bold enough to extrapolate any predictions out to 1,000 years, except for saying "look what this model WOULD do if you ran it way past reasonable extrapolation".

>> then being terrified by what is possibly a mistake. The truth is, as you acknowledge, that many different things may,{or may not} happen.

I should try to make more clear what I expect is very likely, and what I think is frighteningly possible.

Say, for example, that the long term models that are immune to the short term variability managed to prove a 20% probability of climate changes over 100 years that would cause shortfalls in agriculture enough to starve 20% of our current population, or 30% of the population in 2114.

I would consider that solid grounds for the kind of international action that started reversing the ozone layer damage, and will probably solve that problem by 2050.


>> Warmies believe the worst possible is going to happen.

I don't know any of the crazed, evil conspirators that populate your posts.

People who study the climate or read about that science think is likely that some fairly dramatic and presumably bad-for-agriculture-things will probably happen in the next 10-50 years , and very bad things MAY happen in 50-100 years, but that if we do nothing the rate of CO2 release, that very bad things WILL happen in fewer than 100-300 years.

The WORST possible anyone has thought of yet is frequent super-cyclonic storms knocking down buildings and forests over half the globe, tsunamis from ice shelf collapses, EXTREME alternating climate extremes in different regions every few years, followed by runaway greenhouse effects like Venus, rapidly rising and/or boiling oceans, starting some time in 50-300 years but once it starts, going to the point of humans living in mines within only decades.

THAT would be "the worst" and I don't know anyone saying that WILL happen.

>> I just had some skin cancer, squamous, not melanoma, removed last week.

If you look at the links, the rapid drop of ozone density leveled off, went up some, leveled or dropped a little, but i trending up.

That why I said something like 'will probably be solved by 2050'.

Maybe the improvement would be further along if fewer countries were cheating on the treaty ?

I see this:

"shall accept a series of stepped limits on CFC use and production, including:

from 1991 to 1992 its levels of consumption and production of the controlled substances in Group I of Annex A do not exceed 150 percent of its calculated levels of production and consumption of those substances in 1986;

from 1994 its calculated level of consumption and production of the controlled substances in Group I of Annex A does not exceed, annually, twenty-five percent of its calculated level of consumption and production in 1986.

from 1996 its calculated level of consumption and production of the controlled substances in Group I of Annex A does not exceed zero.

There was a slower phase-out (to zero by 2010) of other substances (halon 1211, 1301, 2402; CFCs 13, 111, 112, etc.) and some chemicals were given individual attention (Carbon tetrachloride; 1,1,1-trichloroethane). The phasing-out of the less active HCFCs only began in 1996 and will go on until a complete phasing-out is achieved by 2030.

There are a few exceptions for "essential uses", where no acceptable substitutes have been found"

Hopefully the industrial canisters of Freon 12 you bought were from old inventory, that you aren't an international criminal conspiring to poison the planet and give yourself skin cancer! :-)

Let's see ... Freon-12 is CF2Cl2, which is in Group I of Annex A in the Montreal ... they agreed to zero production and consumption by 1996 and you bought it easily six years later.

Sorry to hear that. I agree that it supports your idea that not everyone obeys the law.

But if you were also saying, as it seemed you were, that "the existence of criminals means that we should not even start correcting the problem", I'll continue disagreeing.

BTW, this may get your blood pressure up before I go to bed:

Some science fiction novel was talking about a time when many people lived in space colonies, big tin cans where the life support system would rather quickly kill everyone if it was not carefully maintained.

The tin-can dwellers KNEW how fragile their ecosystem was, and had plenty of examples of blowouts and poisonings and crop infestations and diseases that required the survivors to abandon their entire "world" and sterilize it before anyone could return. No "maybes" there, they had examples.

The novel briefly described a controversial play where the main action was a child informing on his parents to the space colony's "life support police" for violating some law that protected the life support system from damage.

The novel made the point that "stupid mudfoot Earthers" thought it was horrible that mind police had brainwashed the kid into betraying his own parents for violating a mere law.

Most residents of space colonies thought it was sad that the kid had to rat out his criminally insane parents (but of COURSE he had to).
"Screw the law, we just don't want to all die tonight!"

The dumb Earthers did not realize how fragile their ecosystem was. They had not YET had their noses rubbed in an example of the failure of their life support system.

Oh, well, the Freon Cartel CFC-Lords will only slow down the ozone layer healing, not stop it.

Resistance to CO2 treaties ... now THAT could teach us the lesson that those space dwellers knew in their bones at a young age.

I hope we already have space conies by that time.

One question for anyone who is sure the CO2 level is too high and needs to be lower-
What do you want to do about it?

Rick,

Do you recall whether Mexico was a party to the Montreal treaty? The small cans amd the cartons looked new, as did the 7 kilo, canisters, and were manufactured in Mexico. I also heard from a Refrigeration Tech tthat flies all over the world fixing Navy and other ship refrigeration that it was available in Panama. I purchased it in a large modern marine hardware store, not some back alley deal. Come to think of it, a friend bought some down there 2 or 3 years after i did, so it was still in the market until about 2006 at least.

I read science fiction when i was 12 to 14 years old, and then gave it up, except about 30 years ago i read Dunes, that had the big Sand Worms in it, on a barren desert Earth. Hubbard wrote that. That was the last one i read.

You never responded to my question as to your thoughts about sacrificing the Coal Miners Families now, to slow down Global Warming. I do not understand why you are so concerned about people being destroyed in the future but it does not seem to bother you to have their lives ruined now to slow down the Carbon buildup.

Ernie

This message was edited Mar 18, 2014 7:59 PM

Rick...You are a man of infinite patience.

