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There are 24 comments on The Climate Crisis: Tracking Change, Predicting Trouble

  1. They won’t say a climate change crisis is as real and eventual as a comet hit crisis is.
    Help the planet could be on fire maybe?
    But it WAS fun watching you doomers try so hard and be so determined to believe in your Reefer Madness of climate blame. Your grand kids will have to explain the CO2 death threats you used them like fear mongering neocons.
    27 years of maybe means it won’t be or did you want this misery to have been true?
    *Occupywallstreet does not even mention CO2 in its list of demands because of the bank-funded carbon trading stock markets ruled by corporations and trustworthy politicians.

    1. Im a doom and gloomer. However, I focus on the more important, more immediate threat to this country; the 16+ trillion dollars of debt we have, the trillions in unfunded liabilities, and the trillion dollar college debt bubble formed.

      1. and you think that “producing” extra money and pumping it into the economic system will somehow help to ease the long-term effects of climate change?

  2. “Climate Change” (formerly “Global Warming” is the biggest scam ever foisted on mankind! Fact: The earth in an INTERGLACIAL PERIOD, in a long series of glaciations. Another ice age is due! And THAT is the greatest environmental calamity imaginable, grinding the planet down to bedrock! That is because we are on the COLD FRINGE of the planetary “habitable zone”. Every time it gets colder, things get WORSE! Every time things get warmer, things get BETTER! Its Global COOLING that is the problem, Al Gore, not Global Warming! But you can’t make billions of corrupt $dollars mandating people to buy “carbon credits”. WAKE UP America, this one is really obvious! Stop being scammed by people who want to raise your taxes and shut down the economy over a complete and total fiction!

    1. As a student studying the environment and earth science, I can tell you that this is not fiction. If you look at climate records over the past several thousand years, you can see that the Earth goes through natural tectonic and orbital cycles that impact Earth’s climate. However, Earth’s greenhouse gas concentration has shot up exponentially SINCE 1850 (the beginning of the industrial revolution).

      People forget about the fact that there is a time lag between actually putting greenhouse gases into the environment, and then its effects on the environment. So it may look “nice” now, but as temperatures rise, there will be serious droughts, agricultural reproduction, major loses in biodiversity, etc.

      Scientists agree over the actual science–climate change IS occurring. The people that don’t “agree” with this are the POLITICIANS creating the actual policy. The majority of these politicians are probably not scientists.

          1. Geologic evidence for record keeping? Geologic evidence cannot account for annual temperature changes by degrees. To read our limited data back into millennia is science by anachronism.

            I am not discounting geologic evidence on the macro. But to pretend we have been measuring what we have not been measuring and lumping two different things together is sloppy or dishonest. I will assume sloppy in good faith.

        1. There are a lot of geologic records you can look at to study climate over the past several thousand (and even million) years. Ice cores go back around 800,000 years; tree rings go back further; sediment cores even more so. But ice cores are really interesting in that they capture air bubbles, which contain CO2. You can actually go back and measure the CO2 concentration in these ice cores, which gives us the climate record that supports climate change studies.

    2. The paranoia capitalists have over the second most enthusiastically pro capitalist party never ceases to amaze me. The occurrence of climate change is only controversial to people who are worried more about the monetary costs to business of preventing massive pollution, not among scientists. Even if we make businessmen pay for the damage they cause the environment, they shouldn’t complain, as we appropriate land for them, have gone to war to protect their claims to property in other lands, and ensure workers and their children starve rather than cut into their profits.

      Capitalists should be on bended knee, thanking us for repeatedly getting them out of their own messes, but, like petulant children, instead they whine whenever asked to show the slightest responsibility.

    3. could you please point to the specific errors in the IPCC report and the vast climate literature and identify , again specifically , A. where the error is and B. how the research that you have done demonstrates these errors? Once you have done so I suggest you submit your work to Science or Nature as you would be the first person to empirically demonstrate that global warming is a “hoax” .

      Secondly how does one claim global cooling while all the empirical evidence shows your assertion to be incorrect. I think it is you who needs to WAKE UP and accept that you make an argument with no empirical basis. While at the same time questioning the integrity of scientists like Myneni who through their publications make their methods and data available for scrutiny.

      Better yet meet with the faculty quoted in this article and show them where their methods or data are flawed. IF you are so convinced their is a hoax going on put your money where your mouth is and do some of your own work to demonstrate it. Put up, or shut up.

  3. You’re right Steve, we SHOULD be in a state of cooling that would lead to an another ice age. But that is a gradual transition, which would give us plenty of time, on the order of 1000s of years, to adapt. Currently however, we have interrupted this natural cooling, and caused one of the steepest increases in global temperature on record. We are on track to see serious and catastrophic conditions in our lifetime. We need to stop fooling around and making a chemistry project out of our atmosphere, and start making the health of our environment a top priority.

    Here are some articles to help you take off your tin foil hat.
    http://www.technologyreview.com/article/416786/global-warming-vs-the-next-ice-age/
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090903-arctic-warming-ice-age.html

  4. The next time you attend a climate change event, ask yourself why all the marxists and communists are in attendance.

    Weird, huh?

    Why is it that Putin’s Russia is pushing so hard (as did Chavez before his death) for Climate Change solutions? Does Putin care one iota about the environment? Um, no. But he does see the environmental movement as a way to further his agenda . i.e. Carbon Taxes, Energy Regulation, Stronger Centralized Government.

    Here’s a quiz. Does the political left thrive on:

    A.) Higher taxes and more government
    B.) Lower taxes and limited government.

