On Oct 27, 12:38 am, Tom Adams <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Oct 25, 7:39 pm, Alastair <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I dropped in yesterday for the first time in quite a while and saw my
> > name mentioned so I can't resist responding :-) Moreover, how the
> > sceptics would react when the shit hits the fan was something I had
> > been curious about. The answer I came to was that it would be no
> > different from now!
>
> > All men, and probably all women, will not admit that they are wrong.
> > The earliest citation I have found for that fact is in Dale Carnegie's
> > "How to Win Friends and Influence People." The driving force behind
> > all people is prestige. As Milton wrote "Fame is the spur that the
> > clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind)".
> > Therefor they cannot admit that they are wrong because they will "lose
> > face", and so lose prestige. Carnegie says that even if you win an
> > argument, your opponent will still believe that he is right, and would
> > have won if only he was better at arguing or had thought of the killer
> > argument which is ther if only he could think of it.
>
> > So the situation is that we have already passed the tipping point, but
> > people in general are still saying the same things. Here is Clive
> > James, an Australian by birth, now a British Broadcaster, praising
> > scepticismhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8322513.stm
> > yet the scientists are saying that "three of these boundaries [leading
> > to abrupt global environmental change](climate change, biological
> > diversity and nitrogen input to the biosphere) may already have been
> > transgressed."http://www.stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries
>
> > Ten years ago I was told by a friend of Wally Broecker that they
> > thought we had twenty years to put thing right. Two years later he
> > told me that some scientists believed that Greenland had already
> > passed the point of no return. In other words the effects of climate
> > change are happening much faster than it was believed before. Within
> > the last ten to fifteen years the live expectancy of the Greenland ice
> > sheet has change from thousands to hundreds of years, and of the
> > Arctic sea ice from 100 years to only 10.
>
> > But nobody is speaking out, except for Gordon Brown, who having seen
> > Al Gore's Nobel Prize, is obviously hoping he will be rewarded in that
> > way when he too is rejected by the voters in the forthcoming general
> > election.
>
> > There is a right wing mentality that we all share to some extent,
> > which says that disaster won't happen to me, and any one who warns
> > about it is just chicken. They are not the sort of people who change
> > their minds, so if they do suffer disaster it will not be their fault,
> > just a freak of nature or due to the scientists speaking with forked
> > tongue. See Clive James.
>
> > > I doubt that I will live to see the disaster, but this interesting
> > > turn in the political dialog should be just around the corner. Right?
>
> > Wrong, the disaster is only a few years away. You will see it. Abrupt
> > changes happen with little warning by definition. Think of the Boxing
> > Day tsunami. So when the Arctic sea ice vanishes that will be the
> > global air conditioning system broke, and we can't fix that! But then
> > nobody could have predicted that, or at least that is the cry that
> > will go up.
>
> > Cheers, Alastair.
>
> I was beginning to think I had mentioned your name in vain :-)
>
> There is apparently not a single popular book or article on exceeding
> the nitrogen input boundary. We the people did not even notice. We
> didn't even have a chance to be apathetic or go into denial about
> reaching a global change tipping point. Kinda breathtaking. Could that
> be?
There are pretty few popular books about abrupt climate change, but it
did happen in the past. See "the Two Mile Time Machine" by Richard
Alley. The fossil fuel and associated industries have put up such a
smoke screen with discaussion on whether climate change is happening,
abrupt change hardly gets a mention.
But the financial sector relied on computer models, and that has
crashed. The climate is also modeled using computures, and it too is
a dynamical system, so it is quite possible that the climate will
also crash unexpectedly.
The point is that no-one will believe you if you say the end of the
world is coming. They equate you with a man carrying a sandwich board
with the slogan "Prepare to Meet Your Doom." Therefore the scientists
know what is happening, daren't speak out or they will be ridiculed.
That is exactly what James Lovelock found when he visited the Hadley
Centre, which he describes in "Gaia's Revenge".
But abrupt climate change is not even mentionsed in the Stockholm
paper http://www.stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries So
you see what a dire situation we are in
The main problem is over population. With a population of 650
million rather than 6.5 billion we might be able to cope. There
would be no global warming because there would be less industry.
The forests would not need clearing, water would not be a
problem, etc.
But we are still expecting the population to continue rising
during the 21st Centruy. That will make cutting back on CO2
emissions impossible. But if we don't cut back on the
population, Mother Nature will do it for us with wars,
epidemics, droughts, floods, and famines.
Cheers, Alastair.
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