Dune, Frank Herbert. (so as not to be confused with L Ron Hubbard)

Sallyg asks the relevant question--what do we do about this? This is the big question. REAL BIG!!! No one anywhere is proposing, much less doing, anything realistic. People in the third world--China, India, etc.--who are coming into reasonable wealth are not going to want to return to mud huts. In this country, even very "green" people drive big SUVs and 4WDs (reference CG's comments from a few weeks ago). realistically, can anyone see the US cutting back and learning to walk and not heat/cool their homes? I heard one physicist (who had done modeling) say that, if the US just vanished, that in five years global carbon production without the US would equal what it is now with us.

Nobody (except, IMHO, reasonable people) wants nukes. Electric cars are a joke--they just move the coal burning elsewhere. Hybrid cars are good, but cars in general are a surprisingly small contributor to GW; it's mostly electricity generation that is the driver of atmospheric CO2. Solar and wind can't currently do the trick and it will be decades before they can.

If the most severe predictions are the ones that turn out to be accurate, we're already "toast". The best we can do is learn to adapt. Any other thoughts?

L. Ron Hubbard--another scary SOB ala Jeffrey Smith.

thank you Willy, those are pretty much my thoughts there!

>> >> What do you want to do about it?

1. REMOVE CO2 from the air and oceans, hopefully without destroying the planet even faster than climate change.

There are several proposed schemes to suck CO2 out of the air, but "sequestering" a lot for a long time (centuries at least) is even harder.

And the problem with all those science-fiction-like "Geo-engineering" schemes is that the unintended consequences are likely to be huge. These schemes are like hitting a plate-glass window with a sharpened pick-axe ... but I expect that we will be driven to them in desperation, since we did NOT start fixing this problem in the 1980s when it became clear that we would have to, eventually.

These are the ones I remember:

1. "Ocean fertilization". Scatter soluble iron or floating iron "foam" in Antarctic ocens. The high-O2 level and presence of every other nutrient will support algae blooms if you provide iron. The area is (for now) only deficient in iron. Someone noticed that dust storms caused algae blooms, and that it was the iron in the dust that did the trick.

The algae feeds krill and fish and cetaceans. They hope that enough organic matter will sink and enter the abyssal circulation and "just stay there" for a few centuries to sequester useful amounts of CO2 pretty fast.

Someone tested the "iron bloom" by scattering iron sulphate (I think it was) from ships already passing through the area. But how much sank? How much just fee fish that resumed cycling carbon rapidly from sea to fish to sea to air?

How long would the algae blooms last, even if you could keep the iron floating around?
How long would it take to exhaust the local excess of other nutrients?
Don't know & don't know.

I only know that eager young nerdy scientists want to try it,
older conservative scientists don't think it would work very well, ...
...
... Ernie, we can agree on the rest of this paragraph!
...
... and true Eco-Warmies with an agenda and no conscience admit that they WANT to suppress industry and force people to live a less energy-intensive life (because they :KNOW we NEED to do that to be sustainable) ... and claim it won't work, and besides, that anything so unprecedented, experimenting on a global scale, is even riskier than learning to live with climate change.

I kind of agree that "unintended consequences on this scale are AS scary as climate at this time and for some number of decades into the future. But not as scary as the climate change will probably be in 2040 or 2060.


On land, the equivalent would be "plant lots of trees" and store the wood and bark where it won;t oxidase. Pretty small change, but every little Gigaton helps.

Turn desert sands into fertile soil with 5-10% organic content and keep it that way for hundreds of years. That could hold a lot of carbon, but as we know, organic matter in the soil is consumed rapidly and goes right back into the atmosphere.

Maybe turn the deserts into fast-growing forests, and then stack up the logs "somewhere" and sequester the carbon in giant pyramids. Future generations will think we had some strange fetishes.

>> What do you want to do about it?

That's the difficult question, isn't it?

We've been pushing "efficiency" for some decades, and probably taken up some of that slack, since more companies and some people are willing to invest X to save Y per year, if it saves them money in 3-10 years.

But spending money (corporate funds, private savings or tax dollars) is an uphill struggle.

Becoming less competitive internationally (or compared to nearby company) is a hard decision. If another country or company has less concern about long-term sustainability, or the price of food in the Third World. they can put out a cheaper product and take your customers away.

My first reaction is "that's why countries have laws" and "that why countries sign international treaties". When the benefits accrue to everyone, including future generations, logically "everyone" should pay for it.

Then the hard part is agreeing on how hard to push and how far the obvious has to be proved before spending money, enforcing expensive regulations, and making everything more expensive.

And I do understand, and used to worry about, the idea of this government, or some UN agency, having and exercising power. Big organizations seem to make bigger mistakes than small ones, but we have conclusively proven, since the 1800s, that unfettered competition pollutes (BP), crashes the the global economy and gives each other bonuses for having done so, puts competitors out of business through what are now called "unfair business practices", and generally proven that they would follow the profit motive to h end of th3 world if it looked good on a quarterly earnings statement.

Some other system, mechanism, or authority is needed to address global problems like air, water and CO2 pollution. Like it or not, sharing a planet when our industry has the ability to destroy that planet's life support system without even trying, means that (like a space station), we need some global authority motivated by human survival more than quarterly profits. Or treaties with enough teeth that Mexico and Ernie don't undermine attempts to keep the boat from sinking.

I'm not a paranoid about "jack-booted UN thugs are taking over our school systems", but it DOES worry me that power becomes more and more concentrated in national governments, world organizations, and large corporation, as the world becomes more complex and, in effect, shrinks.

>> What do you want to do about it?

