241–250 of 264 posts
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I'm interested by your comment, but I can't figure out what you are intending to say. Why do you need to dilute CO2?
Mostly because you do not want to die into CO2 poisoning when inside. :) Every building has some designed air change rate with the outside that will keep its habitants alive and comfortable. This can happen through so called natural ventilation or through controlled ventilation. As far I know, the common standard for the commercial buildings is 800 ppm (parts per million (1)) CO2 in the air. It is assumed that this l…
However, 400000 to 410000 is a very small percentage incresse
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"Reducing energy consumption" does not mean nobody can use tools from post 1800, and it also doesn't mean that nobody can help after a drought. There's even a quote in your link describing it as a man made famine.
"Reducing energy consumption" does not mean nobody can use tools from post 1800 Until you actually demonstrate functional and economic alternatives, that is exactly what it means.
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> Stopping -- let alone reversing -- climate change is orders of magnitude more difficult than that. It involves the coordination of billions of people in a task that goes against their short-term, individual interest. It is also extremely dangerous. Most folks engaging in the climate change debate are implicitly doing a cost-benefit analysis of action vs non-action (action implying governmental action). Non-action m…
It's not a strawman. There are a frightening number of people who believe the issue is not at all complex, and that the whole thing is a lie made up by their political opponents. If you can believe his words (doubtful), the current President of the US is one of these.
-- ISAAC ASIMOV
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be the change you want to see in the world
The reason that works is that it shows others what is possible and what it is like, eventually converting others around you. In the case of climate change, austerity living may actually be counterproductive towards convincing others. The change we need in the world is both technology and attitude.
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Yes, ecosystems change constantly. An ecosystem is a state and the state changes as its components change. The fact that this is news to you is a clue that perhaps you know less about this subject than you think you do.
Now you're just getting nasty, without any substantive response to my assertions. Hint: that means I won. You claimed that the ecosystem "didn't survive" the Chicxulub event because there were different organisms afterward. I pointed out that by that "definition" the ecosystem has never "survived", because it has been in a state of constant change since day one. Rather than responding to this, you just got nasty. I r…
The question is, what do those changes mean for individual organisms? Because that's what you and I are.
Changes to the climate and ecosystem are like changes to velocity. Whether the change is good or bad for people depends on the magnitude and direction.
I do think that your focus on who is "winning" an imaginary Internet slap fight is detracting from your understanding.
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Science is the process of learning how the universe works. It is not anthropocentric. What we choose to do with that knowledge is anthropocentric because we are humans. Science can tell us how fire works. We still have to decide what to do when our house catches on fire.
I'm being pedantic, but what to do with the knowledge seems to be a policy and political question, not a science question.
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It's actual scientists saying this. > On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which…
That is specifically a scientist that got heavily involved in the climate change movement. Not every scientist would agree with those methods.
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I think you're stretching the analogy a bit too far there... We know that increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 will result in higher temperatures (the mechanism is well understood, and the IPCC models have done a good job of predicting that over the past couple decades), we also know rising temperatures will result in rising sea levels (again, we have empirically observed this happening at rates consistent with our u…
I'm not arguing about higher sea level, temperatures, or CO2 levels. I fully believe that all of these are going up. I think it's unrealistic to believe we can get the whole planet to reduce CO2 emission, so we should stop spending so much effort on it and find other solutions. I also doubt how much rising sea level will actually hurt humanity. Even in the worst case scenario were talking about an inch or two a year.…
Why?
The problem with fossil fuels - especially coal, isn't "just CO2", it's all the ash that is killing people.
The problems with oil extraction isn't just the CO2 at the end, it's all the crude and junk stuff going (bunker oil), and the political power of the oil lobby, and how dictatorships are financed by these resources.
Sure, these are the factors that make it hard to change, even "locally", within the US.
> cyclones
Yes, and just estimate the cost of a lot more cyclones. It turns out to be a lot more than switching to non-fossil stuff. And that's why a lot of people think that it's not rational to try to continue the consumption of fossil fuels (in a way that leads to CO2 emissions).
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On a species level we'll probably survive it, but that doesn't mean it won't be disastrous at the individual level. Suppose, for example, that a natural disaster reduces the human population by 50$ over a few decades. Humanity survives, but the deaths of 3-4 billion people would be pretty awful.
Over the next few decades, over 4 billion people will certainly die, regardless of global warming. Whatever kills them, death isn't usually pleasant. I don't see why death from climate change is worse than death by any other means. Maybe you mean that we should minimise the number of deaths, which implies our ideal global population isn't much less than the current level. That's debatable.