In Germany, ecology has become a surrogate religion that replaces the faith in the old deity that is not believed in anymore. But people need to believe in something, apparently, no matter in what, and ecology, genderism and social equality are three such faiths that drive people now. Before anything else it drives them nuts. From CO2 footprint statistics to veganism, from house insulation (you cannot imagine what madness that has broken lose over here) to hysterically proclaiming higher and higher criterion markers by which the temperature rise should be artifically limited this century: people are almost levitating with a halo over their heads when talking about these things and tell the world "that we must do better". Fiscal and global, political and economic realities get ignored more or less. Reason in assessing these, is Satan's work. The attitude, in which ecology gets debated and reflected, is almost Calvinistic. Is self-castigation.

I take it as granted that the climate by general trend is becoming warmer. The signs are such in quantity and quality that it is impossible to claim otherwise without making a fool of oneself. Namely biological facts are my main argument, not even geological or atmosphere-related ones.

However, survival of the fittest as thrown into the discussion by Darwin doe snot necessarily mean survival of the longest teeth and the strongest claw. It means survival of those who adapt. And adapting to a changing climate, and hoping to artificially change it, are two totally different things.

I am a strong defender of the scientific methodology, as is known by now. I believe it is the best intellectual tool mankind has, it is second to none. That has led me to once having followed climate activists' arguments to good degree. However, in best scientific tradition I also took note of findings and implications that became known later, that contradict the earlier claims and theories, pout them in question to more or less degrees. The IPCC and other voices, in best religious tradition, just ignore these and stick to their dogmas and demonize everybody violating it, trying to silence opposing voices. And some voices are hilarious indeed, no doubt. But there are also some, and increaisng in numbers they are, that have mentioned reasonable doubts and solid findings indicating that the activists' claims probably cannot be maintained the way they are being announced today.

Lets not forget one thing: in global politics - you can see this in every climate sum mit - climate policies are a weapon to try to change financial flowing patterns and to channel funds from the North to the south. It is a big, big money- winning machinery for the emerging economies, blackmailing of climate idealists takes place, appeals to their bad conscience should make them will to pay endlessly, on global scale we are talking about hundreds of billions - per year. And I do not even mention the massive lobbyism of industry groups that can make profit from selling insulations for houses, new ovens, and so on. Not to mention the economic stimulus promise that makes political institutions to jump onto the fright train as well.

Populations accept this to happen. Because and I said: it all is a new religion, and doing something good for the climate has become the individual's new fetish, the new golden calf to dance around.

It's hysteria all around.

In the end, all that freak show does not matter. The comate still will chnage the way it will. And the question of our survival, and the quality of it, still dpeends on in what way we are adapting, or not. Limiting temperature rises is something I believe is beyond our reach now. We are talking about processes of great longevity, strong self-dynamics and limited predictability, due to our still limited understanding of these processes' complexity. I do not waste any thinking over it, and I ignore all numbers on marketing stickers that try to sell their product by revealing some conscience-soothing ecology stuff. It would make me feel like a fool if I would waste my mind on that. We have a huge waste of resources, there is planned obsolence in product design, there is a mind-numbing cult about always buying the newest, the latest, the coolest even if your old stuff still works - no doubt on that. But we will not tackle it by this collective obligatory exercise in self deception that we call "ecological conscience", but only by understanding the basic principles of how markets function, what drives mko9nopolists, and how smaller markets can tackle the craving for ever-more monopoilism by every growing economic monster corporations that prevent right the capitalistic fundament and the free market.

The key to ecologically making a difference, is understanding economics. And that is where things lack tremendously in public discussion, both regarding diagnosing what is going wrong and why, and desi8gning the therapy.

Finally, my closing argument, like often before, is this: it probably will not make a difference anyway because WE ARE FAR TOO MANY. By a factor of 5-6, I would estimate.

I know this isn't the best source but the contents come from far more reliable sources.

Maps of continents before and after sea levels rose by 260 feet:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...ose-260ft.html

My beloved Flensburg would be gone. Hopefully not within the next couple of years - Let's say the next 30 years.

These will be the first to go down here in this area. I used to live on one of those for one year.

I think it's the lag time which is deceiving many.
The current effects we are witnessing have been caused by our actions of...well any time within the last forty or fifty years really.
There's about 200 years of rampant pollution which has only really started to be addressed in the last twenty years, and yet people are acting all surprised that the climate is still changing.
Another confusion is the term 'global warming', people seem to think that because of the name it's purely going to result in places getting hotter, but that is not necessarily the case, it will result in the average temperature globally getting hotter, but there may still be harsh winters and mini ice ages.

However people saying that climate change doesn't exist...they are very much wishful thinking. It's happening, and it's not going to go away, even with our actions at the moment. What our actions at the moment are going to do though is possibly help alleviate matters in another fifty or sixty years, if (and this is a big if) we haven't already pushed things too far, as the current figures seem to possibly indicate.
It's not unlikely that the current events are part-natural, the planet does go through warm and cold phases after all, but it's also quite likely and probable that we have exacerbated the process with our industrial byproducts.