Another kind of answer, ignoring HOW the actions can be enforced, is more nerdy.

1. Release less CO2 (hopefully without destrying industry and jobs).

Nuclear power, "hydrogen-based power distribution", small change from solar panels, wind trubines I guess ... then what? Electric or hydrogen cars?

Part of that is "sharing the costs", so that all the jobs and factories don't simply flee countries that care about our survival, and wind uo in Mexico and Red China so that everyone else is out of work.

As with air pollution, if every country FOLLOWS treaties that cap emissions, competition stays level. My theory is that at this time profit is flowing uphill faster than heated air over a volcano, and that there would be zero hardships if some of the profit that laws assure go the the richest 1% instead goes into paying the ACTUAL costs of industry.

Those costs should be based on running industries in such a way that it does not poison, cook, or drown the planet.

My theory was that it would have been cheaper to PREVENT lots of the last 180 billion tons of CO2 from having been released since 1994, than it will be to somehow suck them back out the atmosphere and sequester them somewhere. And INFINITY safer than the various "geo-engineering schemes being thrown around. But it's too late for that.

My next theory was to prevent lots of the NEXT 90 billion tons of CO2 from being dumped, like gasoline on a fire, between now and 2024. But it might take that long to convince the deniers that we even need to START.

I guess the only thing in this catetgory that we CAN do is struggle like heck to get minute improvments into international treaties over the next few years.

Then, as extreme weather and crop failures become undeniably caused by excess CO2, hope that something overcomes the denier's resistance and we start to bite the really unplatable bullet of international cooperation and regulation. In this context, global panic and food riots or monsoons drowning thousands (in the near future) might start to look better than billions of deaths in the middle future.

I guess that bleak possibility hints at a parallel method: pray that soemthing happens to save a species to stupid to live, from its own short-sightedness and greed. I'm not sure how I would phrase that prayer. Can a person pointing a loaded gun at his own head and pulling a trigger pray that God will spare him from reaping what he is sowing?

Maybe we can pray that the onset of undeniable change is fast enough to wake people up to the necessity of harsh, unpalatable, expensive actions, but slow enough that we can slow the rate of getting worse and start to reverse it while the tropics are still habitable and we have not made too many more species extinct and too much arable land into deserts or bogs or salt-inundated by coastal storms.

>> What do you want to do about it?

3. Send tens or hundreds of of millions of tons of particulates and aerosols into the high stratosphere, and keep them there, to reflect sunlight indiscriminately.

That might simulate the effect of volcanoes like Mt. Pinatubo, but would aim for lasting effects more like the "Little Ice Age" than the sulfur-dioxide / sulfuric acid aerosol that Pinatubo threw into the stratosphere (taking a big bite out of the ozone layer as well.

The expect-able downside would be to stand the current system of atmospheric circulation and weather on its head, and then find out what happens afterwards. Probably something to try after the food riots have made extreme measures more palatable to the survivors.

Talk about unintended consequences!

The INTENDED consequence of this kind of intervention would be to reflect sunlight before it even reached the lower atmosphere. Fight fire with fire!

Maybe, after the climate models improve enough to make short-term testable hypothesis (like over 1-5 years), small-scale pilot-plant variations on this "nuke the stratosphere" approach will be proposed in order to try to create a small, predictable change that lets them refine the models enough predict more reliably what larger changes might do.

http://geography.about.com/od/globalproblemsandissues/a/pinatubo.htm

"The cloud over the earth reduced global temperatures. In 1992 and 1993, the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere was reduced 0.5 to 0.6°C and the entire planet was cooled 0.4 to 0.5°C. The maximum reduction in global temperature occurred in August 1992 with a reduction of 0.73°C. The eruption is believed to have influenced such events as 1993 floods along the Mississippi river and the drought in the Sahel region of Africa. The United States experienced its third coldest and third wettest summer in 77 years during 1992."

Umm, you ask: "how would we get tens or hundreds of of millions of tons dust or sulfuric acid aerosols or other aerosols that high, and keep them there, and NOT destroy the ozone layer?" Good question, I hope someone IS working on that.

>> What do you want to do about it?

2. Orbiting mirrors to reflect 5-10% of sunlight. That's a LOT of mirrors! Like, at least 5-10% of the earths surface area, times some factor because they will be several hundred miles above the surface and hence have a larger radius. Plus another factor of 2-8 since they will only be in position to shade the earth some of the time.

Assume the mirrors come from lunar and asteroidal resources, using the space industry that we could not afford to develop while fending off famine. (Plus, it would have taken tax dollars to develop a space industry capable of saving the planet, and we CAN'T HAVE anyone spending tax dollars!

Figure out which latitudes need shade to mitigate the "uneven" effect of warming. First guess, the tropics need it most because they will be hottest soonest.

But who knows, due to the complexity of the system.

Probably, as some regions bake and others drown in rain or monsoons, the modellers will learn enough to get better models, and be able to guess where to put the mirrors to do less damage.

Then , the first few Geo-engineering schemes we try will teach the climate modelers more about what NOT to do, and what happens when you poke a hornets nest with a short stick.

Oh, yes! say we do learn that putting mirrors HERE but not THERE will benefit the industrialized North a lot, but give the tropics even more cyclonic storms. (Or vice-versa.) Negotiation, or war? Stay tuned.

I forgot the most likely and effective way to reverse global warming.

Nuclear war, nuclear winter, problem solved.

The Keeling Curve and population curves look a lot like exponential growth curves. In the real world, as opposed to math, those never go on for long. They climb and climb until "something happens", like resource depletion or drowning in poisons.

