[NeonSamurai]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

Neon - I think we agree on some things here.

So let me ask you. Should we, as the animals at the apex, be taking steps to insure our own survival against the cycles of nature? If so, wouldn't it stand to reason that nature will react drastically should we do so? To borrow from "The Lion King" - it is the circle of life that your saying we should be altering.

Well we have done exactly that for much of human history. We have (I think foolishly) tried to dominate, subdue, and control nature. We use technology to overcome population limits, and medicine to limit the effectiveness of natural population controls (disease, etc). Honestly I don't think we will be stopping that any time soon. We have already stomped all over the circle of life.

I think we need to learn how to control ourselves, for our own sake if for no other reason.

In one sense, yes - our existence alters the environment. However, isn't that alteration "natural" given the makeup of our species? Thus, our actions and its impact are in effect, a "natural" occurance. They are a product of humanity's "evolution" from its primitive roots. When people talk about modifying society's behavior to keep from "altering the natural course" of things, are they not altering the natural course of things by that very modification?

Is it? We are not purely creatures of instinct, but are capable of escaping those bonds and able to consider our actions. If not we never would have gone far beyond our hunter/gatherer origins, which is what we are most naturally suited for. If we hadn't use our intellect beyond basic instinctive needs, the world probably wouldn't be in the mess it is in now. Most of our problems are due to our natural instincts to survive, thrive and reproduce, coupled with our intelligence, and developed technology. Though in spite of all our foolishness and hubris we are still just as bound to nature (the ecosystem) as we ever were.

Climate change proponents state that we must change our society to maintain an ecosystem. Just a postulation - but wouldn't that change alter not just the forecasted weather - but the entire fabric of nature in all its facets by changing the track of natural evolution? Isn't maintaining an ecosystem, when the natural progression is to have that ecosystem change, a worse meddling in the affairs of what we all fail to understand in its entirety?

The question is, if our species is responsible for the changes to the ecosystem, and if so how much are we responsible for. I think in most cases the answer is that we are responsible for a lot of it. Obviously we cannot control the paths nature itself takes, the warming and cooling cycles which have gone on since the planet was formed we can't do much about. But we can try to control how much we negatively affect those cycles, and our negative impact on the global ecosystem. We are already meddling with nature by releasing the massive quantities of greenhouse gasses we do, by hacking down the forests (which consume C02), by causing the mass extinction of species, by overfishing the oceans and over cultivating the land, by creating massive amounts of pollution and dumping it into the environment, by overpopulating and putting local ecosystems under severe strain to maintain our numbers and continue our growth, etc.

Sure we are not responsible for everything, but I do think we are responsible for a lot of what is going on. The basic solutions are less people, less man made carbon and other emissions, more trees and other CO2 consumers, lower pollution, putting a halt to our expansion into the natural world, etc. Problem is I don't see this happening until it is way too late, which means nature will either take our species out (after a major global extinction, probably caused by our last gasps to survive, destroying everything around us), or cut our numbers down drastically (which has already happened more then once).

Granted, these questions border more on the philisophical, but they are thoughts that are rattling around my head at the moment.

I don't mind discussing philosophical things, and thinking is always a good thing.

Originally Posted by August

Yep. I would go further to say that we won't know for that long what are the true average numbers of storms per year.

The thing is Neo in the last 40 years we're really come a long way when it comes to identifying and monitoring the weather out at sea. Before the 60's the only way somebody knew there was a storm was if they happened to fly or sail through it. So i'd be surprised if there wasn't a big increase in the count since we've put those electronic eyes up in the sky.

Yep which is why such studies tend to look at data starting in around the 1970s onward (we can though calculate how many damaging storms made land before that, but that data is incomplete as many storms do not make landfall). Of course the obvious problem is we have a very small window of data to work with. So we can't say for certain if the data we do have is following a pattern (natural or otherwise) or not as that pattern may be beyond the scope of our more recent solid data.

I will say though that it is pretty certain that warmth increases the power of storms, and that this has been demonstrated under laboratory "storm in a bottle" conditions.

Nobody is ignoring it but i'm wary of throwing lots of money at things that won't actually address the problem.

That I can understand. I do think we better damn well start addressing the problems though, or pay the consequences later on. I do feel though that many people are trying their best to stuff their fingers in their ears and pretend its not happening, that is human nature too.