In short, I fully expect my town to be underwater within the next century. It has been fighting erosion anyway, and if sea levels do rise as predicted then we're screwed, no two ways about it.
But hey, if America thinks that business is more important that the well-being of both its coastal regions and other nations then by all means open up all the CO2 vats and flood away. We'll see how well that goes.

http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-conte...g-537x373.jpeg

Failing that, we could...I dunno, all work together to reduce pollution globally, using pressure on businesses no matter what nation they flee to, and perhaps, I dunno, help other nations reduce their footprint?
All this talk about China, but the funny thing is, they are the worlds biggest producer of green energy, unfortunately for a nation the size of China though, it's not enough and so it's suplemented by plenty of coal and oil power stations, but they're working to replace those with nuclear power stations...which is little comfort if they melt down, buuuut as we've discussed before, the fatalities and pollution from coal and oil production versus that of nuclear production is somewhat jinked in favour of nuclear when all is said and done.
We're in the transition phase right now, the world, moving from fossil and nuclear towards green energy. Unfortunately our lack of cohesion and co-ordination is hurting us (just as its hurting us in our space exploration efforts) but that's what you get from a planet with 196 different countries all pulling in different directions.

Because, you know...if we did have our heads out of our arses, we could have just pooled together our resources and done something like this:

http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp...quired1000.jpg

Boom, problem solved. Heck, you could build two in each nation just for back-ups...or if you really wanted to avoid putting it in a human populated area, just do this:

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-conte.../Fullneed2.jpg

There's 9,400,000km2 of desert to use in the Sahara, 2.5m people live there, approximately one person per square mile. It's not exactly going to have a massive impact on the area with the lowest population density in the world...and from that, we can decomission all nuclear power stations, all coal and gas power can be shut down. Oil can be rerouted to plastics and aviation fuel, until we can figure out a way to fix that, oil can also be rerouted for cars until we work out how to make quicker charging batteries for electric cars (which would probably be done by the time this solar farm would be finished).

There are plenty of options for humanity, it's just we're so retarded and fragmented by our own inbuilt bias that we refuse to take them, and as such, we continue to collectively shoot ourselves in the foot.

Good job, humanity, good job. :yeah:

Hello,
opinions vary, but as a geologist i can state that the CO level has been rising steadily, with the begin of the industrial revolution. Whether it would have also happened without it ? -> need more data.

But: The amount of CO2 has never been as high as it is now, in the history of our world, since the earth itself was created from planetesimals some 4+ billion years ago. And we can prove that by continental deep drilling cores. Data are also in the polar ice (being probed by drilling cores) and in other drill cores, as well as in living plants.

Usually free CO is being used by plants, it is also bound by free Calcium like in CaCO3, and in Methan hydrates. While the living plants can flourish with a CO overdose, the amount of free elements to bind CO is limited. You could name this a buffer, which will be saturated one day.

The problem is no one knows exactly when this day will be, but when it happens we will quickly run out of solutions. This is, because if the free CO cannot be bound anymore, it will enrich the atmosphere, and this definitely leads to global warming.

There also billions of tons of CO trapped worldwide in methan hydrates, e.g. in the gulf of Mexico, but also (in unbelievable masses) in the frozen ground of Siberia. They are only stored there, because the low temperature allows it. When tempereture rises, those buffers will set free the trapped CO gases, which then will heavily fuel global warming.

After a certain point, this is a process that will run its course automatically after the point of no return. Of course, geologically speaking there will be a stop, but it will take around 20 millions years at least, to even come to a halt.

I think we would do well, to prevent reaching this first point.

I used to be a skeptic, but this country currently goes trough it's third flooding this year, right after a third strong wind disaster this year. Usually we have one strong wind per year and country wide flooding every 10 years.

Something's not right.

Not to mention a green Christmas and an Easter blizzard every year now.


my opinion on solutions:
hang politicians and those that lobby them, then we'll redraw plans

The other elephant tip-toeing into the room

He said the current rate of acidification is believed to be unprecedented within the last 65 million years – and may threaten fisheries in future. Australia's Great Barrier Reef is slowly dying off already.

more

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29746880

I think this sums it up nicely :yep:
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta...-Pie-Chart.png

The globe has in the past and will in the future go through it's warming and cooling phases and I believe life in general can adapt to that. Frankly, I think debating the causes of global warming is a complete and utter waste of time. Because I don't think global warming will be our demise rather the rampant unabated pollution that is killing off our food chain, pets, plants, families, trees and aquatic life.

climate change is a Ponzi scheme for liberals to get rich and they do that very well to the tune of millions and even billions of dollars.

climate change is a completely natural and normal condition the earth has been going through for millions of years and man has only been around for a few thousand and in that time man has had 0.00000000% impact on altering the earths natural patterns of warming and cooling cycles but because we haven't been closely tracking this data the global warming cabal claims "never before seen changes" but it truth they were more dramatic changes in the past all the time, we just weren't around to record the data. based on every prediction the global warming crowd has harped about we should have drowned under 20 ft of water 50 years ago but last time I checked my feet weren't wet lol. everything they have ever claimed about global warming has been shown to be a lie and never came to pass but the old adage is true, if you rep[eat something long enough and loud enough then people will believe it even though the polar ice caps are larger and thicker then they have ever been in a hundred years so based on their own flawed models sea levels should be alarmingly low right now.

if man went back to the stone age tomorrow the earth would not change at all because mans activities have no effect on the climate and to think that we do is rather comical and sad but then people keep voting for politicians they don't like so along with the 911 truthers we will always have the global warming cult followers who want to fell they can do something about climate change.

bottom line is ALL scientists agree there is climate change but only a very select few who have something to gain by it claim that mans activities have some effect on it. the other majority of true scientist say nothing we do will or has ever had any impact on it.

Well, the mayor has spoken his piece.

https://secure.static.tumblr.com/b5e...ic_vaughn2.jpg

One of many gravy trains making a few people very very rich.

:haha::haha::haha:

There's always one in every disaster movie.

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/24/244b...f6dd550ccd.jpg

You are aware that peer review isn't designed to detect fraud, right?