Then, the bacteria, rats, lemmings or humans devour each other, go crazy, and/or start wars.

Based on history, that seems by far the most likely outcome as soon as crop failures and loss of arable land makes food our limiting resource.

First, the cost will go up, and "only" Third World and poor people will actually starve outright, stage food riots, and seriously depopulate regions and try to migrate en masses to anywhere with food. Small and medium-sized wars.

Then almost everyone will be impoverished trying to fed themselves, even in the industrial countries. Large and global and nuclear wars.

Problem solved.

The planet will recover from nuclear winter AND global warming at the same time. Then we'll find out whether small bands of hunter-gathering humans with Stone Age technology can compete with rats, cockroaches, raccoons, squirrels, and other primates.

Ernie,
>> the cartons looked new, as did the 7 kilo, canisters, and were manufactured in Mexico.
... available in Panama. I purchased it in a large modern marine hardware store, not some back alley deal.
... so it was still in the market until about 2006

Bummer! The online articles I read said EVERY country signed.
Now that I think about it, of course, they all signed, in the absence of enforcment.

I do hope you know I was teasing about your being an internation CFC-smuggling king-pin!
Besides, doubting the claims of the warmies as you do, you wer acting consistently with your principles.

I could undertand giving up SF after reading ANY of the follow-on novels to Dune. Those stunk, major-league. As bad as Hubbard's ASF for the pulps. But Dune was Frank Herbert, by far his best book, thoguh "Under pressure" (I think it was) was pretty good.

I like Heinlein, Pournell, Niven, H. Beam Piper. You MIGHT like Piper and Pournelle.

Piper's works, or most of them, can be had free from Project Gutenberg. Check Lone Star Planet and Four-day Planet for humor, any Paratime short story for quality writing (like PoliceOperation or Time Crime). Space Viking, Litle Fuzzy, The Cosmic Computer / Graveyard of Dreams are some of my all-time fgavorites. You might like Uller Uprising, Day of the Moron and Murder in the Gunroom. I see I['ve listed most of his works. What can I say, I like Piper!

RickCorey, I think you've effectively demonstrated there is no realistic way to make any change to the CO2 level.
Algae blooms create other problems, particulates or mirrors do not get into the atmosphere without the expenditure of energy to create them and send them there, and we can't even get all the countries or rulers of the world to stop killing each other or their own citizens, much less come together and abide by international agreements.

Ernie,

Why am I callous about coal miners?

Because EVERYONE will suffer, and not just from losing jobs, as we re-tool every industry and even, probably, how we live, to emit less carbon dioxide.

Say it another way. They (and the oil companies, and car owners, and maybe methane-farting Cows), are killing us slowly. Or fairly slowly, we're about to find that out over the next few decades.

We are going to have to do SOMETHING before it is much too late, and it is going to "hurt: everyone, economically at least, when we do.

Why am I callous about EVERYONE?

Because it WILL be much, much worse then just "economic hardships" if we don't start soon.

In the 1980s, it seemed to me that it might already have been too late to reduce catastrophe to "mere" global hardship. And (I thought) totally obvious to anyone that if you extrapolate a line going up steeply, it will reach "a bad place" eventually, or soon, or very soon.

Thirty years and 270 BILLION tons of CO2 later, we may still have a chance to reduce major global catastrophe to some more manageable degree of catastrophe.

Recently, it exceeded the highest levels the planet saw in the last 400,000 years. I'll express it as "I have concerns". "The sky is falling" sounds like small beer compared to this. To say "the sky is on fire" would be too alarmist. That won't happen for several hundred years (exaggeration - it won;t burn, just sear crops and lung tissue).

Yeah, it might take longer than I expect to reach the stage of enough crop failures to cause widespread, frequent famines and food riots.

It just doesn't make me delighted to think that maybe billions of people starving to death can be deferred several decades or even a whole century. Knowing that failing to act now dooms then eventually ... bothers me more than unemployed coal miners.

Besides, the coal miners might find work building levees to keep coastal cities above water if we wait long enough to start fixing the problem.

Wait a little longer yet, and they'll have full time jobs burying the bodies, or shooting at starving hordes trying to reach a food warehouse.

If we get to demand answers of each other, how can you focus on "we MIGHT NOT be destroying the planet"?

Do you have any interest or concern about the fact that we PROBABLY ARE, and the only reasonable question remaining is whether it will come in the early or late 21st century?

Let's even say that 9 billion more tons of CO2 every year might take until (wild, gross over-estimate) 2314 to fry or drown every hectare of cropland over half the planet.

When would YOU start addressing the problem, if you were King of the World and still had 5-6 billion people left, damn eager to do your will as long as you would quell the storms and turn their homelands back fro desert to arable?

What would you say to the billions of dead when they point at the Keeling Curve and demand to know why you voted against even TRYING to save their lives?

That you didn;t wnat to interfere with industry at all until you damn good and sure that they absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt WERE CERTAINLY going to starve in droves, and by then it would be MUCH to late to reverse it, too bad so sad?

>> RickCorey, I think you've effectively demonstrated there is no realistic way to make any change to the CO2 level.

Sallyg, for the first time in this thread, I get to say "I'm not THAT pessimistic!"

There are no known plausible methods yet, that don;t involve HUGE risks. We probably won;t try them on large scales until the obvious, in-your-face downsides of climate changes are even more damaging than the plausible downsides of reckless Geo-engineering.

But they are better than seeing the world population drop from 8-9 billion down to, say 4-5 billion as the amount or arable land drops to 1/4 of what it was.

I do hope that we try some things (maybe even, gasp, conservation) soon enough that we can move from the new deserts to where the old deserts and tundra used to be, and establish crops that CAN survive there, before it gets so bad that we destroy industry and populations with large-scale wars.