    The correct answer, of course, would be A.

    And what do the comprehensive climate change solutions generally entail? Naturally, higher taxes and more government control.

    Odd how that works, huh?

    Do the math. Follow the money. The most influential climate change leaders are making millions (or billions in Al Gore’s case), while demanding that you pay more in taxes and cede more freedom and liberty to the government – all in the name of junk science.

    1. Please elaborate on whether paying lower taxes is worth having an unlivable climate, how the top scientists from around the world are performing “junk science”, and how money is a higher priority than the health of your environment and yourself.

    2. Science declared junk by capitalists… seems legit. When has business ever harmed the environment or worked counter to the interests of people in general? Surely, what we need is stronger business.

  5. Sustainable economic growth and actions to curb infusions of greenhouse gases in to the atmosphere are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Collectively, we have to tap our creativity to solve this problem. The science, irrespective of what few deniers say, is pretty much clear. It is time to act judiciously and expeditiously by the policy makers of the world. They will not do it until the people ask for it. Therefore, I initiated a petition – please go to https://www.yourclimatechange.org/ – read/sign the petition and get your family, relatives, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and other contacts to do the same. Change comes bottom-up, not top-down.

  6. If we’re running an “uncontrolled experiment,” then Myneni doesn’t actually know that thirty years of “warming” aren’t random.

    1. Really grasping at strings, taking textual bits far out of context there Andrew. Myneni, and Over 97% of climate scientists agree that the “warming” is happening and that it is human-induced, and they have proven it. Read more on that here: http://clmtr.lt/cb/qom0WZ

  7. Ok guys, here is how academia works. I know it is complicated, I know that in here you have all those geeks you had hated in your class. But admit it, those geeks, howsoever awkward they might have been, they could have run an intellectual marathon by the time you were taking out your scrapbook. So please first understand why people with IQs much higher than you care to count are scared. And please understand the business they are in.

    1) Peer-review is a process where geeks evaluate geeks. And, remember, geeks never used to take sides. They were kinda adamant about those trivial minutiae and would somehow keep working on them till they were convinced. Peer review, although not all by geeks, is kind of similar. We scientists are an argumentative lot. We analyze everything by what we think to be right. Now answer me this. If most of the smartest people on this planet agree on something in peer-reviewed journals, then what are the chances that you could prove them wrong? Well, not on an anonymous message board, but more like in an international conference, where you have to actually talk for half an hour minutes in front of an audience with an average iq of 140?

    2) OK. Second. For a moment consider this. Take the remote control and switch of the television. How long did it take for your action to reap benefits, i.e., how long did it take to switch of the TV? Instantaneous, right? Have you witnessed an ugly divorce that started of with small misunderstandings and ended with a divorce 5-10 years down the line. OK how long did it take for the divorce to materialize? Would you have guessed from the first small misunderstanding that your lovely wife and you would be divorced 10 years down the line. That was an example of something that takes a long time to develop. What is the similarity between these two events? Nothing. Because they are fundamentally different systems and they react on different timescales. Our earth is another system, which reacts over hundreds, thousands and million year time scales. The technical term for this is ‘deep time’. The longer the time it takes for a system to react the more non-intuitive the system becomes. And that is why you don’t realize that your actions could have severe consequences for the future. Climate change is not like the TV. A cow belches and you expect summer to arrive a day earlier. It is slightly more complicated.

    3) Third. And final. Don’t be too harsh on yourself. Earth science is very strange. Even the brightest tend to ignore the evidence – the physicists however have a certain knack of not quite getting it. Remember that guy called Einstein. Ok, now look up plate tectonics. Einstein opposed plate tectonics till the very end. So don’t worry, imo, it is too late anyway. As James Lovelock would take a sip from a glass of wine and say ‘Lets not worry too much about this thing, only one in seven will live to know how wrong they were few decades back’

    1. Shut up, he explained. Very persuasive indeed. Epistemic closure like this sounds more like religion than science.

      Apparently the science is far from settled, even among those with 140+ IQs: Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/)

      Rather than simply shouting down or ignoring (see Ranga’s comment below) those who are not yet persuaded, perhaps you should try refining the theories and models, gathering more data, presenting it more clearly, and proving why countervailing theories are incorrect. That is how science works.

      A question for the global warming / climate change believers: What evidence could be presented that would convince you that you are wrong? If your answer is “nothing,” perhaps you are no longer approaching this as science.

      Many people are so heavily invested in global warming / climate change that they cannot back down without suffering a substantial hit to their professional reputation – not to mention their research funding stream. It is difficult to trust that they are objective in their research, conclusions, or recommendations.

      Based on the intemperate tone of those pushing for immediate, drastic action, I am inclined to think that what’s going on here isn’t science, it’s a con game. The shift of terminology from “global warming” to “climate change” reinforces the perception that this is a scam – of course the climate is changing, it has been doing so since the beginning of time. The East Anglia e-mail scandal and the fact that temperatures stopped rising 15 years ago don’t help either.

  8. Alfred, I really enjoyed your comment. When I am frustrated arguing with the uninformed or the illogical ones, I would say “Deadenders” and leave, or say “Never argue with a fool – they will drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience” – but now, I will use your response. Again, Thank You!

  9. Shut down all the power stations, stop using fossil fuel vehicles boats and planes then watch the anarchy unfold hopefully these idiots who propogate this crap will be the first to go. Unfortunatly the enviroment will be the first to go as everybody cuts down trees and kills all the animals to survive.My mother always told me to eat my greens now eating our greens takes on a whole new meaning.

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