It would be nice to avert mass amine, also. Risking huge damage to the planet with geo-engineering ... bad, yes. But the consequences of where we are going now? Worse.

My guess is that ocean fertilization and sequestering carbon in new soils and wood will be tried and found negligible.

Orbital mirrors will be too expensive unless we have lunar industry - but we won't invest in that, either, because multimillionaires have lobbyists to keep their taxes low, and the vanishing middle class will be spending more of their money on food.

We'll go to pumping sulfuric acid into the high stratosphere within a few of enough people noticing the obvious - that the alternative is worse.

Then we'll learn what the downsides of that are.

But I REALLY WISH that we had been researching such things on a small scale, as a desperately high priority, for the last 30 years, so we could feel our way into it gradually and hopefully keep the unintended consequences smaller.

But we didn't. And we aren't.

We may find that answer to the Fermi Paradox is that it takes more intelligence and wisdom and altruism from a species to create a sustainable industrial civilization, than it does to create a short-lived industrial civilization and then flush it down the tubes and revert to savagery.

By failing to pass the test.

Willy, great post!

>> Nobody (except, IMHO, reasonable people) wants nukes.

I agree.

>> Electric cars are a joke--they just move the coal burning elsewhere.

I thought that too, but an electric-car enthusiast convinced me that the sheer EFFICIENCY of an electric motor over internal combustion was so great that it outweighed the waste in generating and distributing electricity. I don't know, but I hope.

One very painful small step is everyone (even in rich countries!) having to live near where they work. Not many people would vote for that, until gas is $100 per gallon, and wheat flour is (say) $20 per pound.

Hydrogen-powered buses for the luckiest masses and a few hydrogen airplanes and blimps for the very rich?

>> not heat/cool their homes?

Have to move everyone out of cold regions. Or heat in the winter using low-level reactor waste and count the sterilization as a free bonus for reducing the surplus population. "Bundling"? Not very reliable, and you still can't work a job while bundling.

I guess we could move back North after global warming makes the cold regions warm! (kidding)

I'm guessing that the tropics will starve before the fry, but I don't really know.

>> it's mostly electricity generation that is the driver of atmospheric CO2.

I didn't know that: it's very good news. Breeder reactors can generate electricity, create fissile fuel, and probably eventually "burn" reactor waste.

>> Solar and wind can't currently do the trick and it will be decades before they can.

Cartoon: a Woodstock-like festival, with a bearded, charismatic man shouting "Turn ON the solar-powered generator!!!"

Skinny, nerdy bespectacled guy holding a thin, limp power cable in his hands, sadly: "It IS on."

>> If the most severe predictions are the ones that turn out to be accurate, we're already "toast".

Yeah.

Pray, soldier on, hope. Push for sustainable technologies. Deal with despair and frustration. Prepare for hordes of refugees, and food riots or at least hideously expensive food. GMOs, pesticides, nasty herbicides ... all will be desperately embraced as alternative to famine. Or embraced as desperate alternatives?

Consider geo-engineering, so we at least go down swinging.

Develop profitable space industries that motivate LARGE self-sufficient habitats, so there's still a large gene pool of humans with technology to re-populate the planet after everyone else eats each other.

Replace electrical power generation with solar power satellites?

No, I forgot, we can't have taxes and anything that doesn't make the richest 1% richer is a bad, socialistic idea.

Gerard O'Neill started pushing space industry and colonies around 1970, but couldn't even get a paper published for four years ("L5" and "The High Frontier"). The Princeton conferences started in 1974 (I went to one of them.)

We might very well be, as a species, to dumb to live.
Almost every other animal knows not to foul it's nest.

Rick--I guarantee that electric cars are a joke. Either you burn fossil fuels in your gas tank or you burn them in a power plant and then send the electricity to the car. Burning them in the car incurs X% loss. Burning them in a power plant incurs X% (plus or minus) loss, plus transmitting them via power lines incurs an additional loss. The only way you benefit in terms of CO2 is if the power is generated via hydro, nuclear, or some other carbon neutral generation scheme.

Electric cars can be a benefit in terms of air pollution in a congested city. Globally, they are actually worse because of additional inefficiencies. Hybrids are good because they take advantage of energy produced by the car itself. When braking, energy used to reach high speed is transferred to the battery and reused when accelerating. Also, batteries for hybrids aren't as costly because they don't get cycled as often. Battery expenses--both out-of-pocket and environmentally--are huge for totally electric cars. Read "Energy for Future Presidents" by Richard Muller (UC Berkley physicist).

Sally, Thank you for asking the question that needs to be realistically answered. If the problem does develop and becomes as serious as about 40% of the people believe, there will just not be enough lifeboats to save everyone.

Willy, While you do not post as often as some of us do, when you do it is usually relevant, and I for one agree with you that the only feasible choice is to Adapt. That will have to be coupled with a return to Darwinism or whatever ‘Survival of the Fittest is called.

The survivors will be forced into strange surroundings, as the Mormons were when they arrived in Utah. Irrigation was not the usual practice when they lived in the Midwest and East, but they adapted to using the melting snow to water the barren desert, and did very well. And that is just one example that has been repeated over and over during the history of our human race. Either people migrated into a different environment, or the environment around them changed.

As Sally said, Rick spelled out many theoretical possibilities, but all seem to be very difficult, if not impossible to put in place

None of us know how many of his theories would or would not work, but spreading Iron dust on the surface of the ocean would probably not be feasible. I had no conception of just how big the Pacific Ocean really is until I crossed it a few times in a small sailboat. And attempting to do anything physical in the atmosphere would be an even larger undertaking because, as Rick pointed out, the Atmosphere is much larger than the surface of Oceans.

But I am not worried, regardless of whether the next calamity is too much heat, too much cold, or too many rocks falling from the sky. There will be habitable pockets between the hot and cold areas, or between the wet and dry areas, where a few of the fittest will continue to adapt and survive.

But one thing about this entire difference of opinion that depresses me, is that instead of everyone believing in themselves being able to adapt and survive, so many of us now have lost that confidence and automatically turn to the Government to pass a law that will protect us, so we do not have to make the effort ourselves.

Rick, If I was the King of the World, I would gradually start weaning able bodied people from the idea that the Government’s duty is to protect us, not only from others but from ourselves. It would probably take longer to do that than it has taken to seduce them into dependency, while robbing them of their pride and self respect, but it would do much more good for them than to continue to make beggars and weaklings out of them to buy their votes.

As the able bodied people found out they actually woke up feeling better about themselves when they no longer had to use Food Stamps or take crap from a Social Worker to get Welfare, they would develop the courage to believe they could adapt as the CLIMATE CONTINUED TO CHANGE, just as I believe that I could..

Industry, Labor Unions, Corporations, Government, are all made up of groups of people, so collectively they have all of both the good and bad traits that individuals do. As any group gains power, that Power Corrupts the Group. So all groups need regulating.

In just my lifetime I have seen the Railroad treat my father and his co-workers brutally, even worse than slaves. That was before Unions had any power. Then, he got a ticket pass for the family from the Railroad and we migrated to CA. About 1937, I saw workers fighting with hired policemen on Soto Street, trying to organize into the CIO. Clubs were being used and I saw some men with blood on them. The Companies had the power and had been abusing it to the point the men physically fought for a Union.
I helped organize a Warehouse and was inducted into the Teamsters Union in November of 1941. In 1944 I joined the Operating Engineers Union and became active in it. By 1955 the AFL and the CIO had gained enough power that they became corrupted, and the abuse began flowing the other way. The Unions were organized enough to extort more money for their members then was deserved, which abused all non-Union workers by raising prices for everything without raising the non-union wages, plus all the graft the Union Officials raked off.

Then, as the Government grew and became more powerful, it became corrupted, and started buying votes and using taxpayer money to pay back the Unions or Private campaign contributors that helped re elect them.

And of course, the larger Corporations used their power to enhance their own growth.
So, the reason I took time to spell this out is that Power Corrupts, so every powerful group needs some Regulations.

But now. The EPA and the HHS and the IRS have gained so much power that they are now corrupted, and the regulators now need regulation.

So, to believe that big Government is the solution is a fallacy. It is just like the big Corporations, big Unions, and any other group. And the only solution is for the people to take an active role in fighting for a balance. But what we have been doing is to allow whatever group we happen to belong to or support, to become corrupt and abuse its power by taking advantage of weaker groups.

That is the real problem we should be trying to solve instead of worrying about things that may or may not happen in the distant and uncertain future.
Ernie

P.S
rrr That you didn;t wnat to interfere with industry at all until you damn good and sure that they absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt WERE CERTAINLY going to starve in droves, and by then it would be MUCH to late to reverse it, too bad so sad?


. Rick, i have never said anything to indicate that Industry should be allowed to run unfettered. That may be an ad homenen argument you are making.Every group needs REASONABLE RULES AND REGULATIONS but not to the point of being Counter Productive
E.



This message was edited Mar 20, 2014 7:15 AM

Great post, Ernie.

Rick,
I often see things like this that seem to contradict the links and articles you quote. Are people on both sides hyping or lying and actually getting away with lying, or how can the two sides be so far apart?

I have no idea who tthis fellow is, and i have never read National Review, but we are sure hearing different stories.
Ernie

"Victor Davis Hanson considers how technological advancements make it too easy to forget some things fall outside the range of technology for National Review. From Technology and Wisdom: “Computer models assured us that the Earth would now be getting really hot. But over the last 17 years, when carbon emissions reached historic levels, temperatures mysteriously have stayed the same or cooled. Nature remains fickle, complex, and unfathomable, and can defy even computer-enhanced theorizing…"

Great insights, Ernie.

Regarding hydrogen: it isn't a practical source for energy. If obtained from electrolysis of water, it consumes more energy than the resulting hydrogen can return. If obtained from methane, it releases CO2. No free lunch.

We've had a Department of Energy for 34 years. What have they accomplished?

In a recent poll, a quarter of those asked didn't know the earth revolves around the sun. Another poll showed 65% of people thought only GE foods had genes. A letter to the editor in this morning's local paper stated: "Those who claim that evolution is scientific and creationism is just myth know better deep down. They are trying to avoid the reality of death and what comes afterward...(after the fall)...God had to limit man's ability to do evil by instituting death and the laws of thermodynamics".

Gee, if it warn't fer that durned apple, we wouldn't have thermodynamics!!!

Rick, I was going to disagree with your pessimism about mankind. The above tells me I have no argument. :«(

Willy,

Perhaps we need to Genetically Engineer the Evolution process and change SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST to SURVIVAL OF THE SMARTEST.

As a Human Race, we are certainly going down hill now. A large part of the dumbing down of America has been because we no longer require even a basic level of physical or mental effort to be able to survive. If you can make it out of your cradle, the Welfare State will carry you all the way to your grave.

Ernie
.

Ernie--I don't know if I can go that far.

I will say I hate being pessimistic. Too many people have predicted doom and we've managed to carry on anyway. From the Plague to the Mongol hordes, to Stalin and Hitler and...we're still here. There's something deep down in all of us that lets us rise to challenges when we really need to do so.

Or not.

Willy,
Well, i could agree with all you said except a couple of words.

That "Thing" that you say that lets us rise to the challenges of life seems to me to only be in part of us, not ALL OF us. . I have been arguing with Rick from the beginning that SOME OF US will adapt and survive, but sadly, not ALL OF us will.

While there are enough of the Survivor type that i am optimistic about the Human Race surviving, many able bodied people cannot survive on their own now, let alone if a calamity should occur.

Ernie

Ernie said:
>> There will be habitable pockets between the hot and cold areas, or between the wet and dry areas, where a few of the fittest will continue to adapt and survive.

You do seem to be saying that with a straight face. Please let me know if you're pulling my leg.

What you said seems to be what I would describe as "after 70% to 80% of the world population dies, and civilization is mostly destroyed".

I'll say again that AVOIDING that apocalyptic scenario seems worthwhile and urgent.
Even more urgent than reducing governments everywhere to Tea-Party-small!

You also seem to be assuming that the dead ones died quietly without causing huge wars and plagues that killed a lot of the people in the survivable pockets. I wouldn't bet on that!

Even the surviving pockets would be whiplashed by major climates changes, perhaps ongoing change, and presumably the locations of "farmable" regions will change, north and south, as the climate tries to adjust and find some new equilibrium. That why "widespread crop failures and famine" are easy to predict even if you don't know which ways which regions will change when. Major change, and especially rapid change, will drop yields sharply. Interesting world politics will evolve as certain regions find themselves starving or downing from monsoons while industrial nations keep burning more and more coal.

My guess? Those nations with weapons will eventually use them, before they starve. I think history supports that theory. "NBC": nuclear, biological and chemical. Bon appetite.

The changes will make agriculture a matter of rediscovering every few years what will grow and survive changing pests and diseases in each region - an ongoing experiment and gamble (which is to say, frequent famines even in the regions that are farmable after a fashion).

Even assuming that (for instance) the USA adapts your philosophy and would rather see most of humans on earth die than subject themselves to another regulatory agency, we might agree that many other countries (for example, all the ones that would starve first) WILL try to survive, and WILL use war as a tool for survival, and certainly WILL use nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if the industrialized and temperate nations tell them that the Northern Rich nations have all signed a suicide pact rather than work together to fix the climate. The Tropical Poor nations will have (literally) nothing to lose, if they go nuclear before the deserts, monsoons or glaciers kill them all.

This scenario sounds more like an argument FOR international cooperation and regulation to save the planet. I guess our values are more different than I realized.

Or, hopefully, you're pulling my leg.

Ernie, do you have a link for that National Review article?
If I can only look at what you quoted, i can only make a superficial comment.

>> “Computer models assured us that the Earth would now be getting really hot. But over the last 17 years, when carbon emissions reached historic levels, temperatures mysteriously have stayed the same or cooled.

He either hasn't read anything technical on the subject for the last 10-12 years, is crudely lying (they have risen), and/ or a total idiot. Probably lying, excuse me, "distorting the science". Typical Denier distortion.

NASA, NOAA, the long list of real scientific organizations ALL disagree with that.
The quoted part of the NR article sounds like about as much integrity as Mr. Yoga-Flying or the "GMO causes Leukemia" anti-GMO publicists.

>> Nature remains fickle, complex, and unfathomable, and can defy even computer-enhanced theorizing…"

Yes, sure, obviously. But once you've taken your best scientific estimate, (not a politically-motivated BS position), and until you've refined the models further, you DON'T say "we can't know everything with certainty, so let's assume that the only true facts are those that agree with my political agenda".

You hedge your bets, and try to avert disaster. At least admit that you DO know what you know, and that this year's "middle-of-the-road-scientific-bst-guess" is "fairly bad soon, really bad later, and eventually mass famines".

Take two "5% extreme" guesses - one in either direction.
Say you get these two equally likely scenarios:
- maybe it will take 100 years to get really bad, and global famine might be as far as 200 years away, oh boy!
- maybe global famines are only 30-50 years away - we don't know.

BOTH SCENARIOS CALL FOR ACTION TO AVERT SUICIDE.

"National Review", forsooth. ... Let's consider the source.

Ernie, you might call them a middle-of-the-road conservative think tank (the NR Institute).
I call them a raving, foaming-at-the-mouth lying mouthpiece for big-money sociopaths.
Maybe "socipaths" is a little harsh, but they fit the definition.

Founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.
They say of themselves: "has defined the modern conservative movement"
http://nrinstitute.org/

They're about like the Huffington Post for partisanship, but I think they go MUCH farter in the direction of knowing deceit than the Huffing Po.
You might think the opposite, that fits with our very different orientations.

Either way, I'll keep getting my science from NASA and NOAA, not self-professed political partisans, thank you very much.

P.S. I hope you find time to look at some H. Beam Piper. A lot of his early stuff is short stories, and you HAVE to read Space Vikings some day. If it helps: I came to like him back when I was at my most conservative stage.

>> Perhaps we need to Genetically Engineer the Evolution process and change SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST to SURVIVAL OF THE SMARTEST.

Having spent a lot of time around nerds, that is NOT a survival trait. Maybe people with "people smarts" instead of "techy smarts" have some survival skills, and would help a primitive tribe to survive.

Technical smarts have almost no value unless you have a civilization around, with industry, technology, computers, books, libraries, schools and cyclotrons. Or at least enough surplus food that not everyone in the tribe HAS to spend all their time gathering it and fighting off other tribes. That was one theory of civilization. It took the invention if agriculture to produce enough excess food that a few people could specialize in crafts, government, teaching and religion.

Sort of like being J.P. Morgan , Fred C. Koch, or John D. Rockefeller. Having "industrial organization smarts" doesn't necessarily translate into helping a hunter-gatherer tribe re-discover agriculture or flint-knapping.

Global catastrophe might select for "the fittest" defined as those who can live on cellulose, in which case we would be replaced by termites.

>> the Human Race surviving, many able bodied people cannot survive on their own now, let alone if a calamity should occur.

Yeah, I kind of wanted technical civilization to survive, too, but I guess I'm in a wussy minority.

Neanderthals left fossil evidence of keeping tribe members alive into old age, arthritis, and broken limbs, even though they were not the FITTEST and didn't contribute to the tribes cash-flow. It sounds like the argument is being made for "climate change won’t be so bad if it reverses that wussy trend!"

That may be another liberal-conservative difference. "Social Darwinism" was a lot like the old Star Trek episode "Friday's Child".

"POWDERS, and LIQUIDS for the sick? Bah! We Klingons believe as you do, the weak should DIE!!"

I'm kinda on the other side, with the gentle and civilized Neanderthals. I think of one function of civilization as helping the weak and sick. Reducing human suffering.

Certainly rendering most of the globe un-farmable will select the survivors for certain traits. Resistance to pain, starvation and disease. Willingness and ability to kill neighbors for their food. Being nasty, brutish and short.

It might be worth factoring into the calculation that we mined out all the easily reached, rich ores decades or centuries ago. If civilization fell, even "briefly", we might not have enough technology left to re-create a technical civilization, because the only remaining metal and oil and coal resources requires advanced tech to get at.

Is there a word for "unfarmable regions" like "un-arable"? Uninhabitable? Not self-sufficient in foods?

Oh, well.

P.S. I don't agree at all that every geo-engineering scheme has been thought of, or that all the proposed ones are totally impractical.

Suppose ocean fertilization could reduce the rate of getting worse by 2%.

Find a way to loft low-orbital metal balloons inflated with a tiny amount of gas, like Telstar, cut insolation by 1% right on the equator.

EXPERIMENT with strato-aerosols once it;'s clear that the alternative is mass starvation for some group we have any human sympathy for.

Fiddle with changing weather over deserts in ways that we might hope might establish some sod and/or trees over decades.

If we can postpone the worst consequences of our current suicidal stupidity by some decades or a century, that might give us time to find other technical mitigation.

Or (dreaming wildly now) the electorate might notice what's happening and think about voting for alternatives to riding the ship down while re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Call me a wild optimist.

Ernie said:
ERNIE SAID
>> There will be habitable pockets between the hot and cold areas, or between the wet and dry areas, where a few of the fittest will continue to adapt and survive.

You do seem to be saying that with a straight face. Please let me know if you're pulling my leg.

Rick,
I was merely discussing how the Human Race would cope and adapt to the Changes that you are convinced are going to happen. Remember the thread changed to what REALISTICALLY could be done if it DID HAPPEN.

And I am not pulling your leg. While it may not be the Global Warming change that happens, based on the history of our planet, it is quite possible there will be a catastrophe that wipes out large portions of the population. But everyone of us are going to die sometime, which of course is always regretful but I do not see that a few years one way or the other is such a horrible thing.

As i said to Sally G earlier. IF RICK'S DIRE PREDICTIONS DO HAPPEN, THERE ARE NOT GOING TO BE ENOUGH LIFEBOATS TO SAVE EVERYONE.

Your assume far too much, most of it wrong, about my philosophy or what i am thinking. I am just trying to add some common sense and reality to the things you imagine and fear are going to happen.

On the National Review article. I pasted all that was said. But as you seem to have closed your mind and ears to all of the moderate and conservative media, you apparently are not well informed on what the other viewpoints are. I watch Fox to find out what mistakes the Liberals are making as the Liberal media seldom mention that, and I watch the Liberal media to see what the Conservatives are doing wrong as Fox seldom reports on those things. By only listening to commentators that you know agree with you, you are depriving your self of half of the information.

And the information about very little Warming having taken place in the last 15 or 17 years is pretty well reported. It is also well documented by polls that about 60% of the population disagree with your beliefs about Global Warming, and while you sincerely believe it is the most Critical problem we face now, a large poll recently ask what the most important problem we face is now. Jobs and the Economy was near the top, and Global Warming was near the bottom.

Ernie

>> Perhaps we need to Genetically Engineer the Evolution process and change SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST to SURVIVAL OF THE SMARTEST.

Having spent a lot of time around nerds, that is NOT a survival trait. Maybe people with "people smarts" instead of "techy smarts" have some survival skills, and would help a primitive tribe to survive

Rick,
I certainly did not mean or believe that Education is an accurate gauge of Smartness or Intelligence. Education does provide detailed KNOWLEDGE about the subject being studied.

I have employed one Physicist, several Engineers, a few CPAs, Accountants and Lawyers,, and had 3 MDs as close friends. All, of course were highly educated in their professions.

I have also employed many skilled tradesmen, and some laborers, so i have had a good opportunity to study the results of Education, Experience, and natural Smartness or Intelligence. Education teachs a lot about one thing, leaving less room to learn about other things, but Intelligence or smartness seems to be lacking or be in abundance in a person, unrelated to the number of years they have gone to school. I do not mean this in a pejorative way, as i have respect for all good men.

And what i meant when i said " to perpetuate the human race, we should focus on Survival of the Smartest". And the man that can best lead the others to adapt to new conditions will, in that situatiion be the smartest..

Ernie